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Serendipity: The Abalone Junks of La Playa

John Gerlach

Robert Nash:

I think it is important to know how man has taken his livelihood from the sea. I think it is important to know how things got like they are, and I do not think that the simplistic explanations presented in popularized accounts tell us this. The whole seafaring technology, partly because it is so ancient but also partly because it is alien to the lives of most people, is underplayed, if not dismissed, by historians with insufficient technological backgrounds to understand what it is they are talking about. I think it is important that someone who understands the issues and problems involved set it down for the record before it is completely lost.

La Playa is a terrace on the lee side of a high treeless point which looms over it, blocking the persistent coastal fog and seas, and sheltering the mouth of San Diego Bay from the prevailing northwesterly winds. Across the narrow channel of the bay is a low sand barrier island and a narrow sand spit that forms the bay and runs southward in a gentle arc almost to Baja California. Three ephemeral rivers, ephemeral because this is a near desert landscape, transport coarse granitic sand from the hills and mountains of the hinterland to the Bay. The mouth of the San Diego River escapes a narrow canyon about a mile east of the point where its sandy delta covers an active fault that separates the point from the mainland. The point is the uppermost edge of a gently westward sloping crustal block. After the oceans rose with the melting of the glaciers, the soft sandstone of its windward side was cut into steep bluffs by long period swells produced by fierce winter storms far to the northwest. San Diego Bay, and its smaller sibling bay to the north, lie directly on the fault and exist because the fractured crust under the bays is sinking faster than the river delta can fill the hole. Tidal and riverine flows molded the coarse river sand into La Playa’s steep beach, its deep channels and sandbars, and made it a perfect all-season anchorage near the mouth of a very large but shallow bay. On the 2,000-mile (3,200 km) coastline from Canada to the tip of Baja California, it is one of two all-season natural harbors that a large sailing ship could enter.

1849 Sketch of San Diego Bay and the point, looking from the presidio towards La Playa, H.M.T. Powell.

Cabrillo landed at La Playa in 1542 while he was searching for a route for Spain’s Manila treasure galleons to sail Chinese silk and china, and spices, to southern New Spain. Vizcaíno landed at La Playa in 1602. The next landing occurred in 1769 by an advance party sent to establish a mission and presidio to keep the Russians and British from claiming New Spain. The Spanish king’s engineers built a graded road from La Playa to the presidio. Vancouver landed in 1793. The first Yankees landed in 1800. They sporadically hunted sea otters for their pelts which were greatly valued by the Chinese and sold in Canton, and each time were driven off by the Spanish. In 1822, the Mexican flag was raised at the presidio. Annually, for almost 250 years, Spain’s Manila treasure galleons had sailed south just offshore. Yet, until Mexico opened Alta California for trade, fewer ships had anchored off La Playa than spacecraft have landed on Mars. It, and Baja California to the south, were the far side of the world from the perspective of the rest of the world.

In 1803, Alexander von Humbolt, on his way home from exploring in South America, stopped by the library in Mexico City and copied the Spanish maps and geographical descriptions of New Spain. Continuing homeward, Humbolt stopped in Washington DC to meet President Thomas Jefferson and gave Jefferson 14 pages of documents describing the areas of Mexico which the US was interested in taking in its westward expansion to the Pacific Ocean. In the 1820s, Mexican Alta California was swarming with wild, long-horned, Spanish criollo cattle which browsed its shrub covered hills and a brief hide trade attracted European and American ships to La Playa. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., worked at La Playa’s cattle hide houses and described the area, the bay, and the people in Two Years Before the Mast. The US did expand westward but, by the time the American flag was raised at the ruins of the presidio in 1847, San Diego had fallen on hard times and was nearly abandoned. Two years later gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, 500 miles to the north, the Gold Rush was unleashed, and the territory of California was made a state to establish a civil government and laws.

San Diego Bay, 1857.

La Playa and San Diego escaped the turmoil of the Gold Rush but were impacted by shore-based whalers who created a community on the ruins of the Spanish cannon emplacement at Ballast Point, a small sand spit jutting perpendicularly into the bay just seaward of La Playa. In 1861, the Los Angeles Star newspaper reported that one junk was anchored in San Diego Bay [probably at Ballast Point]. The residents of Ballast Point included Juk and Ah Sing who sold fresh fish and Pismo clams to the residents of Old Town San Diego. The tax collector reported in 1863 that they owned boats and nets and, in 1865, that Ah Yu owned a schooner [likely a two-masted junk]. The whalers (Portuguese-Americans, Irish-Americans, Europeans, and Chinese) established seasonal shore whaling camps at strategic locations southward along the coast of Baja California specifically to hunt the gray whale. In 1873, the Ballast Point community was evicted by the US Army Corps of Engineers and the Chinese moved to La Playa where they established a fishing and boat building camp. Archaeological digs at the location of the Chinese shacks on the Ballast Point site uncovered remnants of kelp harvesting and abalone shells.

