Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks

CHAPTER NINE BURIED IN THE HEART OF SAN FRANCISCO

Standing on the Clay Street wharf in San Francisco, Etting Mickle stared at the advancing wall of smoke. Since late the previous evening, he had listened nervously to the roar of flames. The bright glow in the sky, the flying sparks and the hoarse shouts had seemed distant, but now, well into the new day, the wind shifted. With terrifying speed, fire raced across the waterfront.

One block west of where Mickle stood, the ship Niantic began to smolder, then suddenly exploded into flame. Embers carried by the wind swept across the wharf and landed at his feet. “Get out the pump!” he shouted to the crew of his ship, General Harrison. Mickle’s fortune was invested in that ship, now ringed by fire. Inside her hold lay a wealth of merchandise: imported wines and liquor, tools, hardware, rolls of fabric and fancy foods. The men pumped frantically, but it was too late. General Harrison began to burn fiercely. Mickle and the men with him turned and ran for the safety of the open water at the end of the pier. Stopping just beyond the reach of the flames, they hacked away at the wooden wharf, ripping up planks and chopping at the pilings. This last-ditch effort succeeded in cutting off the advancing fire and saved many other ships that sat in thick clusters in the deeper waters of the city’s anchorage. Standing on the truncated end of the Clay Street wharf, choking in the thick smoke, Mickle stared as General Harrison went up in a sheet of flame. A year of hard work and investment was gone.

Deep inside the excavation, the backhoe carefully pulls back layers of sand. When the scrape of the huge bucket exposes a dark-stained layer, I raise my hand to stop the huge machine and pick up the high-pressure hose. As water washes over the area, sand streams away to reveal ashes, burned wood, melted glass and twisted metal. Tips of charred pilings become visible alongside the fire-scarred planks of General Harrison. Over the past week, archeologists and construction workers have labored to uncover the ship from her tomb of mud and sand. Now General Harrison’s, charred hull is exposed where she burned and sank in that long-ago fire on May 4, 1851.

Today, the ship lies 24 feet beneath street level. Lining the construction fence on the streets above are hundreds of spectators drawn to the incongruous spectacle of a ship lying deep in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district. Whether you approach San Francisco by air or sea, or by car across the Bay Bridge, the view is dominated by the high rises of the financial district as they march up from the Embarcadero to the slopes of Telegraph, Nob and Russian hills. The distinctive profile of the Transamerica Pyramid rises above some of the city’s few standing survivors of its youth. The relatively low two- and three-story brick buildings of Jackson Square are the last visible remnants of San Francisco’s infamous “Barbary Coast,” survivors of the 1906 earthquake, fires and urban renewal. They are survivors from another era, perched in the midst of a modern city.

Directly beneath the financial district lies an immense archeological deposit that dates back to the origins of San Francisco during the gold rush. Six major fires and innumerable smaller conflagrations have devastated the city. After the destruction wrought by the fires, entire burnt districts were filled over. The debris of those fires lies buried beneath the modern city. The astonishing collection of items that came to be buried beneath San Francisco attracted comment even during the gold rush. The San Francisco Evening Picayune, on September 30, 1850, remarked: “At some future period, when the site of San Francisco may be explored by a generation ignorant of its history, it will take its place by the side of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and furnish many valuable relics to perplex the prying Antiquarian. Buried in the streets, from six to ten feet beneath the surface, there is already a stratum of artificial productions which the entombed cities of Italy cannot exhibit. Knives, forks, spoons, chisels, files, and hardware of every description, gathered from the places of several conflagrations. Masses of nails exhibiting volcanic indications, stove plates and tin ware, empty bottles by the cartload and hundreds of other miscellanies, lie quietly and deeply interred in Sacramento Street, and perhaps will be carefully exhumed in days to come, and be distributed over the world as precious relics!” The Evening Picayune’s smug prophecy did not take long to come true. As early as the 1870s, excavation for construction unearthed relics of the gold rush period. The transient nature of San Francisco ensured that most residents were ignorant of the particulars of its past — and the “discoveries” that arose from beneath the streets and sidewalks delighted them.

Now, I stand watching the high-pressure hose strip away the shroud of mud and sand as history emerges from the buried ashes of a long-ago fire. The oak planks of the ship’s hull are solid, and the wood is bright and fresh. Even more amazing is the stench of burned wood and sour wine rising from the charred debris. A century and a half ago mud, water and sand sealed the wreckage of the ship so perfectly that time has stood still.

