EXCAVATING THE GOLD RUSH SHIPS

Excavating

the Gold Rush Ships

In September 2001, Archeo-Tec, an archaeological consulting firm, uncovered the hulk of the General Harrison in San Francisco’s financial district. For mapping purposes, the archaeologists constructed a 5-by-5-foot grid above the exposed portion of the 19th-century vessel.

San Francisco was built around a huge fleet of ships that invaded its harbor 150 years ago. Many of them are known to be resting under the city. Several of these ships have been unearthed, reminding us of this remarkable time.

By Leora Broydo Vestel

Archaeologist Allen Pastron was not a bit surprised when a gold rush–era ship was discovered in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district.It was buried beneath his favorite Chinese restaurant, Yank Sing,where he’d eaten hundreds of times. Often,while digging into a plate of dim sum,he’d dream of unearthing the historic vessel entombed beneath his feet.

“I’ve always known it was there,”Pastron says.“Every time I went there I’d think,here’s my next job.”

Eventually, it was.Last September,Yank Sing was

This photograph, called the Forest of the Masts, shows the hundreds of ships that docked in San Francisco. Many of these ships were deserted by their crews and passengers, who went to the hills in search of gold. This photo was taken in late 1850 or early 1851. A number of these ships were damaged in the Great Fire of May 1851.

demolished to make way for a hotel.At the construction site Pastron found the oak hull of the General Harrison,a 409-ton merchant ship that sailed to San Francisco in May of 1850.Deserted by its gold-obsessed passengers and crew, the ship was converted to a storage facility before it burned to the waterline in the Great Fire of May 1851.

Pastron used a drill rig to bore for the ship.When the drill hit oak,he knew he’d found it.Eighty-four feet of the 126-foot hull sat 12 to 16 feet below street level—the remaining 42 feet rested below a building to the west.Working for 18 straight days,from dawn to dusk, Pastron and his team toiled in the muck to recover thousands of charred and waterlogged artifacts found alongside the ship.Their work addressed the question of what kind of goods these ships carried.“We didn’t know what was on the General Harrison at the time of the fire,” says Pastron. “Now we know.”

Boozing was a popular pastime during the gold rush. “The amount drunk is perfectly astounding, appalling,” wrote miner William Swain in an 1850 letter.Therefore it’s not surprising that Pastron’s team found cases of wine packed in hay and encased in wooden shipping crates. These were located right next to the starboard side of the ship.When salvagers came through to strip the ship after the fire,Pastron believes they dumped much of the hull’s contents overboard because they assumed it was burned and useless and they were anxious to get to the valuable copper and brass fittings.

Most of the bottles were broken—the area reeked of vinegar—but eight or nine were still intact.Though no labels were found, Pastron believes the wine is most likely Bordeaux or Burgundy shipped from France,and that it was made between 1847 and 1849.“I believe these are among the oldest extant bottles of French wine in the world,” he says.

Tens of thousands of tiny red,white and blue glass beads,made by the Italian company Murano and used for trading with Indians, were also salvaged.Charred bolts of cloth,a Derringer handle inlaid with silver, hemp ropes, wheat,and a crate full of tacks,all melted together during the fire,were also found on the ship’s perimeter.

Artifacts found inside the hull include “pegged” leather footwear (common during the gold rush,the soles of these shoes are fastened to the upper by wooden pegs), and a huge cache of European penny pipes,used to smoke tobacco prior to the advent of cigarettes.

Such worldly items were shipped to San Francisco to meet the demands of the city’s swelling population.The contents of the General Harrison,and its bizarre financial district location,speak volumes of the wealth and change generated by the gold rush. Virtually overnight,a village called San Francisco became an international port city, teeming with fortune seekers from every corner of the globe.America,and the world,would never be the same.

Before the start of the gold rush,

San Francisco was an inconsequential hamlet with a population of about 450.Then,on January 24,1848, New Jersey carpenter James Marshall chanced upon several gold flakes in the Sierra foothills.News of “gold in them thar hills” spread like wildfire.Argonauts headed to San Fran-

cisco in droves hoping to get rich quick.

A common misconception is that most arrived overland via wagon trains.On the contrary, the majority came by sea.In 1849 alone,more than 700 vessels carrying some 35,000 aspiring gold diggers sailed into the Golden Gate from U.S., Pacific,and European ports.

