An oil painting of the three-masted sailing ship NIANTIC, in port at Ningpo, China. The date of the painting is circa 1836-1839. It is 27 inches wide and 22 inches high, in a plain, brown wood frame.
NPS Photo, SAFR 22386
The Niantic was one of the many ships that brought gold-seekers to San Francisco during the height of the California Gold Rush. Upon arrival in 1849, her passengers and crew alike deserted in search of fortune, leaving the abandoned ship to run aground just offshore of the intersection of Clay and Montgomery Streets. The ship was then converted for use as a store, a warehouse, and a hotel. The great fire of May, 1851 burned the ship down to the waterline, and Niantic's remains were buried under debris and landfill during the city's reconstruction. Rediscoveries of the buried wreck in downtown San Francisco in 1872, 1907, and again in 1978, has made the Niantic one of the best known of the buried ships of San Francisco.
Niantic was built in 1832 for trade in the China, and her crew made four trips to the Chinese ports of Canton, Whampoa, and Hong Kong and the Philippine port of Manila. They returned to New York packed with tea, porcelain, silks and other commodities. The early years of the ship's career were chronicled by George S. Payne, a talented diarist who sailed on Niantic's first four voyages.
The ship was converted into a sperm whaler in 1844, but her second whaling voyage in 1849 was disprupted completely by theGold Rush. While docked in Peru, the American consul requested transport for passengers from Panama to the newly-discovered gold fields of California. Captain Henry Cleaveland agreed and whaling gear was offloaded and replaced with lumber, food, and 150 mules. Upon arrival in Panama, the mules were sold, the ship was cleaned, and the lumber was used to build bunks in the hold. Within the month, Niantic set sail for California with 249 pannengers. Niantic was one of the first ships to arrive in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, and she, along with hundreds of other abandoned ships, would eventually be buried in landfills upon which Downtown San Francsico now stands. Her remains lie beneath the corner of Clay and Sansome Streets, near the Transamerica Pyramid building.
In 1980, Cleaveland's descendant Dionis Coffin Riggs gifted to the park Captain Cleaveland’s logbook of Niantic's last voyage from Panama. This logbook, which was prefaced by a fine drawing done by Cleaveland's son (and first mate) of the Niantic receiving passengers, is now part of the park's extensive maritime collection. Thirty years later, Dionis’ daughter, Cynthia Riggs, contacted the park’s Maritime Research Library about an old painting that had hung on the wall in her ancestral home for about 150 years. It was a painting of the Niantic in port at Ningpo, China about 1838, at the height of her career in the China Trade. A skilled conservator brought the faded and torn painting back into the light of a new day, illustrating the ship in her glory, and it has joined the ship's logbook in the park's collection.
Exhibits on the Niantic can be seen today on display in the Maritime Museum, including a detailed diorama of the ship on the Gold Rush waterfront of 1849, and the ship's actual stern and rudder , which was recovered in 1978 during excovations of San Francisco's Downtown area.