The product of the venerable New England seafaring town of Newburyport, Massachusetts, General Harrison was launched from the banks of the Merrimack River in the spring of 1840. Built for a group of local merchants, General Harrison worked as a coastal packet out of Boston and New York, running south to New Orleans with passengers and cargo, then returning north with southern cotton. In 1846, the ship’s owners sold her to a consortium of well-known and moneyed Charlestown residents who had mercantile links to Pacific Coast ports from Chile to Alaska as well as Hawaii and China. The new owners sent General Harrison on a sixteen-month voyage around the world. After trading at Valparaiso, Tahiti, Hawaii and Hong Kong, she returned to New York in 1847. A new owner, Thomas H. Perkins, Jr., son of America’s richest man of the day, kept the ship in his fleet until 1849, the year of the exciting news that gold had been discovered in California.

The gold discovery sparked a “rush” for California’s riches. The editors of the New York Herald remarked in early January that the “spirit of emigration which is carrying off thousands to California… increases and expands every day. All classes of our citizens seem to be under the influence of this extraordinary mania… Poets, philosophers, lawyers, brokers, bankers, merchants, farmers, clergymen — all are feeling the impulse and are preparing to go and dig for gold and swell the number of adventurers to the new El Dorado.”

Most gold-seekers chose to travel to California by ship, and between December 1848 and December 1849, 762 vessels sailed from American ports for San Francisco. One of them was General Harrison. Sailing from Boston on August 3, 1849, the ship rounded Cape Horn to reach the Chilean port of Valparaiso. There, the ship’s agents, Mickle y Compañia, loaded merchandise from Chile’s farms, wineries and shops to sell in San Francisco. On February 3, 1850, the ship reached San Francisco. With her passengers off to the gold fields and her cargo sold, General Harrison would have been ready for another voyage. But the lure of gold was too much for her crew, who deserted and headed for the mines, leaving General Harrison, along with hundreds of other ships, idle on the San Francisco docks.

The waterfront was then a constantly growing, hectic center of activity. Every day, more ships arrived, workers landed cargoes, and thousands of men crowded the sandy streets seeking passage up the bay and its tributaries to the heart of the gold country. Crowded beyond its capacity, San Francisco was boxed in on all sides by massive, shifting sand dunes and a shallow cove that was by turns either a stagnant pond or an expanse of thick foul mud at low tide. The city’s entrepreneurs solved the problem of lack of space by building on top of the shallows of the cove. Thousands of pilings, shipped south from the forests of British Columbia and Puget Sound, were pounded into the shallows, enabling long wharves to march across the mud flats to the anchorage. Alongside the wharves, buildings were perched atop piles, and ships were hauled up onto the mud to serve the needs of the booming frontier town.

By the time of General Harrison’s arrival, a Chilean visitor to San Francisco described the city as “a Venice built of pine instead of marble. It is a city of ships, piers, and tides. Large ships with railings, a good distance from the shore, served as residences, stores, and restaurants… The whole central part of the city swayed noticeably because it was built on piles the size of ship’s masts driven down into the mud.”

The frequent fires that ravaged San Francisco exacerbated the city’s need for buildings. Etting Mickle, who was in charge of the local branch of Mickle y Compañia, bought (eneral Harrison to serve as the company’s “store ship,” or floating warehouse. Just a block west lay the Niantic, beached in August 1849 and converted into a store ship by friends of Mickle’s. Workers removed General Harrison’s masts and hauled her up onto the mud flats alongside the Clay Street wharf. Nestled in the mud, her hull still washed by the tide, the ship was quickly converted into a warehouse. Carpenters built a large “barn” on the deck and cut doors into the hull, while laborers cleaned out the hold to store crates, barrels and boxes of merchandise. Mickle advertised, on May 30, 1850, that “this fine and commodious vessel being now permanently stationed at the corner of Clay and Battery streets was in readiness to receive stores of any description, and offers a rare inducement to holders of goods.”

The new venture prospered. Mickle’s neighbors on Niantic reported, in a private letter in July 1850, that their store ship, thanks to the inflated real estate values of the gold rush, was worth what in today’s money would be $2.72 million and was raking in nearly $80,000 per month renting out space for storage and offices. Mickle doubtless was doing nearly as well. Commission merchants like him handled cargoes that arrived from around the world, storing them and arranging for their sale at auction. For his services, Mickle would collect a 10 per cent commission on the sale of merchandise, 5 per cent for procuring freight and flat fees for other services. He would also collect rent for storing merchandise inside General Harrison. In short, from the time a vessel arrived and Mickle’s firm cleared it with customs officials, landed the goods, stowed them in General Harrison for a month or two, sold and then delivered the goods to buyers, each crate or barrel had earned more than a few dollars.

