The Blue Bottle
May 7, 2008
By Irene Martin
While emptying drawers and cabinets preparatory to a major remodeling, I found an unusual bottle in one of my husband’s miscellaneous piles. The blue bottle was two inches long, with slender white striping along the sides. At one end it curled back upon itself, like a chambered nautilus. The other end had an opening which must have had a stopper or cork in it at one time. A curl of clear glass defined the upper edge. Many years ago my husband had found it on the beach at Bayview on the lower Columbia River, site of a 19th century salmon cannery. At first he thought it was just a bit of broken cobalt glass, but when he picked it up, he realized it was a bottle.
But what kind of bottle was deliberately made to not stand upright? I guessed it might be a perfume bottle, but it seemed an odd shape for such a purpose. In the days before the Antiques Roadshow and e-Bay there was no easy way to find out. We took it with us to antique shops and shows, and glass collector displays. We pored through books in the local library. Finally, at a large antique show in Portland, Oregon, we found a dealer who identified it.
“It’s Nailsea glass,” she said, “and it’s a Victorian tear vial.”
We weren’t much further ahead on either count. But further research led us to discover that Nailsea glass was made in England in the mid 19th century, and was known for the striping that was twisted into the molten glass while being blown. Cobalt blue was a popular color. And a tear vial? Known at one time as a “lachrimatory,” the tear bottle dates from antiquity. In Victorian times they became especially popular, as part of the elaborate mourning customs of the era. The bottles were fitted with special stoppers, that allowed the collected tears to evaporate over a period of time. When the bottle was empty, the mourning period was over. They were also used to hold tears for sprinkling on love letters, to indicate to the loved one how much they were missed. I sighed over this romantic idea, put the glass bottle back in one of several drawers of miscellaneous items and forgot about it.
Some years later I came across a passage about the life of Celia Hume, wife of salmon canner Robert Hume. Together with her husband, Celia Hume came to live at the Bayview Cannery just below Skamokawa, Washington, on the Columbia River, in the early 1870s. Robert Hume had struggled for several years to amass the capital needed to establish his cannery. The early days were filled with difficulties, including a spring freshet that wiped out some of his construction work, and the constant worry about getting the huge amount of labor done in the short season available to put up a pack of canned salmon in those pioneering days. But worse was to come. In Robert Hume’s own words:
“At this time our baby girl was taken sick and we sent for an old German doctor who lived at Cathlamet, but think he gave her such strong medicine that it caused her death. She was a beautiful child, and it nearly broke her mother’s heart when we lost her. We buried her in a little nook near the house, and many times I would awaken at midnight and find that my wife was missing from my side, would go to the little nook and find her stretched upon this grave. She grieved so much that [I] believe she implanted the seeds of death into her constitution. I was obliged to have the child disinterred and taken to Portland, to the Lone Fir cemetery, on the west side, where she now lies.”
Shortly thereafter the Humes had a baby boy, but in 1877 he also died. Robert Hume wrote:
“During the summer we lost our little boy, four and one-half years old, who had come to heal the wounds of our early loss. This second bereavement was too much for my wife to endure, and she went into a decline and soon followed her children to the Lone Fir cemetery.”
The distancing from his own emotions is evident in this passage, “her children” being the most obvious phrase.
Robert Hume left Bayview in 1877 and moved to San Francisco for a while. Despite his successful business ventures, he sold his Bayview and Astoria property, saying “I felt I had gotten to the end of life and cared little what became of me.” Although devastated by the loss of his little boy and his wife, he eventually remarried, and entered the canning business again, this time on the Rogue River in Gold Beach, Oregon.
Was the bottle Celia Hume’s? My romantic notions of a woman in a Victorian parlor writing letters to a fiancé or to friends far distant, sprinkled with her tears, vanished. Was it Robert Hume’s? Grief so deep that it caused him to leave the Columbia River entirely despite his early success makes the tear vial seem like a paltry thing.
The Bayview Cannery is no more, only a few pilings near a rocky beach. I sometimes look at the blue bottle, and see it as a reminder of pioneer days, of the many lonely women from those early times who lost children and their own lives trying to establish homes and families in the Pacific Northwest. I also think of it as a grave marker on that rocky beach at Bayview, a symbol of sorrow left behind. The bottle is empty now. The blue glass is surprisingly soft to the touch, as if the beach has worn and smoothed it in the century that passed until its rediscovery.