Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks

by James Delgado

  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 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 what stunned us more— finding the plan or that generous woman succumbing to Peter’s entreaties to donate it to the maritime museum back in San Francisco.

  We ended the day by driving to nearby Newcastle to visit the home of the Glidden family, one of King Philip’s first owners. Glidden & Williams operated the principal clipper ship line between New England and California from 1850 until well after the Civil War. King Philip, built after the heyday of the extreme clippers with their knife-like hulls and lofty spars filled with sail, was a more full-bodied “medium” clipper and a predecessor to the boxier “down-easters” that were the last generation of American wooden-hulled full-rigged sailing ships. To make money with these ships, they had to carry cargoes quickly. The fast clippers of the late 1840s and early 1850s made record time on their voyages, but their narrow hulls could not carry much cargo. The medium clippers were a compromise, sacrificing some of the form that made the ships fast for more capacity. Just the same, King Philip was said by historian William Fairburn to have been a good sailer with good (that is, fast) passages. “She was,” commented Fairburn, “undoubtedly hard driven.”

  “Hard driven” applied not only to the ship but her crew. To get a slow ship to make good passages meant pushing both ship and men to their limits, if not beyond. And King Philip’s crew mutinied on more than one occasion, setting the vessel on fire on two occasions. In 1874, a U.S. naval officer, who sent an armed force aboard King Philip in Rio de Janeiro to quell an uprising, during which “the ship’s steward had been killed and most of the crew had deserted,” sympathetically commented that “perhaps they had good reason.” Intrigued by the harsh reality of life before the mast, I spent more time digging into the ship’s history than into the sand that shrouded her bones.

  Instead of running to California like other Glidden & Williams ships, King Philip entered the “general carrying trade,” loading all types of merchandise and delivering them to ports around the world. Captain Rollins’s letter book spans the time between June 1857 and May 1860. Those early letters did far more to flesh out those water-stained oak bones than all of the archeology I could ever practice on the hulk, an invaluable lesson for me. Beyond the science and the study of the “object,” in this case the half-intact hulk I was enthusing over, the significance of any find lies in the connections to real people.

  Rollins’s first letters recorded a voyage from Gravesend, England, around the tip of Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean and then to Melbourne, Australia. He reported that “the ship sails fair” with all sail set but went on to say that “my crew have mostly left the ship,” leaving him with two officers and seven men. “The cook is away today and it is doubtful if I see him again. They leave about ^120 wages behind them. I do not think the ship shall lose anything by these men as I shall take but two mates from here and the Steward shipped in Boston was totally unfit for his place. He had no idea of cooking or of saving provisions and besides was abominably filthy.” From Melbourne, King Philip sailed to the coast of Peru to load guano — the accumulated droppings of sea birds— being mined in the Chincha Islands as fertilizer. The reeking cargo stunk to high heaven but was literally worth its weight in gold.

  After discharging the guano at Rotterdam in September 1858, Rollins took on four hundred casks of gin and headed for England, and from there to San Francisco with a cargo of lumber, sugar, pig iron, livestock and coal. His letter to Glidden & Williams from San Francisco is full of complaints, particularly about a “patent reefing gear” installed in the rigging to handle some of the work that the sailors usually did aloft. The gear should have acted like a rolling window shade to retract a sail in heavy wind so as to keep the wind from bursting it or breaking the yards or mast. Rollins raged that the gear was too tightly installed, slipped off its rollers and cut into the wooden spars, and jammed frequently. In a fierce gale, the gear stuck, leaving the sail exposed to the full fury of the wind instead of “reefing” or rolling up. The main topgallant mast bent and nearly broke, then the sail burst, ri
pping away in the storm.

  I was amused by Rollins’s comments on this Victorian-era invention to cut costs by replacing people with a machine. Reading his letter was a revelation, and one that I would not find in the cold dead hulk of a wrecked ship, about how frustrated people felt when confronted by technology that promised to help but did not.

  Rollins left King Philip in early 1860, but under other captains and other crews, the ship carried a variety of cargoes around the world. In 1869, at a stop in Honolulu, the crew mutinied and set King Philip on fire. The damage was bad — so bad that the ship was condemned and sold at a “fire sale.” Puget Sound lumber merchants Pope & Talbot bought and repaired King Philip, but the bad luck that had dogged the ship since the beginning continued.

