“Lewis & Dryden’s Marine History of the Pacific Northwest” recounts the “terrible wreck” of the American barque Industry on the Columbia River Bar on March 16, 1865.

After two weeks of rough weather that destroyed water casks and washed away supplies, the Industry approached the bar. After waiting outside for several days, hoping for assistance, the water ran out. Desperate, Capt. Lewis was about to make a run for it.

Then he spotted a pilot boat, but it didn’t approach to put on a pilot. The captain misread their signals to him and followed the boat into the north channel. The wind failed during the attempt, so he set anchors to keep from running aground. The flag was flown upside down as a distress signal, but there was no response.

When the wind picked up, he got underway again but drifted into shallow water and ran aground stern first. Not one to give up, the captain kept trying to work the vessel over to the middle channel, but then the Industry ran hard aground, receiving “fatal injuries” to her hull, and began taking on water quickly.

After a boat was lowered and became immediately swamped, drowning the mate, all hands took to the rigging at 9 p.m. During the night, all of the upper works of the vessel were carried away, and the rest of the boats were demolished.

In desperation, two rafts were constructed in the morning to get help. The five people on the first were rescued by a lifeboat from Fort Canby. On the second raft, only two of its eight passengers reached shore safely. Seventeen of the 24 passengers and crew aboard the Industry perished.

One of the survivors was C.W. Shively, son of J.M. Shively, Astoria’s first postmaster. He wrote an account of the disaster for the Daily Alta California — there was no Daily Astorian yet — blaming the loss of life on the pilot boats for ignoring the Industry’s distress flag.

Coincidentally, the elder Shively was no stranger to disasters at sea himself. Returning from the gold rush in California in 1850, he lost everything in a shipwreck, only to arrive in Astoria to find out he’d been replaced as postmaster. Hopefully, after the demise of the Industry, the family avoided all things nautical. (Painting: Ivan Aivazovsky)