The junk fleet of San Diego Bay — the Chinese fishermen history nearly erased.

Long before the Navy anchored a single gray hull in San Diego Bay, and decades before the great tuna clippers made this port famous across the Pacific, a different fleet worked these waters. In the early 1880s, as many as a hundred Chinese fishermen launched their distinctive flat-bottomed junks from the mudflats south of the waterfront, their battened lugsails catching the morning westerlies off Coronado as they had caught winds on the Pearl River Delta a world away. These men were the first commercial fishermen San Diego Bay ever had, and their vessels—built of local redwood but shaped by two thousand years of Chinese maritime tradition—were the first working boats to make this harbor productive.

They arrived in the wake of the California Gold Rush, part of the great mid-century migration from Guangdong Province that brought tens of thousands of laborers to the American West. Where others went to the Sierra Nevada mines or the Central Pacific Railroad grades, the fishing families of the Pearl River Delta did what they had always done: they found a harbor. San Diego's sheltered bay, teeming with halibut, yellowtail, and the enormous abalone beds along its southern approaches, was a fisherman's paradise. By the mid-1860s a small settlement had taken root at the foot of Sixteenth Street along the waterfront—a cluster of weathered shacks and drying racks that would grow, in the following decade, into the most productive fishing enterprise the young city had ever seen.

The junks they built here were not museum pieces or nostalgic reconstructions. They were working craft, adapted shrewdly to local conditions. Traditional Chinese junk construction favored watertight compartmentalization—a bulkhead system that European shipwrights would not widely adopt for another century—combined with a distinctive battened lugsail that could be reefed in heavy weather by a single hand. In San Diego, the carpenters substituted coastal redwood for the teak and fir of Guangdong, producing vessels between thirty and fifty feet that drew little water and could be beached without harm. A contemporary observer writing in the San Diego Union in 1882 described them as "curious craft, half-Chinese, half-Californian, built for these particular shores as perfectly as any vessel could be." They were also, by any measure, fast.

The fishery that sustained these boats ran on two economies simultaneously. For the local San Diego market—the hotels, saloons, and households of a booming frontier town—the Chinese crews supplied fresh halibut, sand bass, and yellowtail, sold from dockside directly into the hands of cooks and housewives who had no other reliable source of seafood. But the larger and more lucrative trade was in abalone. Dried and salted, abalone commanded premium prices in San Francisco's Chinatown and even found its way back across the Pacific to Guangdong markets, where it was prized as a luxury ingredient. The fishermen worked the beds by hand from the gunwales of their junks, using iron prybars to lever the massive shells from the rocky reefs—a technique unchanged from centuries of practice on the South China coast, now deployed in the cold surge off Point Loma.

Their richest grounds lay beyond the international line, on the rocky faces of Las Islas Coronado—four volcanic spires rising from the Pacific eighteen miles south of Ballast Point, belonging to Mexico but a short overnight run for a well-found junk. The fishermen established seasonal camps on the islands' boulder-strewn beaches, where racks of drying abalone stretched in rows under the sun and the smell of brine and woodsmoke drifted across the anchorage. Mexican authorities tolerated these operations, and for a brief period the Coronado Islands became a kind of autonomous fishing republic: Chinese-managed, economically tied to San Diego, legally ambiguous, and extraordinarily productive. Contemporary cargo records suggest that some seasons saw more than forty tons of dried abalone shipped northward from the San Diego waterfront.

What dismantled this fleet was not storm nor competition but legislation, applied with the deliberate force of official policy. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 cut off the flow of new workers from Guangdong—a slow hemorrhage that, combined with the aging of the existing fleet's crews, guaranteed eventual collapse. California's cascade of anti-Chinese legislation translated into net restrictions targeting Chinese fishing methods, bans on abalone export, and shoreline lease laws that made renewal nearly impossible for men who could not, under federal statute, ever become citizens. By 1888 the waterfront settlement had shrunk; by 1893 it had largely vanished. The junks were beached, broken up for lumber, or simply abandoned—and the men who had sailed them faded into the historical record, leaving almost no names behind.

The irony embedded in San Diego's maritime identity is this: the fishing industry that would eventually make the city famous—the tuna fleet, the sardine canneries, the commercial docks that once ranked among the busiest on the Pacific coast—was built directly atop the commercial infrastructure the Chinese fishermen had pioneered. The fish buyers, the drying and processing techniques, the knowledge of which grounds held what species in which season: all of it passed, without credit, into the hands of the Italian, Portuguese, and Japanese fishermen who succeeded them. The Navy base that now occupies the bay's northern shores sits within sight of mudflats where the junks once tied up at dawn. The city that grew up around their labor has no monument to the men who first showed the harbor could feed a civilization.

The waters they worked have not changed. The abalone beds are depleted now, protected by law rather than harvested by it, but the westerly still builds by mid-morning off Coronado, and the run south to the islands is still the same eighteen miles it was when a redwood junk made it under a full spread of battened canvas. The same bay. The same summer swells. You could sail it tonight—and somewhere in the lift of the swell off Ballast Point, you'd be crossing the wakes of the first fleet that ever called this harbor home.