SS City of Rio de Janeiro

The SS City of Rio de Janeiro was an iron hulled steam powered passenger ship, launched in 1878, which sailed between San Francisco and various Asian Pacific ports. On 21 February 1901, the vessel sank after striking a submerged reef at the entry to San Francisco Bay while inward bound from Hong Kong. Of the approximately 220 passengers and crew on board, fewer than 85 survived. The wreck lies in 320 ft of water just off the Golden Gate and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as nationally significant.

City of Rio de Janeiro was one of many ships that was lost due to challenging navigational conditions in this area.

History
Launched on 6 March 1878, the City of Rio de Janeiro was originally built for the United States & Brazil Mail Steamship Company, a two-ship shipping line between Brazil and the United States. This proved unprofitable and she was sold to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company in 1881 and refitted to serve as an ocean liner, traveling between her home port in San Francisco to Honolulu, Hawaii, Yokohama, Japan and Hong Kong.

In 1898 the US Government leased the ship for a short time to ferry troops to Manila in the Philippines as part of the Spanish American War. After the war she went back to her usual Pacific route.

Sinking
On 22 February 1901, while trying to pass through the Golden Gate in heavy fog, en route to her home port of San Francisco, the City of Rio de Janeiro struck rocks, reportedly on the southern part of the straits at or near Fort Point, and sank.

The damage to the ship was considerable: virtually the entire underside of the vessel had been torn open by the collision and the engine room and cargo holds rapidly flooded. The ship had been built in 1878, before watertight bulkheads came into use, and sank in 320 ft of water only eight minutes after striking the reef.

Launching of the lifeboats was hampered by a language barrier between her mostly Chinese crew and American officers.

The wreck was so sudden that the lookout at the Fort Point Lifesaving Station, only a few hundred yards away, was completely unaware of the situation for two hours, when a lifeboat was sighted emerging from a fog bank. Fortunately Italian fishermen were nearby and were able to rescue a number of survivors clinging to wreckage. One of those rescuers, Gaspare Palazzolo of Terrasini, Sicily, Captain of the boat, Citta di N.Y., was awarded a gold medal by the Banco Italo-Americana di San Francisco for his heroism.

Of the 210 people aboard, 82 were rescued and approximately 130 people perished. The captain, William Ward, was not among the survivors. He had previously stated that if ever faced with such a situation, he would go down with his ship. Among those lost in the wreck was Rounsevelle Wildman, the US Consul General at Hong Kong, who had been en route for Washington DC to participate in the inauguration of William McKinley.

Cargo
After the shipwreck, rumors circulated that the ship's cargo had included a substantial amount of gold and silver, but her manifest listed no such cargo. However, the manifest did list 2,423 slabs of tin, each of which weighed 107 lb. The ship's insurers paid a sum of $79,000 for the loss of the metal, which at present day prices would be worth in excess of $900,000.

Salvage attempts
Divers engaged by the Pacific Mail Line immediately began a search for the ship but failed to find any traces of it due to the depth of the water in the area, well beyond the diving or salvage capabilities of the time.

For some years after the disaster, bodies washed up on the beach near Fort Point, including, in July 1902, the remains of Captain Ward which were identified by the watch chain wrapped around his rib cage.

On November 15, 1905, the Los Angeles Herald reported that divers had found the wreck. It was asserted that there was no doubt of the identity of the wreckage found. One diver had a narrow escape from death during his exploration of the bottom of the Golden Gate.

In 1917, a wooden keg clearly marked Rio de Janeiro surfaced off Point Lobos. In 1919, more wreckage from the ship surfaced off Suisun Bay, 40 mi away from the assumed site of the wreck between Mile Rock and Baker Beach.

In 1931 a Captain Haskell made a formal claim for the cargo and fabric of the wreck by right of discovery; he announced to a news conference that he had discovered the wreck using a two-man submarine of his own invention and planned to salvage $6 million worth of silver from the wreck. However, he disappeared without a trace in July 1931.

In 1987, Gus Cafcalas, a San Francisco-area mortage banker, announced that he and four other men had discovered the wreck the previous fall in 200 feet of water, half a mile west of the Golden Gate Bridge, aided by sonar and photographs taken by a robot submarine. Cafcalas said they would not attempt to raise the ship because the condition of the hull and fierce tides and currents made the task virtually impossible, but that they hoped to probe the ship's interior for the rumored cargo of silver. He said the consortium was prepared to spend $1 million to salvage whatever was left on the wreck.

Cafcalas and his partners applied for a salvage permit from the California State Lands Commission under the name Segamb, Inc. (listed in several media reports as “Seagamb Corp.”), and on February 6, 1989, the Commission authorized the issuance of a permit “for survey and mapping purposes, and retrieval of an object or objects sufficient to positively identify the shipwreck,” subject to numerous conditions. However, Segamb never met the conditions, and the authorization was revoked on January 17, 1990.

The wreck of the Rio de Janeiro has never since been located. A reason which has been cited is that off Baker Beach the currents are too strong for amateur divers and the water too deep for anything other than professional divers. It has also been suggested that the currents may have pushed the ship out to sea as she sank, while some say that she will never be found because of the number of wrecks on the seabed in the area, and that even using modern sonar it would be impossible to distinguish whatever remains of the ship from all the other disintegrated remnants of sunken ships.