Upon arriving in San Francisco,passengers set out for the gold fields. Crews, and even officers,infected with gold fever, abandoned their ships.Before long the waterfront area,Yerba Buena Cove,was glutted with deserted ships.In 1850 there were no less than 526 vessels sitting idle in port.With crews impossible to find or too pricey to hire,many of these ships “rotted at their anchors.”

But some vessels were put to new and creative uses. The “Instant City,” as San Francisco was dubbed, was desperate for buildings and storage space to accommodate its expanding population. Clever entrepreneurs realized they could capitalize on the deserted ships by recycling them. A number of abandoned ships were intentionally beached on the cove’s mud flats and converted into warehouses, a restaurant, tavern, hotel, church,prison,and even an insane asylum. Converting ships was quicker and cheaper than building a new structure.

But the converted ships played an especially critical role in San Francisco’s burgeoning economy. More than 150 waterfront “storeships”provided a secure place for miners to stash trunks and baggage while away in the gold fields. Merchants used them to house goods during gluts in the market so they could sell at the best possible time at higher prices.Small storefronts opened upon their decks to sell direct to the public. San Francisco literally built itself around these famed ships.Piers,and then buildings and streets, were constructed around them to provide easy access from land and sea. It was a bizarre sight.“At the time people were stunned to see ships surrounded by blocks and buildings,”says maritime historian James Delgado, executive director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum in Vancouver. In time,the mudflats of Yerba Buena Cove were filled in with sand and debris to make way for a more modern waterfront.The gold rush ships were buried where they lay. In the last 25 years at least four 19thcentury ships have been unearthed during construction projects in the city’s financial district.These represent a small portion of the graveyard fleet—it’s estimated that more than 40 such ships exist. In the 1960s, historians at the San Francisco Maritime Museum used hisThis pipe was found during the General Harrison excavation. Clay pipes— toric journal and newspaper frequently called penny pipes because of their price—were common in the accounts to create a map 19th century. showing where they’re all

This model of the Niantic recreates the gold rush days. The ship had been converted into an office, hotel, and warehouse. The rectangular boats, known as lighters, are delivering cargo to be stored in the warehouse. On the far right corner of the pier a man is dumping a cartload of debris into the water. The debris was used to fill in the bay.

buried.It was this map,not a fortune cookie,that led Pastron to the General Harrison.

Studying the buried ships from construction to destruction provides insight into the gold rush era and the fiery American entrepreneurial spirit born of the time. Americans began chasing the proverbial dream,and the ships were a means of achieving it.In that way, the final resting place of the ships—whether beneath the Transamerica Pyramid, Levi’s World Headquarters,the old Federal Reserve Bank,and other icons of industry—makes perfect sense.

In the beginning there was excite-

ment.Then panic and chaos. Finally, there was sadness.Such was the emotional roller coaster ride caused by the discovery of the gold rush ship Niantic at a San Francisco construction site in 1978.

The Niantic is the most famous of all the waterfront gold rush ships.She was the first to be beached and converted to a storeship.Described extensively in newspaper accounts,the journals of forty-niners, and the notebooks of scribblers and sketch artists,she is also the most documented storeship of the day.

Built in 1833 in Chatham,Connecticut,the 451-ton, 119-foot-long Niantic first carried goods between New York and Canton,China,and was later used as a whaler. Her shrewd captain,upon hearing of great profits being made transporting gold rushers to San Francisco,sold a cargo of live donkeys and used the money to convert the Niantic into a passenger ship.Charging up to $250 per head,the Niantic set sail from Panama to gold country on what would be her last ocean voyage.

Sixty-six days later,the Niantic arrived in San Francisco on July 6,1849.Her passengers and crew promptly deserted for the mines.Unable to find a staff or a buyer, the ship was pulled ashore at high tide, roofed over, and converted into a warehouse, office, and hotel.“Rest for the Weary and Storage for the Trunks,”read an entryway sign.

The Great Fire of May 1851 ravaged the San Francisco waterfront, engulfing 2,000 buildings.The Niantic was one of them.In 1978 the remains of the Niantic were uncovered during the construction of a high rise.Though an environmental review had confirmed the Niantic’s presence,there was much confusion over what to do when she surfaced.

California law now provides that mitigation measures to protect historic resources must be agreed upon before construction begins.But no such measures were in place then. San Francisco officials,caught flat-footed,could not retroactively demand the developer pay for a proper excavation.

