Even with this second tow, the brig continued to drift in the shallows and after half an hour of desperate work the vessel suddenly struck into a shelving ledge. Next moment the brig heeled broadside and huge waves began crashing overhead. Soon all the passengers were soaked to the skin and the Sabine began to take water. The brig rocked and groaned against the pounding surf as Captain Barmore stood astride the poop deck with a pistol in each hand, threatening to shoot anyone who dared to leave before the women and children. Mary Ann was then ushered into a lifeboat along with the other women and children and she bid farewell to William and her father before being lowered onto the sea and rowed through the treacherous surf.
Despite these perilous conditions, the Sabine’s passengers and crew were all safely returned to Upolu. A rescue party even managed to salvage several dray wheels and a pianoforte—as well as at least twenty cases of wine and six of beer, although all of these were badly damaged. The Sabine now lay in the tropical waters, hauled to one side and entirely wrecked. The forty-five passengers who had been determined to get to San Francisco as quickly as they could were now stranded on this isolated island in the Pacific Ocean.
For several days Mary Ann and Will wandered about the small village until, on their third day, a strange-looking ship with ‘The Pilot’ painted—somewhat amateurishly—upon its side, sailed in Upolu with an American captain at his helm. Those on board the Sabine had already informed the British Consul about the extraordinary news they had heard at North Cape concerning a ship known as the Helen which had been captured by a group of pirates led by a restless young man named John Wilson, who came from Massachusetts and had a curious habit of tilting his head—just a little—to one side.
It was the son of the British Consul who came up with the cunning plan about the whaleboat race. A group of men from the island were told to hide their weapons ‘under each man’s thwart’ before partaking in what appeared to be a friendly boating competition across the bright blue waters of the harbour. The Pilot would be their starting point and they would ask the young American captain to arbitrate upon proceedings. Will and Mary Ann gathered on the beach with the other passengers to watch the race.
Off both boats set—only to make not one, nor two, but ultimately three deliberately bungled false starts—each requiring them to return to the Pilot and allowing them to take careful note of how many men were on board the seized vessel and how well armed they might be. On their third start the two boats set off, to much cheering from the shore. On their return journey, they were rowing neck-to-neck and appeared to be locked in a dead heat as they approached the Pilot. No sooner had both crossed the finishing line and Captain Wilson declared one the victor, than the Consul’s son and his men stormed onto the pirate ship, arresting all on board and reclaiming the stolen vessel.
So far so good, but now George Pritchard was faced with the dubious reality that he had no prison on the island in which to incarcerate the Pilot’s pirate crew. The Consul had little choice but to put Wilson and his men on parole and release them onto the island while he waited for a colonial warship with a prison below deck. And so, for the following week, Mary Ann and Will supped with the local Samoans, a crew of pirates and the British Consul—although during this time half of the Pilot’s crew, including the young blue-eyed Captain, managed to escape.
The restoration of the pirated vessel provided the crew of the Sabine with a ship to recommence their journey. But when they finally did set sail out of Upolu, Mary Ann found herself bound, not for California but Sydney. Captain Barmore and partners were legally obliged to inform authorities of the Helen’s seizure to ensure immediate action was taken to find the escapees and bring them to justice. After all the frustrations she had already encountered regarding her romantic aspirations, Mary Ann was once more forced to suffer another exasperating delay. She had been away from Sydney almost two months, every day edging closer to James Butler as well as the beginning of her new life, and now—yet again—she had been thwarted, and this time by pirates.
Since Margaret Gill had farewelled her eldest children she had been having a terrible time of it. On the first day of 1850, Saul and Lewis Samuel commenced action against Martin Gill, determined to sequester whatever goods he or his wife might have in payment for the £75 that was still outstanding on the Pitt Street hotel rental. Mr Samuel had also been successful in encouraging other men about town to pursue costs and once it was clearly established that Martin Gill had managed to ‘defeat and delay’ his creditors by absconding the colony, Margaret Gill was summonsed to court to answer for her husband. Such were the times that while Martin Gill was free to publicly refuse to honour his wife’s debts, Margaret had little choice but to stand in court and answer for her husband’s.
