• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 770 0

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.

KING PHILIP: OCEAN BEACH, SAN FRANCISCO

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