A Gold Rush Enterprise: Sam Ward, Charles Mersch, and the Storeship "Niantic"

Abstract

One of the strangest aspects of San Francisco during the Gold Rush was the frequent use of ships as buildings. Perched high and dry on the mud flats of the city's shallow waterfront, or moored in deeper water, often housed over and subdivided, were dozens of formerly proud vessels serving as hotels, restaurants, offices, warehouses, the town jail, and a sailors' church. The conversion of the ships was not historically unique; ships had served as buildings in the past, notably in England where old hulks moored on the Thames had housed Napoleonic prisoners of war and British subjects found guilty of various infractions of the law.' The practice had waned by the time of the California Gold Rush, but several factors led to its revival on the western shore of the North American continent. By 1850, over seven hundred vessels of various sizes, rigs, and registeries had cleared for San Francisco. Upon arrival most were abandoned by goldmad crews and left to rot in the stagnant backwaters of Yerba Buena Cove along the San Franciso shoreline. This glut of available vessels, many of which could be procured for little cost, helped solve a desperate shortage of buildings.2 Evidently, the first to seize upon the possibilities of the abandoned hulks were Sam Ward, Charles Mersch, and Adolphe Mailliard, friends and business partners who had met during Ward's prolonged tour of Europe between 1832 and 1836. Mersch had emigrated to the United States in 1838 as an impoverished scholar from Luxembourg to join Ward in New York as his secretary. Mailliard, a Frenchman living in England as an attache to Joseph Bonaparte, the exiled king of Spain, soon followed, eventually becoming Ward's brother-in-law. The trio had come to San Francisco in 1849 in hopes of earning their fortunes. Ward, Mersch, and Mailliard purchased the whaling ship Niantic of Warren, Rhode Island, and had the 119 foot long wooden vessel hauled onto the mud flats of the waterfront at the foot of Clay Street during the summer of 1849. There, the fourteen year old blubber hunter a veteran of both the China trade and the Pacific whaling grounds was converted