The Mastiff was a medium clipper of 1030 tons that was launched from Donald McKay's shipyard in February 1856. She was built for Boston merchant George B. Upton and designed specifically for the California and China trade. She was considered an A-1 ship in every way and had a first class library on board.
The Mastiff was placed under the command of Captain William O. Johnson and sailed from Boston on March 7, 1856, on her maiden run around the Horn and reached San Francisco on July 19th with a 134-day run.
From there, she sailed on to China making a couple of stops along the way. Three years and a number of voyages later, she was on her way five days out from San Francisco, departing there on September 10, 1859, bound for Hong Kong.
Aboard the Mastiff on that voyage was Richard Henry Dana, the author of Two Years Before the Mast, who picks up the story concerning the fiery end of the Mastiff from there:
September 10. Saturday, 10 A.M. Set sail in the noble clipper ship Mastiff for Sandwich Islands. This ship is bound to Hong Kong. Stops at Sandwich Islands to land mail and few passengers, and has one hundred and seventy-five Chinese steerage passengers on board. William O. Johnson, master. His wife on board.
Beats out of harbor exceedingly well. Quick in stays. Last view of San Francisco hills, islands, ports, light-houses, Golden Gate, and its fog and strong northeast winds.
First three days of passage, the coast fogs and cold hold on. Then clear, fair, Pacific Ocean weather, and light winds.
Enjoy highly life in a sailing vessel. So much better than a steamer. No noise, no smell of oil, no tremor, as still as country after city; and the interest in the sails, winds, duties of seamen, etc. Become intimate with Captain Johnson,-seaman by birth, well educated; a library on board which cost some $1.200 or $1,500, and all other things to match-plate cutlery, furniture, provisions, etc.
The ship his home and his idol and chief subject of conversation. He owns one quarter of her, and took her from the stocks; built in Donald McKay's best manner.
Chief mate is Bailey, of New Bedford; second mate, Johnson, of Salem; third mate, a Frenchman, and crew of about twenty men. All newest fashions of rigging.
Interest myself and recall old times by watching working of ship and work on rigging. Songs of sailors. Go below; Chinese burn lamps and smoke. Captain Johnson forbids it.
September 15. Thursday. At about 5 P.M., quiet afternoon, good breeze, all easy and happy, work going on. Captain Johnson, "Here, Mr. Bailey, fire in the ship!" Startled all; smoke immediately pours up after-ventilator and hatch. Call all hands aft. Rig hose to pump. Mates jump down the hatch aft, in the lazaretto, and smoke pours up in volumes, stifling. Officers spring up and report that between decks all on fire, and, having taken fire in lower hold, Captain Johnson immediately gives up all hopes of saving ship, and stops pumps, and all hands go to work in clearing boats for lowering. "Is there powder on board?" "Yes." Captain Johnson has gone below to get it. Magazine brought up and thrown overboard, and Captain Johnson armed with revolver. Chinese are alarmed, and rush for the boats; beat them back by belaying pins and threats and presenting pistol. Steward shows presence of mind, and stands by captain. Gig is lowered first. Mrs. Johnson comes up, prepared to go in boat.
A British ship has been in sight the last two days, sailing with us. She is several miles astern. Set out ensign union down, and half mast, and back after yards. Captain Johnson asks me to see his wife safely in boat. She goes over side on rope. Chief mate and I help her in. Chinese rush for the boat; beaten back; take in Chinese rower, cabin passengers, and few Chinamen, who rush in. Excellent boat. Second mate takes command; four oars, and I help at one. Pull over two miles and put all safely on board the English ship. Ship Achilles bound for Sydney. Calmness of Mrs. Johnson.
Soon two more boats come from the Mastiff, each full of Chinamen; one in charge of third mate, other has no officer, so I volunteer to take charge of the boat with a steering oar. Pull for the Mastiff. Smoke pouring out, but flames not burst out yet. Put her alongside, and take in Chinese hanging from the sails and ropes and chains. Great noise and attempts to get in, but as they cannot swim are afraid to jump in. Keep boat well off and get her full. Men lie in the bottom, And crouch down. Order them aft. Gentle, and ready to obey. Put them all safely on board the Achilles. My boat leaks, and keep one hand bailing. Put off again for the Mastiff. Five boats now employed-four of Mastiff, and one of the Achilles, under charge of her second mate. These boats all flying to and fro. Remarkable that with the alarm, and so many (one hundred and seventy-five) ignorant, useless men, not knowing our language, unaccustomed to boats, struggling for life, we should have launched every boat safely, none swamped or stove, and loaded, transported and put on board all-every one-without an accident.
