by Chris Dixon
The current is irregular, frequently setting against the wind and running with a velocity of nearly two knots per hour, producing a heavy sea, and causing the water probably to break in heavy weather, as has been reported.
In his correspondence to Alden, Stevens included the first fairly detailed chart ever drawn of the Bank. It revealed a sort of hilly mesa, roughly twelve miles long and six miles wide, oriented in a northwesterly direction, “in the immediate path of the Panama Steamers.”
The report seemed to bear some good news. A minimum depth of nine fathoms, or fifty-four feet, would not puncture a steamer’s hull, and though waves might break above a fifty-four-foot-deep shoal during a truly monstrous swell, that would be exceedingly rare. Then again, a strong, southerly current of two knots—a half-knot below the average speed of the Gulf Stream—might also be problematic to ships approaching the Bank. When a northerly swell runs headlong into a southerly current, its waves can steepen and stack up against one another into something resembling a line of harried passengers squeezing onto a narrow airport escalator. This is one of the ways so-called rogue waves are spawned.
But Alden also realized that unless he had once seen a procession of giant ghosts from the deck of the Constitution, Stevens had likely missed the mark. While he had surely found a remarkable offshore seamount, there must be an unseen, as yet unfound feature that would throw up towering breaking waves—visible from ten miles distance—in lesser swells.
Alden then christened the shoal “Cortez Bank,” based on an incorrect spelling of Cropper’s ship. Yet in so doing, he forever obscured the ship and crew that actually discovered the Bank: The USS Constitution, “Mad Jack” Percival, and himself.
During the next couple of years, Alden and his men laid the California coast bare. Among their brilliant discoveries were mappings of a tortured seafloor of mile-deep canyons and sunken ridges that linked San Clemente Island with Santa Barbara Island, San Miguel and Santa Rosa with Santa Cruz, and tiny San Nicolas to the long rise today known as the Cortes Bank.
The first known chart and mapping of the Cortes Bank by the United States Coast Survey of 1853 by Lieutenant T. H. Stevens of the USS Ewing. The name Cortez was eventually corrected to Cortes, reflecting the first American ship thought to have discovered the Bank. This map does not note the existence of the shallowest reach, today known as Bishop Rock. This rock would be discovered two years later by a U.S. Navy Lieutenant, Archibald MacRae, a hardcore young adventurer who would die a horrible death shortly after setting sail from the Bank. Image scan courtesy of Steve Lawson.
During the course of these ensuing surveys, Alden’s suspicions about a far more shallow and dangerous rock were confirmed, apparently twice over, during the first half of 1855. However, like Cortes Bank itself, this feature would be misnamed, due to what was in all likelihood the conflation of maritime myth-making—in which a good story grew even better, and the most outlandish version eventually accrued the patina of truth. The other, far more interesting and tragic tale of discovery, on the other hand, has remained essentially unknown.
In April 1855, a fast little clipper ship lay docked in San Francisco, readying for a trip to New York. The Stilwell S. Bishop had first been put to sea in 1851 by a wealthy Philadelphia merchant of the same name. She was low slung and sharp-lined, 140 feet long and 31 feet wide. She drew only fifteen feet of water and weighed a mere 595 tons. In 1853, a passage from Baltimore around Cape Horn to San Diego took her only 112 days—a sailing record that still stands.
Detailed accounts of Bishop’s journeys are scant. On June 12, 1854, she reached San Diego bearing supplies for a local army garrison and had dropped anchor in Benicia, a port town in San Francisco Bay, by early July. She reached the East Coast in December, picking up a new captain, William Shankland, and had again reached San Francisco by April of 1855. She then advertised cargo space on her next voyage east in an ad in San Francisco’s Daily Alta newspaper on May 7:
The Regular packet A 1 clipper ship SS Bishop.
Capt Wm Shankland. Will be dispatched immediately…The “SSB,” from her small capacity and sailing qualities offers unusual inducements to parties wishing their goods delivered in the shortest possible time. She has made three trips from this port to New York and has always delivered her cargo in fine order. For freight passage, having fine state room accommodations, apply to: H. K. Cummings & Co. 48 California Street.
