Better Lives, Bitter Lies

#9 Special Episode: Preserving Historic Ships with Rigger Josh Payne and Shipwright Josh Brown

What is a chantey? Is 2021's surprising viral hit "The Wellerman" really one? And what does San Francisco Maritime's longtime music programs coordinator, Peter Kasin, have to say for everyone looking to follow this internationally flavored music?

For the first three decades of the 20th century, the park's square-rigged cargo ship, Balclutha, sailed under the name Star of Alaska for the Alaska Packers Association. This episode explores that period of the ship's lifetime, as well as the Pacific Coast histories entwined with it: canning, labor organizing, debt peonage, and muckraking journalism.

John C. Fremont named the entrance to San Francisco Bay "the Golden Gate to the Orient." What has happened when ships crossed it to build their empire on the other side of the ocean? This episode examines a chapter of history that led to the United States expanding into Asia -- and brought Filipinos to California believing a distinct version of the American Dream.

At the turn of the 20th century, San Francisco faced a plague that devastated Europe in centuries past. As sickness began spreading through Chinatown, its most densely populated neighborhood, the city had to confront the deadliness of this disease and its own societal ills.

Among the people who arrived in San Francisco in the late 1800s were Asian girls and women trafficked for the purpose of prostitution. Sometimes called “daughters of joy,” they were the victims of kidnapping, abuse, and a form of slave trade practiced openly on the waterfront well into the 20th century.

For “paper sons” and “paper daughters” – Chinese men and women who assumed false identities to circumvent exclusionary immigration laws – starting a new life in America required mastering someone else's history.

In 1848, James Marshall, a New Jersey-born carpenter, discovered flakes of gold in the American River, gilding California in layers of dreams and promises. Tens of thousands from around the world soon made their way to San Francisco, seeking their fortunes and sealing that of the small port town beyond the Golden Gate. These new arrivals included countless Chinese, who called California by another name: gam saan, or “Gold Mountain.”

San Francisco’s fabled strait was so named two years before gold was discovered in Northern California. How did it get the name “Golden Gate?”