19th-century ship unearthed in Calif. has New England roots

SAN FRANCISCO -- The skeleton of a ship unearthed at a construction site belongs to an early 19th-century merchant vessel that sailed out of New London, Conn., and limped through the Golden Gate after its last voyage, maritime archeologists concluded.

The three-masted Candace was built in Boston in 1818 and sailed the South Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans before it suffered ice damage while on a two-year whaling expedition in the Arctic.

Originally bound for home in New England, the leaking ship was retired in 1855 when the captain concluded it wouldn't make it past San Francisco, according to James Allan, the archeologist who helped identify the Candace.

The ship remained buried at the onetime site of a dismantling yard until crews found its timbers in September while digging foundations for a pair of high-rise condominiums in San Francisco.

While dozens of old ships abandoned after the 1849 Gold Rush live under the streets of San Francisco, the Candace was the first to be discovered mostly intact, Allan said. The San Francisco Museum and Historical Society hopes to install the hull at a new city history museum that is scheduled to open in two years.

''We consider it a coup," said Gil Castle, the society's executive director.

Allan and James Delgado, executive director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum in Canada, figured out that the buried ship was the Candace by consulting old San Francisco newspapers, ship logs, maritime museums, and the Center for Wood Anatomy Research run by the US Forest Service in Madison, Wis.

Built from three kinds of oak and two kinds of pine, the ship was relatively small, at 99 feet, 8 inches long and 26 feet wide.