by H. W. Brands
The early summer—that is, December—of 1848 found Tom Archer sheep-rich but bored, and when he heard the news of gold in California he naturally took notice. But the news, at least as circulated in the Sydney papers, was puzzling. The editors couldn’t decide whether the gold strike was a good thing or bad. As Archer himself appreciated, the Australian market for wool was slumping sadly; California offered a fresh and—if the reports of its sudden riches were true—lucrative outlet. And not just for wool. Australia was the closest English-speaking country to California, and therefore was well positioned to supply the miners with all manner of provisions. As the Sydney Herald, which broke the gold story in Australia, put it, “We believe several persons are going to send provisions to California, and if they arrive there before shipments from the United States, immense profits will be made.”
Yet even as the papers applauded the transport of goods to California, they did their best to discourage the transport of people. Archer wasn’t surprised, as preserving the population of Australia—in particular, that part of the Australian population that hadn’t been ordered to the penal colony by British magistrates—was a regular theme with local editors. Even before the news from California, people had been edging toward docks to escape the economic slump. Now many of those same people were willing to bet ten pounds—the price of steerage to San Francisco—that they’d do better hunting gold in California than hunting jobs in Australia. And the Australian papers were trying to keep them from going. The Herald made a habit of deriding life in the “diggins” and depicting Californians as sharps. The “Mormons,” the paper explained to readers wondering about these strange people involved in the gold discovery, “were originally of the sect known as ‘Latter-day Saints,’ which sect flourishes wherever Anglo-Saxon gulls are found in sufficient numbers to swallow the egregious nonsense of fanatic humbugs who fatten upon their credulity.” The paper relayed satirical advice to aspiring gold-seekers:
What class ought to go to the Diggins? Persons who have nothing to lose but their lives.
Things you should not take with you to the Diggins. A love of comforts, a taste for civilization, a respect for other people’s throats, and a value for your own.
Things you will find useful at the Diggins. A revolving pistol, some knowledge of treating gun-shot wounds, a toleration of strange bedfellows.
The sort of society you will meet with at the Diggins. Those for whom the United States are not big enough; those for whom England is too hot; those who came to clean out the gold, and those who came to clean out the gold finders.
What is the best thing to do when you get to the Diggins? Go back home.
How gold may be best extracted. By supplying, at exorbitant prices, the wants of those who gather it.
What will be the ultimate effect of the discovery of the Diggins? To raise prices, to ruin fools, to demoralize a new country first, and settle it afterwards.
The discouragement was lost on Tom Archer. He guessed that conditions in California couldn’t be any harder than conditions in the outback, and as for the alleged dangers from thieves and cutthroats, they might be just the thing to spice up a young man’s life. With a friend named Ned Hawkins, he prepared to head east. Settling affairs—to wit, selling his sheep in a slow market—required several weeks; had Archer been of a less phlegmatic temper he would have grown impatient, for gold-hunters were embarking from Sydney’s Circular Wharf by the thousands. Nor did he and Hawkins deny themselves a suitable leave-taking for their great adventure. Friends in Sydney joined the celebration, and for days and nights the pubs of the city did a lively business by them.
With a light heart and a heavy head, Archer left Sydney on July 17, 1849. His vessel was the bark Elizabeth Archer of Liverpool, commanded by Charles Cobb and named, evidently, for no relation of Tom (at least he didn’t comment on the coincidence of names). Archer’s party consisted of himself, Hawkins, two other friends, and five servants: “my two Durandur black boys, Jackey Small and Davey… another black boy of Hawkins’, and two Chinamen, also his.” Besides Archer’s group, the ship carried more than a hundred argonauts, including one Edward Hargraves, whom none particularly noticed but who would become his country’s hero in just a few years.
