Two Years Before the Mast
moderns they are! I tell them of the time when Richardson's shanty of
1835--not his adobe house of 1836--was the only human habitation
between the Mission and the Presidio, and when the vast bay, with all
its tributaries and recesses, was a solitude,--and yet I am but little
past forty years of age. They point out the place where Richardson's
adobe house stood, and tell me that the first court and first town
council were convened in it, the first Protestant worship performed in
it, and in it the first capital trial by the Vigilance Committee held.
I am taken down to the wharves, by antiquaries of a ten or twelve
years' range, to identify the two points, now known as Clark's and
Rincon, which formed the little cove of Yerba Buena, where we used to
beach our boats,--now filled up and built upon. The island we called
"Wood Island," where we spent the cold days and nights of December, in
our launch, getting wood for our year's supply, is clean shorn of
trees; and the bare rocks of Alcatraz Island, an entire fortress. I
have looked at the city from the water and islands from the city, but I
can see nothing that recalls the times gone by, except the venerable
Mission, the ruinous Presidio, the high hills in the rear of the town,
and the great stretches of the bay in all directions.
To-day I took a California horse of the old style,--the run, the loping
gait,--and visited the Presidio. The walls stand as they did, with
some changes made to accommodate a small garrison of United States
troops. It has a noble situation, and I saw from it a clipper ship of
the very largest class, coming through the Gate, under her fore-and-aft
sails. Thence I rode to the Fort, now nearly finished, on the southern
shore of the Gate, and made an inspection of it. It is very expensive
and of the latest style. One of the engineers here is Custis Lee, who
has just left West Point at the head of his class,--a son of Colonel
Robert E. Lee, who distinguished himself in the Mexican War.
Another morning I ride to the Mission Dolores. It has a strangely
solitary aspect, enhanced by its surroundings of the most uncongenial,
rapidly growing modernisms; the hoar of ages surrounded by the
brightest, slightest, and rapidest of modern growths. Its old belfries
still clanged with the discordant bells, and Mass was saying within,
for it is used as a place of worship for the extreme south part of the
city.
In one of my walks about the wharves, I found a pile of dry hides lying
by the side of a vessel. Here was something to feelingly persuade me
what I had been, to recall a past scarce credible to myself. I stood
lost in reflection. What were these hides--what were they not?--to us,
to me, a boy, twenty-four years ago? These were our constant labor, our
chief object, our almost habitual thought. They brought us out here,
they kept us here, and it was only by getting them that we could escape
from the coast and return to home and civilized life. If it had not
been that I might be seen, I should have seized one, slung it over my
head, walked off with it, and thrown it by the old toss--I do not
believe yet a lost art--to the ground. How they called up to my mind
the months of curing at San Diego, the year and more of beach and surf
work, and the steering of the ship for home! I was in a dream of San
Diego, San Pedro--with its hills so steep for taking up goods, and its
stones so hard to our bare feet--and the cliffs of San Juan! All this,
too, is no more! The entire hide-business is of the past, and to the
present inhabitants of California a dim tradition. The gold
discoveries drew off all men from the gathering or cure of hides, the
inflowing population made an end of the great droves of cattle; and now
not a vessel pursues the--I was about to say dear--the dreary once
hated business of gathering hides upon the coast, and the beach of San
Diego is abandoned and its hide-houses have disappeared. Meeting a
respectable-looking citizen on the wharf, I inquired of him how the
hide-trade was carried on. "O," said he, "there is very little of it,
and that is all here. The few that are brought in are placed under
sheds in winter, or left out on the wharf in summer, and are loaded
from the wharves into the vessels alongside. They form parts of
cargoes of other materials." I really felt too much, at the instant,
to express to him the cause of my interest in the subject, and only
added, "Then the old business of trading up and down the coast and
curing hides for cargoes is all over?" "O yes, sir," said he, "those
old times of the Pilgrim and Alert and California, that we read about,
are gone by."
Saturday, August 20th. The steamer Senator makes regular trips up and
down the coast, between San Francisco and San Diego, calling at
intermediate ports. This is my opportunity to revisit the old scenes.
She sails to-day, and I am off, steaming among the great clippers
anchored in the harbor, and gliding rapidly round the point, past
Alcatraz Island, the light-house, and through the fortified Golden
Gate, and bending to the southward,--all done in two or three hours,
which, in the Alert, under canvas, with head tides, variable winds, and
sweeping currents to deal with, took us full two days.
