I realized I was becoming hysterical myself for these were women of my own kind, like my mother and sisters. But when the collision occurs and the Martinez begins to sink, he is suddenly surrounded not by poetry but by a 'screaming bedlam' of terror. Aboard the doomed Martinez is Humphrey van Weyden, an amateur literary critic, perusing his latest essay in the Atlantic and thinking of 'how comfortable it was, this division of labor,' as the sailors toil on the decks of the Martinez so he can spend his time enjoying the repose of his intellectual life (p. Jack London (1876–1916) used this wreck as the basis of the sinking of the Martinez at the beginning of his 1904 adventure novel, The Sea Wolf. In the midst of the panic, the two captains managed to lash their vessels together long enough to get the San Rafael's passengers onto the Sausalito, but the career of the captain of the Sausalito was ruined. Three people died as a result of the collision, and an old horse named Dick, who was used to move baggage carts around the ferry, refused to leave and went down with the ship.

The elegant side-wheel steamer-which had a pair of gilt eagles atop decorative masts-sank in twenty minutes. Navigating the fog in an era when ferry skippers relied on the sounds of foghorns, bells on buoys, sirens on piers, and echoes of whistles together with compasses and a heavy dose of instinct, the Sausalito never saw the San Rafael before hitting it amidships, the Sausalito's prow slamming into the dining room of the smaller, older San Rafael. On 30 November 1901, an unusually foggy night even by San Francisco standards, the ferry Sausalito collided with the ferry San Rafael in San Francisco Bay in what was the worst ferryboat collision in the history of the bay.

The Sea Wolf by Jack London