The Age of Gold

by H. W. Brands

  In any event, he turned his face to the west and the future. He told Jessie he would soon continue to the coast, where they would be together again. “When I think of you…”he concluded his letter, “I feel a warm glow at my heart, which renovates it like a good medicine, and I forget painful feelings in a strong hope for the future….I make frequently pleasant pictures of the happy home we are to have, and often and among the pleasantest of all I see our library, with its bright fire in the rainy, stormy days, and the large windows looking out upon the sea in the bright weather.”

  THE SHOCK OF READING of her husband’s ordeal was more than Jessie could stand. The emotional strain of caring by herself for Lily, the physical toll of the journey from New York and across the isthmus, and now the psychological trauma of reliving the near-death of her husband culminated in a collapse she attributed to “brain fever.”

  Debating doctors fought over her treatment. The favorite of the family she was staying with prescribed the Spanish practice of bleeding, the avoidance of drafts and all other fresh air, and the application of hot water inside and out. An American doctor en route to California prescribed an abundance of fresh air, the application of ice to the skin, and iced drinks. “These two, with their contradictory ideas and their inability to understand each other fully, only added to the confusion of my mind, and became part of my delirium,” she wrote. The one thing they agreed on was croton oil, obtained with difficulty from a visiting British man-of-war to treat congestion in her lungs.

  Her illness elicited a repetition of the pleas of those around her that she return to New York. In her weakness she entertained the idea once more. But then, in the dark hours before dawn on May 6, a cannon’s report announced the arrival of the steamer Oregon, long awaited from San Francisco. By coincidence, a second Pacific Mail steamer, the Panama, arrived within the same hour after a voyage around Cape Horn. Finally the thousands of stranded travelers felt deliverance at hand. En masse they stormed the harbor where the vessels anchored, each argonaut demanding to be taken on board and transported to the goldfields. A full-scale riot threatened as it became clear that even the two ships together couldn’t transport anywhere near the number clamoring to leave. Bribes were offered, blows exchanged. The situation was resolved by the only method able to command a consensus: a lottery. The winners danced gleefully at their deliverance; the losers waited sullenly for the next vessel.

  Once again Jessie’s connections came to her aid. The steamship company withheld a few berths from the lottery; one of these went to the senator’s daughter. Ushered to the head of the line of embarkation, she and Lily were hoisted onto the Panama by the makeshift of an oversized bucket attached to a boom. The ship had been built for eighty; four hundred crowded aboard. Although Jessie and Lily were assigned a cabin, its stuffiness aggravated her cough and drove her above decks, where she rigged a tent out of a large flag. By now all knew who she was, and what she had gone through. “Everybody contributed something to make me comfortable; one a folding iron camp bedstead—some, guava jelly—some, tea—while one of my fellow passengers gave me from his own private stores delicate nourishing things which brought back my strength.” Even the tent on deck was a comparative luxury; most on board could claim no more than a rectangle for sleeping, sketched on the deck in chalk.

  The fresh ocean air healed her lungs (confirming the prescription of the American doctor), so that by the time the Panama reached San Diego, she was tolerably well. Yet the nearer she approached to California, the more she feared bad news that would say her husband hadn’t made it safely to the coast. As the ship dropped anchor in the bay of San Diego and everyone else crowded to the rail, she went below, anticipating the worst and not wishing to hear it.

  Her situation and Lily’s had engaged the emotions of the entire ship; many of the passengers were nearly as anxious as she to learn the outcome of Colonel Frémont’s journey. From behind her closed door she heard a rising commotion in the passageway outside; gradually the commotion became comprehensible. The colonel had arrived! He was safe in California! He had been seen at Los Angeles and would meet her at Monterey!

  Jessie’s relief overwhelmed her. After all he had endured, after all she had endured, they were finally to be reunited. A few days more, another week perhaps, and the new chapter of their life—the chapter that brought and kept them together at last—would begin.

