San Francisco: The “Vicar of Bray” in Yerba Buena Cove During the Gold Rush in 1849

Included in San Francisco’s armada of gold seekers were many foreign ships. The Vicar of Bray, shown here, was an English ship built in 1841 by Robert hardy. The bark was named after a sixteenth-century English vicar whose religious ‘convictions’ during the Reformation and post-Reformation shifted with preference of each occupant of the British throne, and thus he both survived and prospered while many of his more resolute brethren were either burned at the stake or hanged.

When the Vicar of Bray arrived in San Francisco on November 3, 1849, there were some 741 abandoned vessels in the cove. Even though there was a twelve-year jail penalty for jumping ship, the lust for gold usually over came all reason. The ships abandoned by their crews were pulled ashore to serve as hotels and warehouses.

The Vicar of Bray exhibited the ability of her namesake to survive; after escaping the maelstrom of the gold Rush, she resumed her role as a trader, and for the next thirty years transported cargo between the British Isles and South America. In 1880 she was hulked in Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, where, incredibly, she remains to this day, the only surviving ship of the hundreds the thronged San Francisco Bay in 1849.

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