{"id":4882,"date":"2014-04-26T08:42:48","date_gmt":"2014-04-26T13:42:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=4882"},"modified":"2014-04-26T08:43:46","modified_gmt":"2014-04-26T13:43:46","slug":"morbid-fact-du-jour-for-april-26-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=4882","title":{"rendered":"Morbid Fact Du Jour for April 26, 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s Xenophobic Yet Truly Morbid Fact!<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The Oceanic on the prowl.<\/p><\/div>\n

A sunken steamship involved in one of San Francisco’s worst maritime disasters was discovered at the bottom of San Francisco Bay, a silent reminder of a historic calamity that rocked a city steeped in xenophobia and racial\u00a0hatred. \u00a0The wreckage of the 202-foot-long passenger ship, the City of Chester, was found sitting upright in the shipping channel near the Golden Gate Bridge, a giant gash still visible in its port-side bow, scientists and historians with the\u00a0National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration\u00a0said\u00a0Wednesday. \u00a0The Chester sank after being hit by the ocean liner Oceanic in 1888, taking 16 people down with her, the second-deadliest maritime disaster in San Francisco\u00a0history. \u00a0The wreckage was found in May at a depth of 217 feet using a high-tech echo-sound sonar system. Scientists have spent the months since then analyzing the data, gathering facts and putting together high-definition maps of the\u00a0wreck. \u00a0“It was sad in a way because of the loss of life, but to be able to connect with maritime history was amazingly fulfilling and to find a wreck of such significance was also extremely exciting,” said\u00a0Laura Pagano, a physical science tech with NOAA’s navigation response\u00a0team.<\/p>\n

The calamity was notorious not just because of the deaths, but also because the ship that hit the City of Chester had 74 Chinese crewmen and 1,062 Chinese steerage passengers. The accident happened at a time when xenophobic fears of a “yellow peril” were at a peak in San Francisco, and five years after President\u00a0Chester Arthur\u00a0signed the Chinese Exclusion\u00a0Act. \u00a0The disaster occurred on a foggy September morning. The Chester,\u00a0<\/em>with 106 aboard,\u00a0<\/em>was heading out on its usual run to Eureka just as the Oceanic was arriving in San Francisco after 25 days at sea from Hong\u00a0Kong. \u00a0Robert Schwemmer, the regional coordinator of NOAA’s maritime heritage program, said the two ships spotted each other about a half mile before impact, signaled and prepared to pass. The problem, he said, was that the incoming current and a riptide bouncing off Fort Point pushed the Chester off course and the captain couldn’t\u00a0correct. \u00a0Contemporary newspaper accounts and court documents described a frenzy on board the Chester before impact. “She’s running us down!” someone cried. “Hard to a-starboard! Hard to a-starboard!” yelled the wild-eyed\u00a0captain. \u00a0The sharp prow of the Oceanic cut through the doomed ship as though “she were made of cheese,” according to news accounts at the time. Schwemmer said it penetrated the hull 10 feet, nearly cutting the steamer in\u00a0half. \u00a0Men, women and children were trapped below deck as the rest of the passengers scrambled toward the\u00a0bow.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The doomed City of Chester.<\/p><\/div>\n

“Save yourselves,” yelled the captain of the Chester, according to the book “Ocean of Bitter Dreams,” by\u00a0Robert Schwendinger. “Everyone who\u00a0can!” \u00a0It took only six minutes for the steamer to sink, but passengers and crew on the Oceanic pulled dozens of survivors out of the water and Chinese sailors jumped into the water to rescue others. One sailor, named Ah Lung, dived into the water and heroically saved the life of a young boy, wrote Schwendinger in his book, which details America’s troubled maritime relations with the\u00a0Chinese. \u00a0The dead included three members of the Chester’s crew and 13 men, women and\u00a0children. \u00a0“When this happened, it happened in an atmosphere in which the population was dead set against the Chinese,” said\u00a0James Delgado, the director of NOAA’s maritime heritage program. “They accused the Chinese of standing there impassively and watching these white people\u00a0drown.” \u00a0Subsequent reports of heroism among the Chinese crew not only proved the accusations wrong, but also may have helped change some people’s racist attitudes, Delgado\u00a0said.<\/p>\n

“What this shipwreck reminds us of,” he said, “is that you don’t need to make assumptions based on color, language, religion or\u00a0nationality.” \u00a0Pagano said her team was charting a 1952 shipwreck known as the Fernstream, when representatives of the Gulf of the\u00a0Farallones National Marine Sanctuary\u00a0asked them to see if they could find the\u00a0Chester. \u00a0Historians provided her team with an 1888 geodetic survey in which the position of the steamer was charted using a wire dragged across the bay floor. She said it took the team two days in a 28-foot boat equipped with multi-beam sonar to locate the wreckage, only 400 feet from where surveyors estimated it sat 125 years\u00a0earlier. \u00a0“We thought we may have found it, but we weren’t sure until we brought the information back to the office,” Pagano said. “We were very excited when it turned out to be the exact dimensions as what they were looking\u00a0for.” \u00a0Subsequent images showed the gaping hole that sank the\u00a0steamer. \u00a0Delgado said NOAA plans to put the information on its website and solicit members of the Chinese community for their perspectives. There are no plans to salvage the wreckage, he\u00a0said.<\/p>\n

Culled from: SFGate.Com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s Xenophobic Yet Truly Morbid Fact! A sunken steamship involved in one of San Francisco’s worst maritime disasters was discovered at the bottom of San Francisco Bay, a silent reminder of a historic calamity that rocked a city steeped in xenophobia and racial\u00a0hatred. \u00a0The wreckage of the 202-foot-long passenger ship, the City of Chester, was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-facts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4882"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4887,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4882\/revisions\/4887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}