Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [20]
Contemporary historians have puzzled over this incongruity. It was first raised by the editors of Mains ‘l Haul, the definitive journal of California nautical lore, in 1968. The question has also vexed Steve Lawson, an Orange County treasure hunter and rabid historian who has assimilated vast records of the movements of nearly every ship that plied the West Coast during the Gold Rush. Lawson agrees with a hypothesis laid out in Mains ‘l Haul. The Bishop didn’t strike the Cortes Bank at all, especially given her shallow draft.
“Ships sailing toward Frisco during the Gold Rush would have not sailed close to Southern California for two reasons,” Lawson said. “First, the prevailing wind and currents along the coast travel south and sailing ships could find better winds a few hundred miles out to sea. Second, the eight islands of Southern California were to be avoided since they created major navigational hazards.”
Lawson thinks that if the Bishop ever did strike the Cortes Bank, it occurred after she called on San Diego in 1854. “That could account for her running relatively close to shore and hitting the Bank,” he said. “Then heading for Benicia and bypassing San Francisco makes sense because she would have been sailing in ballast [using rocks to keep her hull low and her keel down]. She wouldn’t have a cargo to unload, and there was a shipyard in Benicia where she could be repaired.”
Yet Lawson believes that the lack of any documentation of a collision makes this highly improbable. It seems more likely that her captain, instead, merely stumbled onto the same spellbinding white water spectacle witnessed by the Constitution and Cortes. Then, in its retellings, the Bishop’s story morphed into a direct encounter that subsequently lent the feature its name: the Bishop Rock.
By all rights, though, this rock should be named in honor of Archibald MacRae.
In late 1854, a thirty-four-year-old lieutenant accepted a position under James Alden to take command of the U.S. Coast Survey ship Ewing, which in 1853 had made the first survey of Cortes Bank.
Archibald MacRae was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, to an American general named Alexander MacRae. Young Archibald cut his maritime teeth in the Atlantic and Mediterranean serving “Mad Jack” Percival aboard a famed navy frigate called Cyane. He was a highly skilled navigator, astronomer, and a witty raconteur who regularly wrote home with hilarious, fascinating tales of his life at sea. Short of a pirate, MacRae is as colorful a character as you’d ever hope to meet on the open sea, and it’s hard to imagine why he ever accepted his job working for Alden and the Coast Survey. Not long after embarking on the sailor’s life, he penned this self-portrait of himself in a letter to his father in 1841: “If, in about eight or ten days, you should see a small character with long red hair, something between the colors of red and auburn, a little lame, a small red nose and several other peculiarly, peculiar peculiarities, you may without hesitation claim the hopeful boy as your son.”
In the year leading up to the Mexican-American War, MacRae was sent to Central America as a spy. Posing as a British naval officer, he ferried top secret correspondence between Washington and California—it’s a barely known fact that MacRae was the person who actually snuck orders to California’s commanders confirming the rumor that the United States was actually at war. After the war started, the wily Tarheel rejoined the Cyane under Captain Samuel Francis DuPont. He trekked to Hawaii to protect the US whaling fleet, helped oversee the sinking of some thirty ships off Mexico, and became the deadly leader of a team of U.S. Marine troops that DuPont called his “Fire Eaters.” After the war, MacRae made a peacetime traverse of the Chilean Andes with a naval expedition, trekking over two thousand miles of utter and often violent wilderness.