by Casey, Susan
The 2002 shark season had just wrapped up, and I was here for a recap. Though I’d intended to make a day trip or two to the island with Ron this past fall, magazine work had kept me pinned to Manhattan. I had no idea how the year had played out in terms of sharks: who’d been back and who was AWOL; how many tags had been deployed; what fresh discoveries had been made. In emails, Peter had offered hints of difficulties, with tensions from the cage-diving feud affecting everything they did. I wanted to hear about all of it. I still, as Scot would say, had sharks on the brain.
By now I was a sort of cocktail-party expert on great whites and could hold forth about them for any amount of time. I often found myself thinking about the Farallon sharks during long sets at swim practice, and they continued to populate my dreams, sometimes even waking me at night. Unlike most memories, soon relegated to the brain’s discard pile (even the sentimental favorites) the sharks occupied prime real estate in my head. And as the months passed, my intrigue about the islands themselves intensified, too. Whenever I had a spare moment between deadlines, I’d dig deeper into my Farallon research. My apartment filled with nineteenth-century newspaper clippings set in metal-and-wood type, with headlines like “Marooned on the Farallones” and “Frisco’s Strange Outpost,” melancholy sepia-toned pictures of people who had lived—and died—on the islands, buildings that no longer existed, and the two houses that remained, their facades morphing unhappily over the decades. A few leads paid off, and each clip of information became a clue that pulled me to the next source. As the pieces fell into place, I began to see the outlines of a haunting story that dated back to the sixteenth century. Bit by bit, the islands’ lost history became clearer. And stranger and stranger and stranger.
FROM THE BEGINNING THE FARALLON ISLANDS HAVE HAD AN IMAGE problem. Sailors referred to them as “the devil’s teeth,” in testament to both the nautical dangers they posed and their sublime appearance. In a nineteenth-century magazine article, the islands were compared, unfavorably, to prison. “God has done less for it than any other place,” griped one early visitor.
In 1579, Sir Francis Drake became the first European to set foot on the islands, visiting just long enough to stock up on seal and seabird meat. He christened the Farallones the “Islands of St. James,” but the name didn’t stick. I could see why; it was indefensibly fancy, like naming California “Sussex” or Colorado “Devonshire.” Or saddling rugged Point Reyes with the precious name “New Albion.” (Which Drake also did. That didn’t catch on either.) Seventeenth-century coastal Miwok Indians called them the “Islands of the Dead,” considering the place a kind of offshore hell: “An island in the bitter, salt sea, an island naked, barren and desolate, covered only with brine-spattered stones, and with glistening salt, which crunches under the tread, and swept with cursed winds…. On this abhorred island bad Indians are condemned to live forever.”
Or rapacious fortune hunters. The first wholesale effort to convert the islands’ abundant wildlife into cash took root in 1807 when a Yankee fur trader named Jonathan Winship, captain of the Boston-based trading vessel O’Cain, noted “a vast number of fur and hair seal” on Southeast Farallon. Three years later the O’Cain returned, and over the course of two years managed to kill seventy-three thousand animals. At the time, Winship was involved in a joint venture with a group of Russians, who’d been doing a brisk business trading seal and sea otter pelts with China, hunting their way across the Bering Strait and then down from Alaska, eventually establishing their southernmost base at Fort Ross, one hundred miles north of San Francisco. The Russian American Fur Company’s hunters were Kodiak, Aleut, and Pomo Indians, some of whom were slaves condemned to this duty on murder charges. This operation remained on the Farallones for nearly thirty years, cleaning the place out of everything from seabird feathers, eggs, and meat; to sea lion oil and meat; to seal skins; to the ultimate prize—sea otter pelts.
To run your fingers through a sea otter pelt, with its millions of hairs per square inch, is to viscerally sense its doom. This is one plush animal, richer than ermine, silkier than mink. Even back in the preinflationary early 1800s, a single hide fetched forty dollars in China. Fur seals had coarser coats and were far more common. They sold for only two dollars per skin. But there were few otters at the Farallones, and furthermore, the seals were easy to catch. While crack teams of Aleut hunters were imported to snag sea otters from the water, zipping around in small, agile kayaks called bidarkas, when it came to the seals, skill was not required—anyone with a club could do it.
