Beneath downtown San Francisco lie the remains of roughly 40 to 60 Gold Rush ships — crews abandoned vessels by the hundreds to search for gold, and the city eventually filled the old harbor with earth and built streets and buildings over them

For years an Oakland archaeologist ate dim sum in a Financial District restaurant, roughly a hundred times by his own count, wondering about the ship under his table.

In September 2001 the restaurant came down to make way for an eleven-storey hotel, and Allen Pastron got to stop wondering. Crews digging the foundation at Battery and Clay struck oak. Forty feet of hull came up out of the wet sand, then the rest of it. Pastron climbed down into the General Harrison, a 409-ton storeship built in Newburyport in 1840, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported from the edge of the pit. It had been under the city since 1851.

San Francisco Bay once came up to Montgomery Street, and nearly everything east of that line is landfill with boats in it.

Why nobody sailed home

By the Chronicle’s account, some 62,000 fortune hunters arrived by sea between the spring of 1849 and 1850, and the harbour seized up. Captains found no return cargo, no paying passengers and frequently no crew, because sailors tended to walk off the moment the anchor went down. The anchorage swelled towards a thousand vessels. Writing in National Geographic, Greg Miller described what historians have called a “forest of masts” crowding Yerba Buena Cove, a shallow inlet whose shoreline reached inland to where the Transamerica Pyramid now stands.

Not every vessel was truly deserted. Richard Everett, curator of exhibits at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, told Miller that owners often paid a keeper to mind a hull. Minded or not, the ships rotted.

Ships that turned into buildings

A plank once ran up into a hole cut in the side of a beached vessel on Pacific Street, beneath a sign offering “Gude, Bad, an Indif’rent Spirits Sold Here!” at 25 cents a glass. San Francisco Heritage credits that hole to an Englishman named Joe Anthony, who opened the Old Ship Ale House inside the hull of the Arkansas in 1851. Its descendant, the Old Ship Saloon, still pours drinks a few metres from where the ship ended up.

Timber was scarce and milling it was expensive, so the harbour turned into a hardware store. Around 200 of the better vessels became permanent structures, mostly warehouses, along with hotels, offices, auction halls, cafes, a church and the overcrowded city jail. Maritime archaeologist James Delgado, interviewed for KQED’s Bay Curious, passes on the story of one prisoner who lifted the jail door off its hinges and carried it about on his back, protesting a skipped meal.

Sinking a ship to claim the ground

How does anyone come to own a patch of open water? Officials sold water lots in the cove on the condition that buyers fill them in, and the cheapest way to plant something solid on a claim was to scuttle a vessel on top of it. Operators known as “hulk undertakers” ran the logic further, sailing hulls over other people’s lots after dark and pulling the plugs.

Delgado describes one dispute that ended with a wharf employee shooting the hulk undertakers’ captain through both cheeks while he was mid-command, the bullet somehow missing his tongue and teeth. He wore a beard for the rest of his life to cover the scars.

Fire finished the job

On the night of 3 May 1851, fire tore through roughly twenty blocks, destroyed more than a thousand buildings and burned the waterfront fleet down to its waterlines. Digging out the stumps was nobody’s priority. Sand and rubble went over the top, the shoreline marched east, and a financial district grew on the lid.

Rincon Point, at the southern end of the cove, held a salvage yard where Charles Hare and at least a hundred Chinese labourers stripped old ships for brass, bronze and reusable timber, per Miller’s reporting. That business burned too. Archaeologists have since found six vessels there, caught mid-dismantling, one of them the whaler Candace.

What the city finds when it digs

In 1994, crews boring a Muni Metro tunnel near the foot of Market Street ran straight into the Rome. Here was a three-masted ship that had arrived with a hold full of ale and salt pork, then been sunk on purpose in 1852 as part of a land grab. Too big to lift out, too awkward to go around. The SFMTA photo archive records that the tunnel was simply driven through its forward hull, so N Judah, K Ingleside and T Third passengers ride through a Gold Rush wreck daily without looking up from their phones.

Estimates of how many hulls are left run between about 30 and 60, which is a range rather than a census. Nobody has excavated the district to settle it, so the park’s buried-ships map simply gets redrawn as finds turn up, most recently with a lighter, the small flat-bottomed boats once used to ferry cargo ashore, added to the record.

The General Harrison was measured, drawn and photographed, then reburied under the hotel basement, with Pastron’s parting expectation on the record: when that hotel eventually comes down, some future crew of archaeologists will get their turn at it.

Foundation work beside the Old Ship Saloon in 2016 turned up hull timbers and a length of keel about 25 feet down, almost certainly the Arkansas. Archaeologists decided the remains could not be lifted safely and made the same call Pastron had: cover it back up and leave it for whoever digs there next.

San Francisco does not preserve its ghost fleet so much as postpone it, one building cycle at a time.