Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea
by Gary Kinder

The Gold Rush is On

Every newspaper in the East ran articles about the ease of finding gold in California. How-to books, like the Emigrant’s Guide to the Gold Mines, described vast riverbeds "paved with gold to the thickness of a hand," and claimed that "twenty to fifty thousand dollars of gold" could be "picked out almost instantly." Lectures on gold mining drew enormous crowds, and the lecturers added their own hyperbole: that miners in California were finding up to four pounds of gold, or a thousand dollars a day, that one man had found thirty-six pounds in one day, that not even a hundred thousand men could exhaust all of the gold in California if they worked hard at it for ten years.

"In a moment, as it were," wrote the editor of the Hartford Daily Courant, "a desert country that never deserved much notice from the world has become the centre of universal attraction. Fifteen millions have already come into the possession of somebody and all creation is going out there to fill their pockets."

But all creation had only two ways to get to the new territory: They could walk or they could sail. Those choosing to walk would have to wait until April, for between them and California stood the Rocky Mountains, and winter in those mountains first killed the grass, then buried it under feet of snow. Without feed, the pack animals would die.

The impatient ones sailed, but now they had to decide: around Cape Horn or across Panama. The route via Cape Horn was a four- to eight-month journey of thirteen thousand nautical miles that promised the most terrifying storms a landlubber could conjure. In 1833, Charles Darwin described the Horn in his diary: "The sight," he wrote, "is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about death, peril, and shipwreck." Waves eighty to ninety feet tall, the Horn’s infamous "greybeards," swept across the ocean at thirty knots and battered ships already encrusted in ice. Spars snapped, sails shredded, and men washed overboard to freeze and drown in an icy sea.

The route across Panama far exceeded the other two for speed and convenience, and the ways to die were less dramatic. The first leg, New York to Panama, took but nine days with a short layover in Havana. Once the passengers arrived, the journey across the isthmus was more vexing than life threatening. Ahead of them were five days in a dugout canoe, on the back of an unpredictable mule, and atop their own sore feet. The trip exposed them to tropical heat, outbreaks of cholera, malaria, and yellow fever, and coffee sweetened by natives chewing sugar cane and spitting into the cup. Then they arrived in the three-hundred-year-old city of Panama, which one American described as a "dirty, noisy, and unpleasant place to stay in." The sun was too hot, the water too noxious to drink, and the native lemonade too "sloppy" to swallow. Here they waited on the docks until a vessel could ferry them up the west coast to San Francisco.

When the California steamed into the Bay of Panama for a brief layover and to take on more coal, her captain looked out upon the docks and saw mountains of old trunks, dirty bedding, rucksacks, ropes, tents, pots, pans, utensils, spades, and pickaxes. The stories of gold in the far reaches of the Union had incited riots at the steamship offices back east. Already, the first Atlantic steamer had arrived on the Caribbean side of Panama filled with passengers. Two days later a bark arrived carrying another sixty. By the middle of January, five other ships had off-loaded more passengers to begin the trek upriver and over the mountains to Panama City.

The California had room for 200 passengers, but over 500 waited at the docks. The captain ordered lumber, built berths in the ship’s open spaces, and left Panama two weeks later with 365 passengers and 36 crew "crammed into the ship and overflowing onto the deck and the housetops." But by then, a total of four steamers, two barks, three brigs, and a schooner had deposited 726 passengers on the opposite shore to make their way to the Pacific side, and more were coming in daily on vessels embarking from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans.

Use of this excerpt from Ship and Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder may be made only for purposes of promoting the book, with no changes, editing, or additions whatsoever, and must be accompanied by the following copyright notice:

Copyright © 1998 by Gary Kinder. All rights reserved.

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Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder

Copyright © 1998 Gary Kinder

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