Living conditions were beyond wretched: there was little shelter from the elements, plenty of disease, no freshwater, no way of getting back and forth to the mainland. The relentless damp brought on skin rashes and sores that quickly became infected. Ships dropped off provisions at long and random intervals, but most of the time there was nothing to eat but sea lion meat, abalone, and seabird eggs. Deaths were numerous. In his euphemistically titled book Adventures in California, 1818–1828, a Russian teenager named Zakahar Tchitchinoff recounted his time on Southeast Farallon:
About a month afterward the scurvy broke out among us and in a short time we were all sick except myself. My father and two others were all that kept at work and they were growing weaker every day. Two of the Aleuts died a month after the disease broke out. All the next winter we passed there in great misery and when the spring came the men were too weak to kill sea-lions, and all we could do was to crawl around the cliffs, and gather some sea-birds eggs and suck them raw. On the first day of June of that year (1820) my father lost his balance while trying to reach out for an egg and fell into the water and as he was too weak to swim the short distance to shore he was drowned. His body was not washed ashore on the island and I never saw it again.
By the late 1830s, even the Russians had decided that conditions were too harsh. Plus, there were no more seals. Within thirty years, the number taken per season had dropped from forty thousand to fifty-four. In December 1841, the Russians packed up Fort Ross and left California for good.
And then came the literal gold diggers. Within a year of the monumental 1848 discovery in the gravelly sand of the American River, San Francisco’s population had swelled from eight hundred to forty thousand, with four thousand newcomers surging in every month, relegated to tents and shacks. As the population exploded, so did the anarchy. Infrastructure was nonexistent and justice was administered, often brutally, by vigilante groups. The general idea was this: Lay claim to anything you could get your hands on and then keep it by means of force. And during the early, scrambling days of the new metropolis, there wasn’t enough of anything to go around.
Women and food were in particularly short supply. While an enterprising businesswoman named Eliza Farnham attempted to import females from the East aboard the jauntily named Eliza Farnham’s Bride Ship—all a woman needed was $250, a character reference from her clergyman, and nothing to lose—an arrival from Maine named Doc Robinson noticed that there were not many chickens in California. Therefore, no eggs. And without eggs there could be no cakes, no pies, no breakfast rolls, no omelette brunches. Robinson had heard rumors of an island just outside the Golden Gate, home to an enormous population of common murre, a duck-sized seabird with tuxedo markings like a penguin and the sleek head of a loon, that laid eggs every bit as edible as a hen’s. What’s more, a murre egg was the size of a softball.
So in spring of 1849, Robinson and his brother-in-law, Orrin Dorman, chartered a boat and sailed to the Farallones. Immediately they realized that, if anything, the estimate of how many murres were on this island was wildly understated. There was nothing but birds here, jammed shoulder-to-shoulder, packed onto the rocks in unfathomable numbers. Trying to count the birds on Southeast Farallon Island was like counting grains of sand on the beach or blades of grass in a field. It simply couldn’t be done.
And everywhere they looked—eggs. Hundreds of thousands of murre eggs lay on the rocks, out in plain sight rather than tucked away in nests. The egg
s had leathery, speckled shells that ranged in color from pale taupe to ivory to soft green or turquoise. They were covered in black scribbles, like writing in a secret murre language. Tapered on one end, the eggs were well designed for the terrain; they wobbled in circles on ledges rather than rolling off the side.
For baking, everyone agreed, this was a perfectly fine substitute. When cooked straight up, however, the seabird eggs were less appealing. A fried murre egg had a bloodred yolk, clear whites, and a fishy aftertaste. And if you ate a bad one, it was rumored to take three months to get the taste out of your mouth.
Robinson and Dorman loaded their boat with eggs and headed back to San Francisco, coming up against a nasty storm and dumping half their cargo into the ocean just to stay upright. Nonetheless, they sold the remaining eggs for a dollar a dozen and pocketed three thousand dollars, serious money in those days. Robinson opened his own burlesque hall—another big growth segment of the fledgling California economy—and neither man ever went back to the Farallones. But others did. Within a week of the successful egg sale, Southeast Farallon was swarming with “eggers.”
