Sydney Town was once a harbor...

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In 1848, California's "Gold Rush" began. Tales of fortune quickly spread across the Pacific Ocean, where eager explorers boarded ships by the hundreds to test their luck in the open seas and the golden-coast that awaited them. In San Francisco, these ships were greeted in a harbor district called Yerba Buena Cove.

Thousands of emptied wooden vessels were kept here. Most awaiting their owners to return pockets full of the fortune that they had set out for. But few ever came back. Most either stayed in California or didn't have the funds needed to make the return voyage. It was an eerie site to see a "forest of masts" swaying back and forth. Hundreds were left idle and empty. Many of the abandoned were reclaimed as warehouses, rowdy wild-west saloons, as houses or hotels.

Below - a daguerreotype of the Cove taken by William Shew in 1852.

Over time, the Gold Rush era faded... but the demand for real estate in San Francisco began to boom. Some ships were purposefully sunken in order for the sinker to lay claim to the land above it. It was a bizarre scene of building land atop of sunken ships and a city looking to expand. This cove in particular was filled in with sand soil and debris to make way for new streets and avenues.

Suddenly, the graveyard of ships disappeared and a city emerged on top of it.

Re-Discovering a Lost Sea-scape

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In the 1990's, a construction team was boring a tunnel to extend a subway line beyond San Francisco's Market Street and had to pass directly through the hull of a ship! Archeologists later found that this ship was called "the Rome." As below-ground infrastructure grew to meet the demands of a growing city, more and more ghost ships were getting carved up. This expansion underground fueled new archeological research into the history of California's 19th century coastline.

• Super-imposed map of identified ships and existing city streets. Image source National Geographic

Coastal Cities / Layered History

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In a previous post - I wrote about the "Ancient Rivers Below Manhattan", visible in the time lapse graphic below. Long before it was called the "concrete jungle" - Manhattan was a marshy island home to nearly 60 miles of streams and natural springs. Coastlines are dynamic and ever-changing environments. Over the course of decades and centuries, cities bury their history and build in layers above it. Every once and a while, an artifact is discovered below and a story from the past emerges...

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