After an easy run eastward for a week and a day, the ship sighted the islands called the Three Kings, off the northern tip of New Zealand’s North Island. Captain Cobb kept the bearing east, to win as much seaway as possible before turning north into the trade winds that would push them back west. A single squall upset the smooth sailing, tilting the ship almost on beam ends in the middle of the night and leaving the passengers to survey a chaotic deck the next morning. On his earlier voyage out from England, Archer had discovered in himself a spryness about the rigging; twelve years later he astonished the Elizabeth Archer’s crew with his ability to scamper aloft with the best of the tars. He amazed even himself one dark night when the crew began reefing the main topsail while he was perched on the main topsail yard. Suddenly his seat swung away beneath him, leaving him dangling one-handed from the topsail stay. He managed to grasp a shroud with his other hand, and slid down the rigging, alighting with a bounce beside Captain Cobb, who was nearly as surprised as Archer himself had been two seconds before.
Several days after this, the captain proposed landing at Pitcairn Island, where the passengers might purchase fresh fruit and vegetables to complement their biscuit and mutton. Archer appreciated the shrewdness in the offer. In asking the passengers to pay for what he should have been supplying, Cobb calculated that few aboard would want to miss this singular opportunity to visit one of the most storied landfalls in the entire Pacific. As all knew, Pitcairn had been the last refuge of the mutineers of the HMS Bounty, seized in 1789 from its commander, Lieutenant William Bligh. Every English lad could recite the strangely stirring tale of how the brutal Bligh and eighteen loyalists had been cast adrift by Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers; how Bligh and the others had managed to steer their open boat four thousand miles to Timor, where Dutch colonists arranged their return to England; how Christian and the mutineers had sailed to Tahiti, where several were eventually captured by the Royal Navy and taken to England for trial and execution; how Christian and a handful of the other leaders of the mutiny, along with a number of Tahitians, had secretly sailed to the once-discovered but since-forgotten island of Pitcairn; how one by one the Pitcairn colonists had murdered one another till a single mutineer, a dozen Tahitians, and assorted offspring of the mutineers and Tahitians remained; how the long arm of British law had finally tracked down this last rebel but took pity on him and let him live out his days as the doddering patriarch of his sorry tribe.
Captain Cobb’s invitation to visit the mutineers’ redoubt elicited enthusiastic approval. Archer was one of the first into the boat lowered over the side; after a strenuous bit of rowing (the height of the cliff that dominated the shore had caused Cobb to underestimate the ship’s distance from the island) and with the help of a whaleboat sent out to greet them, the visitors made their way through the treacherous surf to the beach.
It was obvious to Archer that conditions had improved since the colony’s nadir.
At least a score of people of both sexes and all ages now rushed upon us, seized our hands, and, shaking them most cordially, bade us welcome in excellent English. A comely, well-built set of folks they were, many of the men and nearly all the young women and children having tolerably fair, rosy complexions, with black or dark brown hair, the women’s neatly gathered on the top of their heads, and fastened there in graceful, wavy ringlets. The men were all dressed in light European clothes, and the women wore a loose jacket of light striped stuff, reaching below the waist, and a long strip of the same kind of stuff wound round and fastened to the waist.
(Edward Hargraves rendered a similar judgment of the Pitcairners. “A more happy or a more virtuous people it is scarcely possible to imagine the existence of,” he wrote in his account of the voyage.)
Th
e islanders led the visitors up the cliff to their village. Archer had never seen such a charming place. Rustic cottages provided the little shelter the inhabitants required; each cottage was surrounded by a large cultivated plot teeming with banana, plantain, and breadfruit trees, sugarcane, yams, sweet potatoes, and numerous tropical fruits and vegetables for which Archer had no names. (It was breadfruit, which the British hoped to transplant to their colonies elsewhere in the tropics, that had brought Bligh to the South Pacific on his fateful voyage.) Behind the village rose the slopes of a volcano, upon the peak of which, the islanders said, Fletcher Christian used to sit, awaiting the man-of-war that would come to take him away.
