The voyage of the 'Frolic'

by Thomas N. Layton

In the late summer of 1984, the author and a group of his archaeology students excavated fragments of Chinese porcelain at the site of a Pomo Indian village a hundred miles north of San Francisco. How did these ceramics, which were more than a hundred years old, find their way to this remote area? And what could one make of local legend that told of Pomo women wearing Chinese silk shawls in the 1850's? The author soon learned that in 1850 the clipper Frolic, a sailing ship built specifically for the Asian opium trade, had wrecked on the Mendocino coast, a few miles from the Pomo village. He unearthed the business records of its owners, A. Heard & Co., which showed that respectable Bostonians had made their fortunes running opium from India to China. In describing the design, construction, and outfitting of the Frolic, the author was aided by a stroke of luck - a slave named Fred Bailey, later known to the world as the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, worked in the Frolic's shipyard in