English explorer, pirate and trader of enslaved people, Sir Frances Drake, is the first person to leave a record of visiting the islands. He and his men made their way on shore in 1579, where they collected seal meat and eggs. They left after just one day. Drake named them the “Islands of St. James” — a name that didn’t stick.

The name that did stick came about 25 years later, when Friar Antonio de la Asunción, sailing on a Spanish expedition, described the string of islands in his diary as “seven farallones close together.” Farallon is Spanish for steep rock or cliff. This time around, the name took.

An illustration of the Farallons featured in the 1874 book: “Western Wanderings: a record of Travel in the Evening Land, etc. Illustrated” by Boddam-Whetham, JW (Courtesy of the British Library/Flickr)

A Land Pillaged

The first people known to live on the islands arrived in 1819. They were Russian fur hunters and members of the Aleuit community, who were likely working as enslaved people. They lived on the Southeast Farallon, which is the only island large enough to support humans. They came to the islands to harvest fur seals – the warm pelts were in high demand in Russia.

Zackhar Chichinoff was one of the Russians living on the island. His story has been recounted in several books over the years:

“A schooner took us down to the islands but we had to cruise around for over a week before we could make a landing. We had a few planks with us and some canvas, and with that we built huts for shelter. The water was very bad also, being taken from hollow places in the rocks where it stood all the year round. We had no fire-arms, the sea lions were killed with clubs or spears. Scurvy broke out among us and in a short time all were sick except myself. All the next winter we passed there in great misery and when the spring came the men were too weak to kill sea-lions, and all we could do was to crawl around the cliffs and gather some sea birds’ eggs and suck them raw.”

Despite the difficult living conditions and basic weaponry, an estimated 200,000 fur seals were killed on the Farallons over the course of a few years. Captain Benjamin Morrell, Jr., visited the island in 1825 and offered this update in his diary:

“Many years ago this place was the resort of numerous fur seals but the Russians have made such a havoc among them that there is scarcely a breed left. On this barren rock we found a Russian family and twenty-three Codiaks, or northwest Indians, with their bark canoes. They were employed in taking sea-leopards, sea-horses, and sea-elephants for their skins, oil and flesh… at the time of our visit they had about fifty tons of this beef cured and were expecting the arrival of a Russian vessel to take off the beef and leave them a supply of fresh water, there being none on the island.”

By 1834 the fur seal population was decimated. The animals that did remain abandoned the island. It would be a 140 years before they were seen on the island again. In the 1970s, a few fur seals started to return to the island. The first pup was spotted in 1996, and since then the population has continued to grow. In 2019, Point Blue Conservation Science reported that about 2,000 pups are born on the island each year.

The fur seal population has rebounded, as seen in this 2011 photo. (Jim Tietz/PRBO Conservation Science)

The Egg Wars

Things were quiet on the islands for a few years, but interest in them picked up again during the Gold Rush. Food scarcity prompted entrepreneurial men to venture out to the Farallons in search of supplies. Because the islands are the largest seabird nesting colony south of Alaska, what they found there were eggs. Lots and lots of eggs.

A group of men clean a week’s haul of seabird eggs. (Arthur Bolton/California Academy of Sciences)

The eggs they collected turned out to be a hot commodity in protein-starved San Francisco, and the egg hunters quickly found themselves quite rich. An industry sprung up, which Mildren Hoover described in her 1932 book about the Farallons:

“There was one essential item in the equipment of the workers – a loose fitting jacket with capacious pockets inside the front. At a given signal, the day’s operations began: every man started on the run for a favored spot among the nests. … When the loose-fronted jackets were full of eggs the men descended the slippery rocks with care to deposit their booty in hidden baskets – hidden because of the Gulls. Accidents were not unknown and to fall while wearing a coat full of eggs delayed the worker at least long enough to wash out the pockets with cold sea water.”

By the early 1850s, about a half-million eggs were gathered each year. Egg collecting became so lucrative that in 1863 two men were killed in “The Great Egg War.” (We actually did a whole Bay Curious episode about The Egg War if you’d like to learn more.)

But just as with the fur seals, overharvesting of eggs caused damage to the animal world. The wild murre population plummeted. Eventually, the federal government ruled all commercial eggers off of the islands.

In this 1871 image, you can see a crane-like device that was used to haul small boats safely onto the island. A similar technique is used today. (Eadweard Muybridge photography, courtesy of USCG History)

A Lighthouse Brings New Residents

Navigating the waters around the Farallon islands has always been extremely dangerous. Quick moving currents can sweep boats onto the rocks, where the Pacific pounds them into oblivion, and during storm waves can get so big they swallow boats whole.

The post A Historical past of San Francisco’s Wild, Uncooked Farallon Islands appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

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