

The Ghost Ships of San Francisco
At the start of 1848, San Francisco was a sleepy Mexican village with a population of under two hundred Spanish-speaking fishermen and farmers living on the shores of a picturesque bay. But unbeknown to the residents, their lives were about to be transformed by outside events. Many hundreds of miles to the south a peace treaty was being signed to bring the Mexican-American war to an end. It included the transfer of a huge slab of Mexican territory, including all of modern-day