From May 1850 to May 1851, General Harrison was a thriving business in the midst of a rapidly changing and expanding city. Continued construction on the waterfront pushed out well past Niantic and General Harrison, surrounding them with streets and two- or three-story wooden buildings perched atop pilings. In April 1851, one San Francisco newspaper, the Daily Alta California, commented: “It looks very curious in passing along some of the streets bordering on the water to see the stern of a ship with her name and the place from which she hails painted upon it, and her stern posts staring at you directly on the street. These ships, now high and dry, were hauled in about a year since as store ships, before the building was carried on in that section of the city in so rapid a manner, and now find themselves out of their natural element and a part of the streets of a great city.”

These new surroundings doomed General Harrison and Niantic. San Francisco had burned several times during the gold rush, but the worst disaster was the fire of May 4, 1851. The blaze began on the west side of Portsmouth Square just after u p.m. on May 3 and spread throughout the city. By early morning, the fire was still burning: “We do not know how great is the destruction, for the smoke is so dense and the fire intervening, it is impossible to tell.” When the smoke cleared, San Francisco had lost nearly two thousand buildings, a number of lives and $7 million in destroyed property and merchandise. Among the losses were Niantic, General Harrison and another store ship, Apollo.

In the aftermath of the fire, the Daily Alta California reported that the “portion of the burned district which was built out into the bay and upon piles will have to be rebuilt in a very different manner. The piles generally are entirely ruined or so badly injured that they will not serve the purpose of foundations for houses. They cannot be replaced from the fact that there is not now sufficient water in that portion of the city to enable the pile driver to be used. It will therefore be necessary generally, to fill it up, and thus give future improvements the solid earth for a foundation.” Over the next few years, sand from the dunes that hemmed the harbor was loaded by steam shovels and sent rocketing into the shallows on rail-mounted dump cars, burying the old waterfront beneath 16 feet of fill.

In the summer of 1851, before the burned area was completely filled in, Charles Hare, a “ship breaker,” reportedly “broke up” the charred remains of General Harrison and sold them off “piecemeal.” After that, as a progression of buildings arose on the corner of Clay and Battery, the story of General Harrison gradually faded from people’s memory. In April 1906, the great earthquake and fire destroyed San Francisco and leveled the block. Rebuilding was slow, so it was not until 1912 that workers cleared the ruins and dug down into the sand to pour the foundations for a new building. Their steam shovels hit the buried remains of General Harrison, but no one remembered the ship’s name, and newspaper reports suggested the wreck was that of a Spanish ship lost on the old waterfront in 1849. The workers tried to chop away the thick timbers of the ship, but the venerable old hulk resisted their axes and saws. A few pilings were hammered through the ship to support the foundations of the new building, and General Harrison was reburied. By the mid-1990s, that rediscovery had also been forgotten, and no one was sure of what lay beneath the street and the buildings at Clay and Battery. But one archeologist suspected that General Harrison was still there.

Thanks to various laws, developers in San Francisco must conduct an archeological reconnaissance before any construction proceeds. In 1999, archeologist Allen Pastron began negotiations with the New York firm that was planning to build a new hotel at the corner of Clay and Battery streets. Pastron, a veteran of many digs in downtown San Francisco, believed that the remains of General Harrison were buried there. He used a powerful auger to bore a series of holes into the site. At one hole, the drill spit out a chunk of oak covered with copper. It was a section of the ship’s wooden keel, or backbone, still sheathed with the copper that once protected the hull from marine organisms.

Just how much of the ship had survived was unknown. In early September 2001, construction crews cleared away the concrete floor of the basement of the recently demolished building on the site and dug into the wet sand beneath it. Within a few hours, the outline of a ship began to emerge. About two thirds, or 81 feet of the 126-foot hull, was exposed. The other end of the ship lay beneath an adjacent building.

Pastron had uncovered the long-forgotten General Harrison. He needed a maritime archeologist to help with the project and phoned me. I flew out right away to “get my hands dirty” on the dig.

On September 9, I arrive at the site and am struck by how this small hole in the midst of all the high rises is a portal to the past. After a steep climb down a construction ladder, then a walk over loose sand and slippery mud, I reach the wreck. General Harrison burned down to her waterline, so only the bottom third of the ship’s once massive hull remains. The hold is largely empty, as it was cleaned out after the fire by salvager Charles Hare and his crew of local Chinese laborers. They pumped out the flooded lower part of the ship and mucked out the sodden, charred cargo. Hare’s crew, working in toxic, awful conditions after the fire, did more than clean out the ship. They also wrenched out hundreds of solid copper and brass fasteners that held together the timbers and peeled off the copper sheathing on the outside of the hull, which meant diving into the surrounding fetid shallows.

