R.D. Hume moved his commercial salmon fishing, processing, and shipping business from Astoria to the mouth of the Rogue River in 1876, expecting large profits from king salmon runs. After his small steamer Varuna sank on the Rogue River bar in 1880, he salvaged its steam engine and built a replacement vessel at Gold Beach from a white cedar tree cut 13 miles upriver, using naturally curved white cedar roots for ribs and myrtlewood dowels to join ribs to keel. Despite a severe flood in January 1881 that nearly destroyed the ship during final construction, Mary Duncan Hume, named for Hume's wife, was launched on January 21, 1881. She began 97 years of active commercial sea service, the longest for any commercial vessel on the Pacific Coast, and retained her original name of registry from 1881 to the present. For her first decade she worked as a coastal freighter carrying wool, canned salmon, and other goods from the Oregon Coast to San Francisco. Sold to Pacific Whaling Co. on December 5, 1889, for $25,000, she entered Arctic whaling service in the Bering Sea and became noted for a 29-month voyage with the largest recorded catch of whale baleen, valued at $400,000, and for the longest recorded whaling voyage, lasting six years. During that Arctic service, sailors died from scurvy, cold, and lunacy caused by privation, and their bodies were kept frozen in ice until burial became possible on Herschel Island after the spring thaw. After a later storm washed two sailors overboard on her return from her last whaling voyage, she was retired to towing service on Alaska's Nushagak River. The American Tug Boat Company purchased her on May 20, 1909, fitted her as an ocean tugboat, and after a brief, unprofitable 1914 refit for halibut fishing with 10 halibut dories, she returned to tug service under numerous owners for 60 years. In the summer of 1978, she entered the Port of Gold Beach under her own power for final retirement near her birthplace, and on August 1, 1979, she was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.