(upbeat folk music) (boat horn blows) - Nothing helps define the coastal Pacific Northwest more than the wet.

From rainforest to the Salish Sea, from the Pacific Ocean to Puget Sound, we are wet all year round, one way or the other.

You can complain about the rain, the damp, the floods, the squish, but we're lucky to have them.

Far better than wildfire smoke and 100-degree days.

Water shapes our lives, our history, and culture.

We thrive on it, and it makes things green.

When people complain, my first impulse is to say, "Get wet or get out."

We're out today, taking an ice cream cruise on Seattle's Lake Union, sharing stories about the water.

When the Seattle-founding Denny Party first arrived in a rainy November over 170 years ago, they had to slog through the tidal muck to get ashore, and when they arrived in a drenching rain, they found that their shelter wasn't ready.

Some sat on the beach and wept.

Some arrivals have been hard.

Take the case of the Spanish galleon that went way off course, and paid an unexpected visit to the Oregon coast instead of Mexico.

The Denny Party had a picnic compared to the crew of this ship.

When European explorers and traders first came to the Pacific Northwest, Native Americans on the coast offered to trade with them.

And one of the things they offered to trade were large blocks of beeswax.

(bees buzzing) This was not the kind of thing that was produced in North America, and some of the beeswax actually had foreign markings on it.

And the question was, where did this beeswax come from?

It turned out, it was from a shipwreck on the Oregon coast at Nehalem Spit, just south of Manzanita.

In the late 1600s, a Spanish galleon wrecked on that shore.

The ship was part of the so-called Manila Trade.

Every year, the Spanish colonies would send a treasure-laden vessel to the Philippines, and the vessel would bring back silks, spices, and things that the colony needed.

One of the things it would bring back would be massive amounts of beeswax for making candles for all of the Spanish colonies.

It lit all the churches and all the major public buildings.

If you didn't have beeswax, you couldn't have light.

A Spanish galleon normally would not sail up to the Pacific Northwest.

Their typical route would be going down the coast of California.

What was the ship doing here?

Well, the working theory is that it was disabled at sea.

It was probably caught in a storm, and driven north, and washed ashore.

(ship creaking) Researchers and archeologists have been trying to determine for years the exact identity of the vessel, and they've come up with a theory that's almost certainly correct.

And that is that it was the Santo Cristo de Burgos, a Spanish galleon that disappeared in the winter of 1693 to 1694.

As far as European history goes, the ship simply set sail and disappeared.

But we know, from Northwest Native American accounts, that a ship at the same time and place came ashore.

There were some survivors.

Some of the survivors set out and were never seen again, and some, apparently, intermarried with the tribes.

(uplifting music) The Spanish galleon's legacy of beeswax isn't the only thing it left behind.

Even though the Manila shipwreck was in the late 1600s, we're still learning from it.

Archeologists recently recovered some timber beams trapped in a cave near Manzanita that is only accessible at certain tides.

And researchers believe they're part of the old ship, perhaps washed there by the giant tsunami that crashed into the coast in 1700, a tsunami caused by an earthquake on the Juan de Fuca Plate off our shores, an event so big, it was recorded in Japan.

That wasn't the only connection our coast has had with Japan.

Three castaways arrived near Neah Bay in the early 1800s, and no one then quite knew what to make of them.

It led to an around-the-world saga no one expected.

Between the year 500 and 1750, as many as 187 Japanese junks drifted from Japan to the Americas.

It's also known, through artifacts and DNA research, that there was Japanese contact in North Central and South America thousands of years ago.

Japanese coastal fishing or trading vessels could become lost or disabled at sea, and swept across the Pacific by the Japan current.

Sometimes they brought their crews.

A dramatic example happened in January of 1834, when reports from the Washington coast filtered out that a ship had wrecked with three survivors, a man and two teenage boys.

They were the only survivors of a crew of 14.

After losing their mast in a storm, and more than a year adrift at sea, their 200-ton junk came ashore near Cape Flattery, on the very tip of the Olympic Peninsula.

