Sailingsteps San Francisco

Around the world: San Francisco

In sailingsteps of my ancestor captain Jacob Bouten


Zeilsporen van mijn voorvader kapt. Jacob Bouten


1 Kees Bouten © 2012 Sailingsteps

San Franciso in sailingsteps

When Jacob Bouten arrived in San Francisco in 1850 it was just one and a half year after the Goldrush

started and less than four years before it was called Yerba Buena on Mexican soil.

View of San Francisco, formerly Yerba Buena, in March 1847 [4]. In the bay: the USS “Portsmouth” (A), USS transport ships (B) and the merchant ship “Vandalia” (C). Along the shore: Montgomery St, uphill in the center Clay St and Washington St on the right. In between Kearny St. Customhouse (1) with flag and Samuel Brannan’s Residence (10) behind it. In the background: Los Pechos de la Choco (33) and Lone Mountain (34). [SFMM]

Spanish settlers first arrived in San Francisco in 1776. Soldiers established a presidio or fort at the

entrance to San Francisco Bay, and catholic padres consecrated the site of Mission San Francisco de

Assisi, now known as Mission Dolores. When Mexico gaines undependance in 1821, the new

government issued large land grants to Alta Californios. With the help of Indian labor, the land grants

became vast rancheros and produced great quantities of wheat and cattle.

San Francisco: City of golden dreams

May 12, 1848 is mentioned as the start of the goldrush most often, when Samuel Brannan marched

across Portsmouth Square in San Francisco waving a bottle of gold dust over his head crying, “Gold!

Gold! Gold from the A,merican River!” His words electrified the village and eventually the entire

world. Within a few days San Franciscans left en masse for the foothills, beginning the greatest

migration in American history, the world famous Gold Rush.




Thousands of goldseekers and pioneers from around the world converged on the shores of Yerba Buene

Cove. At one point in 1849, the population of San Francisco was doubling every ten days. But what’s

most remarkable about the Gold Rush was not the wealth it porduced; it was the character of the city it

created. The rush for gold drew more people from more different countries and continents into one place

at one time than ever before in the history of mankind. From the beginning, San Francisco was truly an

international city.

Between 1821 and 1848, in 1846 at the onset of the Mexican-American war, the USS Porstmouth

anchored in Yerba Buena Cove where seventy marines, soldiers and sailors marched up the plaza and

raised the Stars and Stripes. Yerba Buene was on American soil now and the village got the name San

Francisco.

July 7, 1846. Population the pueblo of Yerba Buena estimated at about 1000 non-natives. There were

about 50 buildings in the pueblo.

1849. Fire destroyed most of the city. It broke out at Dennison’s Exchange on the east side of Kearny

between Clay and Jackson sts. Fire spread to surrounding buildings before the bucket brigade could be

formed. Fifty buildings were destroyed, and the fire caused $1,500,000 damage. This was known as the

first Great Fire. Mayor-elect Geary organized the crowd which pulled down buildings with ropes to stop

the fire. Edward Edgerton was killed while fighting the conflagration.

December 31, 1849. Population of San Francisco was estimated at 100,000 including 35,000 people

who came by sea, 3000 sailors who deserted ships and 42,000 who came overland.

http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist/chron1.html

When Jacob Bouten came to San Francisco on his voyage of 1849, it would have looked pretty similar to

the above picture. He describes (in his lifestory about his second time in San Francisco) S.Francisco in

early 1850 as a town with only 20 to 30 houses. This is hard to combine with a population of 100.000

(see before) even when taking into account the 50 houses destroyed by the First Great Fire in 1849. He

came into San Francisco just three years after it became American and less than two years after the Gold

Rush had started. This was a totally different and new world for him.

I flew in from Miami, with a weekend stopover in Dallas, where I visited Evelyn Reyers, a family of the

Klinkhamer’s not related to me.

