Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [17]
After surviving alternating rounds of terrifying combat and ceaseless boredom during the Mexican-American War, Alden was offered a position with the western command of the U.S. Coast Survey. At the helm of a navy steamer, Active, he would lead the effort to map the vast swath of new United States territory along the Pacific Coast.
It would be difficult to overstate the danger, importance, or maddening tedium of this work. The discovery of gold in 1849 created an explosion of demand for transit to California. Yet shoals, currents, and tides were largely a mystery, and maps—many of which dated to the seventeenth century and even before—were so dangerously inaccurate as to be worse than useless. Coast Survey captains navigated creaky, leaky ships along a strange and spectacular coast peopled by suspicious and occasionally hostile natives. To compound the thankless duty, sailors regularly abandoned ship for the gold mines. In 1849, gold-hungry crewmen beat senseless Captain William McArthur of the survey cutter Ewing and threw him into San Francisco Bay. He was saved only when a fellow officer spotted him drifting toward the Pacific and latched onto his hair.
For anyone with a passing interest in California history, the writings of Alden and MacArthur are fascinating, for therein lie the first descriptions of a once nearly empty coastline today inhabited by millions. For our purposes, the most relevant passage is one Alden wrote describing the Southern California coast:
From the last-named point [Point Conception] to Santa Barbara the coast is almost straight and runs nearly east and west. The passage formed by the islands lying abreast of this portion of the coast is called Santa Barbara Channel…
We steered down to the southward and westwards, so as to get on the parallel of latitude well to the westwards of certain dangers said to exist somewhere between that point and the Coronados Islands. Our search was not entirely unsuccessful, for we fell in with a bank, where the shoalest [shallowest] water we found, however was forty-two fathoms [152 feet], fine white sand. For many reasons, our examination was limited…I should not, therefore be willing to say that there are no dangers existing in that quarter, particularly as one of the shoals that was discovered by the U.S. Frigate Constitution, in January, 1840 [Note: this date proved to be a typographical error and should have read 1845], and I happened to be one of the officers who believed they saw it at the time. I shall improve the first opportunity to give that locality a more thorough examination.
Alden would eventually make good on this promise, yet in the meantime, he wasn’t the only one to witness the Bank’s strange specters. In their quest to reach the California gold mines, countless 49ers traveled over land, but scores more—perhaps spooked by horror stories of parties withering in hellish desert infernos or feeding on fallen comrades in Sierra snowfields—chose the longer but safer route by sea: sailing the Gulf of Mexico, crossing a lawless Panama, and then being ferried north along a route plied by ships that came to be called Panama Steamers.
A January 1853 advertisement from the New York Times noted such an opportunity:
The magnificent new double-engine side-wheel steamship CORTES (1600 tons) THOS B. CROPPER, Commander, will be in readiness at PANAMA to receive the UNCLE SAM’s passengers and sail immediately for San Francisco. The accommodations and ventilation of the Cortes are all that can be desired. Her speed (established on the voyage between New York and Panama and while on the Pacific coast) is unequaled.
It seems that on this very January journey Cropper witnessed a baffling spectacle. Passing south of San Clemente Island in a heavy