Qualla: Deadman's Island (San Pedro)

Deadman's Island (San Pedro): Introduction

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain. Richard Henry Dana Jr. saw Deadman's Island in 1835 and found poetry in its desolation. A single grave marked the steep, conical hump of clay, he wrote in Two Years Before the Mast, containing an English ship captain rumored to have been poisoned by his own crew. It was the only thing in California from which I could extract anything like poetry, Dana wrote. Then, too the man had died far from home, without a friend near him. Nearly a century later, dynamite and dredgers would erase the island from San Pedro Bay. In the process, they uncovered two dozen skeletons, evidence that many more lonely deaths had accumulated on that desolate rock.

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Deadman's Island (San Pedro): The Eagle's Nest

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain. French sea captain Auguste Bernard Duhaut-Cilly visited the small islet on April 10, 1827, eight years before Dana's voyage. Climbing to its highest point, he discovered something unexpected: the eyrie of a sea eagle with two eaglets, the birds black with yellowish-white patches ...

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Deadman's Island (San Pedro): Isla del Muertos

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain. On October 8, 1846, American soldiers fought local Californios in the Battle of the Old Woman's Gun, a skirmish during the Mexican-American War. As many as six Americans died in the fighting. Their bodies were buried on the islet the Spanish called Isla del Muertos, adding milita...

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Deadman's Island (San Pedro): Whale Oil and Barrels

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain. A whaling station operated on Deadman's Island beginning in 1860. The Los Angeles Star reported in January 1861 that a whaling party from San Diego had located on the island and captured two whales, extracting forty-five barrels of oil. Business improved. In March 1861, they caug...

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Deadman's Island (San Pedro): Free Harbor Wars

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain. In the late nineteenth century, Deadman's Island became ammunition in the free port wars, a political battle over where to build Southern California's major deepwater harbor. Powerful interests backed either San Pedro or Santa Monica Bay. Senator William P. Frye of Maine, arguing...

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Deadman's Island (San Pedro): Erased from the Map

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain. Harold Lloyd filmed the comedy short Lonesome Luke's Wild Women on Deadman's Island in late 1916, one of the last records of the islet as a recognizable landmark. Beginning in 1928, dynamite, dredgers, and bulldozers went to work. The expanded Port of Los Angeles needed the space...

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