One of the grandsons of Jacob Bouten, Cornelis Jan Bouten, younger brother of my grandfather and my

god-uncle, was married to Beppie Klinkhamer. Her husband died in a mining-accident. Before my aunt

Beppie died she started the “Bouten-Klinkhamer Foundation”, and since I am one of the board-members

of this foundation, I thought “why not visit some Klinkhamers living around the world (they went to

North-America and Australia, the Boutens did not)” during my trip in sailingsteps. It was great to meet

Evelyn in her world as an architect with HKS (a company which builds hospitals) and at her house in

Dallas in Texas, quite another world again for me to experience.

Evelyn, thanks a lot for your hospitality and showing me around in your life and environment.

I arrived in San Francisco on May 3rd , 2010 and believe it or not, as in Valparaiso and in Ancud, nothing

remained from the 1850-1853 years, because of an earthquake in 1906, the same year as in Valparaiso.

The earthquake in San Francisco was not as strong as the one in Valparaiso, but in San Francisco they

had gas pipes that exploded and set a huge fire in the city and because the water pipes also broke, the fire

could not be extinguished before the whole central area of the city burned down.

The oldest building that remains is the Old Mint, built in 1874, a legacy of the city’s silver age and

located at Fifth Avenue near Market Street. It is also the starting point of the Barbary Coast Trail through

the heart of the historic center of San Francisco.

I was lucky, coming by subway from the airport to Powell Station, to speak with some-one at the tourist

information office (first of all to find a hotel and also to get some more information about San Francisco),

http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist/chron1.html




who was interested in my reason for visiting SF and who advised me to walk the Barbary Coast Trail. I

bought the booklet without understanding completely what it was about.

Barbary Coast Trail downtown San Francisco 1868

In the picture to the left the original coastline is shown and you should be able to see Montgomery St and

Kearny St as it is nowadays and Clay St plus Washington St with some more effort. Between Clay and

Washington, above Kearny, you find Portsmouth Square which became the center of the town in the mid

19th-century. Nowadays it is the meeting place in the Chinese quarter, where you can find the spot where

the American flag was raised.

In the picture to the right, the original coastline can not be recognized

anymore. Best reference between the left and the right picture is Market St,

diagonal on the picture right.

Before finding out about these details, I walked from the San Remo hotel

in Mason along Fisherman’s Wharf to the Maritime National Historical

Park, where I spent the next couple of hours in the Visitor Center. The

Maritime Museum itself is closed for a couple of years, but in the Visitor

Center [Ref 7] I immediately found some interesting information. Not only

the picture of San Francisco in 1847 and the DVD of the “Peking” which I

have shown before, but also the pictures of SF in 1849 and 1850 which

show the rapid growth of SF in those years.

San Francisco in 1850 is painted from the opposite direction as that from

1849, from a point on Telegraph Hill, and looks through Montgomery St to

the Long Wharf in front of Commercial St, that parallels with Clay and Sacramento. The cove between

Washington St and Telegraph Hill has been filled by land.




San Francisco in 1849 (~June), looking north on Kearny St toward

Telegraph Hill, by Henry Firks. This image is one of the earliest

views of SF after the discovery of gold in California [SFMM]

San Francisco 1850, by William B. McMurtrie

[SFMM]

The next morning I started to walk the Barbary Coast Trail, starting from Hyde where I took the Cable

Car, an interim technology between horse drawn omnibuses and electric trolleys, started in SF in 1873. A

highly energy inefficient system that still exists in SF (rebuilt in 1982), the first and now only city where

it is still in operation. Arriving at Powell St, I first went to the Mint, from there on to Union Square,

through Chinatown to Portsmouth Square and through Commercial St to the north side of the former

cove where I took a break in the Old Ship

Saloon.

