Metamorphosis of a Blubber Hunter -- May 9, 2019

San Francisco Call, 17-March-1895

William A Coulter did many maritime drawings for the San Francisco Call. Niantic was a whaling ship that hauled a cargo of passengers to Yerba Buena for the Gold Rush.  Abandoned by its crew, the ship was gradually surrounded by piers and then by land.  It served as a storehouse and a hotel.  After burning in one or more of the six Great Fires of the early 1805s, she was replaced by a building.  

I remember in 1979 when the post-1906 Niantic Building that was torn down that archaeologists excavated the site and exposed the hull.  I wish I had taken photos.  

A seamen's bethel is a chapel catering to sailors.  

METAMORPHOSIS OF A BLUBBER HUNTER

A ship is everlasting. Her timbers may resolve themselves back to dust and her individuality be lost from among the personnel of her fabric, but she passes to memory and lives.

"Siempre vive," always living, may be Written over the final mooring place of noble structures of the ware. Some are resting in silent ordinary along the stormless coves inshore, others are down in the deeps of the tropic zone and their frames, like the bones of sea-born Ariel's sire, are "coral made," and not a few lie still under eternal winter's glacial shroud, not colder than the monument berg lifting its crystal crest above the dead. But they live— live as does the imperishless pole star from out whose ray no ship has ever wandered the great swelling globe around. On memory's mystic tides the pallid squadron sails and sails, passing and repassing in spectral review.

Built for a life battle, with her own grave always below her keel, she is the best, the bravest and the strongest of human handiwork, and over a common peril — no ship can shun the menace of her own and her creator's possible tomb— she goes and comes on her noble mission, and wherever she lies at last she is everlasting. The old ships will all come in when "there shall be no more sea."

Under the big Niantic building at the corner of Clay and Sansome streets are the foundations of a former Niantic edifice, and beneath this, far down in the broken and fragmentary stratum of San Francisco's eocene epoch, lie the bones of the Niantic ship, buried below the dark deposit of the rushing years— the attrition of the wasting ages.

The story of this geological derelict begins when the Niantic first sailed from her New England ways after the leviathan of the deep. Her life as a blubber-hunter was uneventful until the auric dawn of '48 began to gild the sky, when she took her place among the fleets of the new Jason and sought the fleece of gold.

She was then the property of Moorhead, "Whitehead and Waddington— the latter afterward a prominent merchant here — who sent her to Panama to catch the passengers and freight then stranded on the isthmus.

On July 5, 1849, she sailed in through the Golden Gate and from the sea forever. In a few days her crew deserted her for the gulches and ravines of the Eldorado, and for some time she yawed around her anchor, manned by the sociable and harmless Darien cockroaches. The flood of population sweeping into Yerba Buena filled and overflowed the young pueblo of the Gringo, and no cubic feet of air went to waste in the crowded habitations on the sandhills. Houses were of more use than ships, and the abandoned craft were warped into the beach and labeled "To Let."

This was in that free-and-easy day known as the "when-the-water-came-up-to-Montgomery-street" period. Other fluids came up to Montgomery street, but their inclined flow was possibly considered too common for a place in history or the marking of an epoch, and no page shows the record of their motions, though some of the pioneer mounds on the solitary hill back of town might bear silent witness of the fierce and fervid time when the barrels well shaken (before taken) by the Cape Horn tempests took upon— and within — themselves an age which the peaceful cobwebby years of cellar life never could supply.

The Niantic was backed ingloriously into the beach like a recalcitrant mule and tied up to a sand-dune. The pioneer did duty as a warehouse, hotel, town hall, saloon, bethel, holding her own against all kinds of weather and vicissitudes with that sturdy defiance to hard luck that had often characterized her work among the harsh, veritable gales of the horse latitudes. Occasionally she would blossom out as a gambling hulk or a fandango hall, and many a young argonaut, crazed by Joss, or love, failed to go ashore on the gangplank, and the Morgue— but there was no Morgue! When a man died hurriedly, the community resolved itself into a Coroner's jury and decided that he was dead without any corroborative evidence on the part of the corpse, and the quiet people out on Lone Mountain received the newcomer in silence.

As a sailor boarding-house she was an unprecedented success, for she drew all men of marine inclinations unto her. She was a city of refuge for runaways from sister ships, and she opened her doors to them at night to shanghai them out on outward-bound vessels next morning.

The big fire of '51 razed the Niantic down to her copper-sheathing, and a few redwood logs were upended in the mud around the charred hulk for a foundation, and upon this the first Niantic building was perched, and the first seaside hotel was operated. L. H. Roby was the proprietor, and his lease expired when he died shortly afterward— a suicide from remorse over some act in connection with his earlier life. One J. L. Johnson ran the hulk hotel, then gave away to Daniel Parrish. During this proprietorship a guest was accused of stealing a large sum of money, and was sent to San Quentin prison for the alleged crime. He died on the point, protesting that he was innocent, and after his transportation over the bay, a laborious search was made among the old vessel's timbers under the house for the money be was believed to have cached there. The place then passed to P. T. Woods, H. H. Parkell and Miss Mooney, sister of Con Mooney, successively, the latter keeping it from 1864 to 1872, when it was torn down to make way for the present five-story building, which was erected by C. L. Low.

In clearing out some of the old timbers for the driving of the piles thirty-five baskets of champagne were found under the ashes of the flames of 1851, and the accumulated drift of water-front jumble and rubbish. Dug from its long and deep submersion in the ice-cold mud of the vessel's hold the wine was in excellent form, and when opened the lost liquid of a far-away vintage, ripened under the skies of sunny France, popped and fizzed with the compressed energy of unknown years, and like a new version of Samson's riddle — out of the bitterness of death, the grime, the wrack and waste of devastating time, came the delicate fragrance, the savor of fruity spring, and the exquisite conserve of imperishable sweet.

This is the story of the transmigration of a ship. The new Niantic lifts itself where once the bay tides came and went, and the old lies buried under the succeeding waves of shore that drove out the sea.

Hill and wave shift and change form and place, but the tenacious old craft cling to their individuality like the clinging marine things far down in the darker deeps.