The survivors from the ship were taken in by the Makah Tribe.

When the staff at the Hudson's Bay Company headquarters at Fort Vancouver heard about it, they sent a rescue party.

There was some confusion about their ethnicity at first, probably due to the fact that the outside world had little contact with Japan at that point.

The country was closed to Western outsiders.

That year, American missionaries attempted to get them back to Japan on an unarmed vessel.

It sailed into Tokyo Bay, the first American-flagged ship to do so, but they were driven off when the Japanese Imperial forces fired upon them.

The youngest, Otokichi, later worked for the British in Shanghai and Singapore.

He married twice, and changed his name to John Matthew Ottoson.

He is said to have become prosperous for his role in negotiating trade treaties.

The ultimate fate of the other castaways isn't known, but it is believed that none were able to return to Japan to live.

(bright music) These are just a couple of strange stories regarding our waters.

They have also spawned competition and triumph.

One of the most famous characters who once represented the Maritime Northwest was a tugboat captain, partly based on a real-life person, who stood out, and made a place for herself as a symbol of blue collar smarts, in a Northwest seaport.

Her home was a fictional town on Puget Sound.

And when she made it to Hollywood, everyone cheered.

People of a certain age might remember Annie.

She was tough, plus-sized, and middle-aged, with a heart of gold, and a hearty appetite.

(whimsical music) She lived and worked in the mythical town of Secoma on Puget Sound, aboard her working tugboat, The Narcissus.

- The old Narcissus ain't never let us down yet, has she?

- In the midst of the Great Depression, Annie held her own, hauling lumber, towing ships, and outfoxing her competitors.

- What's the matter with you?

- You're on my foot, you big ox!

- Oh.

- The rough-and-tumble waterfront of the 1930s was a kind of last frontier for a maritime industry transitioning from sail, to steam, to diesel.

Annie was a liveaboard entrepreneur, who survived by her wits and nautical know-how, forging a life at sea, with the reality of Hooverville on the tide flats just a short swim away.

Annie was the literary creation of a writer named Norman Reilly Raine, a World War I veteran turned writer who came to Seattle in 1930 to teach short story writing at the University of Washington.

While here, he was inspired by the people and stories of the waterfront, and he began publishing a series of popular, humorous stories about the plucky Tugboat Annie in "The Saturday Evening Post."

Raine became aware of the legendary Thea Foss.

She was a Norwegian immigrant who, starting with a humble rowboat, launched Foss Tugboat Company in Tacoma into the largest tug and barge outfit on the west coast.

Raine's Annie was a tough, working-class woman, but she was more.

She was street smart in the ways of the waterfront.

In story after story, she outsmarted her unsavory competitors.

Her main nemesis was Horatio Bullwinkle, a tugboat interloper from, where else, California, who used every dirty trick to put Annie out of business.

As Raine wrote his stories, he began to imagine the Oscar-winning silent and Depression-era film star, Marie Dressler, as Annie.

MGM Studios decided to make a movie based on Tugboat Annie, starring Dressler, and Wallace Beery as her drunk of a husband.

(big band music) MGM filmed some sequences on location in Seattle.

They used a Foss tug, now called the Arthur Foss, for shots they took down on Lake Union and Elliott Bay.

They even invited 5,000 Seattleites to create a crowd scene that was shot at Bell Street Pier.

In July of 1933, the world premiere of "Tugboat Annie" took place at Seattle's sold-out 5th Avenue Theater.

The movie became one of the top box office hits of the year.

It was the first major Hollywood film ever shot in Seattle.

- There ain't a better captain between Vancouver and San Pedro.

- [Knute] The hit film spawned two sequels.

The first in 1940 costarred Ronald Reagan.

Dressler herself died not long after the original Annie film was made, but she was replaced by others.

Annie was also featured in a syndicated Canadian TV series in the late 1950s.

- Hi, Bullwinkle, you old baboon!

- Annie Brennan, I'll get even with you if it takes the rest of my natural life!

(comical music) - The movies made Annie and Secoma, Seattle and Tacoma, and Puget Sound, widely known, and captured an aspect of the city that is still familiar.

