Slight drift but relevant: The Charles Hare Lighter

“The Nature of the Boat

Sand was still banked firmly around the lighter's hull, helping to hold it together. The hull, spanned by one deck beam well aft of midship, remained intact. Overall, the boat is roughly 23 ft. long by 9 ft. wide by 3 ft. deep. I immediately confirmed that it was a lighter?—Gary had been right.

We recognized these little barges from panoramic photographs of Yerba Buena Cove in the 1850s, showing its shallow waters filled with ships in various states of abandonment. The lighters were used during a brief period from 1849 to 1854 as the only means to carry people or goods ashore, and the several dozen lighters in operation would have been much in demand. As privately-built piers jutted into deeper water to accommodate large ships, the utility of lighters diminished, rendering them obsolete by the mid-1850s.

From subsequent laboratory testing, we found that the Hare lighter was built from a species of beech native to Chile and parts of Argentina. In the earliest days of the Gold Rush, Chilean entrepreneurs owned many of the storage ships and early port infrastructure. The boat was almost certainly shipped from Chile to be nailed together on the muddy shoreline of Yerba Buena Cove.”