Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer Read online

  Before Sawyer abandoned the sea for good, he had made a brief attempt at making a fortune in the gold mines with John W. Mackay, who did strike it big but not until much later. When bankruptcy threatened Twain two decades later, he, too, sought Mackay’s aid. By then the bonanza king was flush. An unusual number of sailors had a thirst for prospecting and had been unusually lucky in their pursuit. Dame Fortune failed to smile upon Sawyer and he had gone back to steamship engineering as fast as he could. When he returned to San Francisco in 1859, he became a special patrolman on land and was appointed Fire Corporation yard keeper.

  Though Sawyer never realized his dream of becoming the foreman of Knickerbocker Five, he had achieved an equally lofty position. He had held literally the highest office in the city as a fire bell ringer in the City Hall Tower, elevated forty yards above the mayor. In 1862, because of his long experience fighting fire, he was elected as a delegate under William C. Cox to the Liberty Hose Number Two, a volunteer fire company he had helped organize a year earlier. In February 1863, he replaced John D. Rice as Liberty Hose’s foreman. Sawyer knew every byway in San Francisco, every steep hill and twisting canyon.

  Burly Ed Stahle, once a strong adherent of the rebellious and bloodthirsty vigilantes, had lived with his family on the top floor of the Montgomery Block since the building was erected more than a decade earlier. Before that he had owned the baths across the way. He was living there when James King of William (King of William was so named to set himself off from the eight other James Kings residing in his native Georgetown, District of Columbia), the self-righteous, muckraking editor of the Daily Evening Bulletin, was gunned down out front. The shooter was James P. Casey, a former volunteer firefighter with a criminal past in the Tombs of New York. King, brought inside to die, was laid out on Stahle’s counter. In life, King’s huge head, perhaps heavy from so much brain, lolled to one side as he walked. As he lay dying, it lolled over the edge of the beer-stained table. When King died in Buffett’s store, room 297 of the Montgomery Block, the Vigilance Committee lynched Casey and set the city aflame. Stahle still held strong opinions. He was vigorously opposed to a number of his patrons, especially the prominent lawyers and judges who were not promoters of the law and order side. “Many were the heated arguments almost to the danger point that arose in bath and barber’s chair,” local author Pauline Jacobson wrote of him.

  “When I first set foot in San Francisco in February 1850,” Sawyer continued in the clouds of steam, “I wanted to be an engineer on a steamer [Twain grunted in disapproval], but got sidetracked performing the honest business of fighting fire and training a gang of ragtag adolescent boys to lead the engines with their torches. The city desperately needed Volunteers then and runners like I had been in New York City even more.”

  Sawyer’s ninety lifesaving acts of courage had taken place onboard a burning steamboat, of which Twain had a particular horror—the kind of dread that awakened the journalist at night and set him shaking in clouds of cigar smoke. For that reason, he listened, sweat rolling down his brow, to Sawyer’s story of fire and explosion onboard the steamboat Independence, in which nearly two hundred died from hideous scalds. The steamer, launched in New York on Christmas Day, 1850, did not reach San Francisco Bay until September 17, 1851. Blasting its whistle, laying a wide trail of foam and thrashing its paddles with abandon, the Independence glided toward Long Wharf, an extension of Clay and Commercial streets between Howison’s Pier and the Clay Street Wharf. Pent steam was screaming through the gauge cocks. The cloud of white steam hanging above it was normal. In such noncondensing engines as those on the Independence, the exhaust steam escapes into the air like a Virginia City hot spring.

  At the wheel swaggered a real-life pirate, the fabulous Captain Ned Wakeman. He had stolen a New York paddle-wheel steamer on the Hudson River from right under the sheriff’s nose and sailed it around Cape Horn, the southernmost headland of South America. The giant’s jet-black hair and whiskers gleamed in the morning light. Twain later sailed with Wakeman, who became a great friend, and described him as burly, hairy, sunburned, and “tattooed from head to foot like a Feejee islander.” He conceded that Wakeman told yarns as well as he did, an incredible admission from a writer who liked his readers to think that all his ideas sprang fully grown from his fertile mind. Twain, as Sawyer reported later, took ideas from anywhere he might find them and claimed them as his own. He especially admired the pirate’s animated gesture, quaint phraseology, and complete and uninhibited defiance of grammar. Wakeman lifted his huge hand—bells jangled, wheels stopped and then reversed, churning the water to foam as the Independence docked.