As January and then February wore on, Margaret Gill faced the insolvency court, and repeatedly insisted that she and her father had only ever been intent upon retrieving certain personal possessions—a bedstead and a feather mattress as well as a washstand and a small looking glass—that her husband had taken up to Moore’s auction rooms without her permission. The whole business was murky however, for Alexander Moore was claiming that Martin Gill had authorised the return of certain goods to his wife, but only because he wanted ‘peace and quietness’. Week after week, auctioneers and dray men were called to give evidence and together they told a winding tale about goods that had been taken from the Pitt Street hotel to the auction room and money that seemed to change hands between Martin, Margaret and even, at one stage, Mary Ann.
There was also the question of the Saracen’s Head which Margaret’s father had taken possession of a few weeks after these hearings began. Rather than do so surreptitiously, however, Thomas McCormick proudly announced to readers of The Herald in mid-January 1850 that ‘with the assistance of his daughter, the recent hostess of Gill’s Family Hotel’, the new proprietor was delighted ‘to ensure a portion of the public favour’ and that he would do so by providing the same ‘genuine comforts’ of that previous establishment. There would be ‘nothing wanting’, his advertisement promised, ‘to contribute to their comforts’, and sea captains could also enjoy ‘a glass of “first-rate” English ale’ with their luncheon.
As tropical waves crashed over the heads of those on board the Sabine, and Mary Ann was supping with Captain Wilson and his band of rogues, Margaret Gill continued to front Sydney’s insolvency court protesting that nothing but ‘papers and a lot of old clothes’ had gone to Moore’s auction rooms with her consent. As her two eldest children sailed back to Sydney, the Samuel brothers’ legal counsel persisted with a line of questioning that eventually provoked their mother to protest that she had never claimed to anyone that she had ‘removed all the things from their hotel to prevent the creditors getting any of it’. Nor had she bragged that she would avoid prosecution by having her father take a new hotel for her in his name. And yet, while Margaret Gill made such vehement remonstrations, she was not, the affidavit confirms, prepared to swear to any of them. By the first week of March 1850, several claimants had become suspicious that Margaret Gill was in cahoots with her husband. There was a growing feeling that she might, in fact, be playing them all. But throughout the interrogations Margaret remained staunch. There had been a ‘rupture’ with her husband, she insisted. He had departed the colony and left her ‘with no more than seven farthings’. The entire matter was increasingly farcical and seemed to have confuddled even the judge who eventually decided to let the matter drop, even after allegations were made that there were still a number of items from the Pitt Street hotel stored at the Kent Street cottage.
Meanwhile, Thomas McCormick continued to ‘respectfully’ inform ‘friends and the public’ that he had taken ‘splendid rooms’ on the corner of King and Sussex and that he and his daughter were well-equipped ‘to accommodate families of the highest respectability’ at the Saracen’s Head. And so they should have been for the advertisement from the year before, when the owners were seeking a new tenant for the prope
rty, listed extensive ‘household furniture, bar fittings, license and other effects’ from this establishment. These included elaborate furnishings for six guest bedrooms, each containing a fourposter bedstead, while the ‘Bar and Dining Parlour, Drawing room and little Parlour’ were all variously furnished with eight-hour clocks, mahogany sideboards and silver decanters, as well as horsehair sofas and seats, bell ropes and window blinds. With eleven guestrooms, the Gills’ Pitt Street hotel may have been slightly larger than this new establishment, but just as McCormick had insisted, the Saracen’s Head was every bit as grand.
