All the years after the Pope had divided the New World between Spain and the Portuguese2, the harbour lay hidden. Cabrillo, Drake, Maldonado, Juan de Fuca, Viscaino passed it in the night or veiled in obscuring fogs. And then Saint Francis showed it clear and lovely to Don Gaspar Portola, having for that revelation led him with holden eyes past his journey's objective. Likewise, when the time was ripe, he put it into the mind of the Yankee alcalde at Yerba Buena, a trading-post in the neighbourhood of Mission Dolores, that if the hamlet should be called San Francisco it might catch by implication the vessels3 clearing all ports of the world for San Francisco bay.
O Chance, Chance! says the historian and turns another page. But it is my opinion that among the birds to which Saint Francis preached was included the Little Duck.
The piers4 of the city front east, they face the Berkeley Hills, the Oaklands, the lands of the Sycamore, or, as the first settlers named them, the Alamedas. From thence vast settlements take their name, feeding the city as sea-birds do, from their own breasts. Back and forth5 between them the shuttling ferries weave thin webs of glistening6 wakes, duck-bodied tugs7 chugg and scuttle8, busy [109] still at world-building. From the promontory9 which makes the northern barrier of the Gate, Tamalpias swims out of atmospheric10 blueness. On its seaward slope, hardly out of reach of the siren's bellowing11 note, Muir Park preserves the ancient forest, rooted in the litter of a thousand years. And round about the foot of city and mountain the waters of the bay are blue, the hills are bluer. The hills melt down to greenness in the spring, the water runs to liquid emerald, flashing amber12; the hills are tawny13 after rains, the waters tone to the turbid14, clayey river-floods; land and sea they pursue one another as lovers through changing moods of colour; they have mists for mystery between revealing suns. Unless these things count for something, San Francisco is the very worst site in the world for a city. You take your heart in your mouth every time you go out to afternoon tea in the tram-cars that dip and swing like cockles at sea. They cut across streets so steep that grass grows between the cobbles where no traffic ever passes, to plunge15 down lanes of dwellings16 perched precariously17 as sea-birds' nests on the bare bones of hills that for true hilliness shame Rome's imperial seven. The bay side of the peninsula is mud, the Pacific side is sand. There great wasteful18 dunes19 [110] blow up, they shift and pile, they take the contours of the wind-lashed waters—the very worst site in the world for a great city's pleasure-ground, and yet somehow it is there.
For this city is one of those which have souls; it is a spirit sitting on a height, taking to itself form and the offices of civilisation20. This is a thing that we know, because we have seen the land shake it as a terrier shakes a rat, until the form of the city was broken; it dissolved in smoke and flame. And then as a polyp of the sea draws out of the fluent water form and perpetuity for itself, we saw our city draw back its shapes of wood and stone, and statelier, more befitting a spirit that has endured so much. Nobody knows really what a city is except that it is something more than a collocation of houses. From Telegraph Hill, where the old semaphore stood, which signalled the far-between arrivals of ships around the Horn, you can see the trade of the world pass and repass the pillars of the Gate, the wall-sided warships21. But none of these things really explain how San Francisco came to be clinging there to the leeward22 of a windy spit of land, like a great, grey sea-bird with palpitating wings.
True to her situation, San Francisco is nothing [111] if not dramatic. One recalls that the earliest foundation was dedicated23 to Our Lady of Dolors, Nuestro Señora de Dolores; the Indians fought here as they did nowhere else against Christian24 dominion25. There were more burials than baptisms, and in the old cemetery26 of Yerba Buena the dead were so abandoned of all grace that the sand refused to hold them. One who spent his boyhood in the shifting purlieus of the old Laguna told me how in the hollows where the scrub oaks shrugged27 off the wind and the sand waved like water, the nameless coffins28 were covered and uncovered between a night and day. But if the dead could not hold their tenancy, the living succeeded. They did it by the very force of that dramatic instinct awakened29 by the plot and counterplot of natural forces.
No Greek tragedy moved to more relentless30 measures than the moral upheaval31 of '56, when the whole city, in solemn funeral train behind the victim of one of those wild outbursts of lawlessness peculiar32 to the "gold rush," saw the lifeless bodies of the perpetrators hanging from the upper windows of the Vigilance Committee. Fifty years later came a wilder rout33, down streets searched out by fire, snatching at humour as they ran, as so many points of contact for the city's rebuilding. [112]
The very worst location in the world, as I have remarked, is this windy promontory past which the grey tides race, but so long as a city can dramatise itself, one situation will do as well as another in which to render itself immortal34.