Among the passengers I noticed an elderly gentleman, thin, with sandy
hair and face that seemed familiar. He took off his glove and showed
one shrivelled hand. It must be he! I went to him and said, "Captain
Wilson, I believe." Yes, that was his name. "I knew you, sir, when you
commanded the Ayacucho on this coast, in old hide-droghing times, in
1835-6." He was quickened by this, and at once inquiries were made on
each side, and we were in full talk about the Pilgrim and Alert,
Ayacucho and Loriotte, the California and Lagoda. I found he had been
very much flattered by the praise I had bestowed in my book on his
seamanship, especially in bringing the Pilgrim to her berth in San
Diego harbor, after she had drifted successively into the Lagoda and
Loriotte, and was coming into him. I had made a pet of his brig, the
Ayacucho, which pleased him almost as much as my remembrance of his
bride and their wedding, which I saw at Santa Barbara in 1836. Doña
Ramona was now the mother of a large family, and Wilson assured me that
if I would visit him at his rancho, near San Luis Obispo, I should find
her still a handsome woman, and very glad to see me. How we walked the
deck together, hour after hour, talking over the old times,--the ships,
the captains, the crews, the traders on shore, the ladies, the
Missions, the south-easters! indeed, where could we stop? He had sold
the Ayacucho in Chili for a vessel of war, and had given up the sea,
and had been for years a ranchero. (I learned from others that he had
become one of the most wealthy and respectable farmers in the State,
and that his rancho was well worth visiting.) Thompson, he said,
hadn't the sailor in him; and he never could laugh enough at his fiasco
in San Diego, and his reception by Bradshaw. Faucon was a sailor and a
navigator. He did not know what had become of George Marsh (ante, pp.
199-202, 252), except that he left him in Callao; nor could he tell me
anything of handsome Bill Jackson (ante, p. 86), nor of Captain Nye of
the Loriotte. I told him all I then knew of the ships, the masters,
and the officers. I found he had kept some run of my history, and
needed little information. Old Señor Noriego of Santa Barbara, he told
me, was dead, and Don Carlos and Don Santiago, but I should find their
children there, now in middle life. Doña Augustia, he said, I had made
famous by my praises of her beauty and dancing, and I should have from
her a royal reception. She had been a widow, and remarried since, and
had a daughter as handsome as herself. The descendants of Noriego had
taken the ancestral name of De la Guerra, as they were nobles of Old
Spain by birth; and the boy Pablo, who used to make passages in the
Alert, was now Don Pablo de la Guerra, a Senator in the State
Legislature for Santa Barbara County.
The points in the country, too, he noticed, as he passed them,--Santa
Cruz, San Luis Obispo, Point Año Nuevo, the opening to Monterey, which
to my disappointment we did not visit. No; Monterey, the prettiest town
on the coast, and its capital and seat of customs, had got no advantage
from the great changes, was out of the way of commerce and of the
travel to the mines and great rivers, and was not worth stopping at.
Point Conception we passed in the night, a cheery light gleaming over
the waters from its tar light-house, standing on its outermost peak.
Point Conception! That word was enough to recall all our experiences
and dreads of gales, swept decks, topmast carried away, and the
hardships of a coast service in the winter. But Captain Wilson tells
me that the climate has altered; that the southeasters are no longer
the bane of the coast they once were, and that vessels now anchor
inside the kelp at Santa Barbara and San Pedro all the year round. I
should have thought this owing to his spending his winters on a rancho
instead of the deck of the Ayacucho, had not the same thing been told
me by others.
Passing round Point Conception, and steering easterly, we opened the
islands that form, with the main-land, the canal of Santa Barbara.
There they are, Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa; and there is the beautiful
point, Santa Buenaventura; and there lies Santa Barbara on its plain,
with its amphitheatre of high hills and distant mountains. There is
the old white Mission with its belfries, and there the town, with its
one-story adobe houses, with here and there a two-story wooden house of
later build; yet little is it altered,--the same repose in the golden
sunlight and glorious climate, sheltered by its hills; and then, more
remindful than anything else, there roars and tumbles upon the beach
the same grand surf of the great Pacific as on the beautiful day when
the Pilgrim, after her five months' voyage, dropped her weary anchors
here; the same bright blue ocean, and the surf making just the same
monotonous, melancholy roar, and the same dreamy town, and gleaming
white Mission, as when we beached our boats for the first time, riding
over the breakers with shouting Kanakas, the three small hide-traders
lying at anchor in the offing. But now we are the only vessel, and
that an unromantic, sail-less, spar-less, engine-driven hulk!
I landed in the surf, in the old style, but it was not high enough to
excite us, the only change being that I was somehow unaccountably a
passenger, and did not have to jump overboard and steady the boat, and
run her up by the gunwales.
Santa Barbara has gained but little. I should not know, from anything
I saw, that she was now a seaport of the United States, a part of the
enterprising Yankee nation, and not still a lifeless Mexican town. At
the same old house, where Señor Noriego lived, on the piazza in front
of the court-yard, where was the gay scene of the marriage of our
agent, Mr. Robinson, to Doña Anita, where Don Juan Bandini and Doña
Augustia danced, Don Pablo de la Guerra received me in a courtly
fashion. I passed the day with the family, and in walking about the
place; and ate the old dinner with its accompaniments of frijoles,
native olives and grapes, and native wines. In due time I paid my
respects to Doña Augustia, and notwithstanding what Wilson told me, I
could hardly believe that after twenty-four years there would still be
so much of the enchanting woman about her.
She thanked me for the kind and, as she called them, greatly
exaggerated compliments I had paid her; and her daughter told me that
all travellers who came to Santa Barbara called to see her mother, and