Inside General Harrison is more evidence of the Chinese ship breakers. A thick iron pry-bar for removing the thick copper bolts lies in one area. Nearby is a pile of iron bolts, stacked ready for removal. We find a broken rice bowl, a shattered bottle and several pairs of worn-out boots. It is as if the workers have just gone home. They left the job unfinished, though. The ship is only partially broken down — nearly every bit of valuable copper is gone, but the work stopped short of cutting apart the wooden hull. That might mean that the scrapping ended in October 1851, when newspapers reported that the work of filling in the shallows had at last reached the burned-out General Harrison. When carts began dumping sand just outside the hull, Hare’s crew simply dropped what they were doing and left. As I look at the half-cut planks, at sections of timber lying where laborers were chopping them up — the axe marks still fresh — and the discarded boots, bowl and bottle, I feel that I have truly stepped into the past.

Then time seemingly stops again, just before seven on the morning of September 11. As I walk to the site, my cell phone rings. It is my wife, Ann, at home in Vancouver, telling me that a jet has just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. The crew gathers at the General Harrison dig, and down in our hole in the heart of San Francisco, we listen to a small radio as the terrible news comes in from back east. The second jet, the grounding of flights across the country and the rumors— we hear that the State Department has been hit, that the Capitol is in flames, that the White House has been evacuated, and that downtown San Francisco is also being evacuated. I look up at the Transamerica Pyramid and the towers of the nearby Embarcadero Center, and all this history beneath me seems insignificant, and the evidence of this long-ago disaster inconsequential. We are hustled off the site by security guards, and I make my way back to my hotel, with no place to go and nothing to do but wait as new history unfolds.

The next day, we return to work on General Harrison. Somber, and now stuck in San Francisco with no easy way to get home since all flights are grounded for an indefinite time, I turn to work and immerse myself in the past. It is cathartic and strangely reassuring. After all, we are exposing a layer of a once-devastated San Francisco that lies beneath yet another layer of destruction, atop which rests the modern city which now, on September 12, is beginning to reassert a semblance of normalcy. Life goes on, and the history we are exposing is a reminder of the great cycle of existence, not only for our crew but also for the crowds that again gather to watch. Local author Rebecca Solnit, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle a year after our dig, remarks that all those onlookers, “somehow drawn out of themselves in this place,” in a social climate where few people even make eye contact, nonetheless “feel part of something, and that the place was somehow enlarged — not only in its sense of time as the ship hull made visible the ruined city of 1851, but in its sense of community.”

The sense of timelessness and intimate contact with a lost community, the San Francisco that ended dramatically on May 4, 1851, certainly comes through as we continue to dig. As the backhoe starts to scratch out a rectangular trench close to the port, or left side, of the exposed hull, I hear the telltale crunch of breaking glass and stop the work. Over the next hour, with the backhoe operator delicately working the huge hoe like a surgeon’s tool, we pull back the sand to expose the top of a thick mass of blackened, melted glass and cinders. This mass, glued together by mud and creosote from the burnt wood, is part of the onetime store of General Harrison.

The fire that destroyed General Harrison was intense, flashing over the ship so quickly that some items fell into the flooded hold and the tidal shallows next to the ship, landing in the mud practically unharmed. Using hoses, we slowly wash away layers of ash, cinders and mud to reveal a door with its brass pull-ring still bright and shiny — and with traces of paint on the wood. A broken box bears the partial trademark and name of a company that we cannot decipher, but which appears to say “Freres,” indicating a French origin. It is a reminder that California’s gold attracted the goods of a world market.

Then, as the water washes away more of the thick black sediment, I spot the corner of a small pine box. Carefully, and yet eagerly, we work for the next two hours to slowly free it from beneath fallen timbers and piles of broken glass. It is an intact crate. Finally, once the box is clear of debris and cleaned, we photograph and measure it, and survey its location on our site map. Only then do I carefully open the lid. Inside are twelve bottles, packed in straw. Soggy and stuck to the bottles, the straw easily yields as I pick up one bottle. The cork in it is covered with a silver foil cap. The label has disintegrated, but as I wipe the bottle clean and hold it up, the sun illuminates the wine inside. It is now red from oxidation, but the style of the bottle and the cap indicate that it is a German white wine, perhaps some of the “Rhine wine” that Mickle advertised for sale just months before the fire.

Even more bottles — of Madeira, brandy, sherry and Champagne— some still full of liquid, emerge from the mud. The fancy foods inside the store ship were probably all destroyed, I think, but we find what might be samples of pâté. Then I reach down and pick up a perfectly preserved peanut, still in its shell and only slightly singed. Other surprises include rolls and bolts of charred cloth, lying next to melted and fused kegs of nails and tacks. A glint of bright red reveals a bag of small red glass beads, and bits of hardware provide a hint of what was once nice furniture.

