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.