Gold Rush-era ship that wrecked in Tomales Bay recently found

Lost in fog for two weeks, the Oxford, a three-masted sailing ship carrying 90 barrels of whiskey for San Francisco’s feverish Gold Rush market, sailed past the Golden Gate in July 1852 and unknowingly turned instead into Tomales Bay, some 45 miles farther north along the rugged California coast.

The stout vessel, which had sailed from Boston and rounded Cape Horn with cargo worth $250,000, promptly got stuck in the mud offshore from Sand Point and never left the spot near the south end of what is today a popular dog-running area at Dillon Beach.

There is no longer any visible trace of the ship, which was stripped and sold at auction after the whiskey, merchandise and 450 tons of ice were quickly salvaged, owing to the cargo’s value of about $7 million in today’s dollars. But the Oxford’s final resting place was noted on charts dating from the 1860s, according to globe-trotting shipwreck hunter James Delgado, who used them to calculate the geographic coordinates.

On Aug. 22, Delgado mounted an unofficial search for the Oxford, three weeks before the start of a government survey of shipwrecks from Sonoma County to San Mateo County, within the 1,300-square-mile Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary.

Abut 100 of the 300 known shipwrecks in that area are on the coast of Sonoma and Mendocino counties, he said. How many of those will be targeted in the two-year survey has yet to be determined.

Deploying a hydraulic probe from a boat in Tomales Bay, Delgado and two colleagues found the Oxford in 4 feet of water and beneath about 12 feet of mud. A telltale “crunch” told them the probe had struck the worm-eaten wood and accumulated mollusk shells associated with a ship’s remains. And it was within 100 feet of the mark noted on the old charts.

“It was a fun thing to do,” said Delgado, a diver, author and marine archaeologist who has investigated famous wrecks, including the Titanic, USS Arizona and USS Monitor, the Civil War ironclad that sank in a storm off North Carolina in 1862. “Who knows how much of it (the Oxford) is left.”

In 1984, Delgado, who began his career unearthing Gold Rush wrecks in San Francisco, led the first official survey of the SS Pomona, a steamship that wrecked in Fort Ross Cove in 1908, its metal bones still lying in 27 to 40 feet of water in a kelp forest within easy reach of scuba divers.

The Oxford, a 148-foot wooden vessel built in New York in 1836, initially served in the packet trade, ferrying mail, cargo and passengers - well-to-do folks in deck-level staterooms and poor immigrants in rough steerage - between New York and Liverpool, England, a booming business following the War of 1812.

With Gold Rush profits looming, the New York-based Oxford shifted to West Coast commerce. On her last voyage, departing Boston in late 1851, the ship carried what was described as “one of the most valuable and best selected cargoes that has been sent to San Francisco,” according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration archives. Her owners hoped to make a $100,000 profit from selling the goods in The City.

But heavy fog off the California coast left Capt. H.H. McLane unable to determine his location for 14 days, the vessel’s log said. When the fog lifted on July 12, 1852, McLane spied the promontory of land at Tomales Head and mistook it for the Golden Gate.

Sailing in slowly, the ship “brought up suddenly upon a reef making it out into the bay,” the archives said.

Word of the wreck reached San Francisco the next day, when the Oxford already was embedded in 3 feet of sand, and repeated efforts to tow her free failed.

Time, tides, weather and the onslaught of wood-boring worms decimated the vessel, forgotten long ago in the narrow bay next to Point Reyes National Seashore, Delgado said.

The Pomona, however, remains an underwater presence at Fort Ross, the coastal outpost established by the Russians in 1812. The steel-hulled 225-foot steamer, headed north from San Francisco bound for Eureka with 300 tons of freight and 88 passengers, struck a rock and sprung a leak a mile or two offshore on March 17, 1908.

The captain, aiming to beach the crippled vessel, aimed for Fort Ross but struck and stuck on a wash rock fringing the cove, according to the Pomona Historic Shipwreck Project undertaken by Indiana University in 1998. All hands were rowed ashore, and most of the cargo was salvaged or stolen. The Pomona eventually slipped off the rock and was dynamited to eliminate navigational hazards, but its jumbled remains are scattered among the kelp, the ship’s bow 25 feet inside the wash rock that claimed her in 1908.

In September 1908, the San Francisco Chronicle published an account by a hardhat diver named Martin Lund who was working in the Pomona’s hold about 40 feet underwater. He was “seized about the leg by the tentacle of a devil fish (octopus),” slashed at it with his knife and signaled to be hoisted to the surface, the story said.

Fearing his helmet would be loosened, Lund had to signal the crew to quit hauling on his line as three other tentacles grasped him about the waist, neck and legs “and he had to fight hard for life.” Cutting two of the tentacles that “grasped him in a death-like embrace,” Lund saw the octopus prepared to strike with its beak.

The diver “made a lunge for the head just in time to deal a death blow,” the story concluded.

Delgado, who has seen octopuses at numerous wrecks, said he regarded the account as a “sea story,” the term for a tale mariners tell landlubbers. But a 3- to 5-foot octopus, like the one captured on video on the wreck of an unnamed tugboat near the Farallon Islands on Sept. 13, could seem formidable to a diver, he said.

The Pomona remained undisturbed until the late 1950s, when scuba divers discovered it and significant looting subsequently occurred, the Indiana University report said. Some artifacts, such as portholes, brass keys and teacups, were donated to the Fort Ross Museum.

You can reach Staff Writer ?Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or ?guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com.