About this time—on 20 February 1850 to be precise—the Lady Howden sailed into San Francisco Bay with James Butler Kinchela peering through the notorious fog of that harbour so he could catch his first glimpse of ‘Gold Mountain’ or Gum San as it was known to the thousands of Chinese also flocking to California at this time. Already the town was surprisingly well established with lines of two- and three-storey buildings advancing in an orderly fashion from the busy harbour up towards the central plaza, where there was a bank and a post office as well as several hotels and a number of stores.
Kinchela disembarked at Clarkes Point, the oldest part of San Francisco and the only place where ships could discharge directly onto land. It may have been eerily familiar to him, for a large number of Australian colonists were working on the wharf as sailors and boatmen and had also taken residence in the nearby boarding houses, ensuring that the area greatly resembled the Rocks around Circular Quay. Such was the infiltration of colonists around Clarkes Point that the area was already known as Sydney Town (sometimes Sydney Valley). It was reputed to be a great ‘rendezvous of scamps’, renowned for ‘constant scenes of lewdness, drunkenness and strife’ among the ‘most daring, depraved and reckless men’. Some of this may have been hyperbole created by American businessmen keen to resist an ‘invasion’ from the worst ‘sweepings of British jails’, but there were already sufficient accounts of vice and violence in this part of San Francisco to suggest that Sydney Town was populated by colonial ‘men and women’ energetically devoted to ‘drinking, swearing, fighting and thieving’.
In 1848 there had been little over a thousand people in San Francisco—some Mexicans who had stayed after the end of the Mexican–American war, the Californios (Spanish-speaking Californians), a group of Irish immigrants who had fled the 1848 famine as well as a number of American military men, a smattering of American and European entrepreneurial sorts and a handful of Chinese men. There were also some African-American slaves who had been brought to the territory before it was declared a free state in the Compromise of 1850.
Before the arrival of Europeans there had been as many as 700,000 Native Americans living throughout the region. By 1850, however, their numbers were already rapidly diminishing not only from European diseases and the way gold mining ravaged their natural water and food supplies, but also the frontier conflict that followed on the heels of European settlement. Some Native Americans, such as the Maidu, worked with settlers like the German-born Swiss timber mill owner, John Sutter, who had built a fort in 1839 at the junction of the American and Sacramento rivers. A huge population of Native Americans also lived in the Great Basin east of Sierra Nevada and west of the Rocky Mountains, where they defended themselves from vigilante attacks and also engaged in their own acts of retaliation. The Native Americans had little cultural interest in gold but quickly recognised its trade value and became adept at finding the coveted mineral. Such proficiency attracted its own problems, however, for within a year or so of the gold rush, the first governor of this state declared the territory a ‘battleground between the races’ and offered rewards to any Europeans who ‘exterminated or removed’ those whose traditional life had been so disastrously disrupted by the invading gold seekers.
And it was correct to describe it as an invasion, for once James Polk the American President verified that gold had been discovered in early December 1848, thousands of gold seekers hauled their covered wagons along the Siskiyou Trail and over the Appalachian Mountains or took the treacherous sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Thousands more sailed into the foggy port from Hawaii, China, England, Europe and, of course, the Australian colonies. Thanks to this great explosion there were more than 25,000 people living in San Francisco by 1850 and thousands more out on the goldfields of Sierra Nevada and up north. And so, by the time Kinchela was making his way from Clarkes Point into town, it was no longer possible to pick up nuggets on the street. The first stage of the rush was over and a new era of mining was about to begin.
In addition to this, the majority of this new immigrant population was male and desperate for gold. Within a year or so San Francisco had utterly transformed from an isolated town to a rapidly expanding, multicultural port city that was yet to develop the significant social structures and legal systems required for civil society. Such conditions meant that at best, the mood about town was improvised and exciting, at worst, extremely lawless and dangerous and whenever allegations of theft, violence and arson were made, the finger was pointed at the rough colonists living up around the lighthouse on Sydney Town.