When got alongside last time found all the Chinese had been taken off. Boats now take off baggage of passengers and crew. We had taken none before, Johnson afraid to leave the deck and boats lest Chinese take them.
Steward saves all my luggage, with trifling exceptions, as it was all in my room on deck, and that was to windward. Nothing could be got from below and from lee side. Sailor's house being on deck, save most of their clothes. Captain Johnson saves the specie, $76,000 in gold, in boxes, and chief mate takes it to the Achilles; also two chronometers. The Captain saves nothing of his own. Steward saves some trunks for him and Mrs. Johnson. (Steward's name is Edward Trofater.) Most of luggage in upper house is saved.
Captain Johnson asks me to come on board and have a calm conference to see if anything more can be done. I do so. Very much fatigued by exertions in my boat, especially the steering oar, and head and lungs full of smoke. Captain Johnson says all between decks a mass of fire, and will soon burst out through deck. Cannot get out of long boats. Been trying it while we were in boats-to few men, and now of no use. All other boats out, and nothing more can be got from deck. Has been trying to get at the bread, but cannot cut through the deck. (Carpenter of no use, has seemed to lose his powers.) Nor could it have been done, as too near fire. Nothing more can be done. My boat is full of luggage and push off again; put all safely on board. Two boats remain by side of Mastiff, and Captain Johnson, the chief mate, steward, are the last to leave her- not until ordered. Captain last to leave.
Flames burst out through deck at mainmast. Now nearly dark, and flames glow over the ocean. Mrs. Johnson anxious lest her husband stay too long. Two figures on the quarter deck. Now disappear, and the last two boats come off. Captain Johnson comes on board, and the poor, noble Mastiff is abandoned. Flames mount the rigging, catch the sails, and all a mass of fire. Main and mizzen mast fall. Foremast stands long, then drops, and only a burning hull.
Captain Hart of the Achilles, a generous, frank British sailor, takes Captain Johnson by hand. Now the excitement is over, and his duty done, the magnitude of the loss comes over him, and he says over and over, "My ship Mastiff! My ship Mastiff! Is it possible she is gone!" Like the mourning of David over Absalom.
Twelve days later, the Achilles reached Honolulu on September 27, 1859, where Richard Henry Dana landed and put off for shore in a lateen-sail Kanaka boat and sailed through the channel for shore while taking note of the surf as it broke over the coral reefs.
Richard Henry Dana had come back out to California after an absence of twenty-three years, for an extensive and lengthy nostalgic visit to the old haunts along the California coast that he had known over the years of 1835-36 while serving aboard the Boston hide droger, the Alert. The events of which sailing up and down the coast in the quest for a cargo of hides to transport back around the Horn had been captured most eloquently in his wonderful book, Two Years Before the Mast, that had become one of the most popular well-read books of the times.
No one had known and captured old California better than Dana and the interest in California that his book had created had made a significant contribution toward the American settlement of California. Which, of course, was greatly spurred on by the gold rush and the prosperity brought on by the era of the clipper ships that followed.
On Dana's first visit to California in 1835, the Bay was a sleepy backwater of old Mexico and the transformation of San Francisco over the following twenty-three years into one of the busiest seaports in the world was nothing short of amazing. To Dana, the transformation was most striking as the following passage of his writings will attest.
