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.