Niantic: Buried Gold Rush Ship

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 the San Francisco during the height of the Gold Rush. Upon arrival in 1849, her passengers and crew alike fled 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 burried 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.

The Niantic was first put to work in October of 1835 in the China Trade, 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 the first four voyages of the Niantic.

Henry Cleaveland captained the ship on a whaling voyage in the Pacific in 1849, setting out from Panama. Over a century later, in 1980, Cleaveland's descendant Dionis Coffin Riggs gifted to the park Captain Cleaveland’s logbook of that voyage. It turned out to be a marvelous account prefaced by a fine drawing done by Cleaveland's son (and first mate) of the Niantic receiving passengers in Panama. This logbook is now part of the park's extensive maritime collection.

Thirty years later, Dionis’ daughter, Cynthia Riggs, contacted the park’s Maritime Research Library. She was opening her home as a Bed and Breakfast and had decided to do something about an old painting that had hung on the wall 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.

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.