Black Fire (4 page)

With these tragedies in mind Sawyer kept a watchful eye on the breakers and the much too visible shore. Those rocks had been laid down upon the chart with specific warnings in red to keep away from the point’s strong currents, high rocks, and sandy islands. Some passengers who had turned out to give the crew a chance to wash the decks observed the rocks, too. “We’re running dead on,” they called up to the wheelhouse. “Mind your own business,” Captain Sampson snapped and dismissed the high, craggy rocks as gray whales that migrate to California every winter. Sawyer knew reefs when he saw them. A sunken reef extended from the southern point of the island for about a mile offshore.

At 5:15
A.M.
, in a smooth sea, the
Independence
struck the high reef, shuddered like a leaf, and caught up against layers of jagged rocks. “Don’t be afraid,” Sampson told the passengers on deck. “You’ll all get to shore safely.” The
Independence
, which in spite of its newness had not been well maintained, could accommodate 250 persons comfortably and 350 unsafely. There were 359 passengers plus 56 crewmen onboard—415 altogether. Sampson barked the order to back off the rocks. Reversing engines is a complicated process in which the valves must be manipulated by hand by the engineer. Chief Engineer Jason Collins raised the hooks from their cranks until the rocker shaft hung free and then, using a six-foot-long iron bar to turn a shaft at the floor-plate level, he opened an exhaust valve. As the big piston reached the end of its stroke, there was a roar of steam. Collins stepped forward, threw the iron bar in the opposite position, and reversed the pressure from one side of the piston to the other side. “Up bar!” he cried as the hooks dropped perfectly onto the cranks. The
Independence
was backed off, but its hold was rapidly filling.

“I knew I would have to beach her to keep her from sinking,” Sampson said. “I got a sail over the bow [under it] to try and stop the leak.” He
asked Collins to give him about five minutes’ warning before water was high enough to put out the boilers so he could set a gang of men bailing at each hatchway. Sampson put the helm hard aport and ran the ship close in along the western side of the island for about four miles before he located a small cove on the southwest side. He pointed the ship head on toward the sand to beach it. In the raging surf the vessel swung around broadside, toward the beach.

Sawyer raced below and dropped into two feet of water. Through a huge rent, the sea was filling up in the
Independence
’s overheated boilers below the waterline, cooling them rapidly. Collins and his men were fighting to keep steam up. After the coal bunkers flooded, the men began tossing slats from the stateroom berths into the furnaces. Sawyer realized the blower channels were flooded and heard Collins cry, “The blowers are useless!” Loss of the blowers drove the flames furiously out the furnace doors and ignited the woodwork in the fire room and around the smokestack. When flames blocked the ladders to the engine room, the “black gang” cut their way inside with axes. Wielding an ax, Sawyer helped them. Flames broke out from the chimneys and burst from the engine room into the kitchen, killing the cooks and pantry-man, and then erupted through the dead light fore and aft, spreading rapidly throughout the ship. Sawyer saw that two coal passers and a seaman were dead and ran back on deck to help the passengers evacuate. Men had begun pumping water from the sea and battling the blaze with hoses. “It’s useless to do more,” Collins cried.

Three lifeboats had been hoisted and craned, but among all three there was not one tholepin. Two such pins, forming an oarlock in the gunwale of the boat, act as a fulcrum for the oar. With his jackknife Captain Steele (a passenger) frantically began carving wood into working pins for at least one boat. Steam and flames were blasting up from the hatch and ventilators around the smoke stack. “The scene was perfectly horrible,” Sampson said later. “Men, women and children, screeching, crying and drowning.” According to passengers, “The captain seemed to lose his presence of mind and now the crew paid no attention to his contradictory commands.” The badly wounded, some covered with hideous burns, flesh scalded to the bone, rolled on deck gasping.

Collins and James L. Freeborn, the purser, panicked, jumped overboard, and in the sea lost consciousness and sank. Seeing their distress, Sawyer, a powerful swimmer, dove into the water, swam down, caught both men by their hair, and pulled them to the surface. As they
clung to his back, he swam for the shore a hundred yards away, a feat of amazing strength and stamina. The breakers were running heavier and the rocks were like razors. Depositing Freeborn and Collins on the beach, Sawyer swam back to the burning steamer. He made a number of round-trips, swimming to shore with a passenger or two on his back each time.

Finally the single repaired boat was lowered, and women, including a passenger named Mrs. Bolle and her two children, and many men, including the ship’s surgeon, who would be needed on land, packed in and were rowed to shore. Those left behind were distraught: Spouses embraced, parents embraced children, and mothers threw their infants into the breakers rather than have them burn. Mrs. Howard and her three infants were lost; Mrs. T. Robinson and her three children drowned. General Ezra Drown, whose wife, Eliza, was drowned, described women clambering down the sides of the ship, “clinging with death-like tenacity to the ropes, rigging and larboard wheel.” Mrs. Ayers, wife of the owner of the Commercial Hotel in San Francisco, threw her child to passenger John Greenback in the water below, then jumped. A protruding beam caught her skirt and she swung piteously over the waves until flames burned her dress away and she dropped. Wealthy men offered their fortunes to be saved. Others clung to spars, hatch covers, tables, trunks, coops, and planks, anything that would float, and tried to reach shore by kicking their feet. Their frantic movements attracted the attention of sharks, drawn to the area by whalers who frequented the islands and left whale carcasses behind.