  On an 1874 voyage out of Baltimore, the crew mutinied and set fire to the ship. After the fire was put out, the crew still refused to sail. An armed force of U.S. Marines from the nearby United States Naval Academy at Annapolis finally had to go aboard to re-establish order. After that, Pope & Talbot never sent King Philip on another protracted voyage. They rerigged the ship as a bark for better maneuverability on the Pacific coast. Later that year, the press reported that “King Philip had just completed her tenth trip to Puget Sound and back since January 1st, 1876, and has still some days to spare. She has brought to port in that time nearly ten million feet in lumber.” The regular run to and from Puget Sound occupied the ship’s days.

  But bad luck continued to trouble King Philip. On January 25, 1878, she was leaving empty, or in ballast, from San Francisco. Cast off on the bar by her tug without any wind to fill her sails, the ship drifted in the current and into the breakers. Both anchors failed to hold, and at five that evening, King Philip went ashore. At low tide, the hull was high and dry; sightseers were able to walk right up and touch the stranded hulk. By the next day, the ship was “immovable” according to press accounts, and the insurance company sold the wreck to John Molloy, a local grocer who also speculated on scrap and salvage. He blasted the hulk apart with black powder to salvage what he could, but the lower hull, set firmly in the sand, remained in place. Periodically uncovered by the shifting sands of Ocean Beach, King Philip finally disappeared from view in the 1920s, when sand was dumped there to build the Great Highway. Six decades later, thanks to the winter storms of 1982–83, I was introduced to the beached wreck whose story we fleshed out from the archives.

  CAPE COD AND THE BARK FRANCES

  My fascination with beached shipwrecks like that of King Philip continued through several years and other projects, but my last serious foray with them came in September 1987, as part of a team consisting of the National Park Service’s Submerged Cultural Resources Unit (SCRU) and the U.S. Navy’s Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit One, documenting wreck sites at Cape Cod National Seashore.

  More than a thousand ships have come to grief off Cape Cod’s shores, and local shipwreck historian Bill Quinn showed us dozens of photos of wooden wrecks in eroding dunes and washed up on beaches. But the only skeleton we spent any time on was an iron ship that lay just offshore on a sandbar in rolling surf. That shipwreck, sitting off Head of the Meadow Beach in Truro, Massachusetts, was all that was left of the 120-foot German bark Frances. Frances, bound for Boston with a cargo of sugar and tin ingots, came to grief on the night of December 26, 1872. The fourteen-man crew took to the rigging and was slowly freezing to death as the salt spray coated them with ice.

  Fortunately for them, Cape Cod’s reputation as a ships’ graveyard had inspired the government to erect lifesaving stations. Because of an average of two wrecks each winter month, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had built huts to shelter shipwrecked mariners in 1797. But it was not until 1871, the year before Frances’s wreck, that the U.S. government had assumed responsibility for lifesaving with the creation of the United States Life-Saving Service (USLSS). Stations were built on dangerous sections of coast, manned around the clock, and lifesavers walked the beaches on patrol to spot ships in trouble and sound the alarm.

  A crew of volunteers from Truro, led by Captain Edwin Worthen, keeper of the USLSS’S new Highland Lifesaving Station, came to the aid of Frances’s crew. Dragging a whaleboat through the dunes and onto the beach, the lifesavers braved the surf and being crushed against the wallowing steel hull to pluck the freezing men from the rigging. Every soul aboard was saved, but the ordeal proved too much for Captain Wilhelm Kortling, Frances’s master. He died from the effects of his exposure to the cold, three days later. When the surf quieted down, some of the cargo was salvaged, and then Frances was left to the sea. But the wreck never broke up. Buried periodically by an offshore sandbar, the hulk, as the National Seashore’s visitor guide explains, “pokes up occasionally above the Atlantic waves and serves as a memorial to the more than 1,000 shipwrecks that have occurred along the outer Cape over the past three and a half centuries.”

