Dec. 21, 1812: Capt. Issac Whittemore and the crew of the 283-ton brig Charon had been scouring California's coast for "soft gold": extraordinarily lush otter pelts. Sitting at anchor in Refugio Bay near Gaviota Pass, they planned to do a brisk but illegal business with the pious but practical Franciscan padres: swapping the pelts for cowhides.
About 10:30 a.m., the sea began to rise.
A tsunami related to a 7.2-magnitude earthquake in the Santa Barbara Channel lifted the ship and dumped it half a mile up Refugio Canyon. Then the receding wave yanked the ship back out to sea.
(Records fail to note whether the Charon was damaged or whether any crewmen were hurt. But the ship survived.)
The temblor is believed to have come from a fault under Santa Cruz Island.
The shocking tsunami off Sumatra last month that killed upward of 150,000 people was a reminder of potential danger close to home.
Computer models based on the 1812 incident suggest that a local tsunami caused by an underwater earthquake-induced landslide could hit the Southern California coast with little warning, according to Jose Borrero, an assistant research professor at USC's Viterbi School of Engineering. Borrero is in Sumatra studying last month's event.
No one knows how much time elapsed between the 1812 quake and the tsunami, but it could have been as little as 15 minutes, the U.S. Geological Survey says.
The temblor damaged several missions, destroying La Purisima near Lompoc. Native American villages and the Santa Barbara Presidio were also damaged.
The tsunami was reported as far north as San Francisco. Waves washed inland three blocks in Ventura.
California's population was small then, so there were few witnesses and little loss of life. Among the witnesses was Padre Luis Gil Taboada, who was in charge of the Santa Barbara Mission. He recorded the Charon's plight, as did an 1864 story in the San Francisco Bulletin.
"The sea receded and rose like a high mountain," Taboada wrote in mission records. " ... It has been necessary for us to withdraw for now, more than half a league inland" -- about 1 1/2 miles.
In Ventura the whole San Buenaventura Mission "site appeared to settle, and the fear of being engulfed by the sea drove all away ... until April 1813," mission records report.
Aftershocks continued for nearly four months after the 1812 quake.