In one passage from a story, the atmosphere is captured perfectly.

Quote, "Tugboat Annie sailed out of the room and down the stair to the street.

Before her, through the curtain of rain, were sprawled grimy warehouses, railroad sidings, freight sheds, and the masts and funnels of shipping.

The air, though murky and smelling of fog and smoke, steam and tide water and wet pavements, was laced with the damp freshness of the sea wind."

(uplifting music) The era of the Great Depression and World War II was one where people were looking for heroes, and testing cultural boundaries and cooperation.

A great example of that, though largely forgotten, was the time the Swinomish Tribe and the University of Washington's Husky Crew raced canoes and shells up in Skagit County.

And when Euro-American boat-builders learned what indigenous peoples had known forever about how to make a boat out of local materials that you could self-propel through the water with confidence and grace.

The University of Washington Shell House is an important wooden historic structure that stands on the shore of Lake Washington.

It's at a fascinating intersection of history.

(dramatic music) This area in Montlake, in the shadow of Husky Stadium, was where Native Americans portaged between Lake Washington, Lake Union, and eventually over to Puget Sound.

It was here that the US Navy, during World War I, built a large hangar to train personnel on sea planes.

After the war, it became home to the University of Washington's rowing teams.

And it also became the workshop of a brilliant, innovative designer of boats, an Englishman named George Pocock, who found a way to make racing boats faster and cheaper.

(dramatic music) (oars creaking) The most famous event involving Pocock's boats was the famous Boys in the Boat race at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when the UW Husky team beat the Nazis, beat the Italians, to win the gold medal.

(crowd cheering) It was an embarrassment for Hitler and the Third Reich, and has been immortalized in a bestselling book.

But there was another, lesser-known, interesting race that happened a few years later.

It was called the Great Race of 1941.

And it pitted the UW Husky Crew against a group of Swinomish Tribal canoe racers.

The event was conceived by Swinomish Tribal elder, Tandy Wilbur.

And the idea was that it could improve relations between the white community and the tribe, in part, by showing this common interest in competition and physical prowess.

Canoe racing was a longtime tribal tradition.

Two Swinomish boats, the Lone Eagle and the Suzy Q, had 11 paddlers each, and they were paired against two eight-man Husky Crew boats.

The event took place in November, in the slough between the Swinomish reservation and the town of La Conner in Skagit County.

The attending crowd got to see these two cultures, side by side, in their cedar boats.

Who won?

No one really knows or cares.

Some say it was the Swinomish, some say it was the Huskies.

The real important thing was this cross-cultural exchange, an unusual activity for its time.

(uplifting music) The Swinomish, by the way, are continuing to teach us how the old ways are sometimes best.

They're recreating clam gardens, a way of cultivating shellfish that was done in earlier times.

They knew how to adapt the environment for their needs.

When settlers arrived in the Northwest, they quickly found the virtues of harvesting local seafood.

There was an old saying, "When the the tide is out, the table is set."

And nothing embodied that better than the tiny little creatures that ignited appetites, and became an industry.

Though the newcomers did get carried away.

In the mid-19th century, America was experiencing an oyster mania.

Oysters were abundant back east and on the Gulf coast.

Oyster pies, roasted oysters, oyster stuffing, oysters of all kinds.

As people moved out west, particularly those who followed the Oregon Trail, they had to make do with a diet of hardtack and beans.

But when they got to the west coast, they found something amazing that pleased their palates.

It was a native oyster, the only native oyster, on the west coast, from Puget Sound to Baja California.

Of course, native peoples on the coast had been eating Olympia oysters, and clams, and other shellfish, for thousands of years, and left the evidence in old repositories of dining debris we call shell middens.

When the settlers got to the coast, they found vast beds of the native oyster, and they dubbed it Olympia, or Olys for short.

One of the greatest repositories was on the Pacific coast near Long Beach, called Shoalwater Bay, now called Willapa Bay.

It was a calm-water estuary, and it was a utopia for Olympia oysters.

