Star of India

In 1871 the Shaw Savill line of London bought her for the New Zealand emigrant trade, in which she made twenty-one circumnavigations — passages her log described as “laboring and rolling in a most distressing manner.” Sold to San Francisco’s Pacific Colonial Ship Company in 1899, she carried lumber under Hawaiian registry, then passed to the Alaska Packers Association in 1901, which rigged her down to a bark, renamed her Star of India in 1906, and ran her to the Alaska salmon canneries for twenty-two seasons.

Congress admitted her to American registry by special act — she is, technically, a naturalized ship. The museum’s tally of her career reads like a checklist of ways to kill a vessel: she went aground in Hawaii, was trapped in Alaskan ice, never once carried auxiliary power, and survived the age of steam anyway. Retired in 1923, she was bought by the City of San Diego in 1926, lay idle through a world war that cost her the rigging, and was restored under curator Jerry MacMullen. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966, she returned to sea in 1976 for the first time in half a century. She remains the world’s oldest ship still sailing regularly, and the oldest iron-hulled merchant ship afloat.

The lore attaches names loosely — a young sailor or stowaway boy killed falling from the rigging, a captain who took his own life aboard, and behind them the crews of twenty-one circumnavigations and a century and a half of hard voyaging to draw from. Museum staff and volunteer crews report voices below decks, footsteps on empty planking, a presence aloft.

The museum files the reports without adjudicating them, and leans in seasonally — the ship has hosted paranormal investigators from television crews on the Travel and Science channels, and runs a Haunted Tales series each October. The stowaway boy is the account most often repeated: a child who signed on illicitly, was worked aloft, and went overboard — the kind of death a twenty-one-times-around-the-world freighter did not have to invent.

Star of India is the rare file where the object still operates: she sails San Diego Bay under a volunteer crew, and whatever else she carries, she carries her paperwork — logbooks, registers, a hundred and sixty years of entries. A ship that survived mutiny, cyclone and the Alaska trade does not require embellishment; the rigging creaks well enough on its own.

Her Alaskan seasons ran from Oakland to Nushagak in the Bering Sea, hauling fishermen, cannery workers and coal — twenty-two round trips into a fishery that killed regularly. The file’s closing note: she has outlived every vessel launched beside her, most of the companies that owned her, and all of the men who died aboard. Whatever walks her deck at night walks in distinguished company.