AUTHOR’S NOTE: Before Mary Lovett Penney boarded the Kings County Mining Company’s three-masted sailing ship, the bark Agate, in mid-February 1898 to begin her voyage to Alaska, the gold-seeking venture was fraught with problems. After the ship finally left harbor in Brooklyn, New York, the problems continued.
The Brooklyn investors in the mining venture ran into trouble from the beginning. The task had seemed simple enough for men with ample financial resources: (1) Purchase a ship to sail to Alaska to mine for gold in the Klondike. (2) Entice stockholders to buy into their company and devise a means of sharing the costs and the profits.
Executing that task, however, had proved problematic.
The first attempt was multi-pronged: First, create a legal corporation and find incorporators with money to spend. Second, buy a vessel capable of sailing around Cape Horn, on the southern tip of South America, and then all the way to Alaska. Third, upgrade the ship and outfit it with a crew and supplies for what was estimated to be a two-year mission. Fourth, fill the boat with paying customers.
In November 1897, an advertisement from the Copper River Mining and Development Company appeared in a New York City newspaper: “Our ship ‘Agate’ sails for Alaska about Dec. 15; first-class passage with one ton of freight $350; second-class, half-ton of freight $250; hurry or you will be left; go down to foot of Court St. to Poillon’s dock and inspect the ‘Agate’; no permit necessary; go right aboard.”
A November news article said that about 60 people had already applied to go. That was untrue. It also reported that the ship was set to sail on Dec. 10; neither that nor the advertised Dec. 15 departure date were correct. In fact, the Copper River Mining and Development Company never left the Brooklyn harbor.
By late December, it was clear that the corporation was, in fact, going nowhere. The Brooklyn Eagle used “Defunct Mining Company” in a headline to describe the failed attempt to join the gold rush.
Despite all the positives — the apparent efforts of company president A. Crosby Flockhart, a successful incorporation during the autumn, the excitement of potential applicants and the purchase of the Agate by investor Adolph Sussman — the company had to admit it lacked the funds to keep it afloat.
In fact, it had been on his own dime that Sussman had purchased the ship and had it refurbished, and he had had not yet been reimbursed.
In this regard, however, the mining company was fortunate.
One of its stockholders — a bank clerk named Thomas Webb Taylor who had quit his job and sold his home to raise the money necessary to travel to Alaska with his wife and one other family member and get rich — filed a lawsuit against the company, asking the judge to order that the Agate be sold to provide him with just compensation for the opportunity he had lost.
Taylor’s wife captured media attention because of her good looks, high breeding and her determination to endure hardships thought to be solely the province of men. The New York American, on Dec. 19, 1897, offered this brief portrait of her:
“Mrs. T. Webb Taylor, the Harlem society woman … is going to Alaska because she was dared to do so…. Mrs. Taylor, who is a beautiful woman, has never been called upon to endure the least hardship, and she has no more idea of the misery she will be called upon to endure than a July butterfly has of the rigors of December.
“She has purchased,” continued the article, “two full suits of Eskimo clothing, and her husband has laid in a good outfit. They will also take the entire furnishings of a cabin, including carpets, rugs, mattresses, etc…. Mrs. T. Webb Taylor says she does not expect to return to New York inside of three years, and her husband, who has only consented to go after using every effort to dissuade his wife, mournfully assents to this. He does not relish a three-years’ residency in the wilds of Alaska and he has no yearning whatever to explore the Copper River or any other river.”
Company officials offered to simply return Mr. Taylor’s deposit, but he wanted more. Unfortunately for him, Sussman himself was the boat’s sole owner, and the judge refused to allow Taylor to punish only Sussman to get back at the entire company.
Meanwhile, Sussman gathered some new investors and regrouped. They formed the Mutual Benefit Mining Company and then the Kings County Mining Company, which finally bought the ship from Sussman. The Kings County group also began holding regular meetings to bring stockholders into the fold.
Generally speaking, the rules were straightforward: Each stockholder, after paying a $500 investment, must either physically engage in mining or send a surrogate to do so. All costs for the good of the whole would be shared, as would all profits earned. About half of the stockholders would sail in the Agate around Cape Horn to San Francisco, while the other half would ride the transcontinental railroad to meet them in California and complete the journey to Alaska.
Delays continued to arise: A launch date in mid-January was pushed back to later in the month and then finally to mid-February. During this time, Thomas Webb Taylor tried last-minute tactics to derail the whole process, but the entity from which he sought compensation no longer existed.
The company also tweaked its plans to reach the Klondike, and would adjust them again months later, resulting in the Agate’s arrival in Homer in October, instead of late spring.
During the earliest years of the Klondike gold rush, there were two preferred avenues of reaching the gold fields around Dawson City. First, there was the poor man’s overland route, lugging the required one ton of gear up and over Chilkoot or White pass, traversing a long lake system to the headwaters of the Yukon River, then floating downstream to Dawson, where the Klondike River had its confluence with the upper Yukon.
Second, there was the rich man’s all-water route: sailing to western Alaska, entering the mouth of the Yukon and then traveling upstream all the way to Dawson. For the Kings County group, the all-water route seemed the way to go. With good fortune, they believed, they would be sailing up the Yukon just after the river’s winter ice had melted and been flushed out to sea.
Mary’s efforts
During the planning and organizing process for the upcoming Kings County Mining Company expedition, stockholder Mary L. Penney stirred up trouble mostly by demanding her rights, by trying to help provision the ship and, frankly, by simply being a woman in a predominantly man’s world.
A New York-based newspaper called The World wrote about her on Jan. 23, 1898, noting at that time that she was the only female stockholder and calling her “a woman of strong mind” who at several meetings had made “vigorous attempts to run affairs to suit herself.”
Some men in the company, said the paper, hoped to buy her share “so as to get her out.” Company officers had asked her to withdraw her $500, but she had refused. The men disliked the fuss she caused and, said The World, it was “not likely (that) any more women members will be allowed to take shares.”
Later, in her efforts to help provide the expedition with the foodstuffs it would need, she made headlines by claiming that one local food vendor had sold the company a barrel of spoiled meat. According to a family narrative written by one of Mary Penney’s granddaughters, Mary turned to her husband, William, a man who enjoyed a peaceful, quiet life and tended to shun the limelight, and exclaimed, “Nobody is going to sell me rotten meat and get away with it!”
William, said the narrative, laid aside his newspaper containing the story entitled “Woman Argonaut Raises Big Row,” and said, “You got your name in the paper, I see.” Mary was undeterred by her husband’s disapproval.
She hired a housekeeper to help clean their home in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn and tend to their five children in her absence. Perhaps she believed that one housekeeper would be sufficient, along with William’s money, to keep the family warm, fed, clothed and happy.
Her elder daughter, 16-year-old Geraldine, thought otherwise. According to one of her own daughters, Geraldine believed the housekeeper was “lazy, sloppy and thought she was boss.” Consequently, a week after Mary departed for Alaska, Geraldine fired the housekeeper and took charge of the home herself.
Less than 10 days after the Agate left harbor, rumors began to circulate that the vessel had been destroyed in a gale off the coast of New Jersey. All passengers, plus the ship’s captain and crew, were feared lost.
The bark (or barque) called the Agate, which carried members of the Kings County Mining Company from Brooklyn, New York, to Cook Inlet, was probably similar to this three-masted barque featured on Wikipedia.
