Black Fire (11 page)

“The arsonist hadn’t struck since the end of January,” Sawyer recalled. “We were all on edge in those days and still woefully unprepared.” The
Alta
wrote, “One of the most desperate scoundrels of England who have been serving the Queen set a fire above Washington Street.” Three other small fires followed, but none got out of hand. Everyone knew the inexperienced volunteer fire companies had no equipment and excelled more at socializing than putting out city-destroying fires. “Pride comes before the fall,” and pride was about all the three fledgling companies had. The arsonist counted on that.

At sunset the northwest wind, which had been blowing furiously through gullies and rushing down hills since breakfast, faltered. At ebb tide it died away completely. A deadly chill set in. According to locals the abandoned ships in the shallow cove were so saturated with ghosts their planks and sails were haunted. As proof they told the story of a runaway vessel from the fleet that rode the night fog at the Golden Gate and of a sloop lost in the towering reeds and swamp grass of the east shore frantically trying to find her way, bumping and banging, and howling away with her whistle. These orphaned vessels gave Sawyer an idea.

At 9:00
P.M.
, he walked toward this graveyard of ships, or as the Spaniards called it, Graveyard Harbor. Because the city had no streetlights, he measured his steps by the light of canvas houses made so transparent by interior lamps they became dwellings of solid light as so many Japanese lanterns illuminating paper houses also shed their light far into the cove. Fog-wet cobbles shone. Finn’s Alley, the roughest
region of a rough town, overflowed with red-eyed ex-convicts who had drifted down from Spyglass Hill and Sydney Town, the enclave of ex-convicts to the north. Sawyer negotiated an area people avoided in daylight and never visited at night. Shadows were cast on the walls of tents. Men in slouch hats slouched in saloon doorways. Shouts, clapping, and laughter drowned out bands of pumping concertinas. Monte tables were piled with bags of dust, double eagles, and doubloons, the losses and wins from monte, trondo, faro, roulette, poker,
rouge et noir
, and vingt-et-un. “Make your bets, Gents,” a croupier yelled. Gamblers with drooping mustaches, wide felt hats, diamond shirt studs, and Prince Albert coats hooked their thumbs in brocade waistcoats. Sawyer rushed by the bright saloons. Ahead, the black silhouettes of ships’ masts peeked over low rooftops where Montgomery Street delineated the water’s edge toward its northern end. He reached Long Wharf. By day it teemed with industry, its planks rattling under the iron wheels of carriages, handcarts, porters, and drays. By day the mock auction houses, shanties, commission houses, saloons, and gambling establishments lining both sides of the pier and the frame warehouses on piles trembled. But by night Long Wharf was a silent, forlorn place, stretching a half mile into the fog of the shallow cove. The pier led him far out into the fleet moored and forgotten there. The city officially estimated that ten thousand people lived on these hulks. “In a city like this, where whole streets are built up in a week and whole squares swept away in an hour—where the floating population numbers hundreds, large portions of the fixed inhabitants live in places which cannot be described with any accuracy.” Many were deserters, refugees, fugitives, mutineers, or ex-convicts and murderers hiding out from roving bands of increasingly put-upon citizens. The residents also included gamblers who had welshed on bets, thieves planning their next robbery, and respectable citizens waiting to find homes on dry land. They would have a long wait. On shore a tiny room, if available, rented for $150 per month.

Those vessels closest to Long Wharf had been transformed into lucrative ship warehouses and ship stores, ship restaurants, ship saloons, and a waterborne city hall. Ship houses and ship hotels stood shoulder to shoulder with land buildings as men began filling in the cove with sand. San Francisco embraced this waterborne metropolis as it built slowly outward to the landlocked fleet. As they cannibalized their cordage, spars, and planks, a third of the wood-scarce city would ultimately be constructed from these spectral ships. Because the finest
steamers, clippers, and whalers brought only a fraction of their worth at sea, workers had begun hauling the abandoned vessels ashore.