At last the other two lifeboats were repaired and Thomas Herren, the steward, launched the second boat of passengers. Exhausted, Sawyer returned in a longboat to the flaming vessel, pulling hard for more passengers in spite of his badly burned forearms. And Sawyer had an idea. Though crippled, he got a group of passengers into life preservers, then towed them ashore all at once and went back for more. One father got his son to shore, but as he was wading through the heavy surf crashing on the beach, he looked back to his beloved wife. Before his eyes she was dashed overboard by “mad, unthinking men jumping upon her and driving her to the bottom.” An hour later the ship was a perfect sheet of flame. The smokestack fell with a crash, raising sparks. The promenade deck tumbled. Chief Engineer Collins, recovering on the beach in the midst of two hundred people, some in the water, saw Sampson clinging to the bow as flames swept aft. Coal
Passer Beaumont, near the fore rigging, jumped into a rowboat leaving with two deckhands. Sampson swam to the boat, where he was picked up with others who were afloat.

On the beach, Sawyer realized their situation was dire: They were marooned on a lone, barren, and stony island off the coast of Baja California Sur with no food, shelter, or water. In the blazing sun, all were quickly overcome with a raging thirst. They found some water in rock fissures and, using a spoon, caught some brackish fluid. As the flames subsided that evening, the steamer burned to the water’s edge and lay broadside. At midnight the mates and crew made a trip to the wreck and salvaged some fruit, pork, and salt beef. Sampson saw a steamer down the coast and launched a boat with two men and attempted to cross the heavy surf, but his boat was swamped and an oar, broken. He got to shore again, but was too exhausted to make another attempt.

The second day the beach was littered with corpses. Sawyer helped bury them above the high-water mark, but the howling wind constantly uncovered them. Using salvaged boilers and copper pots, Collins fashioned a crude distillery to condense fresh water and procured a pint of potable water every seven minutes. Next they salvaged some spars and an old sail washed ashore, and as the sun sank, made a tent for the women and children. They endured a night of looting and pillaging as the castaways fought over the corpses for their valuables and clothing. “That [Captain Sampson] was insane no one will say, would to God we could,” General Drown raged. “That the act was deliberate and intentional, we believe can and will be successfully established.” Drown estimated that 117 passengers, including 15 crew, had been drowned, burned to death, devoured, or driven out to sea. Collins estimated a total of 175 had been lost. Another passenger, James R. Willoughby, cursed his luck. He had engaged passage on the steamer
Northern Light
on January 20 just so he could rush aboard the
Independence
at the last minute and now was sorry he had made the ship. While Sampson went looking for help at the northern end of the island, a few passengers formed their own search party. On February 18, they located and signaled four whalers at anchor on the other side of the island. In the late afternoon they were taken aboard and fed and bathed. The whalers, though, would remain at anchor for two more weeks and delay the passengers’ return to San Francisco.

The
Golden Gate
had last seen the
Independence
in the Gulf of
California. In San Francisco, relatives, concerned because the vessel was overdue, conjectured that it might have broken a shaft and put in to Guaymas or La Paz. Four days later the shipwreck survivors were spotted by the whaler
Meteor
, under Captain Jeffries, then the vessels
Omega, James Maury
, and the bark
Clement
, under Captain Lane, who had been at work in the Bay of Magdalena. Lane sent water and food back to them, and a small schooner was procured to take Captain Sampson, Sawyer, and many passengers and crewmen back to San Francisco. Ironically, just a few months earlier, the
Independence
had reached San Francisco carrying some of the 150 shipwrecked passengers off the ill-fated
North America
. Some of the
Independence
survivors found other ways home. Captain Wakemen passed them onboard the
New Orleans
on his way out of the Gate down to the Marquesas and Tahiti. On March 16, survivor James Willoughby got to San Francisco on the whaling bark
Victor
with no hat, luggage, or money. He did not need them. The magic of San Francisco worked a spell upon its citizens and imparted the feeling that in this city they could do anything simply by putting their minds to it. Willoughby went on to become a founder of the town of Ventura, a breeder of shorthorn cattle, and was among Ventura County’s landowners with the largest spreads.

On Wednesday, March 30, the
Daily Alta California
learned that some
Independence
survivors had arrived on the
Meteor
, which was anchored fifty miles outside of the Heads. The next day at 6:00
A.M.
the newspaper put out an extra: “Terrible Catastrophe!! Total Loss of the Steamship
Independence
and 125 Lives Lost!” and sent its reporters out into the stream to interview Sampson and Dr. Torbett, the ship’s surgeon. Boatloads of survivors disembarked at Long Wharf: “Arrival of Passengers Saved,” the paper headlined on April 1. Ultimately, Sawyer was officially credited with saving ninety lives at sea, among them twenty-six people he had personally plucked from the water by diving in after them and swimming them on his back to the beach.

Twain, floating in boiling clouds of steam at Stahle’s steam baths, had been riveted by Sawyer’s story. “Tom was a glittering hero once more—the pet of the old, the envy of the young,” he wrote in the
Adventures of Tom Sawyer
years later. “His name even went into immortal print, for the village paper magnified him.” He had not yet heard of Sawyer’s amazing land adventures against six city-destroying fires and the hunt for the man who burned down San Francisco six times in only
a year and a half. He would. Like Twain’s fictional character and Twain himself, Sawyer liked to arrange the course of history to bring honor to himself.

Twain took a breath of the healing steam and raised his bet. Gradually he relaxed in the steam, his blood vessels dilated, his pores opened, and his blood pressure lowered slowly in the pleasant atmosphere. His pulse became regular, but his mind was aflame with the story he had heard. What a novel it would make. What a man this Sawyer was. Fire was in his veins. While he was in San Francisco, Twain intended to see more of him. Sawyer had more tales that also had the benefit of being true. “I pride myself on being a member of the first volunteer fire company ever formed in California,” he began. “It was called Broderick One …”

THE MAN WHO BURNED DOWN SAN FRANCISCO

December 24, 1849–September 16, 1850

Before [the engines] raced the most important members of the company—the torch boys holding their torches high as they ran, so that the way could be seen through the unlighted streets.