  4

  To the Bottom of the World and Back

  On January 12, 1848, while James Marshall and John Sutter watched the American River rise and wondered whether the waterworks at Coloma would hold against the flood, half a world away the people of Palermo revolted against Ferdinand II, the longtime king of Naples and Sicily. Six weeks later, after the discovery of gold but many months before the news reached Europe, Paris exploded in revolution. Louis Philippe was forced to abdicate, and the Second Republic was proclaimed. The unemployed who formed the backbone of the Paris mob demanded work; when the new government proved unable to provide it, the mob attacked the new government. June saw some of the bloodiest street-fighting in European history; casualties were too many to count but were estimated at ten thousand. Meanwhile revolution spread across Europe, engulfing Austria, Prussia, most of the lesser German states, and large swaths of the rest of Italy. Amid the upheaval, two German émigrés living in London, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, gave voice to the radical disaffection in their landmark polemic, the Communist Manifesto.

  After reeling, the status quo struck back. In France, the June Days were followed by the Red Fear. Chastened moderates joined convinced conservatives to muzzle the press, ban secret societies, and outlaw most public meetings. The nephew of Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon, was elevated to the presidency on promises that he would save society and restore order—a project he commenced immediately, and which didn’t conclude before he had made himself emperor, with powers (although not talents) to match his uncle’s.

  Jean-Nicolas Perlot was in Paris during the exciting, terrifying, and ultimately disillusioning events of 1848. Born in 1823 in the French- speaking part of Belgium, Perlot left home at twenty-two to seek his fortune in Paris, where an uncle found him a job as a calicot, or linen- draper’s assistant. The great city was a lonely place for a newcomer and at times overwhelming. But for two years the job fed him and left him leisure to explore. He prowled cafes and booksellers; at night he attended a trade school that taught mathematics, surveying, and engineering.

  Neither more nor less political than most young men who had to work for a living, Perlot kept his distance from the rioting and urban warfare of 1848. More important to him than the effects of the revolution on Paris politics were its effects on the French economy. Hard times had helped trigger the uprising, which in turn made the times harder. Workers went hungry and cut down trees on the Bois de Boulogne for fuel. Perlot’s employer ran out of orders, and Perlot was soon out of work.

  At just this moment arrived the news from America of gold in California. With business at a standstill and politics in turmoil, the El Dorado in the west was nearly irresistible. Of late a certain vogue had developed in Paris for the American frontier, largely as a result of the publication of French translations of the accounts of the expeditions of John Frémont, whom the French were happy to claim as one of their own. Now everything involving California was rushed into print and snatched from the bookstalls: correspondence from the few Frenchmen in California, memoirs by French sailors to the California coast, articles lifted from American publications.

  As at Valparaiso and Sydney and Canton and New York, the gold reports sent an electric current through Paris and the surrounding country. Merchants hoped to profit from the sale of their wares at San Francisco; shipowners counted on an increase in traffic aboard their vessels; peasants and workers reckoned how to get to the goldfields to reap the harvest waiting there. Broadsides blossomed on walls across Paris, advertising passage on ships preparing to set sail; companies of gold-seekers calling themselves L’Aurifère, La Toison
d’Or, La Ruche d’Or, L’Eldorado, and scores of other such names appealed to prospective argonauts to join up. Shopkeepers offered to outfit those preparing to go—for a suitable price, of course. Even as the dreams set soaring by the February phase of the 1848 revolution crashed to bloody earth, the news from California provided an alternate hook for hope. A bimonthly journal called Le Californie predicted a golden end to France’s troubles:

  There is no French province which does not have products accumulated to the point of being irksome and which could be sold today with immense profit not only in California but in Valparaiso, Lima, and all Western America. Our agriculture, our commerce, our industry, and our capital of all kinds can draw greatest advantages from the movement initiated by the discovery of great treasure in California. Let us then not lose this chance to increase our riches and to efface from our memory the suffering of the past year. We cannot urge the French too strongly to profit in these marvelous discoveries so that they shall not pass into the hands of other peoples.

