"My heart was in my mouth. I felt strange, nervous, like a man in a dream. On the beach we hurriedly threw together a makeshift raft, tying the lumber we had gathered, with the sheets we carried. We stripped and made bundles of our clothes and put them on the raft. We swam out, pushing the raft before us. Thirty yards out, McCain called a halt. He said that the raft was weak, in danger of falling apart. He insisted on going back for more lumber to strengthen our raft."
- Henri Young
(Photo courtesy National Archives, San Bruno, California)
The sea presented a formidable obstacle to both would-be attackers and escaping prisoners. Legends about man-eating sharks in the San Francisco Bay are untrue (there are sharks in the Bay, but they are harmless scavengers like the five foot long leopard shark), but the cold water itself could numb a man's body and swallow him without a trace.
Despite the danger, men imprisoned on the Rock sometimes imagined the Bay to be an easy swim. Early on the morning of January 13, 1939, Arthur "Doc" Barker, Henri Young, Rufus McCain, William Martin, and Dale Stamphill tried to beat the Rock's natural walls. The five men defeated the prison's security, first, by sawing their way through the iron slats of their D-Block isolation cells.
Then they used a small, handmade pressure jack to break the toolproof bars on the outer windows. Preparing for the break took several weeks and the convicts did most of the work during the morning and evening meals when guards were busy with the general population. When a thick winter fog moved in, the men made their way to the tiny pocket beach beneath the Road Tower (which is no longer standing). Here they started to build driftwood rafts. The noise of the fog horn drowned out the alert which had been sounded when a guard discovered their escape about half an hour after they left the Cell House. A prison launch surprised the convicts. Young and McCain immediately surrendered. Barker and Stamphill ran into the fog. Prison guards on the beach and on the hill above opened fire. Barker died later that day of his wounds. (Stamphill is still alive today, the last survivor of the gang.) Martin, who had tried to slip away so he could make a swim for it, slipped on the rocks and was recaptured. The whole episode was over in less than two hours. When it took over the island in 1972, park service rangers christened the spot where Barker died "Barker Beach".
Another notable incident began and ended on the small bluff overlooking Barker Beach on the northwest. Joe Bowers was pulling incinerator duty when he decided to climb the fence. The Bureau of Prisons believed he was trying to escape. Some prisoners claimed he was crazy and only trying to feed the birds. Still others suggest he was depressed and committing suicide. Whatever the reason, the road tower guard saw him and fired three times. Bowers fell sixty feet from the fence top to the water's edge. The island's doctor determined that he had died before he hit the ground.
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