In the early 19th century, whalers called frequently at San Francisco Bay; and in the 1870s and '80s, by reason of its proximity to the Arctic bowhead grounds off Alaska and Siberia, San Francisco became a whaling port second only to New Bedford.

The greatest American whaleman was San Francisco shipmaster Charles Melville Scammon: illustrations from his book Marine Mammals of the North-Western Coast of North America (San Francisco, 1874) are on view in our Northwest Coast Gallery.

In addition to Bay Area-related artworks and artifacts throughout the museum, shipwright Roger Hambidge's scale model of the famous whaling bark California (built 1842) is often on view on one of the principal galleries; Chinese artist Namcheong's portrait of same vessel (1857) is exhibited in the Brewington Gallery.

Also in that gallery is the builder's half-hull model of the whaling bark Wanderer (1878), which made 12 voyages out of San Francisco and 11 from New Bedford. The same vessel is depicted in a diorama model by Manuel Pacheco Gamboa (1910) in "Heroes in the Ships"; and the windlass -- recovered by a KWM team from its underwater wreck-site in the early 1990s -- is undergoing long-term stabilization in one of the museum's outbuildings.

Whaling out of California survived even after the bowhead fishery collapsed (1904): whaling stations employing modern Norwegian industrialized methods operated in Southern California into the 1950s and at Richmond until 1971; there was even an outfit based in San Diego that specialized in taking whales for traveling exhibitions, carried by rail throughout North America.

A firsthand watercolor of the last cruise of the modern Del Monte whale-catcher Griffyn -- painted by William Gilkerson in 1971 when he was an editor at the San Francisco Chronicle -- is on view in the Modern Whaling Gallery.