  To get to Frances, we had to walk carefully backwards through the surf, then turn around quickly to dive under the waves and swim fast to avoid becoming a scuba-clad surfer instead of a diver. I joined my friend and colleague, National Park Service (NPS) archaeologist Larry Murphy, on a reconnaissance dive. Murphy is a tall, solidly built man whose nickname at the time was “Mongo,” in recognition of his size and strength. As we swam up to Frances, I was amazed to see that most of the ship was there — not just a skeleton. Half buried in the sandbar was the entire iron hull, rising up out of the seabed to the decks. We took measurements of the bow and drifted up to the intact wooden deck. Holes bashed through the planking showed an open space below, which we thought was the forecastle where the crew had bunked. Neither Murphy nor I could fit through the holes, so we swam back down and headed aft to an open hatch in the deck. The main deck was half gone, battered away by the sea or nineteenth-century salvagers who were after the cargo of tin ingots. We easily dropped into the hold and were rewarded by the sight of a small scatter of ingots. Beyond them was a hole in the iron bulkhead that led directly into the forecastle. The light that came in through the holes in the deck above us illuminated the scene as the pounding of the surf boomed through the iron hull. We both realized that few if any had been in this compartment since that night just after Christmas 1872.

  The wooden bunks of the German sailors had collapsed, but, as we surveyed the room, we spotted a wooden box, half buried in the sand, with a hole in the lid. We thought that it might be a sailor’s sea chest, filled with his personal belongings, preserved by the sand and ready to reveal its secrets to us. Murphy cautiously stuck his hand into the hole to feel around, and suddenly yanked his hand back, bellowing through the regulator clenched in his teeth. As he waved his right hand frantically, I saw a large crab, its claw firmly holding on for the ride. I nearly drowned as I burst out laughing, holding my regulator in with my teeth. Larry managed to pull the crab off and, nursing his sore but not injured hand, beckoned that it was time to go.

  Back on the beach, we were debriefing with the Navy divers, who had also been mapping the wreck and who had anchored a small inflatable boat over the bow. They had a strange tale to report. As they were swimming over the bow, a sudden burst of air bubbles had poured out from inside the wreck, and they could swear they heard, muffled through the water, alternating screams and shrieks of laughter that had convinced some of them that the wreck was haunted.

  * * *

  The state of preservation of Frances, like that of King Philip, was mirrored by what we found on other shipwrecks buried in the sand on other beaches. The fact that ships lost on storm-tossed coasts in violent surf conditions did not break up into matchsticks was not widely recognized by maritime archaeologists. Murphy and I had presented a paper on that topic in 1984, to our colleagues at an annual conference in Williamsburg, Virginia, though it was ignored in favor of more exciting deep-water discoveries. But the evidence we gathered, as well as some of the interesting real-life stories behind some of these ships, ultimately showed that you never know where a fascinating shipwreck is going t
o show up, be it buried below high rises in a modern city or in a sand dune on a long stretch of coastline.

  CHAPTER TEN

  HEROES UNDER FIRE

  THE COAST OF CUBA

  The long swell of the sea rolls in from the open Caribbean and breaks against the steep rocks of the promontory known as El Morro. The coast of Cuba, rocky and steep, stretches to the east and the west, defining the narrow gap that is the entrance to Santiago Harbor. Rising above the gap and the stone-lined terraces carved out of the cliff is the masonry mass of Castillo del Morro San Pedro de la Roca, also known, like the promontory it dominates, as El Morro. The ancient fortification, first built in the early seventeenth century and subsequently rebuilt numerous times to defend Santiago from the attacks of pirates and privateers, no longer bristles with guns. Fluttering atop its parapets is the flag of Cuba, which has flown here for a scant one hundred years in the five centuries since Christopher Columbus first circumnavigated the island’s shores and planted a colony. For much of Cuba’s history, the banner of Spain flew atop El Morro, though the rich harbor and island it claimed were contested by other powers and internal rebellions. It was supplanted in 1898, albeit briefly, by the flag of a newly awakened imperial power, the United States.

  THE LAST MISSION OF USS MERRIMAC: JUNE 3, 1898

  In February 1898, Cuba’s three-year struggle for independence from Spain and fears for American lives and property in Cuba convinced President William McKinley to send the battleship Maine to “show the flag.” American interest in Cuba — including demands from various quarters for the outright takeover of the island — dated back half a century, and Spanish officials were highly suspicious of the United States government’s motives in sending the Maine to Havana. When Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana Harbor on the evening of February 15, suspicions of Spanish “treachery,” fanned by the U.S. press, swelled public outrage and led Congress to declare war on April n. Volunteers enlisted around the country, and soon camps were filled with troops training and assembling to sail to Cuba with the slogan: “Remember the Maine and to hell with Spain!”