Hi I'm Kami
and I'm Elliot.
Welcome to San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.
We're both interns here at the park, and right now we're in the museum building.
One of our favorite objects here in the museum is the stern of the Niantic.
Have you heard of the Niantic?
It is one of the many ships buried underneath downtown San Francisco.
That part of the city, and it's surrounding neighborhoods
are popular destinations for people from all over the world.
But did you know that that stretch of land
from the Ferry Building all the way to the Transamerica Pyramid
was once a shallow cove called Yerba Buena?
Most people don't. But it's true!
Much of downtown San Francisco was built on that Shallow Cove
during the Gold Rush over 150 years ago.
San Francisco happened almost as an accident of history.
With 1848 and the discovery of Gold
everybody suddenly realizes...
here's the lottery. I can win it.
And so off they go
Close to 800 ships
leave American ports for San Francisco,
and that's joined by several hundred from elsewhere
So what you have in 49 and coming in to 50
is, you have not only hundreds, but now you've got over 1000 ships in the harbor.
and what's particularly important is it's
not just people, it's goods, it's things,
because people know that there's a market,
that here's this city that's growing up on the edge of the Gold Fields -
they have no idea that they've got to go 30 miles up,
and then get in to the rivers and continue on, and then,
once you get in to Sacramento or Stockton
then get in to the foothills themselves.
San Francisco is where they're headed.
See, Yerba Buena Cove was a mud flat at low-tide,
and a shallow pond at high tide.
To avoid the mud flats, it became a goal to
extend the orginal shoreline
so that ships could unload more easily into deeper water.
Piers were built about a thousand feet out into the bay,
and through a legal loophole, if you could fill in a plot of shallow water,
the plot could be yours.
People began doing this on purpose - to own land.
This process became known as scuttling.
So the ships are an easy source...
for buildings.
You get the town jail with the tiny little brig Euphemia.
You get warehouses.
And then, after that in fast progression you get other ships,
and there's probably close to 100 that end up being
more or less permanently moored,
while the others are out in the stream, moving around
This is happening dramatically.
And, it creates this waterfront.
And, what I like as an archaeologist, is that
that waterfront is destroyed,
dramatically in the fire of May 3rd and 4th 1851,
and it creates this Gold Rush Pompei,
that is quickly, filled over, encapsulated...
not really forgotten...
but there it is.
We now know that there are roughly 40 to 60 ships
buried underneath downtown San Francisco.
In May of 1978, construction in downtown San Francisco
unearthed the remains of a long-buried ship, the Niantic,
lying where she was beached about 130 years earlier.
the Niantic lies somewhere directly under me
at the corner of Clay and Sansome.
This was actually where the original shoreline was
before it was extended out into Yerba Buena Cove.
The Niantic was built in 1835 for the China Trade,
but later became a whaler in the South Pacific.
On a later whaling voyage in 1849,
the American Counsel in Panama notified the captain
that there were thousands of eager gold-seekers
waiting in Panama for a California-bound ship.
The Niantic picked up 248 passengers in Panama,
and arrived in San Francisco in April of 1849.
When they got here, the gold-seekers and crew were so
excited to find Gold that they essentially abandoned the ship.
The Niantic was beached in 1849
at the corner of Clay and Sansome,
near where we stand now.
After being abandoned,
investors bought the ship, and converted her into a storeship.
The owners were able to make a lot of money this way
until the Niantic was partially destroyed in the
Fire of May 1851.
Fortunately for the owners,
the mast was halfway underground,
and a hotel was erected on the remnants.
The hotel was regarded as one of the best in the area,
but was eventually torn down in 1872.
It is also possibly the most famous
of all the buried ships.
Maybe you've even heard of it.
This could be because it was the first to be converted into
a building, or, because it has been rediscovered and uncovered
a total of three different times.
The first rediscovery was in
when the old Niantic Hotel was torn down.
Then, after the great earthquake and fire of 1906,
The remains were exposed for a second time.
And finally, in 1978,
the remains were exposed for a third and final time
during construction next to the Transamerica Pyramid.
It was this third discovery that allowed for the excavation
of the artifacts.
A lot of these artifacts are now housed in our collections,
as well as in the Maritime Museum,
or in our Visitor Center.
A bloc west from the Niantic, on Battery Street,
lies the hull of another Gold Rush vessel,
the General Harrison.
If you walk by this spot, you can see the outline of the vessel
in the sidewalk.
This outline allows you to imagine the size of the ship
beneath your feet, which was pretty big.
There is also a plaque and a sculpture on the side of the
building above the General Harrison that you can check out
when you walk by.
The General Harrison started her career in April of 1840, in New Englad.
