Book Review - Webb Johnson

Poet Milton Ray could not have known when he wrote those words that no definitive human history of the Farallon Islands would be published for another sixty years until Peter White completed his engrossing book, The Farallon Islands, Sentinels of The Golden Gate.

For the residents of San Francisco, and most of the Bay Area, the Farallon Islands, lying approximately twenty-six miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge are a familiar site. They are even mentioned in the log books and memoirs of Sir Francis Drake, the English privateer who provisioned his vessel with fresh seal meat there before completing his journey around the world in 1579. And for two hundred years the craggy islands were avoided as hazards to navigation by the Spanish “Manila Galleons” returning to Mexico from their annual voyages to The Philippines. It is not known if native Americans visited the rugged, storm tossed islands prior to the occupation of California by Europeans, but White relates a very lucid and compelling narrative of the fur hunters, families of lighthouse keepers, eggers and biologists who have inhabited this most inhospitable of places since that time.

White is a conservationist and expert in field ornithology, so the abounding wildlife, geography and natural history is accurately and interestingly portrayed, but The Farallon Islands derives its brilliance from the compelling story it tells about the people who actually lived and worked there, and is the only fully compiled source of their extraordinary history.

While the scholarly work is based on hundreds of original sources, including unpublished manuscripts, oral recordings of now deceased former occupants and the lighthouse keepers' logs starting at the time of the California Gold Rush, the narrative reads at the pace of an entertaining novel, with rare photographs and drawings on almost every page.

Author Peter White said in a recent interview that his book was written and published in just a little more than ten years after he began his research. He had settled in the Bay Area following a tour of duty as a U.S. Army Captain in an Airborne Unit in Vietnam. In addition to his two Bronze Star medals for bravery in combat, he had acquired a life-long love of birdwatching during jungle survival training with the U.S. Army Special Forces. Soon he was the married father of two children, employed by the State Department with offices in San Francisco and a member of the Mt.Diablo Audubon Society, near his home in Martinez.

During a bird-watching excursion to the Farallon Islands, in the mid nineteen eighties the boat captain mentioned that at one time families had lived on the islands that were then inhabited only by pelagic birds and those marine mammals lucky enough to avoid the Great White sharks before hauling out on the rocky beaches. This revelation was received with amazement by the other birdwatchers, biologists and assorted Bay Area residents and tourists who were aboard that day. Peter White had discovered his perfect project. He would find out who these families were, and why they were there.

His narrative begins with an overview of the discovery and exploration of the California coast by Spanish explorers. This period began in 1542, and with the lone exception of Sir Francis Drake's brief stopover for seal meat, the islands represented nothing more than hazards to navigation, which forestalled the discovery of San Francisco Bay until 1769. For more than two hundred years the Manila Galleons had followed instructions, “not to follow the bend of the sea at (Point Reyes), but to stand out to sea, in order to keep clear of the Farallones, which lie somewhat to the east of south.” The word “farallon” means “rocky promontory rising from the ocean," and the name has been applied to other similar small islands. Las Farallones de San Francisco came much later.

The human history of the Farallon Islands begins with the American and Russian fur traders who plundered the islands for its wealth of fur seal hides. White quotes an early chronicler of this period to illustrate the extent of this trade and its devastation of the wildlife:

“Judging from the number of parties known to have been left on these rocks or islands, with the last three years by Boston ships . . . it will be safe to state that 150,000 fur seal skins were taken from there during the time; a fact which contrasts Spanish indolence and imbecility with the activity and enterprise of Boston Men.”

Original sources in English language are few for this era, and translations of Russian history are even fewer, but White accessed all the available resources to provide a fascinating account – relating the adventure and enterprise, while revealing the devastation and cruelty. During the Russian period which lasted from roughly 1812 to 1832, semi-permanent settlements of fur hunters were established. These men and women were primarily native Americans, hired or condemned by the Russians at their outpost at Fort Ross on the northern California coast. In 1820, Kapisha, a Coast Miwok man accompanied by his wife, Vayanin, a Kashaya, was condemned to service on the Farallons for murder. By 1826 the island was home to eighteen people, an interesting cultural mix of Russians, Siberians, Kodiaks, Kamchatkans, Aleuts, and native Californians. These groups were stranded on the islands for months at a time, living on whatever they could find, including sea bird eggs, and drinking water trapped in murky pools after rain storms.

With the disappearance of fur seals came the discovery of gold in California. This ushered in a new era of human history for the Farallons. In 1848, the year gold was discovered, what is now the city of San Francisco was home to only 812 European and American residents. In the succeeding ten years, it would become one of the world's major cities with a population as culturally and ethnically diverse as the settlements of fur sealers had been on the Farallons.

And once again the Farallon Islands would play a role. All the new ship traffic required new navigation aids, and the bleak sentinels to the Golden Gate were designated by the United States government as the Twelfth Lighthouse District. This required a lighthouse and a permanent settlement of: first lonely men, then families, who would inhabit the islands for the next century.