The arsonist was abroad tonight, too. His wind, the Lightkeeper’s Wind, had failed him. He rowed into the Ghost Fleet to make plans with a confederate. He always found the water city overwhelming. Hundreds of windjammers and square-riggers crowded two square miles of the bay, a lost armada dwarfing the navy of any country. San Francisco’s population had swelled from two thousand to forty thousand within just seven months. Abandoned in the cove were 650 vessels and soon nearly a thousand, the greatest amount of deserted naval tonnage ever to clog a major harbor. Gold-fevered crews had instantly abandoned them in their mad quest for gold. The runaway sailors, officers, freight men, and passengers who had leaped over the side before anchors dropped had abandoned not only perfectly serviceable ships but also holds packed with unclaimed cargoes. In a city obsessed with riches, no worker would lift a hand unless paid wages more than the worth of the merchandise remaining onboard. Crewmen who had gotten $2 a day on their ships now commanded $30 on shore. Brigs, frigates, colliers, and windjammers, at the mercy of the receding or filling harbor, arched their sterns toward the Golden Gate or pointed their bows into the oncoming flow. Surrounded by half-sunken hulks and ensnarled by anchor chains and lines tangling upon themselves, so much penned-in tonnage could never be moved. The geography then was this: two groups of 250 vessels, jammed together and separated only by Howison’s Wharf, Long Wharf, and the Clay Street Wharf. At the line dividing the two halves floated the Spanish brig
Euphemia
, a notorious prison ship that employed torture and forced labor. Her owner, Sam Brannan, had turned her into a regular Calcutta hole. A moan from her beaten and lashed men rolled across the choppy water. The Lightkeeper shivered and put his back to the oars. He did not wish to become one of those prisoners. Ahead he saw a ship lit by a single lantern, pulled hard, and soon reached the vessel. A rope ladder flew down and he ascended. Above he saw his secret partner.

Meanwhile, at the end of Long Wharf, Sawyer untied a skiff tethered to a piling and began rowing toward the stern silhouettes. Flocks of seabirds took wing like bats. He rowed into a covered passage between two rust-stained hulls created by fallen shrouds. He smelled tar, decaying wood, rusting iron, and rotting sail—the perfume of derelicts left to rot and sink. Pirates moored to the northeast hid out alongside
genteel families. Treasure was hidden inside Graveyard Harbor, but Sawyer was after something more valuable. He planned to salvage what Broderick desperately needed: buckets, ropes, hooks, ladders, axes, and hoses. He was watchful. Huge ship storehouses such as the
Apollo
had watchmen to guard the riches and records of the city. Ahead, wavering lanterns sparkled. Smoke trailed from cooking fires. Figures on surrounding decks stood listening. Steps led up from the water to doors cut into the sides of ships. So few available lodgings existed on land that frigates in the Ghost Fleet had been drafted as ship hotels. Overcrowded, unwholesome staterooms with six berths each permitted the lodgers to sleep only between 12:00
P.M.
and 4:00
A.M.
Sawyer listened at these side doors for the gentle snore of sleepers, heard none, and climbed aboard a likely vessel. Wind whispered through tattered sails as he scrambled onto the deck. The frigate was canted at such an angle he had to mountain climb. Swiftly he discovered several lengths of hose. On the next abandoned hulk he ferreted out two axes, several long pieces of cracked hose, and ten leather buckets in good shape. Night was waning. This would be his last trip. Fog was drifting two feet over the water’s surface as he reached a deserted whaling ship. Blubber hooks rang hollowly in the wind. The heavy-timbered ship, a cluttered superstructure of cranes and boats, had settled on the shallow bottom. Crates of cargo had swelled and stoves and prefab metal homes had burst through the hull.

Swinging up over the railing, he splashed across the deck to an entryway. Where the deck shone through, the boards were oily and rough. Paint was peeling off the spars and blocks. A deckhouse aft held useful tools. Cutting-in tackle, four large double blocks assembled in two falls, hung just below the maintop. Along the port side and aft on the starboard side, two long boats hung from davits. A squeaking noise alerted Sawyer. He lifted his lantern. Sharp discolored teeth and red eyes shone. A Danish black rat feasting on abandoned stores of cheese and rice peered back. Rats that had journeyed to San Francisco aboard vessels from every deepwater port scampered on the lacy catwalks between ships. On shore, huge aggressive rats ruled the muddy streets. Travelers tread on them in the dark. In the Square rats did at least $500 worth of damage a day and bit the ears, noses, and cheeks of sleeping men. In a single hour the rats massacred a shipload of cats shipped in from Southern California to eradicate them. The only local
rat catcher was Tips, an English terrier belonging to
Alta
editor Gilbert, who refused to risk his pet.

Sawyer pried up a hatch cover. Cargo, seaweed, and a foot of oily water swirled below. He dropped down, waded in black water up to his waist into the darkened ribs of the ship, and brought up salvaged axes and long pieces of hose. He lifted himself onto the watery deck and crouched, shivering until he quit the vessel. Dawn was coloring the sky as he trundled a wheelbarrow to the firehouse on Kearny. Broderick was awake and fretting over his newly formed department’s lack of equipment when he glimpsed Sawyer shaking with cold at the angel-wing doors. He ran down and swung open the doors. Buckets! Hose! Axes! He could hardly believe it. For the first time he believed they might stand a chance against the forces of treachery and indolence gathering against them—but only a slim chance.