  On October 4, 1851, when the Independence returned to San Francisco for a second time, Sawyer was on hand to sign aboard as a fireman. At 8:00 A.M., R. J. Vanderwater, the San Francisco agent for Cornelius Vanderbilt, lowered the wages of the crew and the stewards. Refusing to sail under diminished pay, the crew carted their sea chests ashore and dumped them at Vanderwater’s feet. An hour later, Wakeman, who also deemed the agent’s step improper, stepped onto the pier, his huge belly preceding him. Glowering with suppressed rage, “an earthquake without the noise,” he had belted a bowie knife and a brace of pistols outside his jacket. Seventy-five disgruntled Independence passengers trailed behind this elemental force, demanding their money back. Four hours later, Vanderwater, cowed by Wakeman’s fury and the loss of so many dollars, agreed to retain the rate of wages. Most of the crew and passengers returned to the Independence, and at 1:00 P.M., Sawyer, who could now fill a vacancy in the engineering department, sailed with them.

  On February 16, 1853, the sea was running high on the Independence’s upward trip from San Juan del Sur, the Pacific terminus of the route across Nicaragua, via Realjo and Acapulco to San Francisco. The two-decked wooden side-wheel steamer, part of the newly organized Vanderbilt Nicaragua Line, was more than six hundred tons in weight and two hundred feet long. Its walking-beam engine, including cylinder, valve gear, beam, and cranks, was slung in graceful trunnions at the top of an A-shaped gallows frame. Below, in the engine room, Sawyer was toiling and dripping with sweat as the Independence steamed off the south point of Isla Santa Margarita, one of two barrier islands at the entrances into Magdalena Bay. Sawyer’s shift had started at midnight alongside the firemen (Jackson, DeMott, Orr, Banks, Jones) and the coal pushers (Byrne, Gale, Merrill, Cormick, Herron, and Glenn). The firemen’s mess boy, Harris, was in bed asleep. At 1:00 A.M., the ship, having been set inshore by the current, made the mainland to the east. Captain F. L. Sampson altered her course to southwest. An hour later he made the island of Margarita (then “south point at bearing W. by 8. per compass,” he wrote in his log) and changed course to west southwest. “I intended to give the point a berth of three miles,” he said later, “but owing to a haze over the land I was deceived in the distance.” There was no haze and this was a lie. Sampson was not her regular captain. Captain T. D. Lucas, who had replaced Captain Wakeman as commander of the Independence a year earlier and whom Sawyer knew and respected, would have known better and steered farther away.

  At 4:00 P.M., the end of Sawyer’s engine room shift, he staggered on deck to get some fresh air. He had no appetite for breakfast. His mouth was dry as cotton. At daybreak the sea was smooth enough for him to spy breakers a long way off. The sight made him nervous. The Vanderbilt Line, known among angry passengers as Vanderbilt’s Death Line, had suffered a string of recent accidents. On July 6, it had lost the Union, run aground on the lower California peninsula. Because the crew and passengers had celebrated the Fourth so heartily the night of July 5, no deck watch had been maintained. On August 17, the northbound Pioneer, an 1,800-ton screw-driven Vanderbilt Line steamer, was run aground with a full load of passengers on a beach in San Simeon’s Bay and abandoned. Shortly afterward, the North America went ashore at Acapulco in bright daylight and excellent visibility.

  With these tragedies in mind Sawyer kept a watchful eye on the breakers and the much too visible sho
re. Those rocks had been laid down upon the chart with specific warnings in red to keep away from the point’s strong currents, high rocks, and sandy islands. Some passengers who had turned out to give the crew a chance to wash the decks observed the rocks, too. “We’re running dead on,” they called up to the wheelhouse. “Mind your own business,” Captain Sampson snapped and dismissed the high, craggy rocks as gray whales that migrate to California every winter. Sawyer knew reefs when he saw them. A sunken reef extended from the southern point of the island for about a mile offshore.