Oysterville is there, and it came by its name very honestly.

Northwesterners not only ate Olympia oysters, they sold Olympia oysters.

The California Gold Rush was in full swing, and California could not meet the demand for oysters.

They shoveled them alive out of Shoalwater Bay, they put them in barrels or sacks, moistened them so they would stay alive, put them on a ship and sent them to San Francisco, where they were enormously popular.

In fact, we know that Mark Twain, during his San Francisco period, was a great Oly fan.

The oysters soon became ubiquitous in the West.

With the coming of the railroads, they could be shipped to places like Denver, Butte, Spokane.

Every saloon, high or low, fancy or not, served fresh oysters, along with whiskey and beer.

In 1885, a group of Presbyterian Church women in Portland, Oregon published the very first Northwest cookbook, called, "The Web-Foot Cook Book."

And in it, it contained a single recipe, relating to a native species of the region.

And that was a recipe for fried Olympia oysters.

It was stuck between a recipe for deviled crab and Hollandaise sauce for salmon.

The recipe is very simple.

You take about half a dozen Olympia oysters, you pat them into a little patty, gush 'em all together.

You then roll them in some fresh egg with salt and pepper.

You then put it in some breadcrumbs, and fry it in a pan.

(pan sizzling) The recipe recommended that it be served with cold slaw, which we know today as coleslaw.

The Olympia oysters were so popular that they soon began to run out.

One problem was overharvesting.

Another problem was loss of habitat.

Another problem was, they took a long time to grow, and they just didn't grow fast enough for the market.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Olympia oysters had pretty much declined as a main oyster food substance, and had been replaced by imported oysters that were then grown in Washington waters.

Often, if you see oysters growing on rocks when you're down at the beach, they're not the native Olympias, they're from Japan.

And they've just kind of taken over.

And some oyster companies grow them to this day, and you can go down and you can get a fresh Olympia oyster if you want.

They're tiny, they're strongly-flavored.

They have a kind of coppery flavor, a metallic flavor, which some people like and some people don't.

But believe me, they carry the sort of briny goodness of the sea.

If you like oysters, I'm gonna use an old beer ad slogan.

You owe yourself an Oly.

(liquid bubbling) (tranquil music) Historian Murray Morgan once wrote that some mornings on Puget Sound, it feels like you're waking up inside an oyster.

A lot of us who live on the wet side of the Cascades can relate.

In fact, given winter moisture, seafood diets, maritime livelihoods and pastimes, it can feel like we ourselves are sea life.

Or maybe that's just my Scandinavian genes speaking.

Despite our relationship with the sea, there are still enigmas within the waters that surround us.

The sea and lakes have secrets that haven't been unlocked.

Are we scaring ourselves with stories?

Are we telling tall tales?

Or are we truly peering at the unknown?

Here's a look at this history of mystery.

The idea of sea serpents in the Salish Sea and nearby waters is an old one.

(mysterious music) Indigenous artwork has featured a serpent-like creature in petroglyphs, dances, songs, masks, and carvings.

It was a known critter long before Europeans came along with their own stories of seeing weird things at sea.

In 1880, a news item in "The Vancouver Independent" reported that a marvelous sea serpent had been seen again off Cape Flattery.

Quote, "He disported in the water for more than 15 minutes to invite inspection of its prodigious size and rare ugliness, throwing his long tapering body 90 feet out of the water, and disclosing wings that put our main sail in the shade," reported one B. Stowe when he got to port.

The serpent's snorting was said to be epic.

(creature growling) That same year, a wonderful sea monster was said to have been caught near Victoria by local First Nations people.

It was brought to town and described as a genuine sea serpent, six feet in length, with the Orthodox mane, a head shaped like a panther.

It was said to have been preserved in spirits and sent to Ottawa for identification, as no locals knew what it was.

That wasn't the last time some odd carcass found on a Northwest beach sparked the question, "What the heck is it?"

(mystical music) Since the late 19th century, hundreds of sightings of large serpent-like creatures have been reported off the coast of Washington and British Columbia, most in the Salish Sea, from the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Willapa Bay, from San Juan Islands to Howe Sound.

