Matthew Turner built a shipyard near here in 1882 California Landmark 973.

Turner grounded the whaling bark Stamboul for use as a work platform. It is said that the Stamboul's skeleton is visible at ebb tide, but when I visited on a drizzly, winter's day, the tide was at the flood, and only a solitary gull on a fallen tree was to be seen.

The whaling bark Stamboul was built in Medford, Massachusetts in 1843. During the 1880's, her home port was San Francisco. She had a length of 106 feet, a beam of 25 feet, and a draft of 14 feet with a tonnage of 260.

A bark is a sailing ship with three masts, square-rigged on the fore and main masts and fore-and-aft rigged on the mizzenmast. In the mid-19th century, this rigging became popular for whaling vessels because it required fewer men to handle the sails when the boats were down for whales.

The name Stamboul is a variant form of Istanbul widely used by English speakers in the 19th Century.