A fund-raiser was launched to raise $630,000 to remove the ship from the site.Though there was considerable public interest in the Niantic’s fate,the money wasn’t forthcoming and each day’s delay cost the developer $16,000.The developer contacted the San Francisco Maritime Museum,which was given three days to salvage as much of the Niantic as possible.

The developer turned to the museum because contract archaeologists were then in short supply and “we were the best they could find,”says Stephen Canright,who worked on the dig.Canright is the institution’s curator of maritime history and,like the majority of the excavation crew, he knew ships,not archaeology. In fact,the most expert of the museum’s crew was a secretary who happened to have a master’s degree in archaeology but lacked field experience.“We recovered what we could in as organized a fashion as we could,”Canright says.

A photogrammetric recording of the hull,of which 90 feet were exposed (the bow remained buried beneath an adjacent lot,next to the Transamerica building),was conducted. Jackhammers,saws, and axes were used to sever an 8-foot-wide cross section of the hull.The rudder,log windlass,large beams,and copper sheathing were removed.

Well over 600 artifacts were recovered in this dig. These items included picks,axes,pens,ink bottles,wood and metalworking tools,guns,construction materials,furniture,glass and tableware, porcelains, foodstuffs,garments,currency, and even the dung of mules that were transported on the ship.

And there was wine.Buried beneath fragments of charred wood and glass were crates containing several intact bottles of vintage 1843 champagne.The vintner, Jacquesson Fils,is still in business.“It doesn’t get much better than that,” Delgado,who was working on the dig, says of the find. But he couldn’t say the same of the champagne,which he ventured to taste.“It was horrible.”

Finding a buried ship like the Niantic is like visiting gold rush Pompeii.In the same way the ancient Roman city was mummified by ash spewed forth from Mt.Vesuvius in A.D. 79, the absence of oxygen in San Francisco’s mudflats suspends gold rush moments in time.On the Niantic,researchers found a jacket folded on top of a champagne crate;it was as if a warehouse worker had set it down the day before.

All too soon, the Niantic went down again.Despite public outcry, construction workers bulldozed the remains of her great hull to a pulp.

Adding insult to injury, the Niantic was later refused inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places because of the haphazard way the artifacts were collected. On the bright side, the Niantic experience galvanized San Francisco’s planning department to develop laws for the greater study and care of archaeological resources in the city.

Levi Strauss is arguably the most

famous forty-niner of all.So it seems appropriate that a gold rush ship was uncovered in 1980 during construction of the world headquarters for Levi Strauss & Co.,the company he founded.

During the excavation of the Rome, archaeologists, along with construction workers, had to enter a pressurized tunnel by going through this tunneling machine (left). Everyone working in the tunnel adjusted to the conditions by passing through an airlock (right), in which the air pressure was gradually increased to equal that of the tunnel.

Historical documents revealed a strong likelihood that one of two merchant ships,either the British brig Palmyra or the American William Gray,lay ensconced on the site.Both ships,perhaps used as storeships at one time, were scuttled to serve as bulwarks for Griffing’s wharf, which was constructed in 1852.(Because of its unknown provenience,the ship was named Frederick Griffing’s Ship.) The company paid $50,000 for an exploratory excavation of the ship even though it was not required to do so.The ship would have remained undisturbed by the work on that part of the site.

To determine the ship’s location and orientation, Pastron, who also directed this project,devised a testing strategy that involved laying a grid over the site and doing a series of test bores to obtain subsurface soil samples.His team used a truck-mounted drill rig,usually reserved for well digging. Industrial-grade tools were used, as it was believed that the ship might lie as far as 22 feet below the surface.When several test bores struck oak—suggesting the ship lay below—Pastron prepared to dig.

A backhoe exposed a heavy iron chainplate,used to secure a ship’s standing rigging.Further digging uncovered a portion of the hull, about 10 feet down,in extraordinary condition.A hatch, an iron pin rail,and deck planking were also visible. No gold rush artifacts were found,as the ship was most likely emptied of its contents before being scuttled.

Pastron surmises that the ship’s structure was so well preserved because it was filled and surrounded by yellow sandstone from nearby Telegraph Hill.Over time the shale had decomposed to form a dense blue clay—an excellent preservative.

With the ship located,historians from the San Francisco Maritime Museum sought to prevent Levi Strauss from covering it up again.As ships of the era were hand built without the use of plans or schematics,historians argued that the Levi’s ship should be uncovered fully so that its architecture could be studied.