Our work reminds me of earlier digs in San Francisco — the store ship Niantic, destroyed in the same May 1851 fire and discovered in 1978, yielded a variety of well-preserved objects from linoleum rolls to a leather jacket folded by its owner and placed atop a crate. Faber pencils from London, sausage and truffle pâté and French Champagne from Rheims, mixed in with crockery and hardware, made the Niantic site a gold-rush Pompeii. Later, in 1986, Pastron and his crew, myself included, excavated an entire half block of buildings that had fallen, still on fire, into the bay’s shallows during the May 1851 fire, and were encapsulated in cold, thick blue mud. We gently washed away the mud to reveal crocks filled with butter, bags of coffee, chests packed with tea leaves, bottled preserves — a jar of cherries was still bright red — and crates of army surplus rifles and ammunition: debris now made priceless by the passing of time and their near-perfect condition, thanks to their being sealed beyond the reach of air and light.

My career as an archeologist immersed me in the gold rush so fully that those times seem alive to me. When I walk the streets of downtown San Francisco, in my mind’s eye I see the wharves, tent buildings and crowds of strangers from all lands as ships daily discharge more men and goods into this great and grand bazaar on the Pacific frontier. This sense of the past is reinforced by reading the letters, diaries and newspapers of the time, and from looking at faded photographs of the city as it was. Thanks to archeology, I feel privileged to have walked in the same mud as the 49ers, to have smelled the reeking aftermath of the May 1851 fire as its remains emerged. I have trod the decks and hulls of ships sepulchered in the mud as San Francisco filled in the old waterfront. I have sipped Champagne and brandy destined for a gold-rush saloon, when we unpacked it in the laboratory, and I have sorted through the detritus of the past to scientifically catalog what we have excavated. The smallest and humblest items add to the picture. Carbonized beans from General Harrison appear to be the small white beans common to Chile, and carbonized grains of barley, again probably Chilean, are proof of how that South American country served as the gold rush’s principal larder until farming took hold on the California frontier.

Two weeks after the project began, it is time for me to leave. Very soon, General Harrison will return to the darkness when construction workers rebury her to make way for the new hotel on the site. Rather than destroy her, the developer has decided to put General Harrison back into her time capsule. Displays inside the new hotel will remind San Franciscans and visitors of a city born of the sea, as well as the romance of a buried waterfront that still holds the bones of the ships that helped to settle this town in the days of the gold rush. For me, the mental map of the waterfront of May 1851 is more complete, more detailed than before, and this foray is a powerful reminder of why I love what I do. This dig, in its unlikely downtown locale, is also a reminder that my work as a maritime archeologist does not always mean slipping beneath the waves.

The uncovering of General Harrison reminded me of an earlier exploration of another buried shipwreck, this one covered over by the sands of a beach. That ship was wrecked in 1878 on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, a long expanse of sand that is exposed to the full fury of the open sea. Dozens of ships have come to grief in the surf there, though no trace of them is usually visible. The writer Bret Harte once likened that surf to ravenous wolves of the sea, racing up to meet the dunes.

The winter of 1982–83 hit the California coast with ferocious rain and driving winds. During one storm, high tides and heavy seas ripped up the shoreline, and at Ocean Beach, the sand receded 63 feet and dropped 9 feet, exposing the first hints of a long-forgotten shipwreck. When a local resident called to report that an old ship’s timbers were sticking out of the surf, I rushed out to Ocean Beach and saw the tip of the bow rising out of the sand as the tide receded. Over the next year, more of the ship rose out of its grave, and by spring 1984, the entire outline of the wreck lay exposed.

We helped nature along by using fire hoses and a pumper truck, provided by a very helpful San Francisco Fire Department crew, to cut through the sand. We also pushed down a high-pressure water probe to find what lay buried inside the wreck and discovered that just a little less than half the hull, from the lower deck to the keel, lay beneath us. After washing away the sand at the stern, I put on dive gear and dropped into a maelstrom of swirling grit and water, trying to see what the outside of the hull looked like. As each wave crashed into the hull, I was flipped, twisted and bashed into the ship, but the dive was worth a few bruises and cuts. I could see that the entire outside of the lower hull was still sheathed in a bright yellow composition metal known as Muntz metal. The burnished hull looked like it was covered in hammered gold.

