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They Came by Sea A Pictorial History of San Diego Bay by Jerry MacMullen
They Came by Sea A Pictorial History of San Diego Bay by Jerry MacMullen
Soft cover
Copyright 1969 by Jerry MacMullen
152 pages
CONTENTS
1. Sails from the South'ard / 1
2. Fast-Buck Boys from Out-of-Town / 5
3. The Gringo Takes Over / 8
4. The Glory Days of Sail / 12
5. Mudflats and Long-Legged Wharves / 17
6. Elite of the Seven Seas / 25
7. Sailor Trouble / 30
8. At the End of a Long Stout Hawser / 37
9. Meanwhile, with Adze and Beetle / 42
10. Lance and Net and Hook / 49
11. In the Wake of the Cyane / 53
12. Unsung Hero of the Bennington / 62
13. Of Steamships Large and Small / 67
14. Hanky-Panky / 74
15. ". . . and has not since reported." / 81
16. Four Score Years of Ferries / 87
17. Era of Concrete and Steel / 93
Bibliography / 99
Index / 151
PREFACE
This is not a history of San Diego Bay in terms of change-of-command ceremonies nor of civic banquets; it will not tell you about the social significance of the tuna industry nor will it supply tables of statistics on cargoes or the revenue from tidelands leases. Rather, it will try to plug up some of the holes left by those who, in bygone years, apparently felt that nothing of interest occurred from the arrival of the sea-borne elements of Don Gaspar de Por-told's expedition in 1769 until the Navy began to fly cloth-and-bamboo aeroplanes on North Island. It is just as well to face the fact that "New" San Diego was brought in, piece by piece, in sailing vessels and lumbering side-wheelers, and that bellying canvas played an important part in the town's economy for many years.
In that now wraith-like fleet were sturdy wooden medium clippers out of Searsport and Bath; iron and steel ships and barks hailing from Dundee and Liverpool and Havre and Bremen - and from London and Trondhjem and Barry. They brought steaming coal from New South Wales and blacksmith coal (which had to be watched for spontaneous combustion) from Pennsylvania; they brought steel and glass and cement from Continental Europe, and there was a veritable armada of small schooners from the "dog-holes" of Northern California's Mendocino coast, with redwood from which to build a city. From time to time empty Cape Homers would load San Diego County grain from rolling fields which today grow dense with split-level homes, for the brewers of Germany. Up from the Lower Coast, as the Mexican waters were called, came the tiny schooners and big sloops of the "Mosquito Fleet" with sea-otter pelts and with orchilla and seal-oil, and gold and copper ore. The tall ships and their lusty crews came and went and were quickly forgotten; everyone was too busy telling and re-telling the story of California's missions, and of the Romantic Days of the Dons. So do not be surprised if the following pages lay emphasis on sail and on the coastwise steamers, and pick up such forgotten items as the day when the Navy discovered that you could at last get a battleship into San Diego Bay - or why the tug had to be towed home by the schooner.
Gathering material has not been easy. Half a century ago a tape recorder, in the hands of anyone who recognized the passing of a phase of history which had lasted for thousands of years, would have been all but priceless. Now we have the electronic gear, but most of the characters have made their last landfall these many years ago. In the early days there were no formal port records kept and local newspaper files are indexed only up through 1879, and then from 1930 on, which eliminates most of San Diego's lusty days of sail. Nothing has turned up but a battered log-book started in 1888 by Capt. E. B. Dunnells, a port pilot, and it ends in 1902; it is aboard the museum-ship Star of India, and has been microfilmed by the San Diego Public Library.
The U. S. Custom House Barge Office had a file of the original "Boarding Books" which listed all foreign arrivals - name, rig, consignee, cargo - until that dark day in the mid-1930s when some Washington Jack-in-office passed through on an "efficiency" survey; he declared that they were taking up so many square feet of space at so many cents a foot, and ordered them burned, even though they had been promised to the local historical society. You may destroy excess government property, he growled, but it is a Federal offense if you give it away.
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