Shankland departed for the above passage on June 2. He endured ferocious gales that swept at least one ill-fated crewman into the sea—a perilous journey reported in the New York Times in some detail. Yet nowhere do the Times or Daily Alta mention the incident for which the Bishop has been immortalized, her collision with the shallowest spire above the Cortes Bank, presumably on that 1855 voyage. As the story goes, after striking rock in the midst of a storm, and with a hull then scratched, dinged, or otherwise splintered, Bishop somehow managed to limp five hundred miles north back to San Francisco.
This oft-repeated tale, though, lacks virtually any corroboration, which alone calls it into question. In the mid-1800s, the United States was a maritime nation. Even the most mundane comings and goings of each and every ship were covered by zealous reporters. Yet the story of this collision appears in no newspaper account of the time, which from a sailor or navigator’s viewpoint would have been inexcusable. Thousands of souls were now being ferried past the Cortes Bank each month. Had the Bishop’s hull been so much as nicked, it would have been the height of irresponsibility for Captain Shankland to fail to immediately notify James Alden and the Coast Survey. Had Shankland remained silent, the news would have almost certainly been slipped by a spooked Bishop crewman or passenger and pursued eagerly by reporters for the Alta or Times.
The timely reporting of such a notable wreck should have also appeared in the scrupulous reports of James Alden, but it does not. The first mention appears in reports of the Coast Survey in an 1858 correspondence in which Captain George Davidson, a colleague and competitor of Alden’s, gives the barest mention of the Bishop “striking the rock” three years earlier in 1855.
Contemporary historians have puzzled over this incongruity. It was first raised by the editors of Mains ‘l Haul, the definitive journal of California nautical lore, in 1968. The question has also vexed Steve Lawson, an Orange County treasure hunter and rabid historian who has assimilated vast records of the movements of nearly every ship that plied the West Coast during the Gold Rush. Lawson agrees with a hypothesis laid out in Mains ‘l Haul. The Bishop didn’t strike the Cortes Bank at all, especially given her shallow draft.
“Ships sailing toward Frisco during the Gold Rush would have not sailed close to Southern California for two reasons,” Lawson said. “First, the prevailing wind and currents along the coast travel south and sailing ships could find better winds a few hundred miles out to sea. Second, the eight islands of Southern California were to be avoided since they created major navigational hazards.”
Lawson thinks that if the Bishop ever did strike the Cortes Bank, it occurred after she called on San Diego in 1854. “That could account for her running relatively close to shore and hitting the Bank,” he said. “Then heading for Benicia and bypassing San Francisco makes sense because she would have been sailing in ballast [using rocks to keep her hull low and her keel down]. She wouldn’t have a cargo to unload, and there was a shipyard in Benicia where she could be repaired.”
Yet Lawson believes that the lack of any documentation of a collision makes this highly improbable. It seems more likely that her captain, instead, merely stumbled onto the same spellbinding white water spectacle witnessed by the Constitution and Cortes. Then, in its retellings, the Bishop’s story morphed into a direct encounter that subsequently lent the feature its name: the Bishop Rock.
By all rights, though, this rock should be named in honor of Archibald MacRae.
In late 1854, a thirty-four-year-old lieutenant accepted a position under James Alden to take command of the U.S. Coast Survey
ship Ewing, which in 1853 had made the first survey of Cortes Bank.
Archibald MacRae was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, to an American general named Alexander MacRae. Young Archibald cut his maritime teeth in the Atlantic and Mediterranean serving “Mad Jack” Percival aboard a famed navy frigate called Cyane. He was a highly skilled navigator, astronomer, and a witty raconteur who regularly wrote home with hilarious, fascinating tales of his life at sea. Short of a pirate, MacRae is as colorful a character as you’d ever hope to meet on the open sea, and it’s hard to imagine why he ever accepted his job working for Alden and the Coast Survey. Not long after embarking on the sailor’s life, he penned this self-portrait of himself in a letter to his father in 1841: “If, in about eight or ten days, you should see a small character with long red hair, something between the colors of red and auburn, a little lame, a small red nose and several other peculiarly, peculiar peculiarities, you may without hesitation claim the hopeful boy as your son.”