Much to the dismay of the crowd of curious onlookers, and despite the glittering “false gold” that covered the hull, the wreck yielded no tangible treasure. The hull, filled with gravel, was empty. We were able to establish that this was the wreck of a medium clipper named King Philip. But as the sand continued to erode, we were faced with a mystery. Strands of wire rope festooned the exposed hull, and chunks of Douglas fir timbers appeared. Then one morning we found ourselves looking at a tangle of iron chain with two wooden deadeyes. I recognized it as a bobstay, part of the rigging that attaches beneath the bowsprit of a sailing vessel, but it was too small for King Philip. What was all this? The mystery began to unravel as we mapped out our finds. The wire rope was ship’s rigging, caught in the ribs of King Philip. The Douglas fir timbers were from a different hull — a ship built of that Pacific coast softwood and not the oak of our medium clipper. The bobstays were also from that other ship. Clearly, another vessel had come to grief on the same spot after the wreck of King Philip. But what ship?

We found the answer after a search in the archives. On March 13, 1902, the three-masted Pacific coast lumber schooner Reporter was heading in towards the Golden Gate with a load of pilings, milled lumber and shingles from Gray’s Harbor, Washington. Her captain, Adolph Hansen, lost his way in the darkness after mistaking the lights of the Cliff House for the Point Bonita lighthouse that marks the northern approach to the harbor and sailed into the breakers of Ocean

Beach. Caught by the waves, Reporter hit the beach right next to where King Philip had gone ashore in 1878. The crew took to the rigging to save themselves after one of the masts fell and were rescued from their perch above the waves. But by the morning, according to the San Francisco Examiner, “There is no hope for the Reporter… the schooner can only fight until her tendons give. Her ribs and sheathing, masts and rails will wash ashore, to be carried away by thrifty seaside dwellers and be used as firewood.” A few days later, the newspaper noted that Reporter, broken and scattered, was “fast digging her own grave alongside the bones of the King Philip, whose ribs are still seen.”

Mystery solved, we turned back to learning more about our medium clipper. Then, out of the blue, I received a phone call from Nuna Cass. She had found the letter book of King Philip’s first captain, Charles Rollins, who was one of her ancestors. The letter book’s detailed accounts of both Captain Rollins’s experiences as well as that of the ship had sparked her interest. She offered to help reconstruct the ship’s history. We learned that King Philip began life in November 1856 as the largest vessel ever launched from the shipyard of Dennett Weymouth in Alna, Maine. Nearly twice the tonnage of any other vessel built there, the 182-foot King Philip was also the last full-rigged ship built by Weymouth, who died in 1875, just three years before King Philip met her end.

I flew to Maine and, with the help of Peter Throckmorton, a good friend who was one of the fathers of underwater archaeology, I drove out to visit the “Old Weymouth place.” A manicured lawn sloped down to the riverbank, and as we walked to the water, Peter pointed out the logs and timbers that marked the old shipyard’s ways. More than a century after Dennett Weymouth’s death, the remains of his shipyard were still there, preserved by the cold fresh waters of the Sheepscot River. This was the first time in my career that I’d made the journey, through space and time, from the grave of a ship that I was studying back to her cradle.

Peter, fired up by the moment, went up to the house and knocked on the door. The lady who answered was not a descendant, but she told us that there some old Weymouth family papers in the attic. She rummaged around and came downstairs with a faded drawing. While it was not labeled, we knew immediately what it was. Weymouth had carefully drawn the outline of King Philip and, with the sail maker, had laid out the sail plan for the ship. I don’t know what stunned us more— finding the plan or that generous woman succumbing to Peter’s entreaties to donate it to the maritime museum back in San Francisco.

We ended the day by driving to nearby Newcastle to visit the home of the Glidden family, one of King Philip’s first owners. Glidden & Williams operated the principal clipper ship line between New England and California from 1850 until well after the Civil War. King Philip, built after the heyday of the extreme clippers with their knife-like hulls and lofty spars filled with sail, was a more full-bodied “medium” clipper and a predecessor to the boxier “down-easters” that were the last generation of American wooden-hulled full-rigged sailing ships. To make money with these ships, they had to carry cargoes quickly. The fast clippers of the late 1840s and early 1850s made record time on their voyages, but their narrow hulls could not carry much cargo. The medium clippers were a compromise, sacrificing some of the form that made the ships fast for more capacity. Just the same, King Philip was said by historian William Fairburn to have been a good sailer with good (that is, fast) passages. “She was,” commented Fairburn, “undoubtedly hard driven.”

“Hard driven” applied not only to the ship but her crew. To get a slow ship to make good passages meant pushing both ship and men to their limits, if not beyond. And King Philip’s crew mutinied on more than one occasion, setting the vessel on fire on two occasions. In 1874, a U.S. naval officer, who sent an armed force aboard King Philip in Rio de Janeiro to quell an uprising, during which “the ship’s steward had been killed and most of the crew had deserted,” sympathetically commented that “perhaps they had good reason.” Intrigued by the harsh reality of life before the mast, I spent more time digging into the ship’s history than into the sand that shrouded her bones.

