Black Fire by Robert Graysmith Page B

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 roughestregion 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 fineststeamers, 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.