Garibaldi and The Farallon Egg War

San Francisco Maritime Museum Library Speaking Engagement - January 10, 2012 at 6:00 p.m.

2011-12-23T16:41:00.000-08:00

Come hear about the life and times of the greatest - and most penitent - whaler in West Coast history: Charles Melville Scammon.

I'll present the Scammon story at the San Francisco Maritime Museum Library (the library, not the museum!) at Fort Mason, Building E, at 6:00 p.m. on January 10, 2012.
For reservations, please call the San Francisco Maritime Museum Library at 415-561-7040.

The Russians Are Coming! To The Marine Mammal Center!

2011-11-04T14:31:00.000-07:00

Sketch for the Marine Mammal Center's Comic Book project:

For the past month I've been digging deeper into the archives to build a comic for The Marine Mammal Center about the Russian-American poaching fiasco on the Farallones and along the Pacific Coast of North America.

What a story this is, and one with a surprisingly happy ending.

I showed the sketches for the comic last Tuesday at The Marine Mammal Center (TMMC), and the Center asked me to double the comic's length for their December 10, 2011 Open House, which starts at 10:00 a.m. and runs until 5:00 p.m. On that day, I'll be presenting the Russian-American material in a child-friendly reading at 10:15 a.m. and 2:15 p.m.

The Open House will also feature a meet and greet with the amazing Marine Mammal Center veterinarians, so please check out the details on the Marine Mammal Center's website events page.

Thanks and hope to see you there!

Three New Speaking Engagements...

2011-10-17T12:02:00.000-07:00

1) I've been asked to present "Garibaldi and The Farallon Egg War" this Saturday, October 22, 2011, at The Guild of Natural Science Illustrators meeting in Monterey, California. Should be fun!

2) The Maritime Museum Library in San Francisco booked a separate presentation (dealing largely with Captain Scammon's life and scientific legacy) for January 10, 2012.

3) I'll be tackling the San Francisco-Garibaldi connection at the Marin City Public Library on January 23, 2012. The presentation starts at 7:00 p.m.

And possibly one more: This November at The Marine Mammal Center, I may be giving a presentation on the poaching conducted on the Farallones by the Russian-American Company. It's a helluva story - Updates to follow!

Thanks to everyone for their support,
Eva

The Egg War In the News and This Thursday's Presentation at the Randall

2011-08-15T22:08:00.000-07:00

Juliet Grable of Bay Nature Magazine wrote a wonderful article on Garibaldi and The Farallon Egg War, in advance of this Thursday evening's lecture at The Randall Museum. (The Randall is a children's museum, but the Natural History Series is for adults and for, well, really wonkish kids.) After years of interviewing other people, I have to admit I found the prospect of someone interviewing me to be a little nervewracking, but Juliet made it fun! Here's the link to her article:

http://baynature.org/articles/web-only-articles/artist-finds-graphic-history-at-the-farallones

Sidenote: I had no idea that Bay Nature was the brainchild of someone from Heyday Books!

BTW, here's the link to the San Francisco Natural History Series:

http://www.randallmuseum.org/SanFranciscoNaturalHistorySeries.aspx

And here are the directions to the Randall:

http://www.randallmuseum.org/HoursAndDirections.aspx

A Few Egg War Trading Cards...

2011-05-22T19:47:00.001-07:00

(Click on images to enlarge)

You Don't Have To Be Italian To Want To Correct The Historical Record....

2011-04-28T13:54:00.000-07:00

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In the spring of 2010, I began research for a graphic novel about the 19th-century poaching battles on San Francisco’s Farallon Islands. The monumental devastation wrought by that poaching – and the deadly battles that ensued – eventually led to federal protection of the islands’ fragile ecosystem.

Many of the archival documents characterized the poachers as Italian immigrants with criminal backgrounds. And as recently as 2005, author Susan Casey described the poachers as “mafioso” in her best-selling non-fiction book, The Devil’s Teeth.

Yet the larger historical record shows that Italian immigrants in San Francisco had a lower crime rate during that era than their European and Anglo-American peers. The archives also document their commitment to Giuseppe Garibaldi’s visionary ideals, including his pro-feminist, anti-slavery and anti-Vatican positions.