Instead of running to California like other Glidden & Williams ships, King Philip entered the “general carrying trade,” loading all types of merchandise and delivering them to ports around the world. Captain Rollins’s letter book spans the time between June 1857 and May 1860. Those early letters did far more to flesh out those water-stained oak bones than all of the archeology I could ever practice on the hulk, an invaluable lesson for me. Beyond the science and the study of the “object,” in this case the half-intact hulk I was enthusing over, the significance of any find lies in the connections to real people.

Rollins’s first letters recorded a voyage from Gravesend, England, around the tip of Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean and then to Melbourne, Australia. He reported that “the ship sails fair” with all sail set but went on to say that “my crew have mostly left the ship,” leaving him with two officers and seven men. “The cook is away today and it is doubtful if I see him again. They leave about ^120 wages behind them. I do not think the ship shall lose anything by these men as I shall take but two mates from here and the Steward shipped in Boston was totally unfit for his place. He had no idea of cooking or of saving provisions and besides was abominably filthy.” From Melbourne, King Philip sailed to the coast of Peru to load guano — the accumulated droppings of sea birds— being mined in the Chincha Islands as fertilizer. The reeking cargo stunk to high heaven but was literally worth its weight in gold.

After discharging the guano at Rotterdam in September 1858, Rollins took on four hundred casks of gin and headed for England, and from there to San Francisco with a cargo of lumber, sugar, pig iron, livestock and coal. His letter to Glidden & Williams from San Francisco is full of complaints, particularly about a “patent reefing gear” installed in the rigging to handle some of the work that the sailors usually did aloft. The gear should have acted like a rolling window shade to retract a sail in heavy wind so as to keep the wind from bursting it or breaking the yards or mast. Rollins raged that the gear was too tightly installed, slipped off its rollers and cut into the wooden spars, and jammed frequently. In a fierce gale, the gear stuck, leaving the sail exposed to the full fury of the wind instead of “reefing” or rolling up. The main topgallant mast bent and nearly broke, then the sail burst, ripping away in the storm.

I was amused by Rollins’s comments on this Victorian-era invention to cut costs by replacing people with a machine. Reading his letter was a revelation, and one that I would not find in the cold dead hulk of a wrecked ship, about how frustrated people felt when confronted by technology that promised to help but did not.

Rollins left King Philip in early 1860, but under other captains and other crews, the ship carried a variety of cargoes around the world. In 1869, at a stop in Honolulu, the crew mutinied and set King Philip on fire. The damage was bad — so bad that the ship was condemned and sold at a “fire sale.” Puget Sound lumber merchants Pope & Talbot bought and repaired King Philip, but the bad luck that had dogged the ship since the beginning continued.

On an 1874 voyage out of Baltimore, the crew mutinied and set fire to the ship. After the fire was put out, the crew still refused to sail. An armed force of U.S. Marines from the nearby United States Naval Academy at Annapolis finally had to go aboard to re-establish order. After that, Pope & Talbot never sent King Philip on another protracted voyage. They rerigged the ship as a bark for better maneuverability on the Pacific coast. Later that year, the press reported that “King Philip had just completed her tenth trip to Puget Sound and back since January 1st, 1876, and has still some days to spare. She has brought to port in that time nearly ten million feet in lumber.” The regular run to and from Puget Sound occupied the ship’s days.

But bad luck continued to trouble King Philip. On January 25, 1878, she was leaving empty, or in ballast, from San Francisco. Cast off on the bar by her tug without any wind to fill her sails, the ship drifted in the current and into the breakers. Both anchors failed to hold, and at five that evening, King Philip went ashore. At low tide, the hull was high and dry; sightseers were able to walk right up and touch the stranded hulk. By the next day, the ship was “immovable” according to press accounts, and the insurance company sold the wreck to John Molloy, a local grocer who also speculated on scrap and salvage. He blasted the hulk apart with black powder to salvage what he could, but the lower hull, set firmly in the sand, remained in place. Periodically uncovered by the shifting sands of Ocean Beach, King Philip finally disappeared from view in the 1920s, when sand was dumped there to build the Great Highway. Six decades later, thanks to the winter storms of 1982–83, I was introduced to the beached wreck whose story we fleshed out from the archives.

My fascination with beached shipwrecks like that of King Philip continued through several years and other projects, but my last serious foray with them came in September 1987, as part of a team consisting of the National Park Service’s Submerged Cultural Resources Unit (SCRU) and the U.S. Navy’s Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit One, documenting wreck sites at Cape Cod National Seashore.

