…or de-evolution depending on how you view the metamorphosis from the Napa Valley to the ferry Malahat.

Built as the flagship vessel for the Monticello Steamship company, the Napa Valley went into service in 1910 on the thirty-mile trip between San Francisco and Vallejo. She was to be a modern and forward-thinking vessel for the time, for in addition to the 1,500 passengers she was designed to carry, the steamer also had room for about twenty cars on the lower decks which loaded and off loaded from a side-side port. (Visible in the colorized postcard above.)

Typical for a vessel of the company, the Napa Valley was fitted out if not opulently, very comfortably. Her passenger cabin was fitted out with upholstered bench seats. A well-appointed smoking room was available for male passengers, and for the women a ladies’ lounge. The galley provided food for a full-service dining saloon.  Her upper deck was open fore and aft, allowing passengers to enjoy the crossing outdoors on warm days.

Measuring 231 feet by 49 feet with a draft of 15 feet (71 meters by 15 meters, and a 4.5-meter draft), the steamer was powered by a triple-expansion steam engine powered by four scotch boilers. The engine was rated at 2,600 horsepower, making her capable of traveling twenty-knots. Monticello advertised the Napa Valley as making the trip in 75 minutes.

In 1919 the ferry was joined by another fast steamer, the S.S. Asbury Park. At this time, the Napa Valley underwent her first major reconstruction, resulting in an auto capacity of 60 cars. The two ferries were joined by the Calistoga in 1924. (The Calistoga‘s low car deck clearance ended up with her being used mostly as a reserve vessel a few years later.)

1926 saw the first transformation of the vessel from a classic-looking steamship into more a ferry when, like her running mate (now named City of Sacramento) the bow was reconfigure for offloading and loading cars. It gave both vessels and oddly stunted look, but greatly speeded up the process of loading and unloading cars.

Napa Valley worked steadily until 1937 when the bridges across the bay at last shut done the run between Vallejo and San Francisco. The Napa Valley, along with the San Mateo, Shasta, Calistoga and City of Sacramento were listed for sale in 1940. The Puget Sound Navigation company purchased all but the Calistoga (likely because of her 9-foot deck clearance which made it impossible to load trucks onto her deck. As PSN already had one vessel with that problem [the Chippewa] Captain Peabody undoubtedly felt they didn’t need two with that issue.), however it wasn’t until April of 1942 that the Napa Valley was towed up to Puget Sound.

She was originally intended to replace the Olympic (ex-Sioux) on the Port Angeles-Victoria run, but the need for workers at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, which was repairing some of the damaged battleships from Pearl Harbor, necessitated that the Napa Valley be placed on the Seattle-Bremerton run.

The purchase of the steamers was a deviation from the established pattern of vessel procurement and operation on Puget Sound. Captain Peabody had all but moved the entire fleet away from steam power by 1940, nearly ever vessel but the Iroquois being powered by diesel. By 1939, the remaining steam powered vessel in the fleet, including the Seattle, Tacoma, Indianapolis, Puget, Quilcene, along with nearly all the steam-powered passenger vessels had been sold off or scrapped. The ramp-up to WWII and its eventual reality must have convinced Peabody that the need for back-up vessels was worth the expense of running steam-powered ferries. There’s also every probability that, had the war not started, every one of those vessels would have been repowered with diesel engines.

The second oddity is that the Napa Valley was the only vessel of those California steamers to arrive on Puget Sound that ended up being renamed. San Mateo and Shasta retained their names into their service with Washington State Ferries; Shasta was only renamed when she was sold and became the first the Centennial Queen and finally the River Queen as a restaurant. The City of Sacramento sailed under that name on Puget Sound and was only renamed when she was entirely rebuilt as the Kahloke. The San Mateo is still the San Mateo, even as a wreck.

It’s possible that it has something to do with her intended route–Port Angeles to Victoria. Completed in 1911, the “Malahat Highway”, the Vancouver Island portion of Highway 1 does lead right to the Black Ball terminal. It seems likely that it was an effort to make a connection to the highway and Vancouver Island, and the ferry Malahat as an extension of the highway to the United States.

On 18 March 1943 a fire broke out on board the Malahat. Sources vary on the cause, but at least one claims it was an errant cigarette that sparked the blaze. In no time at all, the wooden cabin of the ferry was ablaze. Firetrucks and two firefighting tugs from the navy were called in and began pumping water into the ferry to extinguish the conflagration. Not long after this started, the Malahat began to list alarmingly over. Not wanting a repeat of the Normandie, which had burned and capsized a little over a year earlier in New York, the ferry was pushed onto the beach at Manette to avoid the ferry rolling over and sinking.

Under normal circumstances, that probably would have closed the book on the ferry, which was already thirty-three years old at that point and with an antiquated propulsion system. However, the vessel was still desperately needed for carrying workers to the yard, and her speed made her a necessity.

