When the Mosquito Fleet Ruled

In November 1836, the 101-foot paddlewheeler, the SS Beaver, arrived in Puget Sound. Built in London for the Hudson’s Bay Company, the steamer’s first voyage was as a sailing ship across the Atlantic, around Cape Horn, over to Hawaii, then to the HBC’s Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, where crews converted the Beaver back to a steamship by reassembling the engine, boilers, and paddlewheels. On the Sound, the vessel lived up to its name. Wood cutting was the crew’s chief occupation, as it took six axeman, two days to cut wood for 12 to 14 hours of travel, or about 230 miles. Because the Beaver could store only 40 cords, “she is at least as much at anchor as she is under way,” wrote HBC governor George Simpson.

Despite its arborphagic ways, the Beaver forever changed Puget Sound by introducing steam power, ultimately leading to the waterway’s infamous Mosquito Fleet (since it was not officially organized in any way, I will abandon the upper case after this). By the 1890s, in the fleet’s peak era, hundreds of vessels crisscrossed the Sound annually carrying hundreds of thousands of passengers and hundreds of thousands of tons of goods. Maritime historian Joe Baar put together a list of about seven hundred vessels as a minimum number of boats that made up the mosquito fleet.

An A to Z list of Mosquito Fleet vessels

No one agrees on a precise definition of the boats and ships that comprised the mosquito fleet but to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography, people knew a mosquito fleet vessel when they saw one. They tended to be pointy-ended, made of wood, steam-powered, and propeller driven but every possible permutation existed. The smallest I came across was the 19-foot Polky and the longest the 283-foot Yosemite.

For many nineteenth and early twentieth century Puget Sound residents, the mosquito fleet was their lifeline, a combination of post office, bank, transit system, UPS truck, and general store, plus a good way to catch up on neighborhood gossip. In the era when few roads existed, as well as for several decades into the era of automobiles and trains, the mosquito fleet provided access to every far-flung settler and community. No one knows how many places the boats made official, named stops but based on newspaper articles from the early 1900s the number exceeded 350, many of which exist today only as abandoned docks, silent testimonials to the dreams of former settlers

An A to Z list of stops based on newspaper articles and lists in historical museums.

Failure was common in the mosquito fleet vessels swarming Puget Sound. Bad financial choices, bad equipment, bad captains, bad decisions. Each played a role. In Gordon Newell’s Ships of the Inland Sea, he calculated that almost forty percent of the mosquito fleet was either abandoned, burnt, sunk, stranded, or wrecked. Some boats even suffered twice, sinking first then being refloated, only to run aground later.

Unregulated, fly by night, money losing, and erratic, the mosquito fleet survived in spite of its downsides because it was also functional, practical, and adaptive. It filled a need and also provided an essential service, that is to allow settlements to grow and thrive. People could put down roots in isolated locations and still be connected to a larger world. They could be farmers living in the middle of nowhere and still have ready access to a dependable market. They could live far from any town and still obtain needed goods. They could be part of community.

In a world where water and forest divided the landscape into separated, often hard-to-reach locations, the vessels of the mosquito fleet were the flexible sinews that held together the people and communities of the region. “There were smiles, tears, laughter and heart break connected with the coming of the steamer that linked us with the outside world…When the little steamer made twice a week trips, we felt we were really getting somewhere. When we had a daily boat we felt we were really on the map,” wrote Lillie Christiansen, who grew up in the little town of Brinnon, on Hood Canal, in the 1890s.

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Word of the Week - Mosquito Fleet - There is an apocryphal story that the term originated with a Seattle newspaper reporter referring to boats on Elliott Bay as a “swarm of mosquitoes.” I have never seen any direct evidence for this such as a newspaper article. In contrast, the term mosquito fleet in reference to fast, maneuverable boats dates back to at least the Revolutionary War. Mosquito fleet vessels also appear in the War of 1812, battles against pirates in the Caribbean around 1823, and the Civil War. In Puget Sound, the term begins to show up regularly in newspapers around 1890 and has been used retroactively to describe Puget Sound’s pre-1889 steamers.