FOUND! The Wreck of the Frolic:
A Gold Rush Cargo For San Francisco

At 9:30p.m. on July 25, 1850, a sleek Baltimore clipper with her topgallants and topsails set approached the treacherous Mendocino coast. Her captain was intent on reaching Gold Rush San Francisco after sailing 6,000 miles from China. As the first officer studied the clear moonlit mountains still 20 miles away, the ship drew closer to a phalanx of offshore rocks and a low coastal terrace hidden by the fog ahead of them. Suddenly spying the danger, the first officer rushed below to alert the captain but it was too late. As the ship turned vainly to port, her stern struck a rock, snapping off the rudder and splintering open the hull.

The Frolic, a former opium-runner, was sailing from Hong Kong to San Francisco with a 26-man crew composed of Portuguese-speaking Lascars (from India), Malays (modern-day Indonesians), and Chinese. Her master, Captain Edward Horatio Faucon was the same man Richard Henry Dana admired and had made famous as the captain of the Pilgrim in his 1840 classic, Two Years Before the Mast.

Faucon was enroute to a San Francisco that had changed greatly since the days of the hide-and-tallow trade. Aboard the Frolic was an emporium of Chinese goods intended for sale in the inflated economy of a booming San Francisco. Her hold was packed tightly with ornately decorated camphor trunks, fine-colored silks, shiny lacquered ware, tables with inset marble tops, gold filigree jewelry, 21,000 porcelain bowls, candied fruits, silver tinderboxes, a prefabricated two-room house with oyster shell windows, toothbrushes, mother-of-pearl gaming pieces, ivory napkin rings, horn checkers, tortoise shell combs, silk fans, and scores of nested brass weights used by San Francisco merchants to measure their goods. Everything was made in China except 6,109 bottles of Edinburgh ale, brought along to inspire thirsty California gold diggers. Of all the cargo, the ale had come the farthest, nearly two-thirds of the way around the globe.

But now Frolic's voyage seemed at an end. She had run aground just north of Point Cabrillo, between the present-day communities of Fort Bragg and Mendocino (about 100 miles north of San Francisco). Six men refused to come down from the rigging -- the rest managed to board two boats and row six miles south to the mouth of Big River. Faucon hiked two miles inland but found no one. Since one of the boats leaked badly and most of the crew wanted to travel by land, Faucon, two officers, and four oarsmen with a sick Malay rowed the other boat all the way to Bodega, just north of San Francisco. They slept on beaches and ate mussels for sustenance. Whatever became of the rest of the crew still remains a mystery.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Faucon or his crew, the Frolic was discovered by Mitom Pomo Indians who salvaged ginger jars full of candied kumquats, ginger and among other things, and carried them inland to their camps and villages.

Within hours of Faucon's arrival in San Francisco he was interviewed by the Daily Alta California. The story which appeared the next day ended:

"Captain F. reached this place yesterday...The Frolic was bound to this place with a valuable cargo of Chinese goods. The loss is estimated to be about $150,000."

The following spring Henry Meiggs, a successful San Francisco lumber merchant, sent an expedition inland up the coast hoping to salvage something from the Frolic. They reported finding Indian women wearing elegant silk shawls, but could find no trace of any other cargo. They did, however, discover huge redwood trees growing along the Big River. Meiggs ordered a steam-powered sawmill from back East and located it at Meiggsville (later renamed Mendocino). It was the first of many settlements on the Mendocino coast and established the logging industry there which continues to this day.

That might have been the end of the story but for the unlikely discoveries made in 1984 during an otherwise routine field class in the coastal mountains. Dr. Thomas Layton, an archaeologist at San Jose State University, describes the event in his recently published book, The Voyage of the Frolic - New England Merchants and the Opium Trade (Stanford Press, 1997):

"Driving slowly to Three Chop Village, we bounced from ridge to ridge. When we accelerated, the bumps merged into machinegun chatter, amplified to a roar under the steel roof of the university carryall. Forty minutes on this road carried us up steep slopes from the heat of the canyon bottom to a long sinuous redwood-forested divide known as Three Chop Ridge.

Just below the crest of that ridge, my archaeology students were excavating Pomo Indian house depressions. Each of these had once served as the foundation for a conical hut made of broad slabs of redwood bark. The students had found the expected tools flaked from obsidian and chert, but they had also found fingernail-size fragments of Chinese porcelain. I had not expected this... ."

Seeking to explain the source of the porcelain, Dr. Layton found a major lead at the Kelley House Museum in Mendocino, where he learned that some large shards of Chinese pottery had been anonymously donated. Still covered with barnacles, they had been discovered at a nearby wreck site. The pottery's donation had been arranged by Richard Tooker, an avocational historian who also worked as a volunteer at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. Tooker introduced Layton to the diver, who had tentatively identified the vessel as the Frolic from reading old issues of the Daily Alta California. The ship had been the object of sports divers for a number of years, and was locally believed to be an old sampan. Over the next five years, Dr. Layton was able to gain the cooperation of thirteen divers and recover a large number of artifacts. After eight years of research, including a summer at Harvard's Baker Library, he pieced together an incredible story of connections between Boston capitalists, Baltimore shipbuilders, Bombay opium brokers, businessmen in Gold Rush San Francisco, Cantonese artisans, and the Mitom Pomo residents of the Mendocino coast.

Layton established a repository for artifacts at the Mendocino County Museum. In 1993, led by the Mendocino County Museum, a collaborative group formed (which included San Francisco Maritime) and in July 1994 exhibits about the Frolic opened at three museums in Mendocino County. A chautauqua-style historical dramatization of the story toured that summer to several venues, including San Francisco Maritime's annual Festival of the Sea. A superb recreation of Frolic's Edinburgh ale was crafted and is now brewed annually by the Mendocino Brewing Company, with proceeds donated to support the preservation, study, and display of Frolic artifacts.

If the Frolic had succeeded in reaching her destination and delivering her cargo, it is likely that none of it would remain today. The ship would have been just another arrival entry in the newspaper. Had Dr. Layton not found Chinese porcelains contaminating his site and sought to explain them, or had he not gained the sport divers' cooperation, there would still be no story. Extraordinary discoveries and research have brought to the surface a fascinating treasure. That treasure is the story of a unique and pivotal time in our history which vanished as quickly as it occurred.

Frolic's voyage ended that night in 1850, her precious Gold Rush cargo arrived in San Francisco on February 28, 1998. On that date, San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park opened a special exhibit, Found! The Wreck of the Frolic - A Gold Rush Cargo for San Francisco, about the story of the Frolic - the only Baltimore clipper ever found and the only shipwreck ever discovered with Gold Rush cargo. An official event of the California Sesquicentennial (a state commission created to celebrate the discovery of gold and events immediately thereafter,) the exhibit was created with the support of the Mendocino County Museum and will be displayed through October 3, 1999, at the Maritime Museum in San Francisco.

Richard Everett is Exhibits Curator at the Park.

Reprinted with permission from the San Francisco Maritime National Park Association's history publication Sea Letter

Images: Frolic Wreck Site, August 1850 (illustration by S.F. Manning, courtesy Dr. Thomas Layton); Pencil Sketch of Captain Edward Horatio Faucon, mid-1840s (courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society); Three Chop Village and Frolic Wreck Site Map (illustration by S.F. Manning, courtesy Dr. Thomas Layton); shell box, china plate and window frame/shell glass photos (San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park).