PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM 117 mers on the San Mateo Coast are particularly treacherous due to warmer air clashing with cold Pacific currents. Despite the ship’s misfortune, the Carrier Pigeon encountered one stroke of luck: the ship met its end only 500 feet from shore. All crew members successfully battled their way out of the water. Bedraggled and worse for wear perhaps, but alive. The lack of casualties did little to stem a flood of newspaper coverage. There was still considerable drama surrounding the wreck. The Sea Bird, a steamer sent to salvage cargo from the Carrier Pigeon, ran into its own problems when heavy swells snapped its anchor chains and rocks damaged its hull, forcing the steamer’s captain to carry out an emergency beaching. Pillagers drawn to the broken Carrier Pigeon descended on it in rowboats like vultures on a carcass, carrying away cargo and copper from its hull. In the bluffs overlooking the scene, scavengers feasted on the ship’s larder, frying up ham, bacon and eggs on long-handled shovels repurposed as frying pans. Calls went out for a lighthouse to save other ships from the same fate. Unfortunately, with the U.S. Lighthouse Service Board embroiled in internal politics and the plodding pace of government bureaucracy, action was delayed. It would take decades and several more sunken ships for their appeals to be taken seriously. LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS A year before the Coya sank, the Sir John Franklin, ironically named after a famous explorer who met a grisly fate, met its own end. The shipwreck survivors buried the less fortunate in the nearby dunes. Awash in fresh tragedies, the public again sent appeals to Washington for a lighthouse. The coastline grew heavy, not only with the fog, but with the restless souls of lost ships and their crew. “It OPPOSITE: (from top left) A Clipper Ship in a Hurricane, a lithograph produced by Currier & Ives in the 1800s; Ein Seesturm an der norwegischen Küste by Andreas Achenbach.
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