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?