In keeping with the land-grabbing ethos, six men immediately staked their claim, declaring that the islands belonged to them exclusively due to “rights of possession,” and incorporating as the Farallon Egg Company. Egging, though lucrative, proved a tough way to make a living. The season spanned eight flurried weeks between May and July, during which time it was man against murre, and both parties against the gulls. Climbing near-vertical rises of crumbling granite, the eggers carried clubs in their free hands to fend off the attacking birds, at the same time stuffing the eggs into specially designed “egg shirts”—giant gunnysacks with multiple pockets. Scalp wounds were common.
By day’s end, the shirts were filled with as many as eighteen dozen eggs, and the eggers would be staggering under the bulk like a troupe of drunken, lumpy Santas. The rocks were slick from guano and fog, and it was ridiculously easy to fall. While the eggers wore rope-soled shoes studded with railroad spikes for traction, injury and death were only a slipped foot or a loose rock away. During the gathering season there were approximately twenty-five men on the Egg Company’s crew and sometimes, at the end of the day, an egger was simply entered into the logbook as “missing.”
MEANWHILE, IN 1851, THE YEAR THE FARALLON EGG COMPANY PLANTED its flag on the islands, there was not a single lighthouse on the Pacific Coast. Ship traffic was on the rise, and captains from all over the world complained about America’s untended western edge. Realizing the dangers of two thousand miles of unknown, unmarked coastline, the federal government set out on a massive project to build sixteen lighthouses from San Diego to Seattle. And, given that the Farallones posed the most notorious obstacle out there, it was one of the first lighthouses to be commissioned.
The Farallon light flashed across the water for the first time in December 1855. It would have been operational two years earlier except the architects’ measurements were off, and the lens didn’t fit into the lighthouse tower. It cannot have been a happy moment when the error was discovered—the entire structure had to be knocked down and rebuilt. As with all Farallon things, this wasn’t easy. The heavy construction supplies couldn’t be landed, and the stone for both tower building attempts had to be quarried from the island itself. Workmen were forced to crawl up the side of Lighthouse Hill carrying the bricks on their backs, a handful at a time. After a few days of this, there was a quiet but firm mutiny and a mule was delivered.
Bad blood arose immediately, it seems, between the Egg Company and the lighthouse building crew. The government, which did not recognize the company’s claim to the Farallones, had deeper concerns than who got to rob the murres, and let it continue its business so long as it didn’t get out of hand. But the Egg Company owners believed that they—and not the government—owned these islands, and they were almost always out of hand. So began thirty years of a bitter marriage.
Four men were stationed permanently at the lighthouse. A spartan stone house with a sleeping loft was built at the base of Lighthouse Hill for their residence, companion to the two Egg Company dwellings that had been erected in the 1850s. Even during the months when they weren’t sharing the island with mafioso eggers, the job of Farallon lighthouse keeper amounted to an exercise in hardship. Theirs was an isolated, lonely existence, and the weather made it worse, pounding them with storms and shrouding them in fog. And each year, the egging season itself became increasingly traumatic. There were nonstop dustups as rival gangs battled the company for the rights to harvest the eggs; on more than one occasion, soldiers were summoned to calm things down. The battles often lasted for weeks, involving threats, fistfights, barricades, and small arms, and during those interludes San Franciscans would go eggless once again.
Sometimes the ejected gangs would hide in sea caves instead of sailing back to San Francisco, waiting for the authorities to leave so they could take another run at the eggs. One tenacious group steered their boat inside Great Murre Cave and remained there for two days, during which they were drizzled nonstop with guano. The ammonia buildup inside the cave killed several men. And the dangers didn’t stop once the cargo was collected; boats running eggs to the mainland were hijacked with regularity.
It was a larcenous, piratical world—and the four lighthouse keepers were stuck in the crossfire. On top of everything else, the pay was lousy. It occurred to the keepers that they should be the ones to profit from the egging. All along they’d dabbled in it, picking small batches of eggs, and taking kickbacks for discouraging outsiders from trying to land. But until 1858, when a new head keeper named Amos Clift arrived, none of the tenders had ever tried to make the Egg Company answer to them.
