Mendocino County Museum
400 East Commercial Street, Willits, California 95490
707-459-2736
In the late 1840s, the Baltimore-built clipper ship Frolic plied Asian waters as one of the fastest American sailing vessels in the opium trade between India and China.
For its last voyage, the ship was outfitted by New England merchants
in Canton with a cargo of export goods bound for Gold Rush San
Francisco. Those goods included colorful silks, ceramics, lacquer ware,
camphor wood trunks, a prefabricated house and more than 6,000 bottles
of Edinburgh ale.
The ship never reached its intended destination. It ran onto
the rocky Mendocino Coast July 26, 1850, and played an interesting role
in
North Coast history. Pomo Indians were first to salvage cargo, and some
fashioned arrowheads from Frolic ale bottles. Members of the Frolic salvage crew helped launch the Redwood Empire's redwood logging industry, and Frolic captain Edward Horatio Faucon was immortalized in Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast.
The Wreck | Captain Faucon | Dr Thomas Layton | Links
The Captain
After surviving the wreck of the Frolic on the coast near Pt.
Cabrillo, and completing his trek to San Francisco, Captain Edward
Faucon wrote to the owners of the ship to report what had happened.
"Captain Faucon was a sailor, every inch of him. He knew what a ship
was, and was as much at home in one as a cobbler in his stall. I want
no better proof of this than the opinion of the ship's crew, for they
had been six months under his command, and knew him thoroughly. And if
sailors allow their captain to be a good seaman, you may be sure he is
one, for that is a thing they are not usually ready to admit. To find
fault with the seamanship of the captain is a crew's reserved store for
grumbling." -- Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast
The Captain was well aware that his letter would be included in the
Augustine Heard & Co. claim for insurance. In light of this
perspective, underwater archeologists have surveyed the wreck
site in detail to see what the evidence tells us about the fateful accident, and
what may or may not be reflected in the Captain's words.
The Wreck | Captain Faucon | Dr Thomas Layton | Links
The Archeologist, Dr Thomas N Layton
Dr Layton, a distinguished professor of anthropology at San
Jose State University, had conducted many field studies in
Mendocino County with his students of archeology. In the summer of
1984, they examined a site called Three Chop Village.
Among the usual artifacts of Pomo material culture of the
mid-nineteenth century,they found fragments that seemed wrong for the
time and place--chips and shards of blue and white glazed porcelain, and brown
bottle glass worked into arrowheads.
From that day, Dr Layton began his quest for the explanation. It was
serendipity that brought this uniquely qualified scholar into contact
with the initial evidence. He expertly researched the many paths of the
story, enthusiastically engaged the participation of sport divers,
historians, artists--people from many walks of life--and made possible several museum exhibitions, including Mendocino County Museum in Willits, California.
The Wreck | Captain Faucon | Dr Thomas Layton | Links
The Thomas N Layton Collection
Most of the cargo objects in the Frolic collection are broken,
tarnished and deteriorated as a result of the 100+ years they spent
submerged in the ocean off the Mendocino Coast. In order to show what
these objects would have looked like, had they reached the market in
San Francisco in 1850, Dr. Thomas N. Layton has sought out and
collected pieces that match many of the Frolic cargo items. These have
been added to the Mendocino County Museum's permanent collection, as authorized by the California State Legislature in 2004, and
are identified in this exhibition as the Thomas N. Layton Collection.
Links to other Frolic websites
Found! the Wreck of the Frolic
The Frolic exhibit was on loan from the Mendocino County Museum in October, 1999. A history of the wreck is on their website.
Frolic Dive online exhibit from Point Cabrillo Lighthouse
The Frolic was discovered near Point Cabrillo on the Mendocino
Coast. The Point Cabrillo Lighthouse website has significant information
available about the wreck and the Frolic dives put together by Dr
Thomas Layton.
Dr Thomas Layton
In addition to discovering the Frolic site and working with many
people to uncover Frolic's treasures through the Frolic Shipwreck
Project, Dr Layton has written three books about the Frolic published
by Stanford University Press. The most well known is The Voyage of the Frolic: New England Merchants and the Opium Trade (1997)
The Wreck | Captain Faucon | Dr Thomas Layton | Links