The area of the former inlet known as Yerba

Buena Cove, is a graveyard of Gold Rush

ships. Many of the more than 600 abandoned

ships where salvaged by entrepreneurs, who

erected wooden structures on the decks and

used them for hotels, warehouses, saloons and

even a jail. One such ship, the three-masted bark

“Arkansas” blew aground in 1849 and lies

buried beneath the site of this saloon. In 1851,

Joe Anthony, an enterprising Englishman, cut

a door into the side of the Arkansas’ hull and

converted it into the Old Ship Ale House. He installed a gangplank to the Pacific St pier and posted a sign

next to the entrance which read, “God, Bad, and Indifferent Spirits Sold Here! At 25 cents each.”

This was ‘my place to be’ of course, especially because they had some pictures on the wall of San

Francisco around 1851. First I had a chat with the bartender and later on with the owner, and their

pictures helped me a lot when next day I tried to explain to the people in the Library of the Maritime

Museum what I was looking for, because they could not help me to information in general, only when

they knew exactly what to look for (they were very helpful, but very American and a kind of government

people as well) !

Anyhow, 1+1 = 1-3 (?, you don’t need to be a technician for this ☺) and thus I can show next interesting

map with nice details:




Map of San Francisco showing how it developed after the Gold Rush started [SFMM]

The full line on the map represents the shoreline in 1851, the thin broken line is the approximate extent of the land

fill by late 1852. As the filled shoreline advanced, wharves were constantly pushed out to deeper water and by 1855

the reclamation of Yerba Buena Cove was almost complete.

The map shows the areas of Sydney town and Little Chile, the Long Wharf opposite Commercial St and the wharfs

in front of nearly every street to the Westside. The numbers indicate abandoned ships that were ultimately buried by

the landfill.

1. NIANTIC

2. APOLLO

27. ARKANSAS

Yerba Buena Cove was glutted with ships, brigs and barks during the early years of the Gold Rush. Their crews, and

frequently officers as well, deserted and made off to the diggings. A vessel thus abandoned could often be bought

for a song from her discouraged master or owner’s agent. Beached or scuttled in the shallow waters of the cove, the

hull would then be turned into a warehouse, hotel, restaurant, tavern or store. Such a conversion was quicker and

less costly than buying a lot in the Gold Rush city, purchasing lumber imported from around Cape Horn, and hiring

carpenters at premium pay to put up a building.

John Lawson, an official ship-scuttler in the Gold Rush period, estimated, in his old age, that a hundred ships were

buried under San Francisco’s business district. Excavations dug for modern office buildings occasionally reveal the

timbers of an old “forty-niner”.

After my visit to the Old Ship Saloon I went through Columbus and along Washington Square, up

Telegraph Hill and down again along the Embarcadero, walking Pier 39 and on along Fisherman’s

Wharf back to SF Maritime Park. A beautiful day with a lot of discoveries for sailingsteps and even more

walkingsteps (I nearly did the whole Barbary Coast Rail ++ in one day). Getting back to my hotel rather

late, I ate again in their restaurant Fior d’Italia, the first established Italian restaurant in San Francisco.

The next morning, first I rented a bike to go to what I thought to be the oldest newspaper of SF, the San

Francisco Chronicle at Fifth Av. However this newspaper started in 1865 and from there I was directed

to the San Francisco Examiner at 2nd

Av, where their building appeared to be empty. A couple of hours

later in the San Francisco City Library [8], I found in the Alta California from February 18, 1850:




Alta California, February 18, 1850

The Dutch bark “Jan van Hoorn” with captain

Bouten, arrived in San Francisco 17 February

1850, in 50 days from San Carlos; to Surocco

Brothers.

This means that he left San Carlos on 29 December 1849, after a stay of about one month (he left

Valparaiso on 21 November to sail to San Carlos). I did not find when he left San Francisco, perhaps I

had not been trying long enough to scroll through the prints of the newspaper, sitting there behind a

screen with a back hurting more and more.

Nevertheless, during this search I also found out about his second time to arrive in San Francisco and

apparently, he was not the fastest one coming from Europe or Valparaiso. What I had not seen before was

that he had four passengers. He does not write about these at all? Again I did not find out when he left, may be because in the meantime somebody had told me where I

could find the same information on the internet. Later on, being back home, I found the website and the

newspaper but not from the right time of the years.

