The Wreck of the Frolic

"On the foggy night of July 25, 1850, the two masted schooner Frolic, built in Baltimore by the company that held the slave papers on Abolitionist Fredrick Douglass, ran aground on the rocks north of Point Cabrillo. The Frolic, which normally ran opium from India to China, was taking oriental trade goods to booming San Francisco, where top dollar would be paid for the silks, porcelain, preserved ginger, and canton-bottled Edinburghale on board.

The Ship's captain and his mates took the leaky lifeboat to San Francisco, while the crew- all people of color - probably walked straight to the Sierra gold fields. When the shipwrecked officers reached the City, entrepreneur Henry Meiggs dispatched a salvage crew to the wild coast of Mendocino.

When salvage boss Jerome Ford found the wreck's location, the Pomo women camped nearby wore shawls of Chinese silk- the local natives had already scavenged the goods from the wreck, eating the ginger and making beads from the china. Ford went back to San Francisco empty handed, but told Meiggs of the vast redwood forests so close to the little bay at the mouth of Big River.

Meiggs soon sent Ford back up the coast, shipping a sawmill to meet him. By 1853 the little lumber town at Mendocino Bay was booming and the wreck of the Frolic was forgotten.

Roughly 80 years later some Pomo people camped at Point Cabrillo told a settler named Freitas about the old shipwreck. Local divers found the wreck, salvaging remaining goods and exploring the ruins. Some thought the wreck was a chinese sampan, others had their own theories, but the wreck's true idenity had been lost.

Only after 1984, when archaeologists found arrow points of green glass and beads made of Chinese ceramics in excavations of a Pomo village site between Fort Bragg and Willits, did Dr. Thomas Layton fit the puzzle pieces together and reveal the wreck's historic idenity. The remains of the FRolic are now on the National Register of Historic Places, and another big piece of Mendocino Coast history has been saved. Dr. Layton tells the whole enthralling story in his book, Voyage of the Frolic, published in 1997 by Stanford University Press."

From Bob Lorentzex's must have book "The Mendocino Coast Glove Box Guide"