SS Mariposa (1883)

Mariposa was an iron ship built in 1883 in Philadelphia by the William Cramp & Sons Shipbuilding Company. It was of 3,000 gross register tons and was built for the Oceanic Steamship Company, which had been founded in 1881 by John D. Spreckels & Brothers to provide passenger and cargo service between San Francisco and Honolulu, Hawaii. Later their service was extended to include Australia and New Zealand.[1]

The ship was sold in 1912 to the Alaska Steamship Company, but not renamed.

On her final voyage she rescued the crew of Al-Ki that was wrecked 1 November and later rescued the crew of Mahattan that was wrecked on 15 November. The crew of Manhattan had looted the wreck of Al-Ki and the Al-Ki crew were not happy when they found out and had to be kept separate from the other survivors. Mariposa in turn was wrecked on 18 November before making port and everyone had to be rescued after she sank after hitting a Straits Island reef off the coast of British Columbia. There are erroneous reports that she was wrecked on 18 December 1917, even on the Wrecksite.com page that shows newspaper article about salvage efforts being halted on 2 December.[2] Her cargo, donkey engine and other machinery were salvaged.

In 1926 the Oceanic Steamship Company was bought out by the Matson Line of which it became a subsidiary.[3]

• Marianne Cope, a missionary Religious Sister, was the leader of a small group of Franciscan Sisters who sailed to Hawaii on this ship at the request of the King of Hawaii to provide medical care for the lepers of the country. She and Sister Leopoldina Burns and their companions arrived in Honolulu on November 8, 1883, and she spent the rest of her life in this service, dying on the island of Molokai in 1918.[4] She was declared a saint by the Catholic Church in 2012 for her heroic and holy life of service and self-sacrifice. She is also honored as a saint by the Episcopal Church.
• King O'Malley arrived in Sydney aboard the Mariposa in late July 1888, travelling from San Francisco via Hawaii. He left the U.S. to escape embezzlement allegations. In Australia he became a member of the inaugural federal parliament and served two terms as a cabinet minister.[5]
• Sarah Bernhardt, French actress. In August 1891 the Sarah Bernhardt Company passed through Auckland on the Mariposa en route from Sydney to Honolulu.
• Jessie Ackermann was the much-travelled delegate of the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union who left Sydney on the Mariposa on 20 March 1893 to return to America.[6]
• Jack London and his wife, the writer Charmian London, traveled from Papeete to San Francisco and back in January and February, 1908.[7]
• William Priestly MacIntosh left Sydney in the Mariposa in April 1898 on the first leg of a journey to Italy where he was going to supervise the roughing out of the marble sculptures for the Queen Victoria Building.[8]
• Victor Segalen, a French Navy Doctor, who later became famous as an ethnographer, writer and poet, boarded the SS Mariposa in San Francisco in January 1903 to travel to Tahiti for an assignment on a French Navy ship.

• Alameda, a sister ship
• SS Mariposa (1931)