Autumn sunlight gilds the flaxen sails of the Vicar of Bray as the sturdy workhorse dries out after a shower in San Francisco Bay. It is 1849, and the ships of the Gold Rush fleet make the beginnings of a new, world-involved city on the shores ofSan Francisco Bay. Painting by John Stobart.
Bring Ho01e the Vicar! by Lincoln P. Paine In 1912, according to a man from thereabouts, a hulk named Vicar of Bray came to her present resting place at Goose Green, head of Choiseul Sound in the 'Falkland Islands. With coal in her holds , the Vicar was blown ashore in a storm and fetched up in shallow waters to be incorporated, eventually, into a pier. So it is that one finds her today, weather-beaten but not bowed. The high latitudes of the South Atlantic , inhospitable as they are to man and ships, are even less a place for worms and other predators that feast on ships' timbers. There, sheltered by islands which on a map seem tattered by the southern tempests like an ensign set for all time , lies the former bark, a threefold monument to the human enterprise. The Vicar of Bray , a tough ore carrier of the 1840s , is the sole representative of an era that some regard as the acme of pre-scientific naval architecture in Britain. She is probably the only survivor of the many hundred ships in the argosy to the Golden Gate in 1849. And finally , she is the motive force,
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the unmoved mover of a growing clutch of visionaries who would and probably will see the Vicar home in the city she helped to found, San Francisco. The Vicar's curious name was given to her by her first captain and part owner, George Seymour, of Bray . Her namesake was a Tudor clergyman who might have mistaken doing well for doing good, and in this doggerel written to his memory achieved a different sort of immortality than that conferred by the endurance of his nominal descendant: And this is law I will maintain until my dying day, sir: That whatsoever king may reign Still I'll be the Vicar of Bray, sir! The vicar remained at his post-variously protestant or papist, as dictated by the persuasion of the four monarchs under which he served.
SEA HISTORY, WINTER 1985-86