San Diego Bay, 1895.

Robert Nash was born in land-locked central Ohio in 1915. His family apparently craved salt water and moved to Southern California, becoming sailors at San Pedro Harbor just south of Los Angeles, and just east of the Channel Islands. Nash sailing alone a couple miles offshore in his late teens or early 20s, came upon a derelict boat that looked like an antique or a movie set prop and towed it home as his rightful salvage. Its ancient hull was planked with wood from California’s coastal redwood, tied for the world’s tallest tree with a Canadian Douglas fir and Australia’s mountain ash. Nash’s relic was no rival to those trees being about 20 feet long. Its deck was gone, it had no rigging, and no gear was aboard. Someone had recently cast it adrift for its last voyage. Old salts at the harbor couldn’t identify the type of hull - it had an unusually bluff round bow and a high square stern. Nash borrowed an anchor and chain and moored his prize just off the harbor beach. A month later, a terrific winter storm struck. The boats anchored off the beach broke free and were buried under drift sand along the shore with just their masts marking their presence like so many tombstones. Nash’s redwood mystery boat was gone.

Twenty years later, Nash, who had acquired some broader knowledge of the world’s sailing vessels, possibly at his new job with NATO, realized that his redwood relic had the hull form of a Chinese junk. Nash did some preliminary research, determined that Chinese junks had been built and fished in California, and wrote a two-page paper about California’s junks that was published in The Journal of Nautical Research. After his stint with NATO, and now in his 50s, Nash entered college as a freshman, first attending a local community college, then a state college, and ultimately earning a PhD in geography from UCLA in 1971. His research focused on the Chinese shrimp fishery of the San Francisco Bay area which was featured in an earlier JRA article.

Nash’s interest in junks (and other ethnic fishing craft), and in the Chinese, grew and he spent countless hours in government archives sorting through boxes of unindexed documents for rare nuggets of information and acquiring photographs of California’s junks. He was elected an officer and director of the Nautical Research Association and was a founder and the first member of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (CHSSC). Nash gave a talk about his research on California’s Chinese junks at the San Pedro Maritime Museum, just a couple blocks from where he had anchored his redwood prize 40 years earlier. Nash died in 1976 not long after his talk and left his research materials to the CHSSC which now curates the Nash Collection among many others on the history of Chinese in California.

During his talk, Nash projected a slide of his favorite junk, which is almost universally declared to be one of the most beautiful junks in the world by everyone who has seen the photograph. Some who prefer fancier junks might argue with that assessment but it has the sweet and clean lines of well-built and maintained offshore junk. The photograph the slide was made from is an incredibly rare thing for California but also for China where small offshore junks are almost completely undocumented. In the photo, the California abalone junk is in the anchorage off La Playa, just inside the barrier sand bar that separates the anchorage from the main channel of the bay, anchor up, all sails hoisted, its crew on deck, and its skiffs and a sailing sampan in tow. The vessel was known as the Sun Yun Lee.

Sun Yun Lee, no date, Fred W. Kelsey, Title Insurance and Trust Co., CHSSC.

Frederick Kelsey was a San Diego businessman who in 1887 cofounded the Kelsey-Jenney Business College downtown, just 10 blocks from the wharfs on San Diego Bay. Kelsey was an avid conchologist with several specimens housed in the collection of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. One species of sea snail he discovered while dredging off the point was named after him. He took his family with him on frequent seashell hunting trips north along the Coast of California and south into Baja California. He and many of his family were artists. Kelsey’s artform was amateur photography and his business success meant that he could afford one of the very expensive new cameras with fast photographic plates, a fast lens, and a fast shutter so he could take photos that were unblurred by motion. He took photographs everywhere he traveled and especially of doings at the harbor. One summer day in the late 1880s, Kelsey traveled by boat to La Playa and, at exactly the right moment, captured the image of the Sun Yun Lee.

continued/  to read the rest of the article, click here:  The abalone junks of La Playa.docx