Two Years Before the Mast
Indians. Vast banks of fog, invading us from the North Pacific, drove
in through the entrance, and covered the whole bay; and when they
disappeared, we saw a few well-wooded islands, the sand-hills on the
west, the grassy and wooded slopes on the east, and the vast stretch of
the bay to the southward, where we were told lay the Missions of Santa
Clara and San José, and still longer stretches to the northward and
northeastward, where we understood smaller bays spread out, and large
rivers poured in their tributes of waters. There were no settlements on
these bays or rivers, and the few ranchos and Missions were remote and
widely separated. Not only the neighborhood of our anchorage, but the
entire region of the great bay, was a solitude. On the whole coast of
California there was not a lighthouse, a beacon, or a buoy, and the
charts were made up from old and disconnected surveys by British,
Russian, and Mexican voyagers. Birds of prey and passage swooped and
dived about us, wild beasts ranged through the oak groves, and as we
slowly floated out of the harbor with the tide, herds of deer came to
the water's edge, on the northerly side of the entrance, to gaze at the
strange spectacle.
On the evening of Saturday, the 13th of August, 1859, the superb
steamship Golden Gate, gay with crowds of passengers, and lighting the
sea for miles around with the glare of her signal lights of red, green,
and white, and brilliant with lighted saloons and staterooms, bound up
from the Isthmus of Panama, neared the entrance to San Francisco, the
great centre of a world-wide commerce. Miles out at sea, on the
desolate rocks of the Farallones, gleamed the powerful rays of one of
the most costly and effective light-houses in the world. As we drew in
through the Golden Gate, another light-house met our eyes, and in the
clear moonlight of the unbroken California summer we saw, on the right,
a large fortification protecting the narrow entrance, and just before
us the little island of Alcatraz confronted us,--one entire fortress.
We bore round the point toward the old anchoring-ground of the hide
ships, and there, covering the sand-hills and the valleys, stretching
from the water's edge to the base of the great hills, and from the old
Presidio to the Mission, flickering all over with the lamps of its
streets and houses, lay a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants.
Clocks tolled the hour of midnight from its steeples, but the city was
alive from the salute of our guns, spreading the news that the
fortnightly steamer had come, bringing mails and passengers from the
Atlantic world. Clipper ships of the largest size lay at anchor in the
stream, or were girt to the wharves; and capacious high-pressure
steamers, as large and showy as those of the Hudson or Mississippi,
bodies of dazzling light, awaited the delivery of our mails to take
their courses up the Bay, stopping at Benicia and the United States
Naval Station, and then up the great tributaries--the Sacramento, San
Joaquin, and Feather Rivers--to the far inland cities of Sacramento,
Stockton, and Marysville.
The dock into which we drew, and the streets about it, were densely
crowded with express wagons and hand-carts to take luggage, coaches and
cabs for passengers, and with men,--some looking out for friends among
our hundreds of passengers,--agents of the press, and a greater
multitude eager for newspapers and verbal intelligence from the great
Atlantic and European world. Through this crowd I made my way, along
the well-built and well-lighted streets, as alive as by day, where boys
in high-keyed voices were already crying the latest New York papers;
and between one and two o'clock in the morning found myself comfortably
abed in a commodious room, in the Oriental Hotel, which stood, as well
as I could learn, on the filled-up cove, and not far from the spot
where we used to beach our boats from the Alert.
Sunday, August 14th. When I awoke in the morning, and looked from my
windows over the city of San Francisco, with its storehouses, towers,
and steeples; its court-houses, theatres, and hospitals; its daily
journals; its well-filled learned professions; its fortresses and
light-houses; its wharves and harbor, with their thousand-ton clipper
ships, more in number than London or Liverpool sheltered that day,
itself one of the capitals of the American Republic, and the sole
emporium of a new world, the awakened Pacific; when I looked across the
bay to the eastward, and beheld a beautiful town on the fertile, wooded
shores of the Contra Costa, and steamers, large and small, the
ferryboats to the Contra Costa, and capacious freighters and
passenger-carriers to all parts of the great bay and its tributaries,
with lines of their smoke in the horizon,--when I saw all these things,
and reflected on what I once was and saw here, and what now surrounded
me, I could scarcely keep my hold on reality at all, or the genuineness
of anything, and seemed to myself like one who had moved in "worlds not
realized."
I could not complain that I had not a choice of places of worship. The
Roman Catholics have an archbishop, a cathedral, and five or six
smaller churches, French, German, Spanish, and English; and the
Episcopalians, a bishop, a cathedral, and three other churches; the
Methodists and Presbyterians have three or four each, and there are
Congregationalists, Baptists, a Unitarian, and other societies. On my
way to church, I met two classmates of mine at Harvard standing in a
door-way, one a lawyer and the other a teacher, and made appointments
for a future meeting. A little farther on I came upon another Harvard
man, a fine scholar and wit, and full of cleverness and good-humor, who
invited me to go to breakfast with him at the French house--he was a
bachelor, and a late riser on Sundays. I asked him to show me the way
to Bishop Kip's church. He hesitated, looked a little confused, and
admitted that he was not as well up in certain classes of knowledge as
in others, but, by a desperate guess, pointed out a wooden building at
the foot of the street, which any one might have seen could not be
right, and which turned out to be an African Baptist meeting-house. But
my friend had many capital points of character, and I owed much of the
pleasure of my visit to his attentions.