The creatures weren't always flapping massive wings, but were often described as having a long body or neck, sometimes serpentine in movement.

People had different impressions of its head, though, saying it looked like a dog, or a seal, a horse, a sheep, a cat, a cow.

(cow moos) I suppose it's a kind of Rorschach test for the observers.

As with UFOs, sea serpent sightings seemed to come in bunches.

With more boat traffic, more reports came in.

The biggest bunch began in the 1930s in the waters off Vancouver Island.

In October of 1933, the "Victoria Daily Times" reported, on an admittedly slow news day, that sightings of a strange sea creature were made by witnesses deemed credible.

That story turned on the spigot of serpent sightings.

The sightings were by two different couples, roughly a year apart, both in the vicinity of Cadboro Bay near Victoria.

One witness, a Major Langley, a local barrister, was out on his yacht with his wife, when they heard a snort and a hiss, and saw a large creature with a dome-like back with serrations.

Langley had been whaling, and he said it was unlike any whale he'd ever seen.

It was near the same location where, the previous summer, another couple named Kemp had cited something bizarre.

Mister Kemp worked for the Provincial Archives, and reported the sighting of a reptilian creature swimming toward shore where it raised its head out of water and rested it on a rock.

It had a serrated tail, and moved a bit like a crocodile.

It had a mane that resembled a bed of kelp.

He calculated it was more than 60 feet long.

(creature growling) Like Loch Ness' Nessie in Scotland, it needed a name.

Suggestions ranged from the multi-syllabic, Hyaschuckaluck, which means large water snake in Chinook jargon, to Amy, but they settled on Cadborosaurus, or just Caddy for short.

(whimsical music) Sea monsters aside, there are are creatures that have connection in terms of evolution.

Sea mammals that breathe like us, that have warm blood, and beating hearts, they communicate, they have culture, their land limbs have become fins, but it was a long time before we understood them at all.

Consider the case of the killer whale, and one in particular.

- But look at that face.

Isn't he a fine fellow?

- So in the 1950s and '60s, the biggest celebrities in Seattle were animals.

Bobo the Gorilla at Woodland Park Zoo, most famous person, put that in quotes, in Seattle of his time.

Another huge celebrity came to town in 1965.

It was Namu the Killer Whale.

Aquariums and marine show places were popping up all over the country, and a local man named Ted Griffin got his hands on an orca named Namu, who was captured up in British Columbia.

When he first got to Seattle, we went down to the waterfront.

There he was in a small pen that was next to the dock, the first live captive killer whale.

And he didn't have any room to swim.

He basically just kind of would come to the surface and take a breath, and then sink back down.

There were animal activists in 1965 and after who came down and picketed, but people were also enchanted by Namu.

The movie comes out, Namu is a huge hit.

Unfortunately, the real Namu lived for about a year in captivity, and died right before the movie came out.

But the cause of death was determined to be a bacterial infection that was caused by sewage that was in the polluted Elliott Bay.

Public opinion about killer whales really started to shift.

People realized, well, these aren't just killers.

These animals, they have a social life, they have a language.

And so people began to understand killer whales better.

Namu helped us figure out what orcas were all about.

It has been a tragic story in many ways, but a species that was once dismissed as a nuisance and a menace is now a beloved regional symbol.

(upbeat folk music) (thunder cracks) And now the wet is upon us.

Isn't it glorious?

But old questions are replaced by new ones.

Will the beloved orca pods survive here?

Will the wet continue to sustain us and all the life it spawns, too?

Will the good rains continue or not?

How much will the water world we know and love change?

What can we do to make sure the changes aren't drastic or catastrophic?

We don't know all the answers, but with so many parts of the world drying out, the least we can do is embrace the wet and all it provides.

(upbeat folk music) - [Presenter] Hear more about this episode on the Mossback Podcast.

Just search Mossback wherever you listen.

- [Advertiser] Mossback's "Northwest" is made possible by the generous support of Port of Seattle.