It was the winter of 1835-6 that the ship Alert, in the prosecution of her voyage for hides on the remote and almost unknown coast of California, floated into the vast solitude of the Bay of San Francisco. All around was the stillness of nature. One vessel, a Russian, lay at anchor here, but during our whole stay not a sail came or went. Our trade was with remote Missions, which sent hides to us in launches manned by their Indians. Our anchorage was between a small island, Yerba Buena, and a gravel beach in a little bight or cove of the same name, formed by two small, projecting points. Beyond, to the westward of the landing-place, were dreary sand-hills, with little grass to be seen, and few trees, and beyond them higher hills, steep and barren, their sides gullied by rains. Some five or six miles beyond the landing-place, to the right, was a ruinous Presidio, and some three or four miles to the left was the Mission of Dolores, as ruinous as the Presidio, almost deserted, with but few Indians attached to it, and but little property in cattle. Over a region far beyond out of sight there were no other human habitations, except that an enterprising Yankee, years in advance of his time, had put up, on the rising ground above the landing, a shanty of rough boards, where he carried on a very small retail trade between the hide ships and the Indians. Vast banks of fog, invading us from the North Pacific, drove in through the entrance, and covered the whole bay; and when they disappeared, we saw a few well-wooded islands, the sand-hills of the west, the grassy and wooded slopes on the east, and the vast stretch of the bay to the southward, where we were told lay the Missions of Santa Clara and San José, and still longer stretches to the northward and northeastward, where we understood smaller bays spread out, and large rivers poured in their tributes of waters. There were no settlements on these bays and rivers, and the few ranchos and Missions were remote and widely separated. Not only the neighborhood of our anchorage, but the entire region of the great bay, was a solitude. On the whole coast of California there was not a light-house, a beacon, or a buoy, and the charts were made up from old and disconnected surveys by British, Russian, and Mexican voyagers. Birds of prey and passage swooped and dived about us, wild beasts ranged through the oak grooves, and as we slowly floated out of the harbor with the tide, herds of deer came to the water's edge, on the northerly side of the entrance, to gaze at the strange spectacle.
On the evening of Saturday, the 13th of August, 1859, the superb steamship Golden gate, gay with crowds of passengers, and lighting the sea for miles around with the glare of her signal lights of red, green, and white, and brilliant with lighted saloons and staterooms, bound up from the Isthmus of Panama, neared the entrance to San Francisco, the great centre of a worldwide commerce. Miles out to sea, on the desolate rocks of the Farallones, gleamed the powerful rays of one of the most costly and effective lighthouses in the world. As we drew in through the Golden Gate, another lighthouse met our eyes, and in the clear moonlight of the unbroken California summer we saw, on the right, a large fortification protecting the narrow entrance, and just before us the little island of Alcatraz confronted us,-one entire fortress. We bore round the point toward the old anchoring-ground of the hide ships, and there, covering the sand-hills and the valleys, stretching from the water's edge to the base of the great hills, and from the old Presidio to the Mission, flickering all over with the lamps of its streets and houses, lay a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants. Clocks tolled the hour of midnight from its steeples, but the city was alive from the salute of our guns, spreading the news that the fortnightly steamer had come, bringing mails and passengers from the Atlantic world. Clipper ships of the largest size lay at anchor in the stream, or were girt to the wharves; and capacious high-pressure steamers, as large and showy as those of the Hudson or Mississippi, bodies of dazzling light, awaited the delivery of our mails to take their courses up the Bay, stopping at Benicia and the United States Naval Station, and then up the great tributaries- the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Feather Rivers-to the far inland cities of Sacramento, Stockton and Marysville.
The dock into which we drew, and the streets about it, were densely crowded with express wagons and hand-carts to take luggage, coaches and cabs for passengers, and with men,-some looking out for friends among our hundreds of passengers,-agents of the press, and a greater multitude eager for newspapers and verbal intelligence from the great Atlantic and European world. Through this crowd I made my way, along with the well-built and well-lighted streets, as alive as by day, where boys in high-keyed voices were already crying the latest New York papers; and between one and two o'clock in the morning found myself comfortably abed in a commodious room, in the Oriental Hotel, which stood, as well as I can learn, on the filled-up cove, and not far from the spot where we used to beach our boats from the Alert.
Sunday, August 14th. When I awoke in the morning, and looked from my windows over the city of San Francisco, with its storehouses, towers, and steeples; its court-houses, theatres, and hospitals; its daily journals; its well-filled learned professions; its fortresses and light-houses; its wharves and harbor, with their thousand-ton clipper ships, more in number than London or Liverpool sheltered that day, itself one of the capitals of the American Republic, and the sole emporium of a new world, the awakened Pacific; when I looked across the bay to the eastward, and beheld a beautiful town on the fertile, wooded shores of the Contra Costa, and steamers, large and small,, the ferryboats to the Contra Costa, and capricious freighters and passenger-carriers to all parts of the great bay and its tributaries, with lines of their smoke on the horizon,-when I saw all these things, and reflected on what I once was and saw here, and what now surrounded me, I could scarcely keep my hold on reality at all, or the genuineness of anything, and seemed to myself like one who had moved in "worlds not realized."
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