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By Root 766 0

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?

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

James Delgado, at the stern, adjusts the baseline to map the wreck of King Philip on Ocean Beach, San Francisco, in 1986. Photo by Edward de St. Maurice/National Park Service.

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