Just how much of the ship had survived was unknown. In early September 2001, construction crews cleared away the concrete floor of the basement of the recently demolished building on the site and dug into the wet sand beneath it. Within a few hours, the outline of a ship began to emerge. About two thirds, or 81 feet of the 126-foot hull, was exposed. The other end of the ship lay beneath an adjacent building.
The hull of General Harrison buried in the heart of San Francisco. James P. Delgado Pastron had uncovered the long-forgotten General Harrison. He needed a maritime archeologist to help with the project and phoned me. I flew out right away to “get my hands dirty” on the dig.
On September 9, I arrive at the site and am struck by how this small hole in the midst of all the high rises is a portal to the past. After a steep climb down a construction ladder, then a walk over loose sand and slippery mud, I reach the wreck. General Harrison burned down to her waterline, so only the bottom third of the ship’s once massive hull remains. The hold is largely empty, as it was cleaned out after the fire by salvager Charles Hare and his crew of local Chinese laborers. They pumped out the flooded lower part of the ship and mucked out the sodden, charred cargo. Hare’s crew, working in toxic, awful conditions after the fire, did more than clean out the ship. They also wrenched out hundreds of solid copper and brass fasteners that held together the timbers and peeled off the copper sheathing on the outside of the hull, which meant diving into the surrounding fetid shallows.
Inside General Harrison is more evidence of the Chinese ship breakers. A thick iron pry-bar for removing the thick copper bolts lies in one area. Nearby is a pile of iron bolts, stacked ready for removal. We find a broken rice bowl, a shattered bottle and several pairs of worn-out boots. It is as if the workers have just gone home. They left the job unfinished, though. The ship is only partially broken down — nearly every bit of valuable copper is gone, but the work stopped short of cutting apart the wooden hull. That might mean that the scrapping ended in October 1851, when newspapers reported that the work of filling in the shallows had at last reached the burned-out General Harrison. When carts began dumping sand just outside the hull, Hare’s crew simply dropped what they were doing and left. As I look at the half-cut planks, at sections of timber lying where laborers were chopping them up — the axe marks still fresh — and the discarded boots, bowl and bottle, I feel that I have truly stepped into the past.
Then time seemingly stops again, just before seven on the morning of September 11. As I walk to the site, my cell phone rings. It is my wife, Ann, at home in Vancouver, telling me that a jet has just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. The crew gathers at the General Harrison dig, and down in our hole in the heart of San Francisco, we listen to a small radio as the terrible news comes in from back east. The second jet, the grounding of flights across the country and the rumors— we hear that the State Department has been hit, that the Capitol is in flames, that the White House has been evacuated, and that downtown San Francisco is also being evacuated. I look up at the Transamerica Pyramid and the towers of the nearby Embarcadero Center, and all this history beneath me seems insignificant, and the evidence of this long-ago disaster inconsequential. We are hustled off the site by security guards, and I make my way back to my hotel, with no place to go and nothing to do but wait as new history unfolds.
The next day, we return to work on General Harrison. Somber, and now stuck in San Francisco with no easy way to get home since all flights are grounded for an indefinite time, I turn to work and immerse myself in the past. It is cathartic and strangely reassuring. After all, we are exposing a layer of a once- devastated San Francisco that lies beneath yet another layer of destruction, atop which rests the modern city which now, on September 12, is beginning to reassert a semblance of normalcy. Life goes on, and the history we are exposing is a reminder of the great cycle of existence, not only for our crew but also for the crowds that again gather to watch. Local author Rebecca Solnit, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle a year after our dig, remarks that all those onlookers, “somehow drawn out of themselves in this place,” in a social climate where few people even make eye contact, nonetheless “feel part of something, and that the place was somehow enlarged — not only in its sense of time as the ship hull made visible the ruined city of 1851, but in its sense of community.”
The sense of timelessness and intimate contact with a lost community, the San Francisco that ended dramatically on May 4, 1851, certainly comes through as we continue to dig. As the backhoe starts to scratch out a rectangular trench close to the port, or left side, of the exposed hull, I hear the telltale crunch of breaking glass and stop the work. Over the next hour, with the backhoe operator delicately working the huge hoe like a surgeon’s tool, we pull back the sand to expose the top of a thick mass of blackened, melted glass and cinders. This mass, glued together by mud and creosote from the burnt wood, is part of the onetime store of General Harrison.