The islanders were most hospitable, throwing a banquet for their guests and providing overnight accommodations in their homes. The visitors filled their bellies with all the luscious produce they could eat and their bags with all they could buy. Archer’s favorable impression of the islanders was diminished only slightly upon departure the next day. His was the last boat off the island; just as he and Hawkins were boarding, the islander in charge of accounts said that his people had been paid ten dollars too little for some of the supplies. Hawkins, who possessed a trusting heart, and Archer, who had literally given the shirt off his back to his Pitcairn host (European clothes being hard to come by in the South Pacific), assumed that the fault lay with their shipmates, especially after the Pitcairn accountant explained, with much anguish and hand-wringing, that he was a poor man with a large family, and his fellow islanders would hold him responsible for any discrepancy. “This was too touching for us to resist, and we each contributed one half of the sum required to render full justice.” Only after they reached the Elizabeth Archer and told their story did they discover that the justice they had rendered was more than full, by ten dollars. Their shipmates got a laugh from the affair, and Archer and Hawkins a lesson in guile in Eden.
The remainder of the voyage was less eventful. East of Pitcairn the Elizabeth Archer encountered the southeast trades, which carried them into the tropics and the doldrums. A ten-day drift ended when they met the northeast trades, which drove them back west of Hawaii. Eventually they entered the belt of North Pacific westerlies, and proceeded before the wind toward California.
A few hundred miles from land they raised an American vessel. Archer had never met any Americans, and as he was going to their country he was curious to see what they were like. He got his wish when several came aboard. “A very queer-looking lot I thought them, dressed as they were in long blue woollen coats and brown or grey billy-cock hats, and looking more like farmers than sailors,” he wrote. “With true republican freedom, they all accompanied the captain into the cabin, and were regaled with copious supplies of ‘Bass’s Bitter,’ which they seemed to enjoy very much. The talk was animated and plentifully garnished with ‘Do tell,’ ‘Waal, waal,’ ‘I reckon,’ ‘I guess,’ and other Americanisms which I had never heard before, and thought rather expressive and amusing.”
As interesting to Archer as the Yankees themselves was their vessel, christened the Mount Vernon. Her clean lines and aggressive rigging made her much faster in the water than the Elizabeth Archer. Archer thought this to be characteristic of the difference between the English and American approaches to sailing. The English built safe, boxy ships that were hard to sink but impossible to sail fast; the Americans sacrificed safety for swiftness, and left the English behind—as the Mount Vernon soon left the Elizabeth Archer behind.
Several days later Archer, scouring the eastern horizon from the crosstrees, spied what seemed a long, low bank of white clouds. When the clouds didn’t move during the course of hours, Archer realized they weren’t clouds but the snow-covered Sierra Nevada, at least 150 miles distant. Closer to shore the ship encountered pods of whales. The mighty mammals sported and breached, sometimes springing clear out of the water and landing with an awesome splash. Archer wondered how the animals had survived the depredations of American whalers, whose exploits were legendary and the source of international envy. (He later learned that these gray whales lacked the oil that made other species—especially sperm whales—attractive to the hunters.)
On October 5, under an azure sky and on a favorable breeze, the Elizabeth Archer entered the Golden Gate. The breeze expired and a strong ebb tide set in before the ship reached the cove of San Francisco, compelling Captain Cobb to anchor for the night. But the next morning the vessel reached the harbor, eighty-one days out of Sydney. Archer recorded little about the arrival, leaving Edward Hargraves to fill in the details:
As we entered the harbour, about 500 sail of shipping came in view, presenting a complete forest of masts—a sight well calculated to inspire us with hope, and remove the feelings of doubt and dejection, which, in the course of a long voyage, are apt to take the place of the first eagerness for novelty and adventure. Boats from the shore and from ships that we had spoken on our voyage soon boarded us to welcome our arrival. “There is gold—plenty of gold—for all those who will work for it,” was the answer to our numerous inquiries.
The Elizabeth Archer soon joined the armada of the abandoned. “The whole crew deserted on the night after our arrival in port,” Hargraves wrote, “excepting one officer and the apprentice boys, four in number.”