From the beginning of his tenure, Clift made it clear that he was only tolerating the Farallones so he could have at the eggs. He was an avid letter writer and corresponded to his brother Horace in a very fancy hand, with swirly S’s and florid P’s and calligraphic sweeps of a fountain pen. These letters are archived at the San Francisco Public Library, and as I read them I could see Clift in my mind’s eye, sitting at the lighthouse as the wind rattled against the door, bent over a sheet of paper with a long pen and an inkwell.
And a bottle of something 100-proof. In almost all of his letters, which tended to run several pages, Clift’s elegant penmanship starts off impressively and then morphs into a scrawling mess. As the handwriting degenerates, the complaints about his post become increasingly bitter, and his plans for total egg dominance grow larger in scale. In a letter to Horace, written on November 30, 1859, he outlined the situation: “Before I came here this Egg Company used to have things all their own way…but since I have been here things have taken a turn. And they have ascertained that I am not as easily bluffed…. I think it will now be settled and the Egg Company driven off the island. I shall not abate my efforts in the least. And if I succeed I may perhaps reap the benefits.” To Clift, this meant a chance at more cash than he would likely ever see again: “The egg season is the months of May and June, and the profits of the Company after all expenses are paid, is every year from five to six thousand dollars. Quite an item. And if this Island is Government property, I have a right to these eggs and I am bound to try and get it.” And after his fortune had been made, Clift added, “the Government might ‘kiss my foot’ and so up along.”
That same month, an article in San Francisco’s Daily Alta newspaper reported that the Egg Company was rampaging around Southeast Farallon, “breaking up the government roads” and that it had “drawn lines and pasted up notices warning the keepers not to pass them on pain of death.” As spring rolled around and the murres got down to business, the three other lighthouse keepers found themselves on the wrong side of a brutal power struggle. “We are now in the midst of the egg season,” Clift wrote, on June 14, 1860. “And the Egg Company and the Light Keepers are at war.” This was his last letter on record. Shortly thereafter, the Daily Alta reported that an armed group of eggers had tried
to force the lighthouse keepers to leave the island. And then, in July, an assistant keeper was assaulted. U.S. Lighthouse Service records for that summer reveal that Amos Clift was removed from his post for “the undue…assumption to monopolize…the valuable privilege of collecting eggs.”
Even after Clift’s departure, the fighting continued. The ugly climax came on June 4, 1863, when three boats carrying a total of twenty-seven armed Italian fishermen sailed into Fisherman’s Bay and weighed anchor. The two egging parties spent the night drinking and yelling threats across the water at each other, and at daybreak the Italians got into rowboats and made for shore. As they neared North Landing, the Egg Company workers opened fire. After twenty minutes of shooting, an Egg Company man named Edward Perkins lay dead, several others had been hit with musket balls, and at least five in the rowboats were seriously wounded. The Italians retreated. “The Farallones War—Arrests for Murder,” read the Daily Alta’s headline two days later.
The government, realizing that official sanction was needed to bring to an end what was now referred to, wearily, as “the annual egg controversy,” finally granted the Egg Company the monopoly it had always sought. Egging, presumably more peaceable egging, continued until May 1881. But there was a more intractable problem: the eggs were becoming scarce. By now, some ten million eggs had been plucked and, after all, murres, like most seabirds, lay only one or two per year. No thought had ever been given to conserving the resource, and as a result the murre population was in free fall. By 1875, the seasonal haul had dropped from about a million eggs to less than a quarter that number. The price had dropped as well, down to twenty-six cents per dozen and falling fast, as chickens caught up to the rest of the mainland population.
In a characteristic burst of arrogance and hubris, the Egg Company diversified its operations at the Farallones, selling the rights to seal and sea lion rendering in 1879. The process of turning blubber into oil was a noxious one, involving furnaces and giant kettles and stinking piles of flayed carcasses. The stench overwhelmed the island dwellers; the billowing smoke was so sooty and greasy that it obscured the lighthouse beam. Once again, tensions between the company and the lighthouse staff flared. When eggers pushed a keeper named Henry Hess over an embankment and demanded that the lighthouse staff pay for any eggs they ate, government authorities decided they’d had enough.