Cortes Bank - General

General

It has long been reported that the Cortes Bank was discovered in modern times by the captain of the sidewheel steamship Cortes, TP Cropper. In 1853, during a voyage from Panama to San Francisco, Cropper reported seeing the seas "in violent commotion" above an uncharted seamount that would eventually be named after the ship. Cropper at first thought he was above a volcano. However, it seems likely that the very first modern sighting of the Bank was not by Cropper but by US Navy Lt. James Alden and Captain (eventually Admiral) Jonathan "Mad Jack" Percival. This occurred on January 5, 1846. At that time, the frigate USS Constitution was passing well off the US West Coast from Monterey to see duty in the Mexican American War. The logbook of the Constitution from this day puts the ship in the vicinity of the Bank and reads: “At 4-20 (p.m.) discovered breakers bearing N.E. about 10 miles distant.”

Alden would eventually become an officer with the United States Coast Survey, an organization charged with mapping the U.S. coastline. In the wake of the Cortes sighting, and because of his own earlier sighting, Alden dispatched the crew of the USS Ewing to discover the source of the open ocean breakers. Under Alden's orders, Lt. TH Stevens discovered and mapped the location and a rough outline of the Bank, which was for years incorrectly named "Cortez Bank." Interestingly, though Stevens discovered waters around 54 feet deep, he failed to discover the dangerously shallow area around the Bishop Rock - and it does not show up on the first Coast Survey map published in 1853.

Bishop Rock is today marked by a nearby warning buoy. It was named for the clipper ship Stillwell S. Bishop that reportedly struck the rock in 1855, then continued to San Francisco with a patched hull. There is some uncertainty over whether the Bishop actually struck the rock, though the captain of the ship, William Shankland surely at least encountered waves along its periphery - likely in 1854. In the wake of the Bishop's voyage, James Alden placed a talented navigator and inveterate explorer from Wilmington, NC named Lt. Archibald MacRae, USN in command of the Ewing and dispatched him to discover the Bank's shoalest reach. On November 3, 1855, the New York Times carried the story "Dangerous Rock off the Coast of California," which reported MacRae's finding - and the fact that he and the crew of the ship had anchored a pair of casks bearing a flag to mark the spot. Two weeks after the story appeared, MacRae committed suicide aboard the Ewing in San Francisco Bay - shooting himself in the head with a large caliber Colt revolver - while anchored alongside Alden's ship, the USS Active.

Among other notable events in the history of the Cortes Bank is the fairly disastrous exploration of the Bank for treasure in 1957 by Mel Fisher. In 1985, Fisher discovered the treasure of the Atocha beneath the sea off the Florida Keys - the richest treasure ever found on the seafloor. In 1957, Fisher was convinced that the wreckage of a Spanish Galleon lay on the seafloor off the Bishop Rock. The expedition found no treasure, but the ship carrying Fisher nearly burned to her waterline. In the summer of 1961, a surfer named Harrison Ealey of Oceanside, California became one of the very first people to surf a wave at the Bishop Rock. In around 1973, surfer Ilima Kalama, father of famed big wave surfer Dave Kalama, nearly lost his life when the abalone fishing boat he was aboard sank on the Bishop Rock in the middle of the night.

There have been at least two efforts to turn the Cortes Bank into an island nation. The most notable and well-planned fiasco - and nearest success in accomplishing this - occurred in late 1966, when a team of entrepreneurs planned to turn the Cortes Bank into the constitutional monarchy of Abalonia. The general plan was to scuttle a WWII era concrete hulled freighter - probably the Tampa-built McClosky ship Richard Lewis Humphrey, which was later badged Jalisco in Mexico - atop the Bishop Rock in very shallow water and surround the ship with an ever expanding ring of boulders so she could be used as a seafood processing factory. The group reasoned that international maritime law would allow them to become the rulers of their own nation - because the Bank lay in international waters. The ship was instead destroyed atop the Bishop Rock by the same waves that are surfed today and her crew was nearly killed. The wreck of the Jalisco today lies beneath the surf zone in three pieces in 6 to 40 feet (2–12 m) of water, and is a diving location.

When another company planned to form a nation called Taluga, the US government declared that the bank, as part of the continental shelf, was US territory.

On 2 November 1985 the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CVN-65) struck the Cortes Bank reef about one mile east of Bishop Rock, putting a 60-foot (18 m) gash in her outer hull on the port side, ripped-off her port keel, and severely deformed her outboard port propeller blades. She continued operations, then went into dry dock at Hunter's Point Shipyard for repairs.