LEAVING CHINA WAS considerably harder than leaving Chile or Australia. Traditional Chinese revered their ancestors to a degree unheard- of elsewhere; a primary obligation of family life was to tend the shrine of the family dead. This duty wasn’t simply familial; the respect for authority on which it was based simultaneously served as a prop to the power of the state. And it tended to tie people to the place of their birth—that is, the place of their ancestors’ death. Emigration, especially across a wide ocean, prevented one from fulfilling this essential duty; it also challenged the legitimacy of the state. Consequently it was frowned upon both privately and politically and was undertaken only under the most compelling circumstances.
As things happened, circumstances were quite compelling during the late 1840s and 1850s. For centuries China’s population had been growing, but with minor exceptions the land available to that population had not. By 1840 the Chinese numbered more than 400 million; where they all would live was a perennial problem. Recent developments both evinced and aggravated the problem. Since the White Lotus rebellion of the late eighteenth century, China had experienced a series of insurrections. The leadership of the rebellions often came from the educated classes, but the foot soldiers were typically peasants displaced by famine, flood, and other manifestations of the relentless population pressure. The greatest insurgency of all—the Taiping Rebellion, which touched off the most devastating war anywhere on earth during the nineteenth century, a conflict that ravaged a region the size of Western Europe and killed tens of millions— erupted at the century’s midpoint, almost simultaneous with the discovery of gold in California.
Adding to the internal turbulence was the humiliation China suffered at the hands of Western imperialists. For centuries European merchants had sought some item to sell to the Chinese to balance the tea and silk the West was buying from China. The British found a solution in opium from India, which they sent to China in growing quantity. Chinese authorities, alarmed at the havoc the opium wreaked on Chinese life, outlawed the drug. British merchants, alarmed at the havoc the ban would wreak on their profits, appealed to their government. Though not yet convinced of the virtues of free trade in such insidious substances as American wheat, the British government nonetheless considered free trade in opium a cause worth fighting for, and did just that. The Opium War of 1839–42 forced open China’s doors not simply to addictive drugs but to the West generally. The war-ending Treaty of Nanking guaranteed privileges to British traders at Canton, Shanghai, and other ports; additional Western countries, including the United States, soon received similar privileges (partly as a result of China’s desire not to be at the mercy of Britain alone). The whole affair seriously undermined the authority of the Chinese government
, and consequently encouraged the rebellions brewing in the countryside.
It was to Canton and the other treaty ports that the word of the California gold discovery came in 1848. Ship brokers quickly spread the news throughout the region around Canton. One broker based in Hong Kong, with offices in Canton, circulated a pamphlet printed in Cantonese and illustrated for the benefit of the nonreaders in his audience.
Americans are very rich people. They want the Chinese to come and will make him welcome. There will be big pay, large houses, and food and clothing of the finest description. You can write your friends or send them money at any time, and we will be responsible for the safe delivery. It is a nice country, without mandarins or soldiers. All alike: big man no larger than little man. There are a great many Chinese there now, and it will not be a strange country. The Chinese god is there, and the agents of this house. Never fear, and you will be lucky. Come to Hong Kong, or to the sign of this house in Canton, and we will instruct you. Money is in great plenty and to spare in America. Such as wish to have wages and labor guaranteed can obtain the security by application at this office.
Whether the Chinese god traveled to California was debatable, but many Chinese certainly did. Prior to the gold discovery there were almost no Chinese in California. By contemporary accounts, one of the few, a man identified as “Chum Ming,” heard the gold stories drifting down the Sacramento River in the spring of 1848 and traveled to the mountains to verify them. Satisfied that they were true, he wrote to a friend in Canton who spread the news before shipping out for California himself. Especially among illiterate peasants, such word-of-mouth reports greatly magnified the effect of the printed flackery, and before long the lure of Gum Shan— “Gold Mountain”—was defeating the traditional aversion to emigration. A handful of ships sailed for San Francisco in 1849; two score weighed anchor in 1850.