Daily Alta California, January 13, 1853

The barque “Jan van Hoorn”, captain Bouten, arrived in

San Francisco on 12 January 1853, in 180 days from

Rotterdam and 53 days from Valparaiso, to

Gildemeester and De Fremery &Co, with 4 passengers.




And again it was after my trip around the world only that I found in Dutch newspapers:

NRC 06-05-1850, Scheepstijdingen: Dordrecht, 3 Mei. Volgens brief van kapt. Bouten, voerende het schip Jan van Hoorn, in dato San Francisco 28 Februarij, was hij den 16den dito, na ene reis van 50 dagen, aldaar van Valparaiso aangekomen. Den 26 dito had hij een aanvang gemaakt met lossen, en dacht binnen vier weken daarmede gereed te zijn.

NRC 27-05-1850, Scheepstijdingen, Vreemde Havens: San Francisco 1 April. Jan van Hoorn, Bouten, n.Java; om binnen 2 á 3 weken te vertrekken.

NRC 14-06-1850, Scheepstijdingen, Vreemde Havens: San Francisco 16 April. Jan van Hoorn, Bouten, n.Batavia.

saying he arrived 16 february 1850 in San Francisco, expecting to be leaving before the end of march and

realy left April 16th to Batavia.

Because of his second voyage it is interesting to read with which other (5) Dutch ships he was in San

Francisco at the same time.

NRC 14-04-1853, Zeetijdingen, Vreemde Havens: San Francisco 27 Febr ter reede de Hollandsche schepen Fanny, Tjebbes; ’s-Hertogenbosch, van der Braak; Edouard & Marie, Eeltjes; Jan van Hoorn, Bouten; WillemIII, van der Burg en Graaf van Nassau, Sanders.

NRC 29-04-1853, Zeetijdingen, Vreemde Havens: San Francisco 7 Maart. Zeilkl. Jan van Hoorn, Bouten, n.Hongkong.

Here it also comes clear that at both voyages he was in San Francisco during two months (One of my

questionmarks before finding this information in the newspapers).

During the afternoon I visited the Library of the Maritime Museum [SFMM], located at Fort Mason,

where I was able to order a couple of reproductions as I mentioned before. One I did not show yet is a

photograph (a very early one and oldest I found during my trip) of San Francisco in 1851 with many

houses made from briks (instead of wood) and a forest of masts in the bay. This one gives a slightly

different view of San Francisco from the ones before, but is at least as valid to show San Francisco

between the two times when Jacob Bouten was there. I had also seen this picture in the Old Ship Saloon.

San Francisco prior to April 1851, from Portsmouth Square [SFMM]

The view looks east from approximately Portsmouth Plaza, with Rincon Point at the right andYerba

Bueana Island at the left. Photo left: the backside of Delmonico Hotel (building in front) at westside

Mont’gy, Dunbar & Gibbs (you can even read the name on the picture!) behind it in the next street

Sansome, with Turner Fish &Co and S.H.Williams Co to the left (north). Photo right: Harry B. Lafitte

&Co bottom left in Montgomery St, Darling &Co (building in the middle) on the corner Clay and




Sansome St (both wooden pier actually) and opposite Nantic and at the very right end the Wells Building

at Montgomery St, the same location as where the Wells Fargo History Museum is now. It’s nice to see

these pictures on real large scale (as I have these from the library of the SFMM) and many details of both

houses and the forest of masts.

