Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [19]
During the course of these ensuing surveys, Alden’s suspicions about a far more shallow and dangerous rock were confirmed, apparently twice over, during the first half of 1855. However, like Cortes Bank itself, this feature would be misnamed, due to what was in all likelihood the conflation of maritime myth-making—in which a good story grew even better, and the most outlandish version eventually accrued the patina of truth. The other, far more interesting and tragic tale of discovery, on the other hand, has remained essentially unknown.
In April 1855, a fast little clipper ship lay docked in San Francisco, readying for a trip to New York. The Stilwell S. Bishop had first been put to sea in 1851 by a wealthy Philadelphia merchant of the same name. She was low slung and sharp-lined, 140 feet long and 31 feet wide. She drew only fifteen feet of water and weighed a mere 595 tons. In 1853, a passage from Baltimore around Cape Horn to San Diego took her only 112 days—a sailing record that still stands.
Detailed accounts of Bishop’s journeys are scant. On June 12, 1854, she reached San Diego bearing supplies for a local army garrison and had dropped anchor in Benicia, a port town in San Francisco Bay, by early July. She reached the East Coast in December, picking up a new captain, William Shankland, and had again reached San Francisco by April of 1855. She then advertised cargo space on her next voyage east in an ad in San Francisco’s Daily Alta newspaper on May 7:
The Regular packet A 1 clipper ship SS Bishop.
Capt Wm Shankland. Will be dispatched immediately…The “SSB,” from her small capacity and sailing qualities offers unusual inducements to parties wishing their goods delivered in the shortest possible time. She has made three trips from this port to New York and has always delivered her cargo in fine order. For freight passage, having fine state room accommodations, apply to: H. K. Cummings & Co. 48 California Street.
Shankland departed for the above passage on June 2. He endured ferocious gales that swept at least one ill-fated crewman into the sea—a perilous journey reported in the New York Times in some detail. Yet nowhere do the Times or Daily Alta mention the incident for which the Bishop has been immortalized, her collision with the shallowest spire above the Cortes Bank, presumably on that 1855 voyage. As the story goes, after striking rock in the midst of a storm, and with a hull then scratched, dinged, or otherwise splintered, Bishop somehow managed to limp five hundred miles north back to San Francisco.
This oft-repeated tale, though, lacks virtually any corroboration, which alone calls it into question. In the mid-1800s, the United States was a maritime nation. Even the most mundane comings and goings of each and every ship were covered by zealous reporters. Yet the story of this collision appears in no newspaper account of the time, which from a sailor or navigator’s viewpoint would have been inexcusable. Thousands of souls were now being ferried past the Cortes Bank each month. Had the Bishop’s hull been so much as nicked, it would have been the height of irresponsibility for Captain Shankland to fail to immediately notify James Alden and the Coast Survey. Had Shankland remained silent, the news would have almost certainly been slipped by a spooked Bishop crewman or passenger and pursued eagerly by reporters for the Alta or Times.
The timely reporting of such a notable wreck should have also appeared in the scrupulous reports of James Alden, but it does not. The first mention appears in reports of the Coast Survey in