These human inhabitants were to share space with the remnants of the marine mammals not slaughtered in the fur trade, as well as tens of thousands of auklets, petrels, gulls, murres, cormorants and tufted puffins who had used the islands as rookeries since time began, and do so to this day. This phenomenal seabird breeding ground is the largest in the contiguous United States, and today is considered something to treasure, but our nineteenth century forebears, always in search of ways to exploit the environment for sport and profit, saw this as an opportunity – the same way the fur traders had a few years earlier. San Francisco, and the rest of nearby California was hungry for life's amenities, and the eggs of these seabirds would be gathered almost to extinction. The eggs came to be a curse, with companies of eggers invading the islands each breeding season, exchanging gunshots with rivals and making life miserable for the lighthouse keepers. The favorite among the collectors were the eggs of the common murre, which is larger than a chicken egg, and a thick shell that made gathering and transporting possible. Even if half the harvest was lost in transport the profits were substantial. White, though a staunch conservationist and avid birdwatcher, relates the events and history of sealing and egging dispassionately, with little editorializing or moralizing, but careful readers will detect a twinkle in the authorial eye as he describes how the eggers were pecked mercilessly by angered birds as they tottered around the barren, slippery cliffs with other squawking birds soaring overhead and splashing their droppings down on them like a snow storm.

Before egging operations began, the murre population numbered in the hundreds of thousands, with more than 500,000 eggs gathered during a two month period in 1854. The population continued to dwindle until 1896 when only 91,400 eggs were gathered. A visiting ornithologist counted 60,000 nesting murres in that, the last year of commercial egging. The population was further decimated by oil tankers that routinely dumped their ballast before entering San Francisco harbor. In 1959 only 6000 murre could be found nesting on the island, and many biologists believed that the bird would soon become extinct on the Farallons. Today, due to the efforts of dedicated conservationists and sympathetic lawmakers, the population has risen to approximately 70,000 pairs, which bodes well for the continued life of the species.

The nature of society on the island was altered in the 1860s when the principal keeper of the light brought his wife and four-year-old daughter to the islands. The little girl called herself “the girl of the Farallones,” for the rest of her long life. For a century after she and her mother and father arrived, families were an important part of island life, and it is White's description of their work-a-day lives that raises his work from the category of very interesting non-fiction to the level of art.

When explorer Charles Nordhoff visited the Farallons in 1874, he remarked, “I have never seen an inhabited spot which seemed so utterly desolate, so entirely separated from the world, whose people appear . . . to have such a slender hold on mankind.”

Only those who have seen the islands up close, or those possessing very vivid imaginations can appreciate the definitude of Nordhoff's observation. For one thing, there are no trees and what precious little vegetation there is grows low to the ground, and disappears for most of the year. In the winter, southerly storms blow fifty-knot winds, and twenty-five foot seas pummel the rocky shoreline. The birds and mammals and fog take over during the spring and summer, with just a brief period of clear weather during October and November. There has never been a pier or docking facilities at the Farallons. The ocean between the Golden Gate and the islands is extremely rough and dangerous, and only experienced sailors, or foolhardy novices attempt to navigate small craft in this area at any time of the year. To land on the islands requires a twenty-six mile voyage across this treacherous stretch of ocean, then to lie tossing at anchor while boarding a boatswain's chair and being launched on a crane-like device called a landing boom.

This was how the men, women and children arrived at their island home, and how its few visitors arrive to this day. Log entries for these occasions list many tragic incidences. One of these dated February 22, 1890 relates, “Keeper's child drown today, boat capsized.” Another in 1892 was just as brusque; “Mrs. Winther and 2 children capsized at landing, boat lost.”

Despite the desperate conditions the families managed to thrive, and White imparts their stories of hardships and simple joys from the perspective of a husband and father as well as a reporter and historian. Over the years the living conditions improved, with new dwellings built, and the population was increased dramatically in 1896 when the Navy established a radio station and later a weather station.

The permanent human habitation ended in the mid-1960's when the light was automated and the year round occupancy was no longer required. At this point, a private organization supported by donations, known as the Point Reyes Bird Observatory became caretakers of the Farallons. Its mission is to return the islands to the condition that attracted the Russian and Yankee fur traders, and inglorious egg collectors in the first place, and after almost forty years of solitude, the islands are beginning to heal themselves. All the bird counts are up and stabilized, and elephant seals have returned to breed after an absence of more than a century.

The Farallon Islands, Sentinels of the Golden Gate is an important and fascinating book – the only book telling the whole story of the Farallon Islands including an absorbing and remarkable human history, that even most San Francisco historians know nothing about. Ask anyone who has seen the islands on a daily basis if they knew there were homes and families and schools on the islands for about one hundred years, and you will likely receive a look of astonishment. This history has been simply overlooked until Peter White contributed his rich and eminently readable narrative.