The fantastic maritime history of the Bay Area, from tortoise steaks to urban arks

The Bay Area, perhaps more than any other part of the West Coast, has always been shaped by its relationship to the water. Today, that maritime history lives on everywhere you look, from unique dishes and tipples to a boisterous sailing culture right down to the literal foundation of cities built upon ships.

“The Ohlone and the Coast Miwok – folks who called the Bay Area home before the Europeans arrived – were at their heart a maritime people. They used the technology available to them, tule-reed canoes mostly, to go on hunting and fishing expeditions, and the result of that activity can be seen in the detritus they left behind,” says Timothy Lynch, author of “Beyond the Golden Gate: A Maritime History of California.”

“These midden sites or shell mounds – you can see one in Emeryville, for example, that was several hundred feet long and dozens of feet high – were really reflective of resource acquisition. They were going out in pursuit of marine mammals or shellfish to augment their diet, which was basically agrarian but needed a lot of protein you can get from the Bay.”

Over in San Francisco, a different kind of detritus lies hidden beneath the ground – the skeletons of Gold Rush-era ships. More than 40 have been found, and every once in a while, construction crews building a new skyscraper will accidentally dig into one of these wooden hulks. At that point, an archaeologist has to be called over to examine the remains.

“In May of 1851, there was an incredible fire that took out a third to a half of San Francisco, particularly along the waterfront, which is where the city mostly was,” says Richard Everett, former exhibits curator at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. “That burned to the water line dozens of ships and, in the mess of the smoking shoreline, they started rapidly filling the Bay over. That was the process of the burial – pushing sand hills down over these ships.”

One of these charred vessels, the whaler Niantic, was found resting near the present-day Transamerica Pyramid holding a treasure trove of intact Champagne bottles. A piece of her stern is now on display at the Maritime Museum in Aquatic Park which, incidentally, holds monthly sea chantey singing nights. Nearby, at Hyde Street Pier, is an equally impressive sight: A collection of ships built mostly in the late 1800s, lovingly restored and ripe for public exploring.

Steve Hyman, a marine preservationist in San Francisco, got involved in the care of these venerable ships by “not listening to my mother and hanging out in the wrong bars,” he jokes. “I got upset with my girlfriend one evening and ended up at Specs’ bar in North Beach. I ran into some great drunken sailors who invited me to the waterfront, where they were sailing on a replica of Sir Francis Drake’s ship, the Golden Hind.”

Hyman was inspired to learn the craft of restoring historic ships and has since struck every wooden spar on the Balclutha, an 1886 square-rigger in the Hyde Street fleet. Even though the Balclutha looks tops today, its shelter deck has made 17 trips around Cape Horn. Hyman finds it thrilling to walk those planks, thinking about what the men who sailed her in those days went through.

“Nineteenth-century sailing ships were lost often – just go missing and never be heard from again,” he says. “Navigation was all done through sextants and a lot of dead reckoning. There were weather incidents, especially off Cape Horn in the Roaring Forties, and then you get around 50 South, where the gale-force winds are extreme. There were dismastings constantly, and the ships that could, would limp back to the Falkland Islands.” (That’s Roaring Forties, as in latitude, not chronology.)

The sailors who made the journey around the Horn as well as those arriving via other routes would come to influence the region’s cuisine. Most people know about cioppino, that rich, brothy stew of the day’s catch invented in the last half of the 19th century by Italian-American fishermen based out of Fisherman’s Wharf. (It’s served all over the city, though a lot of folks swear by the crab-loaded version at Woodhouse Fish Co. on Market Street.) Less known is that tortoise steak and soup were once ubiquitous on Gold Rush-era menus.

“Ships would often stop at the Galapagos Islands, where they could get fresh meat on the hoof or on the claw, whatever a tortoise has,” says Everett. “They’d grab these hundreds-of-pounds Galapagos tortoises, turn them on their backs so they couldn’t keep crawling away, then it’d take several men to carry one to the ship. They’d keep them in the bilges, because you can’t kill a turtle – they’d just live in the pitch black, down in the bilge in the water.”

“They even made a pen for them up near Sacramento,” he says. “Some guy was selling South American tortoise meat out of the banks of the river there – it was just incredible how lucrative and sought-after it was.”

The grape brandy Pisco became popular due to ships stocking up on provisions in ports in Chile and Pisco, Peru. Pisco Punch, a locally derived cocktail, achieved notoriety for its innocent taste and concussive aftereffects – one writer said it “went down as lightly as lemonade and came back with the kick of a roped steer.” You can find a tasty contemporary version at the High Horse, a Washington Street saloon that has part of San Francisco’s original seawall underneath the bar (they’ll let you take a look, if you ask nicely).

At the Hyde Street Pier, you’ll also find the Eureka, a ferryboat and reputedly the longest wooden ship still afloat. Before the Golden Gate and Bay bridges were built in the 1930s, ferries like her were the primary means of getting back and forth across the Bay – and not just for passengers. The Berkeley Pier (now closed to the public) used to stretch almost to Treasure Island, and was used to ferry cars from San Francisco to U.C. Berkeley football games and other major East Bay events. And then there were the mighty train ferries.

“You had railroad ferries that would take entire trains from one side of the Bay to the other, where they’d be reconnected to the tracks,” says Lynch. “A barge would actually have railroad tracks on it. The train would go right onto the barge, and the barge would take off, and then as you approached the dock on the other side of the Bay, there’d be railroad ties on the dock, and the train would just chug ahead.”

And of course, people have always had their own boats – the Bay is ringed by more than 40 yacht clubs, including the oldest on the West Coast, the circa-1869 San Francisco Yacht Club (which is actually in Belvedere). These clubs exploded in number in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries, partly as a way to conspicuously consume wealth but also to transact business and climb the social ladder.

“You needed to have ‘membership’ to be in the club – and I don’t just mean the yacht club, I mean the social club – to be able to be invited to the weddings of the century, to be privy to the conversations about finance and industrialization,” says Lynch. “You had the blue bloods, and then individuals who might not qualify for admission would form their own. Then, of course, there’s no better comeuppance than to challenge the original club that denied you entrance to a friendly race and take home the trophy as a newcomer.”

You’ll find some of these clubs participating in Opening Day on the Bay, a spring festival that marks the beginning of the sailing season with a blessing of the fleet and a parade of decorated boats sailing from the Golden Gate Bridge. This tradition supposedly has humble roots in the ark culture of Marin.