The Labouchere was constructed in 1858 at Green's shipyard in Blackwall, London -- the same yard that had built East Indiamen for centuries. She was a sidewheel paddle steamer, built for the Hudson's Bay Company to serve the rugged coast of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. The vessel was named for Henry Labouchere, who had served as Britain's colonial secretary from 1855 to 1858. Under the command of Captain J. Trivett, the Labouchere entered service along a coast where rivers emptied into cold fjords, Indigenous nations controlled the trade routes, and the nearest shipyard capable of major repairs was thousands of miles away. The ship represented the Company's ambitions in a region still contested between British, Russian, and American interests.

The Labouchere's history is studded with improbable episodes. In 1859, the ship's captain, John Swanson, won election to the Legislative Assembly of the Colony of Vancouver Island representing the riding of Nanaimo. His margin of victory was precisely one vote -- because there was precisely one qualified elector in the entire district. The election was described at the time as won by a "celebrated" majority, and it remains one of the more absurd footnotes in the history of colonial democracy. Swanson, a Hudson's Bay Company man elected by a single Company voter, would go on to serve in an assembly that governed a colony still finding its footing between fur trade outpost and settled province.

The 1862 encounter with the Tlingit was recorded by George Davidson, Assistant of the United States Coast Survey, and it reads like a scene from an adventure novel -- except that it illuminates something more complex than simple conflict. The Tlingit did not attack to destroy. They boarded to assert control, seizing the two most powerful men on the ship and driving the crew to the bow. The crew, with a large gun trained aft, held their fire. Both sides discharged their weapons into the air in a ritual exchange, and the Tlingit left. The Labouchere fled and stayed away for a year. When the ship returned, the Tlingit response was not hostility but generosity -- a deck covered in sea-otter and other skins, a gesture that said the matter was settled. It was diplomacy conducted on the Tlingit's terms, not the Company's.

By 1865, the Labouchere had been reassigned to the San Francisco-to-Victoria run, a commercially important but navigationally treacherous route. On April 14, 1866, under the command of Captain W.A. Mouat and carrying 100 passengers and cargo for Faulkner, Bell & Co., the Labouchere departed San Francisco heading north. Heavy fog blanketed the coast. The ship struck a reef off Point Reyes -- the same headland that has wrecked dozens of vessels over the centuries. The crew managed to back the steamer off the rocks and kept her offshore through the night, but by morning she was taking on too much water. On April 15, the Labouchere sank. Eight lifeboats launched; one was swamped, and two passengers drowned. The remaining lifeboat passengers were picked up by the vessel Rescue. Twenty-three men who had stayed aboard were pulled from the sinking ship by an Italian fishing vessel called the Andrew, moments before the Labouchere disappeared beneath the surface.

The Labouchere left more than a wreck site. Labouchere Channel and Labouchere Point mark the northeast end of King Island in the Dean Channel area of British Columbia's Central Coast, near Bella Coola. Labouchere Passage lies near Drury Inlet farther south. Labouchere Bay sits on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska. These names trace the ship's working life along a coast it served for nearly a decade -- from the Inside Passage to the open Pacific. The wreck itself lies somewhere off Point Reyes, unmarked and largely forgotten, one of 56 ships that have come to grief on this stretch of California coast. But the Tlingit encounter, the one-vote election, and the fog-shrouded sinking give the Labouchere a story richer than most ships twice its size.