July / August 2010

If Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! ever treated us to the lore and legends of the Kennebunk River, they’d lead with the strange case of the Ocean King.

Launched for Nathaniel Lord Thompson at the present site of Federal Jack’s in 1874, the 215.5-foot clipper was an eye-popper at 2,510.5 gross tons, “the largest ship afloat,” according to the New York Times.

The largest vessel in the world was built here, near Shipyard Brewery? Where’s the catch?

Though it’s hardly a proper tidbit for today’s restaurant place mats, she had bad luck of the Drag Me To Hell variety.

In the streamers and fireworks of her debut, things were lovely, though she was as much an anachronism as a curiosity. Consider this August 29, 1877 blip in the New York Times: “The clipper-ship Ocean King, owned by J. H. Sears of Boston, and now lying at Pier No. 19 East River, receiving cargo for San Francisco, is one of six sailing vessels of the world that carry four masts. This additional mast, which is rigged after the style of a bark’s mizzen mast, is called the ‘spanker mast.’”

The spanks are just beginning. Let’s follow her out to San Francisco via The Deseret Evening News, September 22, 1877: “Five sailors of the ship Ocean King, from this port for San Francisco, have been arrested for mutiny.”

These happy campers might have been enough to give her a black eye, but seven years later, a fresh gust of ill wind filled her sails as J. H. Sears & Co. went out of business and was forced to sell her to William P. Ellison.

It’s long been a superstition that appearing prematurely on the cover of Sports Illustrated is a guarantee of snuffed fame, but you tell me the Ocean King wasn’t the Mark “The Bird” Fidrych of clipper ships after you catch a glimpse of her in 1887, during the last chapter of her weird, wild afterlife, hauling coal out of Nanaimo, British Columbia, for her new port of Coos Bay, Oregon, in a horrible gale. The rakish clipper crashed into the rocks and “caught fire, it is thought, from the galley stove,” the Port Townsend, Washington, newspaper reported. “Every attempt was made to quench the flames” before her crew deserted her, and she went down!

“Mommy, the scary ship on my place mat is sinking straight to hell in a fiery inferno!”

We’re missing the Broadway dactyl. According to devils familiar with the matter, one “Special Agent Tingle, of the Treasury Department” seized the $1,000 check the Ocean King’s captain had generously given (mistakenly, the Ocean King’s agent Capt. Knowles claimed later) to Charles Soderstrum of the schooner Angel Dolly, in payment for rescuing him and his crew. Bad ship, no tip.