The weapons of choice in the Italian-American community of 19th-century San Francisco weren’t firearms or knives, but newspaper editorials and fundraising drives.

Would this population really be likely to risk their lives fighting other men for the privilege of collecting seabird eggs on the Farallon Islands? And how did their progressive ideals fit into the larger history of wildlife conservation in California?

Garibaldi and the Farallon Egg War attempts to answer that question by taking a panoramic view of the forgotten progressivism of 19th-century San Francisco – and its obverse. From abolitionist Italian aristocrats to groundbreaking amateur scientists to French arms dealers to the desperate skirmishes on the Farallon Islands, the question is asked: If we had fulfilled Garibaldi’s goal of taking greater care of mankind, would mankind then have taken greater care of the wild?

My illustrated reports have previously been published in The New Yorker Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Observer. Over the past year I have compiled a truly unique set of historical documents regarding both the Farallon battles and San Francisco’s 19th-century community, which serve as the basis for the graphic novel’s narrative. An earlier version of Garibaldi and The Farallon Egg War was warmly received in its debut at the California Academy of Sciences in October 2010, and I am scheduled to present the updated material at The Randall Museum in August, 2011 as part of their Natural History Lecture Series.

The developing graphic novel is now available as a black-and-white, hardcopy, monthly subscription for $20 a month, or a discounted rate of $150 a year. This fundraising will allow me to finish the rest of the drawings for the graphic novel. Individual sponsorships are available beginning at $500. A limited number of panels will always be available to view online at: www.faralloneggwar.blogspot.com.

(Garibaldi and) The Farallon Egg War

2011-04-28T13:49:00.000-07:00

The Farallon Egg War Goes to The Randall Museum

2011-04-28T13:43:00.000-07:00

I've been asked to speak on "The Farallon Egg War" at The Randall Museum on August 18, 2011, as part of their monthly Natural History Lecture Series. The illustrated lecture will start at 7:30 p.m.

I attended the April lecture by Christopher Richards last week on "The Mystery of Laguna Dolores" - it was truly amazing, and the auditorium was packed to hear this remarkable aquatic biologist share several decades worth of research.

(Christopher Richards will apparently repeat that very popular presentation on June 25 at Mission Dolores as part of their 235th anniversary celebration.)

I'll post more details about both lectures later.

Welcome, WonderCon!

2011-04-01T16:32:00.000-07:00

I'll be at WonderCon this weekend in San Francisco, flyering for The Farallon Egg War.

March was a very exciting month - there was strong interest in the book from a major West Coast publisher. In the final decision, the very nice editors, who will remain unnamed, expressed concern that the book was too "mature" for a crossover audience.

(They obviously never saw the bookshelves that belonged to my sister and me as children - stuffed to the gills with Edward Gorey and Philip Roth. No wonder we're so screwed up!)

The reaction of the editors essentially liberated me to take the book in a far more ambitious, adult direction.

All the research on early Risorgimento activism in San Francisco, the newspaper battles, the opera wars, the internecine fighting within the Italian community in San Francisco between Royalists and Garibaldi's supporters, the down-and-dirty details of Limantour's property scams, Copperheads (the political movement, not the snake), Mormons, minstrelsy, burlesque, banking scams, technological advances, and scientists, scientists, and more scientists...

...in short, a far more panoramic view of 19th-century San Francisco, coming to a boiling point in the 1863 Egg War. This is a far more cinematic, action-oriented comic in black ink on white paper.

Wait - Who Owns The Tiburon Peninsula, Again?

2011-04-01T15:33:00.000-07:00

A major player in the emerging city of San Francisco was Joseph Yves Limantour, a successful trader from Breton who held deeds from the outgoing Mexican governor of California showing that he owned Angel Island, Alcatraz Island, The Farallon Islands (Los Farallones), and all the land in San Francisco that was then south of California Street.

It was, in fact, a pre-Gold Rush shipwreck that had first stranded a younger Limantour in San Francisco. Stuck with a cache of luxury goods, Limantour negotiated a fortuitous series of swaps among the region’s original Spanish settlers, the Californios, and savvily befriended William Richardson, the onetime Port Captain of Yerba Buena under Mexican rule. The beach on which Limantour’s ship ran aground is almost as serene as when he first arrived, and still bears his name. It did not hurt that Limantour was able to charm the wives of the Californios, who were nearly mad with boredom.