In the year leading up to the Mexican-American War, MacRae was sent to Central America as a spy. Posing as a British naval officer, he ferried top secret correspondence between Washington and California—it’s a barely known fact that MacRae was the person who actually snuck orders to California’s commanders confirming the rumor that the United States was actually at war. After the war started, the wily Tarheel rejoined the Cyane under Captain Samuel Francis DuPont. He trekked to Hawaii to protect the US whaling fleet, helped oversee the sinking of some thirty ships off Mexico, and became the deadly leader of a team of U.S. Marine troops that DuPont called his “Fire Eaters.” After the war, MacRae made a peacetime traverse of the Chilean Andes with a naval expedition, trekking over two thousand miles of utter and often violent wilderness.
When he returned to Santiago, MacRae wrote to his brother of plans to ask a girl named “Susan” to marry him, though perhaps he was only caught up in the romance of his own adventure. “From the time of our first arrival…everything had passed so rapidly as to appear a dream, and I was at a loss for a while to determine whether I had been in Santiago or not; but when I felt my bleeding heart, and got the scent of French brandy from my pocket handkerchief, I knew that all was reality.”
Archibald MacRae departed Valparaiso via steamer on January 15, 1854, traveling alone. As to why he returned without a fiancée, we can only guess.
No image of Lieutenant Archibald MacRae, who discovered Bishop Rock, can be located. We might imagine, though, some resemblance to his dashing father, General Alexander MacRae, 1796–1868, a man who served the United States during the War of 1812 and the Confederacy fifty years later. The general would bury at least three of his nine or ten sons (it’s not entirely clear how many he had)—with Archibald being the first. The general’s letters show a man both fond and proud of his explorer son. In 1840, he wrote: “I am afraid that you do not take the interest in writing home that you aught. ‘Be not weary in well doing.’ Don’t neglect in writing as it is is not only a source of gratification to ‘all hands at home’…tell us all that you have seen—that is, all that is proper to be written. Your affectionate father, Alex MacRae.” Photo courtesy New Hanover Public Library, St. Johns Masonic Lodge No. 1 Collection.
On January 30, 1855, MacRae reported for duty as captain of the Ewing. He didn’t write home much during this time, explaining he had no good tales to tell. In addition, the logbooks of the Ewing and of Alden’s ship, the Active, seem to have disappeared into a black hole. Personal pictures of shipboard life are thus scant. In 1855, a young officer named Philip Carrigan Johnson served aboard the Active with James Alden, and did time briefly aboard Ewing alongside MacRae. His diary is one of few personal windows belowdecks.
Johnson describes a posse of inveterate chess players, bird hunts, near drownings, and a mingled annoyance with and great respect for James Alden. He also noted the deep mutual disdain between Alden and fellow survey captain, George Davidson. Alden’s wife—a woman already wrecked by her husband’s lonely years at sea—lived aboard the Active, and Davidson took a rabid delight in terrifying her with tales of the ocean. “I expect she will explode one of these days on account of Davidson,” Johnson wrote.
The accomplished and headstrong MacRae, meanwhile, found the leaky Ewing something like a brig. In the year before joining the Ewing, he had taken ill, racked with recurring, debilitating rounds of a flu-like illness whose cause was a mystery. In the wake of a bout that laid him low for days, he wrote home to his brother Donald:
Our duty here is so uninteresting and the whole coast so inhospitable that I can find nothing worth relating and therefore must leave it to your imagination to make out what our course has been. Running lines of soundings on a very exposed coast, looking for rocks and indeed suffering every inconvenience except not catching fish, if that may be considered a convenience, when we are so tired of their sight as to loth [sic] them. That has been our last two months experience.
From here we shall proceed near the mission of San Buenaventura [Ventura, California] and probably in a month from this repair to the coast near Monterey. If I did not suffer a good deal with rheumatism and other ailings, I should speculate on what might occur in the future but as it is I can’t say.
In the summer of 1855, possibly in July, Alden ordered MacRae to sail for the Cortes Bank, perhaps in reaction to the stories circulating of the Bishop. Yet unlike T. H. Stevens, MacRae actually managed to locate the submerged black dome that is the Bank’s shallowest reef, and one imagines that, at least for a moment, the deadly tedium of his work lifted just a bit. Even if MacRae did not witness Alden’s white horses, he would appreciate the danger to shipping the rock represented, the importance of his discovery, and the deadly spectral waves such a shallow, shaggy undersea cliff would produce.