As a large merchant ship, she could carry up to 409 tons of cargo,
which was a lot of stuff.
After news of Gold reached the East Coast,
the General Harrison left Boston
and 7 months later, landed in Yerba Buena Cove.
Her crew sold her cargo, and then her passengers left for the Gold Rush.
She was ready to go on another voyage,
when her crew also deserted her in hopes of finding gold.
The General Harrison was then bought
and used as a storage warehouse
in 1850.
But then,
in May 1851
the same fire that destroyed the Apollo and the Niantic
also got her.
Her remains were covered up,
and new buildings were built upon her.
The General Harrison was basically forgotten about for years,
until she was uncovered in 2001 -
150 years after the fire.
We spoke with John Muir, curator of small craft at
San Francisco Martime about seeing the buried ship.
I came in pretty much the last week of the excavation.
They were just wrapping up
details.
So when I showed up it was...
There was an amazing sight really, it was...
the ship laid bare,
and just imprinted in the soil,
and in the middle of downtown.
I mean it was a striking, striking place.
So we went down with tape measures and strings and
spent a few days taking cross-sectional shapes
as they were sort of scrambling to wrap up the excavation.
I was down there at sunset,
and I was down there in the hull, which was the last moment
anybody was there to enjoy it,
before it was destroyed and buried forever the next day.
And it was beautiful.
It was super sad too though.
You just had this sense that this was
a thing of culutaral importance to everyone, and
extreme beauty, full of history - this rich
beautiful thing, and....
It was going to be gone. It should be saved for everyone.
It just felt so...
wrong to uncover this thing, and understood what it really is
and have no voice to saving it.
It's something about the depth
and the nature of a hull opening up to this huge
historic piece
right below your feet. You're just like...
Okay, this is bigger than
you know, a photo in a book, or a report, or a small artifact.
It really, kind of, communicated that
that it's a really present history, that's...
that we'll all be learning about, and continuing to learn about.
Just two blocks away from the Niantic lies another storeship
known as the Apollo.
Unfortunately, there is no plaque that marks her spot,
but you can visit her final resting place.
She is buried underneath where we are standing right now,
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
Like many other Gold Rush vessels, the Apollo was in
the European trade before she set out West
after she heard news of Gold in California.
In September 1849,
the Apollo landed in San Francisco after a long journey.
After arriving in San Francisco,
the crew of the Apollo abandoned her
for the promise of gold.
So, like the Niantic, the Apollo became part of the growing city.
Unlike the Niantic, the Apollo has never been fully excavated,
even though she has been uncovered three different times.
The last time she was uncovered was in 1925.
She hasn't been seen since,
and the Federal Reserve Bank is still standing above her.v
Crazy huh, that this ship has not been seen for over 100 years.
Do you think she'lll ever be fully excavated and seen again?
Have you ever taken the N, K, or T trains here in SF?
If so, you've likely passed through the hull of a historic
ship without even knowing it.
That's right.
That muni tunnel runs directly through the hull of
a historic ship called the Rome.
The Rome arrived in San Francisco in 1850
with a crew full of gold-seekers who promptly left to search for gold.
The ship then sat abandoned
In what was then San Francisco's port
and was eventually scuttled for land
on Market Street, between Stuart and East Streets,
which is now the Embarcadero.
This spot is in the vicinity of Justin Herman Plaza, where we are now,
somewhere directly under the bocce ball courts right behind.
Archaeologists surveyed and collected artifacts,
but determined the ship was too large to fully excavate.
After whatever excavation was deemed appropriate
they simply build the tunnel through the forward hull of the ship.
I think it was pretty obvious to everybody that
trying to recover that ship
would have been extraordinarily expensive, and unneccessary
for the project.
I don't want to say it wasn't worth the expense, but
the process of recovering a ship like that and bringing it up
is one thing, conserving it is an entirely different story.
You're talking about multi-millions of dollars.
And to what end?
The best we could do was
to reassemble those portions that we did recover,
basically rebuild the ship out of three-feet long segments,
but there were too many gaps.
Next time to you an N, K, or a T train,
you can imagine traveling through a piece of the past.
We chose to talk about these four ships because
of their detailed stories and fascinating histories.
But as you can see from the map
There are mulitple more ships buried underneath San Francisco.
We encourage you to learn more about these ships.
So I imagine there's more of the story to tell.
I'm sure there will be more ships coming down the pike
in future construction efforts, and it should be interesting to
see what happens with them.
San Francisco is a maritime city
It is the port, I argue, that created
not only San Francisco, but really helped catapult America
into greater prominence on the world stage.
and that that history is reflected
in this big massive artifact that is San Francisco.