The Set of the Sail by Wally Smith

Reprinted from the November 15, 1984 Mendocino Beacon

Few sailing ships or steamers plied their trade between San Francisco and Anchorage without occasionally dropping anchor off the mouth of Big River, taking on passengers or cargo to fill the hold when Noyo Harbor failed to fill it. Nearly all of them were photographed and identified at one time or another lying off the Mendocino Headlands, and the late Nannie Escola [local school teacher and historian] collected most of the photos.

Hence it came as quite a surprise the other day when Evelyn Escola [Nannie’s daughter-in-law] came upon a photo of a three-masted barkentine—obviously in Mendocino harbor—which Nannie had not identified. It took a powerful magnifying glass and the combined efforts of Evelyn, Dorothy Bear, and Beth Stebbins of the Kelley House to decipher the name “J.M. Griffith” on her bow. Then another surprise.

This ship couldn’t be found listed either in Nannie’s scrapbooks, shelved at the Kelley House, or in the books “Ships of the Redwood Coast,” published by Stanford University Press in 1945 and revised in 1970 by original author Jack McNairn and Jerry MacMullen.

Dorothy sought the aid of Richard Tooker of the San Francisco Maritime Museum. He reported that the “The Griffith” was built in Washington in 1882 and plied her trade between Puget Sound and San Diego. During the years just prior to the First World War, she loaded lumber frequently at Noyo Harbor for Hawaii or Australia. And just once she took on cargo at Mendocino. On that solitary occasion, [amateur local photographer] Perley Maxwell took the mysterious photo.

Not long after the receipt of Tooker’s reply, Dorothy was looking through Nannie Escola’s unfiled papers and came across a reference to “The Griffith” in a Marine Digest article by John Lyman of the Maritime Research Society of San Diego. “The Griffith,” wrote Lyman, weighed in at 606 tons, was built in Seabeck, Washington, and was based at first at Port Townsend. In those years during which she took on lumber at Mendocino and Noyo Harbor, she was owned by the Griffith Retriever Company with a sister ship named “The Retriever.” 

[A barkentine, or schooner bark, had three or more masts, with the front mast square-rigged and the others fore-and-aft rigged. Because of the reduction of square sails, it required fewer crew members and was often used for carrying lumber. It was used primarily for coastal shipping because of its ability to go into the wind with the fore-aft sails, but it could catch long wind currents with the square sails.]

In 1916 “The Griffith” was sold for $15,000 to A.F. Thane, who 15 months later sold her for twice that amount to L.A. Scott of Mobile, Alabama. By 1920 she was under Portuguese registry, and within a few years, her name had vanished from the registers. Apparently she had been shipwrecked or retired from service.

We were fortunate that Maxwell snapped her picture on the only occasion she dropped anchor off Mendocino.