“Beyond the obvious importance of the Levi’s Plaza vessel as a survivor of perhaps the most remarkable fleet ever assembled,she is also representative of a class of vessel, once seemingly ubiquitous, about which maritime historians have not a great deal of detailed information regarding typical or variant construction details or practices,” notes a report on the project written by Archeo-Tec, Pastron’s company.

It was proposed that the ship be completely uncovered and ramps be built to provide access to it—an openair gold rush museum of sorts.But the plan was rejected because of its expense. Frederick Griffing’s Ship did,however, make it to the National Register. And,unlike the Niantic, it’s still intact, preserved beneath a park that was established by Levi Strauss.

The hull of the Rome was found 35

feet below street level during the excavation of a downtown subway tunnel.The Rome was a 344-ton, three-masted ship built in Salem,Massachusetts,in 1829. After a 210-day voyage from New York, she arrived in San Francisco on February 28,1850, carrying passengers and cargo.

Deserted by her crew, the Rome was soon drawn to shore and sunk by the most famous scuttler of the day, Captain Fred Lawson.A consummate schemer,Lawson would buy idle ships and then sink them to demarcate water lots for property owners, making a tidy profit in the process.

The Rome proved especially challenging to excavate. Construction workers,operating within a confined space filled with compressed air, dug through mud to make the tunnel.The compressed air and wood lagging planks that were held in place by large hydraulic jacks prevented the mud from collapsing on the workers.Being in this pressurized,subterranean environment was like being underwater, and everyone working in the tunnel had to be trained and certified.

None of the ship’s structural components were recovered intact because the ship had to be cut into pieces that were small enough to be transported to the surface. Due to the lack of space,construction workers excavated the ship while the archaeologists were relegated to the role of observers, taking measurements and photos as necessary.

Initially, it was thought the hull timbers were rotten and would thus be a snap to penetrate.But,as with other gold rush ships,the hull proved to be hard as a rock.“It burned chainsaws left and right,” says James Allan of William Self Associates, the firm that conducted the excavation. “The timbers were huge—it was so heavily built. They were really stymied on how to get through it.”The workers finally resorted to a hydraulic pile cutter to grind through, rather than cut,the wood.

For Allan,an experienced diver,investigating the Rome was not unlike working on shipwrecks in the murky waters of the San Francisco Bay.“It’s a sensory vacuum. We could only see pieces of it and had to mentally reconstruct and form a mental template.”Yet, Allan adds,“we got a better view of ship construction than anyone ever has.”Fragments of the floors,futtocks, ceiling planking, keel, and foremast were recovered and studied. Other than several delicate,intact ceramic jars, little was found in the way of cargo or other cultural material; the Rome had apparently been stripped prior to being sunk.The ship’s remains were moved to a nearby warehouse, where the archaeologists recorded and photographed them.Pieces considered unworthy of preservation were discarded.

Looking back on the difficult project,Allan is wistful. “It’s sort of cliché,but it really was a snapshot of the time,” he says.“We could see parts of a ship that hadn’t been touched in 150 years.”The bulk of the ship remains beneath Market Street,one of the city’s main thoroughfares, with the subway running through its hull.

The opportunity to touch history is what makes the archaeology of the gold rush ships so valuable. Thousands of people stopped by to observe the excavation of the General Harrison, according to Pastron,who believes the event connected San Franciscans to their past. “Nine time out of ten you don’t find anything that couldn’t be found in historical records,”says Pastron,who is currently writing a book about the General Harrison. “This is more about context than content.” “Doing this kind of archaeology is an opportunity to experience the gold rush in a sensual sense,” he says. “You’re down there twenty feet below the street where The copper-sheathed lower stern and rudder of the Niantic is on display at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. The upper portion of the stern was burned in the Great Fire of May 1851. the city used to be.” Indeed, Yerba Buena Cove may be gone, but the tide still rises and falls below San Francisco’s towering buildings,just like it did in the 1800s. The General Harrison remains below ground,portions of its hull having been damaged when the foundation of the hotel was laid. Pastron is using the computer program AutoCAD to produce a three-dimensional reconstruction of its hull so that the ship will,as he says,“live again through time.” Having worked on the General Harrison excavation, the ship is very much alive in Delgado’s memory. “You could actually smell the sea,the booze,the fire. It was magic.It’s really an intimate experience,putting yourself on the bay bottom in the ship.Anyone that encounters those ships is moved.” LEORA BROYDO VESTEL lives in San Francisco and dreams of finding a ship buried in her garden.