More than a thousand ships have come to grief off Cape Cod’s shores, and local shipwreck historian Bill Quinn showed us dozens of photos of wooden wrecks in eroding dunes and washed up on beaches. But the only skeleton we spent any time on was an iron ship that lay just offshore on a sandbar in rolling surf. That shipwreck, sitting off Head of the Meadow Beach in Truro, Massachusetts, was all that was left of the 120-foot German bark Frances. Frances, bound for Boston with a cargo of sugar and tin ingots, came to grief on the night of December 26, 1872. The fourteen-man crew took to the rigging and was slowly freezing to death as the salt spray coated them with ice.

Fortunately for them, Cape Cod’s reputation as a ships’ graveyard had inspired the government to erect lifesaving stations. Because of an average of two wrecks each winter month, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had built huts to shelter shipwrecked mariners in 1797. But it was not until 1871, the year before Frances’s wreck, that the U.S. government had assumed responsibility for lifesaving with the creation of the United States Life-Saving Service (USLSS). Stations were built on dangerous sections of coast, manned around the clock, and lifesavers walked the beaches on patrol to spot ships in trouble and sound the alarm.

A crew of volunteers from Truro, led by Captain Edwin Worthen, keeper of the USLSS’S new Highland Lifesaving Station, came to the aid of Frances’s crew. Dragging a whaleboat through the dunes and onto the beach, the lifesavers braved the surf and being crushed against the wallowing steel hull to pluck the freezing men from the rigging. Every soul aboard was saved, but the ordeal proved too much for Captain Wilhelm Kortling, Frances’s master. He died from the effects of his exposure to the cold, three days later. When the surf quieted down, some of the cargo was salvaged, and then Frances was left to the sea. But the wreck never broke up. Buried periodically by an offshore sandbar, the hulk, as the National Seashore’s visitor guide explains, “pokes up occasionally above the Atlantic waves and serves as a memorial to the more than 1,000 shipwrecks that have occurred along the outer Cape over the past three and a half centuries.”

To get to Frances, we had to walk carefully backwards through the surf, then turn around quickly to dive under the waves and swim fast to avoid becoming a scuba-clad surfer instead of a diver. I joined my friend and colleague, National Park Service (NPS) archaeologist Larry Murphy, on a reconnaissance dive. Murphy is a tall, solidly built man whose nickname at the time was “Mongo,” in recognition of his size and strength. As we swam up to Frances, I was amazed to see that most of the ship was there — not just a skeleton. Half buried in the sandbar was the entire iron hull, rising up out of the seabed to the decks. We took measurements of the bow and drifted up to the intact wooden deck. Holes bashed through the planking showed an open space below, which we thought was the forecastle where the crew had bunked. Neither Murphy nor I could fit through the holes, so we swam back down and headed aft to an open hatch in the deck. The main deck was half gone, battered away by the sea or nineteenth-century salvagers who were after the cargo of tin ingots. We easily dropped into the hold and were rewarded by the sight of a small scatter of ingots. Beyond them was a hole in the iron bulkhead that led directly into the forecastle. The light that came in through the holes in the deck above us illuminated the scene as the pounding of the surf boomed through the iron hull. We both realized that few if any had been in this compartment since that night just after Christmas 1872.

The wooden bunks of the German sailors had collapsed, but, as we surveyed the room, we spotted a wooden box, half buried in the sand, with a hole in the lid. We thought that it might be a sailor’s sea chest, filled with his personal belongings, preserved by the sand and ready to reveal its secrets to us. Murphy cautiously stuck his hand into the hole to feel around, and suddenly yanked his hand back, bellowing through the regulator clenched in his teeth. As he waved his right hand frantically, I saw a large crab, its claw firmly holding on for the ride. I nearly drowned as I burst out laughing, holding my regulator in with my teeth. Larry managed to pull the crab off and, nursing his sore but not injured hand, beckoned that it was time to go.

Back on the beach, we were debriefing with the Navy divers, who had also been mapping the wreck and who had anchored a small inflatable boat over the bow. They had a strange tale to report. As they were swimming over the bow, a sudden burst of air bubbles had poured out from inside the wreck, and they could swear they heard, muffled through the water, alternating screams and shrieks of laughter that had convinced some of them that the wreck was haunted.

The state of preservation of Frances, like that of King Philip, was mirrored by what we found on other shipwrecks buried in the sand on other beaches. The fact that ships lost on storm-tossed coasts in violent surf conditions did not break up into matchsticks was not widely recognized by maritime archaeologists. Murphy and I had presented a paper on that topic in 1984, to our colleagues at an annual conference in Williamsburg, Virginia, though it was ignored in favor of more exciting deep-water discoveries. But the evidence we gathered, as well as some of the interesting real-life stories behind some of these ships, ultimately showed that you never know where a fascinating shipwreck is going to show up, be it buried below high rises in a modern city or in a sand dune on a long stretch of coastline.