Many of these men were bounty migrants who, like Henry Parkes, had received a free passage as a way of addressing the labour shortage that blighted New South Wales in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Before these working class men left England they were issued a ‘duck shirt’ of rough blue material and many were still wearing this when they stepped ashore at San Francisco. This harsh duck fabric earned them the appellation of Sydney Ducks but they soon became notorious for other reasons. Among this cohort were a number of men who shared a penchant for pyromania and easy plundering and by the time Kinchela arrived in early 1850, the Sydney Ducks had already set a number of fires raging through the streets and settlement camps of San Francisco.
During the Christmas festivities of 1849, for example, a great conflagration had burnt down a fine two-storey ‘palace’ on the west side of the town plaza before engulfing the town in a ‘tornado of flame and smoke’. It had been the real Tom Sawyer, on whom Mark Twain would loosely base his fictional boy adventurer, who pushed forward with other brave crusaders to fight this blaze. Sawyer and his friends had rallied before the swirling chaos of sparks and burning embers, but by the time they were done the fire had devoured most of the timber buildings and the town had been reduced to piles of smouldering rubble.
Town entrepreneurs were always quick to rebuild their establishments so they could recommence trade with those coming in from the goldfields, but nonetheless, San Francisco was in a constant state of mayhem and by the early 1850s there were reputed to be as many as sixty deaths a week, of which a good many were buried in pauper graves having taken their own lives rather than die of starvation and shame. Already, the promise of a fast fortune had become a cruel joke and an atmosphere of sullen despair was said to permeate the town, so much so that one colonist condemned it as a ‘city of sordid selfishness, heartless profligacy, violence, disease and despair’ before wiping the dust off his boots and returning to Sydney.
As Kinchela walked the streets he sensed this volatile mood, and also noticed the hostile attitude reserved for those from the Australian colonies. Indeed, at the very time he arrived, the atmosphere was particularly tense, for the blame for the most recent blaze was being attributed to the Sydney Ducks and the town was now baying for colonial blood.
By extraordinary good fortune the Helen, still bearing ‘The Pilot’ on its side, returned to Sydney just five days after the legal dispute relating to Martin Gill’s debts had been resolved. Samuel and Co. were not going to recover their money, but they could secure a new tenant for the Pitt Street hotel. Gill had managed to avoid the ignominy and inconvenience of these recent proceedings and was now returning to find his family in much better financial conditions than he left them.
The end of the bankruptcy proceedings must have boosted Margaret Gill’s confidence for the advertisements that featured in the press after the bankrup
tcy proceedings assume a new bravado. In late April, for example, ‘Mrs Gill, pastrycook and confectioner’ was apprising ‘her friends and the public’ that she was ‘prepared to undertake any orders to supply refreshments on the most elaborate scale’, for ‘public dinners, balls and routs’ and that with ‘sixteen years in the trade’, she was willing to ‘flatter herself’ that she was more than capable of giving ‘every satisfaction’. Again in mid-May, ‘Mrs Gill’ informed readers that she was conducting the above establishment for her father and that ‘families from the country’ would find the Saracen’s Head ‘equal to her old establishment. Dinners and Balls’ could be ‘got up in her usual style’ she pledged, before adding in a slightly reprimanding tone, ‘but not in twenty-four hours for a thousand people’.
A week later an even more curious advertisement appeared from ‘Mrs Gill and family’ who wished to express their gratitude for the ‘deep sense of the kindness and support’ they had received from all who relied upon her ‘efforts to supply them with the best accommodation in the city’. This advertisement went on to describe Mrs Gill’s ‘well-established reputation’, which originated from her ‘time in Dublin with . . . the pastry cook to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland’. This, the advertisement continued, had been further refined during the five years she had attended upon ‘the nobility of Sydney’, including no lesser personage than ‘Sir Richard Bourke and family’. There was also an unusual N.B. at the end of this advertisement. While Mrs Gill would supply routs, balls and public assemblies in her ‘usual style’, the advertisement concluded, ‘Mr Gill’ was also available to ‘attend at the private dwellings of gentry in and near Sydney.’
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