  At 5:15 A.M., in a smooth sea, the Independence struck the high reef, shuddered like a leaf, and caught up against layers of jagged rocks. “Don’t be afraid,” Sampson told the passengers on deck. “You’ll all get to shore safely.” The Independence, which in spite of its newness had not been well maintained, could accommodate 250 persons comfortably and 350 unsafely. There were 359 passengers plus 56 crewmen onboard—415 altogether. Sampson barked the order to back off the rocks. Reversing engines is a complicated process in which the valves must be manipulated by hand by the engineer. Chief Engineer Jason Collins raised the hooks from their cranks until the rocker shaft hung free and then, using a six-foot-long iron bar to turn a shaft at the floor-plate level, he opened an exhaust valve. As the big piston reached the end of its stroke, there was a roar of steam. Collins stepped forward, threw the iron bar in the opposite position, and reversed the pressure from one side of the piston to the other side. “Up bar!” he cried as the hooks dropped perfectly onto the cranks. The Independence was backed off, but its hold was rapidly filling.

  “I knew I would have to beach her to keep her from sinking,” Sampson said. “I got a sail over the bow [under it] to try and stop the leak.” He asked Collins to give him about five minutes’ warning before water was high enough to put out the boilers so he could set a gang of men bailing at each hatchway. Sampson put the helm hard aport and ran the ship close in along the western side of the island for about four miles before he located a small cove on the southwest side. He pointed the ship head on toward the sand to beach it. In the raging surf the vessel swung around broadside, toward the beach.

  Sawyer raced below and dropped into two feet of water. Through a huge rent, the sea was filling up in the Independence’s overheated boilers below the waterline, cooling them rapidly. Collins and his men were fighting to keep steam up. After the coal bunkers flooded, the men began tossing slats from the stateroom berths into the furnaces. Sawyer realized the blower channels were flooded and heard Collins cry, “The blowers are useless!” Loss of the blowers drove the flames furiously out the furnace doors and ignited the woodwork in the fire room and around the smokestack. When flames blocked the ladders to the engine room, the “black gang” cut their way inside with axes. Wielding an ax, Sawyer helped them. Flames broke out from the chimneys and burst from the engine room into the kitchen, killing the cooks and pantry-man, and then erupted through the dead light fore and aft, spreading rapidly throughout the ship. Sawyer saw that two coal passers and a seaman were dead and ran back on deck to help the passengers evacuate. Men had begun pumping water from the sea and battling the blaze with hoses. “It’s useless to do more,” Collins cried.

  Three lifeboats had been hoisted and craned, but among all three there was not one tholepin. Two such pins, forming an oarlock in the gunwale of the boat, act as a fulcrum for the oar. With his jackknife Captain Steele (a passenger) frantically began carving wood into working pins for at least one boat. Steam and flames were blasting up from the hatch and ventilators around the smoke stack. “The scene was perfectly horrible,” Sampson said later. “Men, women and children, screeching, crying and drowning.” According to passengers, “The captain seemed to lose his presence of mind and now the crew paid no attention to his contradictory commands.” The badly wounded, some covered with hideous burns, flesh scalded to the bone, rolled on deck gasping.

  Collins and James L. Freeborn, the purser, panicked, jumped overboard, and in the sea lost consciousness and sank. Seeing their distress, Sawyer, a powerful swimmer, dove into the water, swam down, caught both men by their hair, and pulled them to the surface. As they clung to his back, he swam for the shore a hundred yards away, a feat of amazing strength and stamina. The breakers were running heavier and the rocks were like razors. Depositing Freeborn and Collins on the beach, Sawyer swam back to the burning steamer. He made a number of round-trips, swimming to shore with a passenger or two on his back each time.

  Finally the single repaired boat was lowered, and women, including a passenger named Mrs. Bolle and her two children, and many men, including the ship’s surgeon, who would be needed on land, packed in and were rowed to shore. Those left behind were distraught: Spouses embraced, parents embraced children, and mothers threw their infants into the breakers rather than have them burn. Mrs. Howard and her three infants were lost; Mrs. T. Robinson and her three children drowned. General Ezra Drown, whose wife, Eliza, was drowned, described women clambering down the sides of the ship, “clinging with death-like tenacity to the ropes, rigging and larboard wheel.” Mrs. Ayers, wife of the owner of the Commercial Hotel in San Francisco, threw her child to passenger John Greenback in the water below, then jumped. A protruding beam caught her skirt and she swung piteously over the waves until flames burned her dress away and she dropped. Wealthy men offered their fortunes to be saved. Others clung to spars, hatch covers, tables, trunks, coops, and planks, anything that would float, and tried to reach shore by kicking their feet. Their frantic movements attracted the attention of sharks, drawn to the area by whalers who frequented the islands and left whale carcasses behind.