The fire that destroyed General Harrison was intense, flashing over the ship so quickly that some items fell into the flooded hold and the tidal shallows next to the ship, landing in the mud practically unharmed. Using hoses, we slowly wash away layers of ash, cinders and mud to reveal a door with its brass pull-ring still bright and shiny — and with traces of paint on the wood. A broken box bears the partial trademark and name of a company that we cannot decipher, but which appears to say “Freres,” indicating a French origin. It is a reminder that California’s gold attracted the goods of a world market.
Then, as the water washes away more of the thick black sediment, I spot the corner of a small pine box. Carefully, and yet eagerly, we work for the next two hours to slowly free it from beneath fallen timbers and piles of broken glass. It is an intact crate. Finally, once the box is clear of debris and cleaned, we photograph and measure it, and survey its location on our site map. Only then do I carefully open the lid. Inside are twelve bottles, packed in straw. Soggy and stuck to the bottles, the straw easily yields as I pick up one bottle. The cork in it is covered with a silver foil cap. The label has disintegrated, but as I wipe the bottle clean and hold it up, the sun illuminates the wine inside. It is now red from oxidation, but the style of the bottle and the cap indicate that it is a German white wine, perhaps some of the “Rhine wine” that Mickle advertised for sale just months before the fire.
Even more bottles — of Madeira, brandy, sherry and Champagne— some still full of liquid, emerge from the mud. The fancy foods inside the store ship were probably all destroyed, I think, but we find what might be samples of pate. Then I reach down and pick up a perfectly preserved peanut, still in its shell and only slightly singed. Other surprises include rolls and bolts of charred cloth, lying next to melted and fused kegs of nails and tacks. A glint of bright red reveals a bag of small red glass beads, and bits of hardware provide a hint of what was once nice furniture.
Our work reminds me of earlier digs in San Francisco — the store ship Niantic, destroyed in the same May 1851 fire and discovered in 1978, yielded a variety of well-preserved objects from linoleum rolls to a leather jacket folded by its owner and placed atop a crate. Faber pencils from London, sausage and truffle pate and French Champagne from Rheims, mixed in with crockery and hardware, made the Niantic site a gold-rush Pompeii. Later, in 1986, Pastron and his crew, myself included, excavated an entire half block of buildings that had fallen, still on fire, into the bay’s shallows during the May 1851 fire, and were encapsulated in cold, thick blue mud. We gently washed away the mud to reveal crocks filled with butter, bags of coffee, chests packed with tea leaves, bottled preserves — a jar of cherries was still bright red — and crates of army surplus rifles and ammunition: debris now made priceless by the passing of time and their near-perfect condition, thanks to their being sealed beyond the reach of air and light.
My career as an archeologist immersed me in the gold rush so fully that those times seem alive to me. When I walk the streets of downtown San Francisco, in my mind’s eye I see the wharves, tent buildings and crowds of strangers from all lands as ships daily discharge more men and goods into this great and grand bazaar on the Pacific frontier. This sense of the past is reinforced by reading the letters, diaries and newspapers of the time, and from looking at faded photographs of the city as it was. Thanks to archeology, I feel privileged to have walked in the same mud as the 49ers, to have smelled the reeking aftermath of the May 1851 fire as its remains emerged. I have trod the decks and hulls of ships sepulchered in the mud as San Francisco filled in the old waterfront. I have sipped Champagne and brandy destined for a gold-rush saloon, when we unpacked it in the laboratory, and I have sorted through the detritus of the past to scientifically catalog what we have excavated. The smallest and humblest items add to the picture. Carbonized beans from General Harrison appear to be the small white beans common to Chile, and carbonized grains of barley, again probably Chilean, are proof of how that South American country served as the gold rush’s principal larder until farming took hold on the California frontier.
Two weeks after the project began, it is time for me to leave. Very soon, General