  Jean-Nicolas Perlot put the matter more succinctly: “The gold fever succeeded the revolutionary or reactionary fever, or, at least, gave it rough competition.”

  Perlot watched in wonder as the advertisements went up. “The least lucky would have 100,000 francs, rather more than less,” he paraphrased the promises. Twenty-five years old, unattached, caught in a threadbare craft growing thinner by the day, he let himself be persuaded. “The chance to tempt fortune thus presented itself; I seized it and decided to leave for California.”

  LEAVING WAS LESS simple than deciding to do so. The voyage to America cost a thousand francs, which Perlot didn’t have. Yet if he was poorer than most of the French argonauts, he was more resourceful than many, and after much calculating and some negotiation he signed an agreement with the manager of one of the California companies, La Fortune, whereby Perlot would receive passage in exchange for serving as company steward on the way. Once in America he would have a standard share in the company’s earnings, which would consist of the pooled revenues (that is, the value of the gold dust and nuggets discovered) less combined expenses. The overall term of the agreement was five years; at the end of that period the company would return him to Paris, if he so chose. Perlot was delighted at this arrangement. “I was saved, I was leaving!”

  The company gathered at Paris and traveled down the Seine to Le Havre. Their ship, the Courrier de Cherbourg, was supposed to be ready for immediate departure, but was not. For a month the men put up at a boarding house, chafing at the delay and costing the company—that is, themselves—a distressing amount of money. Steward Perlot supervised the packing of provisions and kept a sharp eye out for cheating by the provisioners.

  Finally the preparations were finished and the vessel made ready to sail. The scene on deck at the last hour featured hugs, kisses, tears, and bon voyages from the wives, mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters of the brave adventurers.

  Perlot, however, stood apart. “I had in this crowd neither relative nor friend, nor even an acquaintance, and none of these words of affection was addressed to me. I was leaving—would I ever return? Nobody asked himself this question, which interested nobody. As at my arrival in Paris, I had the bitter feeling of my isolation. Ought I, after all, to rejoice or regret not seeing anyone weep for my departure? I did not know. And nevertheless, witnessing these scenes of farewell, I began to be sorry that I too did not have someone to embrace, to shake by the hand.” The one other Belgian aboard was the sole person similarly stranded. Perlot approached him. “After some seconds of silence, I told him what I was feeling. Without saying a word, he looked at me fixedly, then, covering his face with his handkerchief, he fled. I remained alone, mournful, my eyes turned toward Le Havre, which was slowly receding.”

  Perlot’s companions aboard the Courrier were a diverse crowd. Two were the sons of the director of La Fortune. Two more were the company’s doctor and engineer. Then there was “Clavel de Vérance, ex-Zouave, an imaginary nobleman, whom we nicknamed Portos, to humor him, for he was proud of his bodily strength, although it appeared as debatable as his coat of arms.” A cafe-waiter had recently returned from Madrid to discover that waiters went begging in Paris. A Norman son of a schoolmaster had been a clerk in England but had grown restless there and retreated to his native village, which had nothing more to offer than when he left. A lumber-seller with a weakness for drink, a tanner fleeing his wife, a student fleeing the friars who ran his school, an army veteran named Magraff, who “called himself a nephew of the Duke of Baden, and perhaps he really was,” and a man subsequently dubbed Tenerife, for his mountainous nose, filled other berths.

  The ship also carried argonauts unattached to La Fortune. Badinier was a lumber dealer from Orléans who had been ruined by the recent revolution. Surprisingly, considering this personal history, he held no animus against the popular cause. “Quite the contrary. He was nicknamed ‘Mirabeau’ [after the great orator of the first French revolution] and ‘the Father of the people,’ because on any occasion, and even without any occasion, he talked to us about his love for the people and delivered harangues which were doubtless very beautiful, but which were Greek to us and perhaps to him too, so elevated was the point of view—and so incoherent the form.” The Abbé Laubert “was going to evangelize the savages of California, and in the meantime he evangelized us. In his character as missionary, he wore a long red beard. He was an educated and liberal priest, perhaps a little heretical. Was that why he was going far from the oldest daughter of the Church [that is, France]? It might be. The explanation which he gave us of the birth of Jesus Christ, son of a ghost, although he swore he did not believe in incubi, completely passed my understanding.”

