From the superb Hester Collection: Guests raise glasses of dark beer lo ward off Tacoma's damp in 1902, aboard the French three-masted bark Lamorciere in 1902.
and glass plate negat ives. Two of the finest collect ions of sai ling ship negatives, o ri ginating in the Pacific Northwest, were bought in th e late 1950s and early 1960s: one being the popularly known Plummer Co ll ection, consist ing of postcard size film negatives of ships in tow and under sai l; the ot her being the Hester Collection. Working with the San Francisco Maritime Museum, Mr. Robert Weinstein of Los Ange les obtained funds to buy these two, and segments of other va luable film and plate negative collections for the Museum's growing inventory of pictures. Conc urrent with the massive effort to identify and date the pictures was Mr. Weinstein's special research on William Hester himself. The parallel efforts have been brought to fruition in this book, which tells all th at is known about the photographer, and offers some of hi s best a nd most representative pictures of a long-vanished era. Mr. Weinstein, himself a specialist in marine history and photographic history, has done an excellent job of descr ibing the style of William Hester. Though Hester had been dead for more than twenty years, the author has done a thorough, and imaginative-ifsomewhai conjec tur a l-re-crea ti on of Hester's mode of operation and techniques. One can almost sense that Mr. Weinstein carried the box of plates and tripod on the long daily expeditions from Seattle to Tacoma or Port Blakely. There are nine chapters, including the last which is more of a n index of photographs identification and names of shipmasters. The photographs, which total 107, are all of first-class quality, printed directly from the plates, wi th no secondgenerat ion copying in between. The same detail that Hester saw seven decades ago, has not deteriorated at a ll. The photographs a lone, within the confines of the book's hard covers, are far superior in quality and clarity to the vast collection of pictures of sailing ships or vintage scenes which are available to other publishers and authors who dea l in similar subjects, and which are seen in SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1979
contemporary publications. The book is one of harbor scenes. Hester is not known to have ventured outside the heads on a tug, or to have made any offshore passages with his camera in hand. So hi s work is confined lo the vesse ls he saw at a nchor, a longside the cargo docks, sawm ill spit s or in tow. But more than this, he photographed the people of the ships and the cargoes they came to Puget Sound to load. Here is where Hester-and Bob Weinstein in his carefu l selection of photos-serve the hi storian we ll. Hester worked midst the longs horemen and ships' crews, and caught the size of the huge timbers on his plates as they were dragged and maneuvered, sti ck by stick, into the long holds of the sai ling shi ps. Besides the sh ips themselves, Hester devoted much of his at tent ion and photographic ski lls to the crews, shipmasters a nd families whose lives were centered within the sh ips. The ex traordinary numbers of group photos in the entire Hester collec.tion, is, in our opinion, unequaled in any known collection of sai ling ship pictures, worldwide. Fo'c'sle hand s were int errupted in their duties abo ut the sh ip , or herded out of the forecastle for a posed picture on the decks of th e ship. Shipmasters by themselves, or with wives and chi ldren, were posed on the poop and by the wheel, in their best dress. Hester caught them all in their best looks, and then sold them the pictures. That is how he made the whole b usiness pay. It supported him for years. Hester a lso ventured into the restricted domain of the shipmaster, who li ved in Victorian elegance beneath the poop, and photographed the furnishings of the domestic cabins. This was rare photography, considering the problem of proper lighting, and Hester did an excellent job of adjusting his exposures and utilizing natural lighting through the poop skyligh ts. He specialized in this area of work, and we venture the opinion that this book stands unique in it s presentation of the scenes of numerous sailing ship sa loons and cabins.
The book is more than just a collection of Hester photographs, appea ling as they are in themselves. It is a lso a good, but rath er limited story of the long vanished boom-town atmosphere of Port Blakely, o nce the largest sawmi ll port in the northwest, a nd of the expanding port of Tacoma, which had an endless waterfront of flour sheds and grain elevators. Fo r the venturesome sentimentalist, Mr. Weinstein has provided a handbook by which the shoreline of Port Blakely can be seen in its heyday, the Hall Brothers shipyard and the Port Blakely Mill, and compared to the quiet inlet of today with a few of the old mill-town houses, and where rotting piling heads and crumbling cement foundations may still be seen. With the book in hand, one can sti ll estab lish his bearings whi le standing on the E leventh Street Bridge in Tacoma, and pick out the crumb ling planked quays and nearly abandoned, but sti ll-sta ndin g flour warehouses a long the City Waterway, and see the o ld City H a ll tower above it all. The author provides short paragraphs wit h eac h photo, giving names where they are known, and describing the scene in his own interpretive manner. In his modest haste, mixed with understandab le enthusiasm, he commits a few minor errors, such as calling a ship a bark, o r urgi ng ships a lo ng in tow, when in fact they are moored to a buoy. But on ly the critical reader with a trained eye, or magnifying glass in hand wou ld consider the errors to be serious, and Hester himself emerges unscathed and is sti ll presented at his very best. The book is not indexed with individual sh ip 's names in the customary fas hi on, in the back of the book, nor with personal names; but the author has included in the last pages some tentative offerings as to who the shipmasters might have been, where actual identification is not known. There is some cha nce of mistaken identity in this table, but th e aut hor notes that such offering are not to be considered the final word. However, there is little chance in 1978, that his research will be disputed. Sma ll children who appear in the photographs, posed by the wheel, or standing upon the skylight of their father's ship, may yet be alive today, who could identify these scenes of yesteryear. But the apprentices, and old greybeards of the forecastle, the mates, shipmasters and longshoremen are all but gone. And with no known exceptions, so are the 57