The bay of San Francisco with its contingencies35 is one of the most interesting of inland yachting waters, full of adventurous36 weather. It is possible to sail in one general direction from Alviso to the city of Sacramento, a hundred and fifty miles, and that without attempting the thousand miles of estuary37 and slough38 through which the waters slink and wind.
At this season of the year the river is pushed backward by the tide a matter of ten miles or more above Sacramento City: on the San Joaquin it is felt as far as Crow's Landing. At Antioch it begins to be saltish, and down through Suisun and Carquinez the river-water fights its way as far as San Pablo before its identity is wholly lost. At flood-times it may be traced, a yellowish, turgid streak39, as far as Alcatraz. This is the islet of the albatross which lies south of the tide race, as Tiburon is on the north, fragments all of them of that salt-rimed ledge41 outside the gate where hoarse42 sea-lions play, and brother to the castellated cloud [113] far along on the sea's horizon, the very capital of the kingdom of the Little Duck.
The Faralone Light is the last dropped astern by the Island steamships43 sagging44 south to the equator; it is also the sea-birds' city of refuge. This is the great murre rookery of the west coast, and formerly45 thousands of dozens of eggs were regularly taken from the Faralones to the San Francisco market; but since the islands became a Government station the murres have no enemy but the pirates of the air. In clefts46 and ledges47 close against the wall-sided cliffs they defend their shallow nests against the sheering gulls49, or, hard beset50, will push their single, new-hatched nestling into the friendlier sea, darting51 to break its fall with incredible swiftness, for a swimming gait is one of the things that come out of the shell with the native-born at the Faralones. On the same shelving rocks puffins rear their ratty young in burrows52 or under sheltering boulders53, and the ashy petrel, the "little Peter" of the sea, walking by night before the storm, comes ashore54 here to hide his seldom nest. On the south Faralone the fierce cormorant55 builds her house of painted weed, which often the gulls steal from her as fast as she brings it ashore, for the gulls are the grafters of [114] the sea-birds' city. This particular variety, known as the western gull48, neither fishes for himself nor forages56 for building material. He feeds on the eggs and nestlings of his neighbours, or waits to snatch the day's catch from the beak57 that brought it up from the sea. He has the virtue58 of all predatory classes, an exemplary domesticity. His nest is soft and clean, his nestlings handsome. The western gull is often found marauding far up the estuary of Sacramento, but it is his congener, the herring gull, who follows the long white wake the ferries make ploughing the windy bay; or, distinguished among the silent shore birds for multitude and clamour, scavenges its reedy borders.
Except for the promontories60 north and south, and the bold front of the Berkeley Hills opposing the Gate, the inland borders of the bay are flat tide-lands and sea-smelling lagunas. Stilts61, avocets, herons, all the waders that haunt this coast or visit it in their seasonal62 flights, may be seen stalking the shallows for minnows, or where the marsh63 grass reddens, poised64 like some strange tide-land blossom, lifted on two slender stems. Low over them any clear day may be seen the grey old marsh hawk65 sailing, or the "duck hawk," the peregrine of falconry, following fiercely in the wake of the [115] migrating hordes66 of water-fowl. All about Alviso the guttural cry of the black-crowned night-heron sounds eerily67 above the marshes68, along with the peculiar "pumping" love-song of the bittern.
For some reason the air of the marshes is friendly to the mistletoe infesting69 the oaks and sycamores which stand back from the tide-line; but the marshes themselves are treeless. They have their own sorts of growth, cane70 and cat-tails and tule, goosefoot, samphire, and the tasselled sedges. This samphire of Shakespeare, l'herbe de Saint Pierre of the Normandy Marshes, is the glory of the Franciscan tide-lands; miles of it, barely above the level of the slow-moving water, spread a magic carpet of blending crimsons71, purples, and bronzes. Under the creeping mists and subject to the changes of the water, beaten to gold and copper72 under the sun, it redeems73 the flat lines of the landscape with a touch of Oriental splendour.
For it is a flat kingdom, that of the Little Duck—the hills hanging remotely on the horizon, the few trees and scattered74 hugging the low shore of the sloughs75 as the shipwrecked cling to their rafts, desperate of rescue. The rich web of the samphire, the shifting colour of the water, faintly [116] reminiscent of Venice, borrow another foreign touch from the names under which the borders recommended themselves to attention:—Sausalito, "little
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