Who was "Barnacle Bill," exactly?
William Bernard (fl. 1849+) was a 19th-century
sailor,
miner and resident of
San Francisco, better known as the notorious "Barnacle Bill" of
American yore whose fictional exploits are chronicled in the ribald
drinking song "
Barnacle Bill the Sailor" — itself adapted from "Bollocky Bill the Sailor", a traditional
folk song originally titled "Abraham Brown".
Neither
MGM comedy titled
Barnacle Bill has anything to do with Bernard.
Bernard first sailed into the
San Francisco Bay aboard the ship
Edward Everett on July 6, 1849, just as the
California Gold Rush was heating up. Intent on striking it rich, he set out the next morning across the bay, accompanied by a shipmate named Mr. Phelps. They stopped first at present-day
Yerba Buena Island, where the treasure of a lost
Spanish galleon was rumored by local sailors and dockworkers to be buried, but they found it deserted except for a small colony of
domestic goats. They did, however, discover the ruins of a large
Tuchayune fishing
village on the island's eastern shore, and reported seeing
cremation pits strewn with human bones where the villagers ritually burned their dead. After camping for a few days on the small island, the two men moved on, exploring what is now
Oakland before heading to the
gold mines to seek their fortunes.
Little is known about Bernard's fate. He returned to Yerba Buena Island at a later date, if only to
dry out, and lived there for a time before moving on again in search of fortune and fame. --
Wikipedia
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