News of MacRae’s findings crossed Panama and reached the director of the Coast Survey in early October. They were published in the pages of the New York Times on November 3.
Meanwhile, on October 13, 1855, MacRae either asked or James Alden ordered him to return to the Cortes Bank for a thorough, weeklong survey. This time, Cortes Bank surely impressed upon MacRae its majestic profile and let him witness at least a portion of the North Pacific power it could unleash. He had uncovered a hazard unlike anything off the coast of California. Soundings revealed a series of stair steps fifty to a hundred feet high that told a story of periods of rapid sea level rise and erosion by forces almost unimaginable in scale. Alden and Davidson would come to postulate a truth that geologists would later confirm: Though no Active volcano ever rose out here, the Bank’s black stone is not only volcanic in nature but is probably still growing. Yet as California’s tectonic plates push the Bank upward, toward the water’s surface, the more that rock is pulverized by waves. It is a battle that has raged for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years.
Then, if you were to walk off the final stair step—itself some four hundred feet in depth—you’d plunge into abyssal waters MacRae sounded out at better than six thousand feet deep. As open-ocean swells approached the coast, what would they do when they met this mile-high wall? MacRae was both a man of science and a seasoned sailor who had survived towering seas around Cape Horn and visited Oahu during the wintertime big wave season. Despite how little was known about wave formation in 1855, he almost surely surmised exactly what would happen out here: Swells would lift to heights that defied the imaginations of scientists and seafarers.
In the meantime, MacRae was bearing a hardship that no doubt made this expedition both the height of wonder and the acme of misery. He was unable to recover fully from one of his regular bouts of “rheumatism,” and he began to complain first of debilitating headaches, and later a persistent, maddening sensation around his right temple. When pushed for a description, he called it “a vibration in my brain.”
In early November, Ewing left the Bank and reached Santa Barbara, but MacRae was unable to obtain satisfactory medical attention. He ordered the Ewing to San Francisco, anchoring along
side Alden’s Active off Market Street Wharf on November 12. There, an old Wilmington friend named John Savage greeted him. “He was not at all well and he seemed in low spirits and disgusted with everything out here,” Savage wrote.
Active’s surgeon, Dr. John M. Browne, must have thought MacRae looked a wreck—a bit jaundiced and with dead corpuscles turning his urine the color of cola. Browne described MacRae’s ailment as a “biliary [liver or bile] derangement attended by slight fever of the remittent type, both affording symptoms peculiar to a form of fever prevalent at the Lower Coast [a term for South America].”
In short, MacRae had malaria, which he must have contracted from a mosquito bite a couple of years earlier on his South American adventure. Where avalanches, landslides, blizzards, lightening, bullets, mortars, thieves, and giant waves had failed, tiny parasites were at last succeeding.
Dr. Browne administered opiates and ordered MacRae to rest. Three days later, MacRae announced a near-miraculous recovery. The finally cheerful lieutenant spent Friday and the following Saturday enjoying San Francisco with a small, tight crew of North Carolina adventurers.
Yet late on Saturday after returning to the Ewing, the dead cells clogging MacRae’s brain brought the buzzing, throbbing sensation back with a vengeance. “If this doesn’t stop,” he told James Alden’s nephew James Madison Alden, who had been working as his assistant, “I’m going to jump overboard.”
MacRae was soon surrounded by Dr. Browne and various crewmen and friends. Browne could find no other symptoms to treat, so he gave him more opiates to ease the pain. Then, his friend Savage wrote, “He spoke of bygone days, of different voyages and the time he passed in Chile.”
Eventually, MacRae lay alone on his bunk, attended by Madison Alden, who sat in a chair reading the Daily Alta. The air was suddenly shaken by a thunderous blast. A massive .44-caliber Colt Dragoon skittered across the floor and bounced off young Alden’s boots. He fled in mortal terror, shouting to the others: “The Lieutenant just tried to shoot me!”