The Red Stack Tugboat Ledgers

The Red Stack Tugboat Ledgers showing a page from the volume covering 1908-1909.

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Two ledger books in San Francisco Maritime's museum colleciton offer insight into the history of one of the park's museum ships. These intriguing books were produced by the Shipowners and Merchants Tugboat Company of San Francisco, the old “Red Stack” line. The two volumes cover the operations of the Company’s steam tugs between 1908 and 1913, recording each job undertaken by each boat, and what was earned for the job. The information contained in these volumes is of particular interest to the park because, during this period, Red Stack owned and operated the tug Hercules, now a treasured part of our historic fleet.

Built at Camden, New Jersey in 1907, the Hercules was the newest, the largest, and the most powerful of the Red Stack boats. The ledgers give us a look, in detail, at just what the Hercules was doing during these early years of her career. Much of this is new information. Our best source previously on her early operations is a personal log book kept by the boat’s first Captain, Daniel G. “Smokestack” Thomsen, covering the period from January 1908 to July 1909, including her maiden voyage from New Jersey to San Francisco by way of the Straits of Magellan. The new ledgers, therefore, overlap in time with Thomsen’s log, and, for this period, add only limited new material. The later of the two volumes, covering the period 1911 to 1913, is all new information.

The Hercules, throughout her career with Red Stack, was primarily an “outside” boat, making long coastal or even deep-ocean tows. She was often gone for weeks at a time, venturing as far afield as Tahiti, and routinely making trips to Hawaii.

The bread and butter of her work was in the rapidly expanding oil transport business. Red Stack contracted with Standard Oil of California for the towage of their tank barges from San Luis Obispo to their refinery at Point Richmond. In the ledger column for receipts for many of these tows is the abbreviation “incl,” apparently indicating that the cost of the tow was “included” under a regular agreement. Hercules also towed oil barges for Associated Oil from Monterey to Martinez, most of them iron or steel sailing ship hulls converted to tank carriers. She also towed Union Oil’s wooden-hulled barkentine Fullerton. As one of the earliest oil-fired steamers to operate on the West Coast, the Hercules was intimately involved from the beginning in the petroleum business.

The ledgers also indicate that Hercules made a number of trips towing Benson log rafts from the Columbia River to San Diego. These massive cigar-shaped rafts, comprising some 6,000,000 board feet of Douglas fir timber, would require about 15 days of steaming at three knots. The tug also did several trips with dredges for port improvement projects from Puget Sound to the Hawaiian Isles. These jobs were normally billed at a daily rate of $200. While in the Bay, between her outside trips, the Hercules did ship assistance work, including a tow of the Star of Alaska, another name for our own Balclutha, from Butchertown, near Hunters Point, to China Basin, in October 1911, earning herself $30.

For anyone interested in the operation of a tugboat fleet during the early 20th century, the ledgers offer a tantalizing glimpse of the business. Red Stack was running eleven boats during most of this period. The record of the vessels towed or assisted, shifted among the multitude of ports, piers, and anchoring grounds around the Bay, gives us a detailed snapshot of the complex web of maritime commerce during the period, and would certainly reward the closest examination.