San Francisco early 1851, from Portmouth Square [SFMM]

Next picture of Portsmouth Square itself and also from 1851 gives a slightly different impression of San

Francisco at that time (I found this

picture on the internet somewhere). This

was about as much as I found of San

Francisco from 160 years ago, before I

got problems with a slipped disc as

Kylene Pring of “SF Sport and Spine

Physical Therapy” called it when I

visited her the first time on May 7th,

2010 in Commercial St. She did a great

job, but it did not help me enough to be

able to explore San Francisco any further. Kylene treated me again the following Monday and Thursday,

which made me well enough to fly to New York City on May 14th (thankfuls to fly business class with

flatseats), but not good enough to stroll through SF any longer, to go to the Golden Gate Bridge or across,

to find out more about SF and to meet San Franciscans. Nevertheless I was lucky that this did not happen

to me earlier (for instance when I was in the inlands of Suriname, southern Australia or Indonesia to

name just a few places), but in San Francisco where there was appropriate help.




Views from Coit Tower in opposite directions.

During my first two days in SF I saw more of SF than I did show up until now. Walking the Barbary

Coast Trail I was on Telegraph Hill, not the tallest but certainly the most distinctive hill in San Francisco.

Telegraph Hill received its name in 1850 when a semaphore was placed on this hill, a tall mast with

movable arms positioned in various configurations depending on the type of ship approaching SF. From

the Coit Tower, built in 1933, you have a panoramic view of the city and the bay. Last picture on the left

is a view from the top of the Coit Tower to the Golden Gate Bridge in the west. The bridge was

completed in 1937 and connects the city on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula with Marin

county. As early as 1820 there used to be a ferry, with regularly scheduled service beginning in the 1840s

for purposes of transporting water to San Francisco. The picture on the rightside looks south through the

windows of the tower to the financial district.

Alcatraz

From the Municipal Pier on the westside of Maritime Park, you have a good view into the bay and on the

island of Alcatraz, currently the most touristic attraction of SF. I preferred the view southeast in the

direction of the city and Maritime Park with the “Balclutha” moored at Hyde St Pier in the Maritime

Park.\

San Francisco from Municipal Pier




The “Balclutha” used to be a cargo ship, built in 1886 in Glasgow, Scotland by Charles Connell & Co. A

ship of 1689 tons of iron and steel, 256 feet long, that sailed between England and Alaska yearly between

1903 and 1930.

The clipper “Balclutha” and its voyages from 1886 to 1930

Captain (1894-99) Alfred Durkee wrote about sailing the “Horn” :

“No one who has not been there can imagine the strain on the captain

on trying to get around Cape Horn”.

In front of the ship you see Telegraph Hill with the Coit Tower, to the right the Financial District and

again right Russian Hill behind Ghirardelli Square. Between these two hills along the shore is

Fisherman’s Wharf, where it is hard to find any locals among the many tourists. Nevertheless it is a nice

area without highrisers and not crowded with traffic. Together with Alcatraz Island, Pier 39 may be as

attractive for tourists, I did not like it except for seeing the hundred’s of sea-lions hauling out on K-Dock.

All along the Embarcadero there are Pier-buildings with odd numbers (including 29,5 between 29 and 31

!) untill the Ferry Building opposite Market St and Commercial St. The Long Wharf in the 1850s’ started

from Commercial St and run nearly up to the nowadays’ Ferry Building.

Sea-lions at Piet 39 Ferry Building from Ferry Pier

From what I saw during too short time in San Francisco, it is a very nice city worthwhile to go back to. It

is much bigger and modern compared to Valparaiso, both were not much more than villages in 1847.

Both were expanding rapidly during the Gold Rush and got many international inhabitants. Valparaiso

still has something of the flavour from the middle of the 19th-century, San Francisco has not. Both harbor

cities are built on many hills and both cities are colorful, each in his own way but also alike.

There is only one ‘one of a kind’, but in San Francisco I found another one, I don’t know to remember

how far away from:




It was on one of the tiles, marking the Barbary Coast Trail, and this one in memory of Robert F. Laverne,

a “One-of-a Kind San Franciscan” (Who-ever it may be?) !

San Francisco,

a city of Golden Dreams to go back to (in better circumstances)




San Francisco and it’s vicinity in 1853

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Sailingsteps San Francisco