Lydia (whaling bark)

You are walking over the final resting place of the Lydia, a whaling bark that spent fifty-seven years traversing the oceans before finding a permanent home beneath the modern city streets. Built in eighteen-forty in Rochester, Massachusetts, the ship completed twenty-three whaling voyages from New England and San Francisco before it was laid up near the old Pacific Mail Dock in nineteen-oh-seven. When construction crews digging a sewer trench near King Street struck its wooden hull in nineteen-seventy-eight, they unearthed more than just the ship. Inside the remains, they discovered an intact case of twenty-four bottles of high-class ginger beer, a small, preserved fragment of the life once lived aboard this vessel.