image via Wikipedia

As Zee mentioned earlier [mb], as of today the Lady Washington is our official state ship. But why the Lady Washington?

The original Lady Washington was built as a sloop in 1750 in Massachusetts. In 1787 Captains Robert Gray and John Kendrick set sail from Boston in the Lady Washington and Columbia Rediviva, intent on heading around Cape Horn and up to the Pacific Northwest. (The voyage was plagued with mutiny, scurvy, and bad weather, and the captains eventually switched boats after about a year of fur trading on Vancouver Island.) Kendrick took the ship to Macao and refit it as a brig–a ship with two square-rigged masts, as opposed to the sloop, which generally has triangular sails.

Unable to sell his leftover pelts in Macao, Kendrick took the Lady Washington to Japan, pretending that a storm had forced him to take cover on the closed Japanese coasts. No one wanted sea otter fur in Japan, either, but it did mark the first time an American had reached Japan.

Kendrick was eventually killed on the Lady Washington in Hawaii, where he had taken part in a native uprising and, victorious, fired a salute with his cannon. Two British ships fired a reply, something foreign ships frequently did when in harbor together, only they forgot to not load their guns. All of the officers and several of the crew were killed, and John Howel took control of the ship. The British captains maintained that it was an accident. Howel was uninterested in remaining a captain and handed the ship off to someone else in Macao. The ship remained in Pacific trade until it foundered in the Phillippines in 1798, bereft of a second anchor which could have saved her.

A replica was built in Aberdeen in time for Washington State’s 1989 centennial celebrations. Under the Grey’s Harbor Historical Seaport Authority she now sails up and down the Pacific Coast as Washington’s Tall Ships Ambassador, providing 3 to 5 day summer camps, which actually sound like a lot of fun. She’s also been in the movies, most notably as the HMS Interceptor in the first Pirates of the Caribbean film.

But my real question is, where do I find a model that I can stick in a bottle?

(Information sloppily cobbled together via HistoryLink, Lady Washington, and Wikipedia.)