Sawyer and some other torch boys spent the next three mornings repairing the recovered Pennock & Sellers hoses and building a rack of pegs to dry them. Hose was heavy (though Goodyear had come out with a light rubber hose eleven years earlier) and weighed about sixty pounds to each fifty-foot length, excluding couplings. The lengths of buffalo hide had been folded over to form a tube, the joints being riveted along the seams. Hose of any type was valuable and this kind was worth $1.25 a foot. Hose permitted the smoke eaters to work a safe distance from the flames and, by reversing the flow like a suction hose, eliminate the tedious task of hand-filling the pumper tubs. To lose a hose at a fire was to face a loss of honor.

Sawyer expertly pieced the cracked hose segments together with well-placed recovered rivets and with pride hung the last length of salvaged leather hose on its peg. “Just like ‘leg of boot,’ ” said Broderick. In the noon light he examined the seams of the durable hose. “The best hose is pure oak-tanned leather,” he said, turning it this way and that. “Just like the sewn leather hose we used in New York—double-riveted seams with twenty-two copper rivets of number eight wire.” He counted them: “twenty-one … twenty-two.” After Sawyer washed the repaired hoses, he rubbed them with “slush,” a cheap preservative of beef tallow mixed with neat’s-foot oil for leather hoses. The smelly concoction had to be applied before the hose was dry. A more supple hose allowed the engine to suction water easily.

He cleaned the tools, the nozzles and half spanners used to couple
the hose; filled the salvaged buckets, mostly hand sewn of tanned sole leather; and examined them for leaks and patched some with pitch. New York fire buckets, on average, held two and a half to three gallons. Broderick One’s buffalo-hide buckets were not nearly so capacious. The men spent the afternoon polishing pipes, pump handles, and trumpets, repairing slender ladders and narrow hoses, and sharpening axes with handles shaped like lazy S’s. Oddly, their most important pieces of equipment were not the formidable axes, sharp and lethal, but the glazed, hand-sewn black fire helmets of quarter-inch-thick leather. They were indestructible, reinforced inside the crown by arches of tanned cowhide. A prodigious rear duckbill or beavertail brim kept water from running down their necks, protected them from falling debris, and shielded them from heat. If a volunteer lost his ax, his helmet was heavy enough to smash a window. The fire caps identified them, too: hook and ladder companies had red leather shields, engine companies had black with white numerals, and the chief’s and assistant engineers’ helmets were colored white. Men designated for house duty tied colored scarves around their helmets.

Their brass trumpets saved lives, too. Once, during a building fire, the second-floor planks broke under a volunteer and sent him plunging toward the flames below. At the last second he was caught by his long trumpet and suspended between floors. He was saved, but his back was black and blue for a month. During celebrations Broderick’s men corked their trumpets and filled them with fine champagne. At small fires they attacked with hooks, sacks, mud, and bare hands, holding their greatest weapon, explosives, in reserve for a fire as huge as Christmas Eve’s.

The times between alarms were dreary for the volunteers. After drills and equipment maintenance, they maintained the firehouse, practiced their singing (Sawyer had a beautiful singing voice), played cards, and shot billiards. Former gunfighters practiced quick draws and the ex-prizefighters boxed. The torch boys swept floors, scrubbed windows, polished the engine, washed dishes, scoured the kitchen, and peeled potatoes. When there was a shortage of official volunteers, Sawyer joined in the firefighting and never retreated, even when the fire’s breath singed his only clothes.

Gloom hung over the city during the first months of 1850. Unemployment was high. Drowning on dry land was a distinct possibility. The uneasy landfill grew hungry during rainy weeks that stretched into wetter months. Water rushing beneath the streets created sinkholes,
mud pits, and bogs. Montgomery Street was a mud plague of quicksand. Drunken men were swallowed whole; half-drunk men were swallowed halfway. In January and February the bodies of three men were discovered under the mud in front of Everhart’s Tailors. Any man who stumbled into a boggy sink at midnight, too tipsy to extricate himself, would be there in the morning, cursing, and had to be lassoed like a wild steer by strong men pulling from the safety of a planked sidewalk. No one faulted the victims. In bright daylight, sober, heavy-booted men got stuck as often. To avoid being pulled “eyeball deep,” merchants frequently unloaded directly on the Montgomery Street waterfront. Sacramento Street, above Dupont, existed only as an impassable ravine and was not even “jackassable.” A mule team, wildly snorting and still hitched to their wagon, disappeared into its quicksand and was never recovered. Teams were sucked under marshlike roads. Luckier steeds were hauled out by cables reeved to blocks lashed to the pillars of any standing building.