Gifts from the Celestial Kingdom: A Shipwrecked Cargo for Gold Rush California

In a prior volume—The Voyage of the "Frolic": New England Merchants and the Opium Trade (Stanford, 1997)—historical archaeologist Thomas N. Laytontold the story of his excavation of an ancient Pomo Indian village site in Northern California, where, to his surprise, he recovered Chinese porcelain potsherds. Tracing those sherds to a beach on the rugged Mendocino coast, he then followed them out to the submerged remains of the Frolic, a sailing vessel wrecked in the summer of 1850 with a rich...