The congregation at the Bishop's church was precisely like one you
would meet in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston. To be sure, the
identity of the service makes one feel at once at home, but the people
were alike, nearly all of the English race, though from all parts of
the Union. The latest French bonnets were at the head of the chief
pews, and business men at the foot. The music was without character,
but there was an instructive sermon, and the church was full.
I found that there were no services at any of the Protestant churches
in the afternoon. They have two services on Sunday; at 11 A. M., and
after dark. The afternoon is spent at home, or in friendly visiting,
or teaching of Sunday Schools, or other humane and social duties.
This is as much the practice with what at home are called the strictest
denominations as with any others. Indeed, I found individuals, as well
as public bodies, affected in a marked degree by a change of oceans and
by California life. One Sunday afternoon I was surprised at receiving
the card of a man whom I had last known, some fifteen years ago, as a
strict and formal deacon of a Congregational Society in New England.
He was a deacon still, in San Francisco, a leader in all pious works,
devoted to his denomination and to total abstinence,--the same
internally, but externally--what a change! Gone was the downcast eye,
the bated breath, the solemn, non-natural voice, the watchful gait,
stepping as if he felt responsible for the balance of the moral
universe! He walked with a stride, an uplifted open countenance, his
face covered with beard, whiskers, and mustache, his voice strong and
natural;--and, in short, he had put off the New England deacon and
become a human being. In a visit of an hour I learned much from him
about the religious societies, the moral reforms, the
"Dashaways,"--total abstinence societies, which had taken strong hold
on the young and wilder parts of society,--and then of the Vigilance
Committee, of which he was a member, and of more secular points of
interest.
In one of the parlors of the hotel, I saw a man of about sixty years of
age, with his feet bandaged and resting in a chair, whom somebody
addressed by the name of Lies.[1] Lies! thought I, that must be the
man who came across the country from Kentucky to Monterey while we lay
there in the Pilgrim in 1835, and made a passage in the Alert, when he
used to shoot with his rifle bottles hung from the top-gallant
studding-sail-boom-ends. He married the beautiful Doña Rosalía
Vallejo, sister of Don Guadalupe. There were the old high features and
sandy hair. I put my chair beside him, and began conversation, as any
one may do in California. Yes, he was the Mr. Lies; and when I gave my
name he professed at once to remember me, and spoke of my book. I
found that almost--I might perhaps say quite--every American in
California had read it; for when California "broke out," as the phrase
is, in 1848, and so large a portion of the Anglo-Saxon race flocked to
it, there was no book upon California but mine. Many who were on the
coast at the time the book refers to, and afterwards read it, and
remembered the Pilgrim and Alert, thought they also remembered me. But
perhaps more did remember me than I was inclined at first to believe,
for the novelty of a collegian coming out before the mast had drawn
more attention to me than I was aware of at the time.
Late in the afternoon, as there were vespers at the Roman Catholic
churches, I went to that of Notre Dame des Victoires. The congregation
was French, and a sermon in French was preached by an Abbé; the music
was excellent, all things airy and tasteful, and making one feel as if
in one of the chapels in Paris. The Cathedral of St. Mary, which I
afterwards visited, where the Irish attend, was a contrast indeed, and
more like one of our stifling Irish Catholic churches in Boston or New
York, with intelligence in so small a proportion to the number of
faces. During the three Sundays I was in San Francisco, I visited
three of the Episcopal churches, and the Congregational, a Chinese
Mission Chapel, and on the Sabbath (Saturday) a Jewish synagogue. The
Jews are a wealthy and powerful class here. The Chinese, too, are
numerous, and do a great part of the manual labor and small
shop-keeping, and have some wealthy mercantile houses.
It is noticeable that European Continental fashions prevail generally
in this city,--French cooking, lunch at noon, and dinner at the end of
the day, with café noir after meals, and to a great extent the European
Sunday,--to all which emigrants from the United States and Great
Britain seem to adapt themselves. Some dinners which were given to me
at French restaurants were, it seemed to me,--a poor judge of such
matters, to be sure,--as sumptuous and as good, in dishes and wines, as
I have found in Paris. But I had a relish-maker which my friends at
table did not suspect--the remembrance of the forecastle dinners I ate
here twenty-four years before.
August 17th. The customs of California are free; and any person who
knows about my book speaks to me. The newspapers have announced the
arrival of the veteran pioneer of all. I hardly walk out without
meeting or making acquaintances. I have already been invited to
deliver the anniversary oration before the Pioneer Society, to
celebrate the settlement of San Francisco. Any man is qualified for
election into the society who came to California before 1853. What