Sailing Into the Past : Mysterious Wreckage of 19th-Century Tall Ship Found

To the unschooled observer, Otto Orzech’s find might merely be a jagged hunk of rotting, waterlogged driftwood. But, to local museum officials, it was something much more: a rare glimpse into a colorful bygone era, a piece of California’s maritime history mysteriously yielded up by the sea.

Orzech, a local marine biologist, last month alerted San Diego Maritime Museum officials to the 25-foot-long by 8-foot wide remains of what experts say is a section of the hull of a century-old West Coast sailing vessel that recent storms had tossed ashore near Cardiff State Beach.

On Friday, a team of state parks and recreation workers excavated the 2,000-pound piece of wreckage as museum officials, biologists and ocean archeologists stood by anxiously, wringing their hands like expectant fathers.

Museum officials want to make the hull section the centerpiece of a new exhibit on the construction of the gallant 19th-Century lumber schooners, barkentines and brigantines that once braved local waters, hauling building materials to Southern California from the Pacific northwest.

At times on Friday, the aged mass of wood creaked and groaned as the crane worked to slowly dislodge it from the sand. And that made Craig Arnold wince. Sure, said the museum librarian on hand for the event, some of the passers-by who captured the scene on videotape might be a bit disappointed.

Because, frankly, this didn’t have the drama of any television spectacle, such as when Geraldo Rivera knocked the last brick from the hidden vault where Al Capone supposedly stored his long-lost loot.

But Arnold’s palms got sweaty nonetheless.

“Mention a shipwreck, and most people will picture an intact Spanish galleon complete with treasure chests full of gold--instead of how most wreckage usually ends up, like this, in bits and pieces,” he said.

“But, for maritime historians, this really is a treasure, a significant find--because rarely do you find ships of this kind surviving the ocean depths. When we found it, we weren’t exactly dancing around in the sand, but there were grins all around, you can be sure of that.”

San Diego Maritime Museum curator Dave Brierley said the recent discovery--for historians and laymen alike--touched a chord with a long-forgotten time.

“Here is something that sat buried for so long suddenly coming back to us,” he said. “For us, it’s like the discovery of a little bit of Pompei. It’s an event that clues us in to the great mysteries of the past that are out there all around us.”

Indeed, the mere survival of the hull section in the harsh ocean environment was itself the first mystery, museum officials say.

Most often, shipworm mollusks will devour the wooden frames of such sunken ships, stealing away forever the artifacts of a time when hundreds of schooners sailed the Pacific coastline--which seasoned sailors called the “broad international highway”--until the elegant tall ships yielded their cargoes of lumber to steam-powered vessels.

In time, the steam ships--dismissed by seamen who sailed before the mast as “steam kettles”--were themselves replaced by the modern-day 18-wheeler lumber trucks.

“These old lumber ships helped build Southern California,” Arnold said. “They made tens of thousands of voyages up and down the coast, bringing timber down from the Northwest because building materials were scarce here in the desert climate.

“Without them, I don’t think San Diego or Los Angeles would have come to be what they are now.”

Today, only two intact lumber schooners remain from that grand era, officials say. The C.A. Thayer is housed at the National Maritime Museum of San Francisco. And the three-masted Wawona, which is in poorer condition, belongs to Northwest Seaport of Seattle.

The relic at Cardiff State Beach is an interior section of the starboard side of the hull, experts said. It consist of several massive 25-foot-long timbers and plank fragments, fastened to several cross-running frames, or futtocks, with wooden treenails, a century-old technique for attaching planking.

“The ship was built with the primitive methods of the day,” Arnold said. “It represents a style of shipbuilding that no longer exists. Some of these wooden spikes were used as far back as the Vikings.”

Although local officials have only a small section of the lumber schooner, park rangers and lifeguards have reportedly spotted other remnants nearby. “We’re trying to get a UC San Diego diving team to have a look around off the coast out there to see what else they might find,” Arnold said.

Museum experts, who believe the ship most likely sailed during the 1880s, are not sure of the vessel’s exact identity or what eventually befell her.

Their quest to find out has some of the trappings of a Sherlock Holmes mystery. Last week, local officials looked on like curious investigators as an architect from the Los Angeles Maritime Museum performed an autopsy on the wreckage--reviewing it plank by plank to determine its age and origin.

“It’s a needle in a haystack situation,” Arnold said. “Pinning down the exact identity of the ship may be next to impossible--but, the more fragments we find, the easier it will be. Unfortunately, we didn’t find a brass plate that said, “This is the Pequod--the vessel sailed by Captain Ahab.”

For oceanographer Otto Orzech, the excavation was a minor personal victory. Last month, his nonprofit marine institute in Pacific Beach received an anonymous call about an old shipwreck onshore in Cardiff.

Orzech rushed out to the site, originally about 200 yards up shore from where the hull section was eventually found. Excited, he began calling maritime museum officials in Los Angeles and San Diego.

“But the response was lukewarm at first,” he recalled. “They were all busy with projects of their own.”

But Orzech persisted. Finally, one blustery March day, he persuaded a gaggle of experts to come down to the site.

“When we got to the bluff overlooking the beach, the ship was gone--it was nowhere in sight, thanks to the rough tides from the March storms,” he said. “It was an embarrassing situation.”

The ocean giveth, the ocean taketh away.

Last week, a lifeguard called Orzech to say the wreckage had resurfaced on the south end of the beach near the Cardiff-Solana Beach city line.

“Boy, was I glad to get that call,” Orzech said. “So we decided to come back right away and get that wreckage off the beach and into storage before something else happens to it.”

Officials feel lucky that the wreckage didn’t break apart on the rocks the second time it washed ashore. Or that bystanders didn’t dismantle it as some historical souvenir. “For some people, this artifact could have been hacked up into some real nice coffee tables,” Arnold said.

“But we’ve been pleased with the public’s response. People have been really curious. They’ve shown an interest in this fossil from another century.”