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A MARITIME LEGEND BY LEE BRUNO

n the early days, San Francisco’s port was a rugged outpost rocking in a blowing gale, he altered his course to rescue the PREVIOUS PAGES: Abandoned RIGHT, top to bottom: Boats
for merchant ships seeking safe harbor from the Pacific’s boat, which he believed had been blown out to sea. Instead, ships crowd the Bay in the wild Gold crowd the dock along the northern
Iviolent gales and treacherous shoals. As a young man, as the San Francisco Chronicle recounted, the captain’s “eyes Rush days of San Francisco. San Francisco waterfront, the place
Thomas Crowley bore witness to the desperate struggles of bulged and his exclamations sputtered” when he realized that LEFT: A Whitehall boat outfitted where Tom Crowley began his career
and built his maritime company
sailors whose lives at sea and ashore consisted of rat- and flea- the rowboat’s occupants were that far from the Bay in order with a sail carries three men on San that eventually gave rise to the Red
infested makeshift lodgings and boardinghouses that provided to be first to secure services for incoming ships. The typical Francisco Bay. In the late 1800s, races and White Fleet. • This 1856 photo
little comfort over the cramped quarters on large sailing rendezvous point for water-service boatmen was forty miles for these small sailboats were held of the Vallejo Street wharf shows
vessels. It was here that Crowley’s stepfather, Dave Crowley, closer to shore, near the Farallon Islands. each year around Independence Day. the San Francisco waterfront in
honed his legendary boatman skills to conquer the dangerous “When I picked ’em up, what should they turn out to be its very earliest days, when scrappy
entrepreneurs did anything they
wharves and waves, which he passed on to his stepson, deeply but a pair of bloomin’ beggars, you know, looking for the could to establish their fortunes in the
influencing young Thomas’s remarkable career. custom of me ship for a meat shop in the town,” the captain fast-growing city. By the end of the
In 1873, when a British sea captain en route to San told the captain of the pilot ship who came to navigate the century, Tom Crowley and his family
Francisco came upon a rowboat sixty miles from shore, ship into the San Francisco Bay. were here competing for their share of
The pilot laughed. “Oh, that was Dave Crowley, the ‘hooker- the action down at the waterfront.
on,’ and his mate,” he said. “They are out there often . . . After a
bit of talk, the man slips down into the bloomin’ skiff, and away
they go after another bloomin’ ship,” he told the Chronicle. “It’ll
be a bleedin’ good job if they e’er get back alive, I’m thinking.”
Dave Crowley continued to defy the odds of the
unforgiving Pacific Ocean with his boat skills, eventually
launching a water-taxi service at Meiggs Wharf. About
seventeen years later, Crowley’s teenage sons, Thomas and
Dave, joined him, learning the trade and starting their own
taxi service. The Crowley brothers’ reputation and stories
of their daring exploits spread from waterfront bars and
chandleries to meat shops and boardrooms. They were known

18 • Red and White Fleet Early Days • 19