  At last the other two lifeboats were repaired and Thomas Herren, the steward, launched the second boat of passengers. Exhausted, Sawyer returned in a longboat to the flaming vessel, pulling hard for more passengers in spite of his badly burned forearms. And Sawyer had an idea. Though crippled, he got a group of passengers into life preservers, then towed them ashore all at once and went back for more. One father got his son to shore, but as he was wading through the heavy surf crashing on the beach, he looked back to his beloved wife. Before his eyes she was dashed overboard by “mad, unthinking men jumping upon her and driving her to the bottom.” An hour later the ship was a perfect sheet of flame. The smokestack fell with a crash, raising sparks. The promenade deck tumbled. Chief Engineer Collins, recovering on the beach in the midst of two hundred people, some in the water, saw Sampson clinging to the bow as flames swept aft. Coal Passer Beaumont, near the fore rigging, jumped into a rowboat leaving with two deckhands. Sampson swam to the boat, where he was picked up with others who were afloat.

  On the beach, Sawyer realized their situation was dire: They were marooned on a lone, barren, and stony island off the coast of Baja California Sur with no food, shelter, or water. In the blazing sun, all were quickly overcome with a raging thirst. They found some water in rock fissures and, using a spoon, caught some brackish fluid. As the flames subsided that evening, the steamer burned to the water’s edge and lay broadside. At midnight the mates and crew made a trip to the wreck and salvaged some fruit, pork, and salt beef. Sampson saw a steamer down the coast and launched a boat with two men and attempted to cross the heavy surf, but his boat was swamped and an oar, broken. He got to shore again, but was too exhausted to make another attempt.

  The second day the beach was littered with corpses. Sawyer helped bury them above the high-water mark, but the howling wind constantly uncovered them. Using salvaged boilers and copper pots, Collins fashioned a crude distillery to condense fresh water and procured a pint of potable water every seven minutes. Next they salvaged some spars and an old sail washed ashore, and as the sun sank, made a tent for the women and children. They endured a night of looting and pillaging as the castaways fought over the corpses for their valuables and clothing. “That [Captain Sampson] was insane no one will say, would to God we could,” General Drown raged. “That the act was deliberate and intentional, we believe can and wil
l be successfully established.” Drown estimated that 117 passengers, including 15 crew, had been drowned, burned to death, devoured, or driven out to sea. Collins estimated a total of 175 had been lost. Another passenger, James R. Willoughby, cursed his luck. He had engaged passage on the steamer Northern Light on January 20 just so he could rush aboard the Independence at the last minute and now was sorry he had made the ship. While Sampson went looking for help at the northern end of the island, a few passengers formed their own search party. On February 18, they located and signaled four whalers at anchor on the other side of the island. In the late afternoon they were taken aboard and fed and bathed. The whalers, though, would remain at anchor for two more weeks and delay the passengers’ return to San Francisco.

  The Golden Gate had last seen the Independence in the Gulf of California. In San Francisco, relatives, concerned because the vessel was overdue, conjectured that it might have broken a shaft and put in to Guaymas or La Paz. Four days later the shipwreck survivors were spotted by the whaler Meteor, under Captain Jeffries, then the vessels Omega, James Maury, and the bark Clement, under Captain Lane, who had been at work in the Bay of Magdalena. Lane sent water and food back to them, and a small schooner was procured to take Captain Sampson, Sawyer, and many passengers and crewmen back to San Francisco. Ironically, just a few months earlier, the Independence had reached San Francisco carrying some of the 150 shipwrecked passengers off the ill-fated North America. Some of the Independence survivors found other ways home. Captain Wakemen passed them onboard the New Orleans on his way out of the Gate down to the Marquesas and Tahiti. On March 16, survivor James Willoughby got to San Francisco on the whaling bark Victor with no hat, luggage, or money. He did not need them. The magic of San Francisco worked a spell upon its citizens and imparted the feeling that in this city they could do anything simply by putting their minds to it. Willoughby went on to become a founder of the town of Ventura, a breeder of shorthorn cattle, and was among Ventura County’s landowners with the largest spreads.