  NOT UNUSUALLY FOR a group of landlubbers, nearly all suffered the mal de mer their first days out. This eased Perlot’s job as steward, since the collective failure of appetite freed him from having to distribute food ra tions. For almost a week a surly wind from the west confined them to the Channel; not till the seventh day did the lengthening swells indicate their entrance to the Atlantic. The slower tempo of the ship’s rolling, combined with the acquisition of sea legs by the passengers, eased the seasickness. Appetites improved, and Perlot found his services in greater demand.

  During a brief stretch of clear weather in the Bay of Biscay, the novices concluded that sailing was a fine means of travel. This conclusion abruptly proved premature, as Perlot related.

  It changed all at once from white to black. Then it was that we could judge what the Ocean is. This time we had a real tempest, for we had had, in the Channel, only a shadow of one. A fair number of us who, at that time, had only frowned, were weeping now when they looked toward the absent shore, convinced that their last day was come. Certainly, when seeing in the port of Le Havre great ships which gauged two or three thousand tons, I never would have imagined that the sea had enough power to make these colossi pirouette like nutshells.

  The motions of two ships in distress which we had in sight made us aware of the movements which ours was performing. One of them seemed hardly out of gunshot; we could perceive it only when it found itself, like us, on the top of a wave; sometimes launched toward the sky, we saw it almost upright on its prow or on its poop; sometimes it appeared to us completely upset and let us see only its keel.

  It was just the same with ours. Sometimes it stayed so thoroughly upright on its bow or stem that the deck fled from under my feet and I remained suspended from the rope which I had twisted around my arm; at other times, the roll put the deck on a vertical line and half the yards in the water. Then all at once, it dove between two waves and the surge passed over the deck, and I was astonished at not being engulfed.

  The storm lasted three days, followed by fair weather that carried the craft to Madeira. The voyagers, like most making their first ocean crossing, were delighted to touch terra firma again. And Madeira was a delightful place to touch. “Madeira is a charming little island, a true earthly paradise,” Perlot remarked. Y
et cheap supplies, rather than the picturesqueness of the place, were the reason ships like the Courrier de Cherbourg put in at Madeira. Although La Fortune didn’t buy much in new stores, others on the vessel did.

  It was just as well Perlot and company didn’t provision at Madeira. The ship’s mate took aboard a quantity of tuna, which turned out to be bad. Nearly a quarter of the passengers and crew became acutely ill. None died, but most lost their taste for fish.

  Amid the epidemic, Perlot devised a scheme for efficiently feeding his company. During the first weeks of the voyage his impatient partners insisted on receiving rations at whatever hour suited them; now he succeeded in imposing a more regular schedule. The men were divided into eight squads; each had its own kettle and mess kit, which served its seven or eight members. Each squad selected a cook, who at the appointed hour received the rations for the group and apportioned them out to the members.

  In good weather the mess squads ate on deck, and accidents were few. But in stormy weather the men discovered another difference between life on land and at sea. They were forced to take refuge below, in a large room that served as a dormitory at night and a commons during the day. Here each squad clustered around its kettle, balancing and bracing themselves as well as they could against the rolling of the ship. They rarely held their positions for long. “How many times that damned wind came to disturb the order and the religious silence which ruled in that solemn moment!” wrote Perlot. “How many times we had the bitter experience of that truth, that there is many a slip’twixt the spoon and the lip!” The rolling didn’t merely disrupt the eating; it also frayed nerves and sometimes triggered violence. One man would splash soup on his neighbor and be cursed for his carelessness. Another would knock his neighbor down and receive a cuff in return. A third would topple the mess pot of an adjacent squad and provoke a general melee.