Fortunately, the damage was confined to the passenger cabin. Everything else, including her engines, were fine. The ferry was immediately assessed at Todd Shipyard, and then sent to Winslow Marine Railway & Construction company for rebuilding. She was there from March until late August, and was pur right back on the Bremerton route.

Now with a flush-sided cabin like that of the Chippwa, the Malahat presented a somewhat bizarre, ungainly appearance. The wheelhouse and crew quarters looked standard enough, but the sweep of the deck had a funky bow in the middle, and the ferry looked top-heavy–which, in fact she was, as it doesn’t seem anyone considered what extending the cabin out to the sides of the ferry would do to her stability, particularly with her passenger capacity upped to 1,700. Just how all those people were supposed to fit in the two lifeboats on the upper deck doesn’t seem to have been considered. Her auto capacity was also increased to 75 cars.

After an all-time high of six ferries on the Bremerton run (Chippewa, Enetai, Willapa, Kalakala, Malahat, City of Sacramento) traffic on the route dropped precipitously after the war. The steamers were the first pulled from the route, and sent into layup. While the City of Sacramento continued to be idled, Black Ball sent the Malahat into the yard to have her bow rebuilt for service across the Strait to Victoria. This reconstructed ended up in an even more ungainly, bizarre-looking craft.

In addition to carrying freight, the Malahat supplement service to Victoria, carrying the overflow traffic from the brand new-Chinook, which had debuted in the summer of 1947 and was booked solid for months. In this new role, she was moderately successful–so long as the weather was calm and the seas of the Strait of Juan de Fuca not too rough.

In less that ideal circumstances, the Malahat lurched, rolled and pitched like a metronome, terrfying her passengers. It soon became apparent that running her outside of the summer season was not a good idea and as near as I’ve been able to tell, after several fall crossings in October of 1947 when she filled in for the Chinook that was undergoing some warranty work at Todd, she never crossed the Strait after the second week in September again.

Captain Peabody wisely chose not to take the Malahat for his operations in Canada. Her behavior on the open waters of the Strait and the expense of running her steam engines were probably the biggest deterrents for moving the vessel north. In addition, the Quillayute, Bainbridge, and by 1953, Kahloke were operating successfully and performing better than anticipated. He would soon add the Smokwa and move the Chinook from Port Angeles service to join the Kahloke on the Nanaimo-Horseshoe Bay route to keep up with the traffic. With Black Ball Transport now handling freight with the rebuilt Iroquois (which now took the mantle of “most bizarre looking vessel on Puget Sound” after her conversion to a freighter in 1954) the Malahat was considered surplus. After a little sprucing up, she was offered for sale.

Purchased by O.H. “Doc” Freeman for $25,000.00 on 18 May 1956, she was moved to Lake Union. Freeman was known for buying old ferries and either scrapping them or selling them on to other buyers. In this case, he did the latter, and the Malahat was towed down to Portland where the ferry was going to be converted into a floating restaurant. She was tied up at the Zidell Machinery and Supply Company yard on the Portland waterfront near the Ross Island Bridge when a massive fire broke out on 5 September 1956. In no time, the Malahat was ablaze from stem to stern, and before long, was completely gutted by fire.

I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for the Malahat. She was a gooney, goofy looking thing that makes you wonder how she stayed upright. She was definitely the ugly duckling of the Black Ball fleet, which had some lovely looking vessels over the years, and here is no denying her important contribution to the war effort, ferrying hundreds of thousands of yard workers to and from the Puget Sound Naval Ship Yard.

But that boxy, ungainly rebuilt cabin. Ugh!

I’ve always wondered what her interiors of that rebuilt cabin looked like, which Marine Digest described as “plush.” It’s very likely she had a smoking room for the men (that structure at the stern, which was where the smoking room was on the Chippewa) and other amenities, though it is difficult to say for certain. I’ve only seen a few historic photos that I’ve not been able to identify the interior–there’s almost always something that gives it away, or at least the class away in the case of those ferries that are nearly identical (Steel Electrics or Supers, for instance.)

There is this photo of Black Ball publicist William O. Thornily, taken some time in the 40’s. Given all the woodwork that is evident around him, it could be the Malahat–but it could also be the City of Sacramento–though the columns do not line up with the photos I’ve seen of the City of Sacramento’s interior.

Someday maybe in someone’s family album there will be a photo of the interior of the Malahat, perhaps detailing a frightening crossing the photographer took one day from Port Angeles to Victoria. We can but hope. However, I’m still waiting for interiors of the Kahloke to turn up as well, which, from the deck plans I have seen of her, look like they would have been quite something, right up there with the Chinook.

I would love to see one of the new ferries named Malahat, but unfortunately it violates the rule of “musk have a known meaning” which Malahat, other than being the name of a tribe, does not. It hasn’t stopped WSF in the past, though–Skagit has no known meaning either.

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