(Click on the images below to expand. Try not to think about the fact that I've totally misrepresented the historical munitions - I'm working on it!)

If There Were No Farallon Eggs, There Would Be No Egg War

2011-04-01T15:00:00.000-07:00

The huge influx of gold-hungry prospectors to San Francisco after 1848 led to the near-immediate devouring of any existing poultry for celebratory dinners. The population then found itself (mysteriously!) without any egg-laying hens, and the second great poaching of the Farallon Islands (following the seal poaching by the Russian settlement in the pre-Gold Rush decades) began in earnest, as hordes of desperate men climbed the slippery rocks of the Farallones in search of seabird eggs to sell to the hungry city.
But don't be too hard on the hardworking prospectors for poor planning - with more information and greater technology, modern Californians are unfortunately even more destructive and equally oblivious of long-term conservation issues.

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Back from our post-party huddle!

2010-11-09T23:11:00.000-08:00

Thanks to everyone who came out to the California Academy of Sciences' "Farallon Night" last month. (We hope that second vodka tonic wasn't the reason for the early lights-out at our exhibit, but sometimes it's better not to ask!)

Since that night, we've been in a post-party huddle with: an antique firearms expert; comics fans; and the much-loved local author and Farallones expert Peter White. While I received a great response on this first draft, I knew that the project needed to reflect even more accurately the gritty reality and dynamic action of our "eggmen". Not only was the current project too reminiscent of a polite, 19th-century-ladies' watercolor sketchbook, but I had misrepresented the period firearms - an inexcusable error for a comic book about a war, no matter how minor.

So, after consulting with the aforementioned experts and the NRA Gun Collector's Guide, I dug deep into the Harvey Kurtzman archives (that's Kurtzman, not Pekar!) knowing that the man behind the most politically challenging war comics would provide inspiration and further direction. Emerging from the stupor induced by reading Kurtzman comics for several days (not to mention Jacques Tardi's trench warfare graphic novel and Joe Sacco's Sarajevo comics), I've started re-mapping.

After all, it's their history and their battle - I'm just lucky enough to have found it.

Preview "The Farallon Egg War" at The California Academy of Sciences on October 21st!

2010-10-16T15:40:00.001-07:00

Click on any of the postcards and images below to bring to their full resolution and size, and we'll see you at the California Academy of Sciences's "Nightlife" party on October 21st, 2010.

"Nightlife" will feature psychedelic surf rock band "The Mermen", cocktails, food, the premiere of a great new film on the Farallon Islands, and a sneak peek at Eva's new graphic novel, "The Farallon Egg War."

"The Farallon Egg War" is the true and largely untold story of the battles that took place on the Farallon Islands over poaching "rights", the desperate men forced to poach from such perilous rocks, and the birth of wildlife conservation in 19th-century California that came out of this war.

At $12 a ticket, the Nightlife event is not only less than half the regular admission to the CAS, but a ton cheaper than a boat ride out to the islands otherwise known as "The Devil's Teeth"!

For tickets, go to: www.calacademy.org/events/nightlife

"The Farallon Egg War" makes extensive use of the Academy's photographs of early San Francisco - including many materials that miraculously survived the 1906 fire and earthquake. Some of these remarkable photographs will also be on display on October 21, 2010 - including some rare glass plate negatives.

Lincoln's Appointee Appoints Charles Melville Scammon to Patrol The Farallones

2010-10-16T15:36:00.000-07:00

In the years leading up to the Farallon Egg War, Lincoln's Republican appointee to the Customs House in San Francisco was Ira Rankin, who in turn assigned Charles Melville Scammon to patrol the waters surrounding the profitable port of San Francisco. Scammon had a complicated history, to put it mildly, being first a killer and then a lover of marine mammals. Only after his death would his scholarly work be appreciated in full, and his role in the near extinction of gray whales thereby mitigated.
(Click on the images below to expand.)

But in the years that he was acting as a "boat cop", Scammon was largely distracted from policework...

Tense Moments In Egg War History!

2010-10-14T11:14:00.001-07:00

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