The Age of Gold (8 page)

The monotony resumed. On February 13, Pérez wrote: “Today makes 47 days of the voyage. The state of health, perfect; we have delivered to the sea but one poor dead sailor. According to what the captain says, in about four more days we shall arrive at the country of hope or deception. The wind is fresh; we are traveling at a rate of eight miles per hour. If this continues, the four days will turn into two. Dense clouds surround us on all sides. The captain has been lamenting all day the absence of the sun.”

Pérez thought the captain simply disliked the gloom; in fact it was the danger the fog enshrouded that worried him. That danger became apparent shortly. “Only an hour ago we should have perished, shattered against the shores of the Farallones, which rise up just five leagues from the entrance to the port of San Francisco,” Pérez recorded on February 15. In the fog the captain had shortened sail and readied anchors; this pleased the passengers, who assumed it meant they were about to land. But rather it was a precaution against striking unseen rocks. The captain, in order to keep the passengers from retiring but not wishing to frighten them by hinting at imminent wreck, proposed a game of whist.

Those still in the saloon couldn’t flee fast enough. They scattered cards, broke china, overturned chairs, and splintered tables in their haste
toward the exit. “As this was blocked by the fat Culatus, who in his fright had forgotten that he had to turn sideways to pass, the combined momentum of all of us blew out this devilish obstruction in our path to the deck like the wadding of a cannon, and we clambered over him.”

Fortunately the captain’s alertness rescued the ship and all aboard. Pérez was left to look over the rail at “the white and booming surf that marked the base of the black rocks where, without the swift action of the captain, we should have lost not only our dreams of riches but our very lives!”

The immediate danger past, the captain dropped anchor in forty fathoms. That day and the next, the fog persisted. A distant storm sent heavy seas that combined with the recent near-disaster to keep everyone uncomfortable. The sea lions and seabirds that inhabited the Farallones contributed to the discomfort with an incessant cacophony.

On the third day a heavy rain sheeted out of the fog. A rising wind convinced the captain to leave this dangerous zone; in doing so he almost collided with a brig that appeared ghostlike from the mist. Disaster was averted by an even narrower margin than before, as the brig scraped the stern beneath Pérez Rosales’s feet. “What a hazardous position!” he scribbled.

Finally, at dawn on February 18, after a fitful night during which all slept in their clothes, expecting to have to swim for their lives at any moment, they awoke to glorious relief. “We beheld the most beautiful panorama that could have unfolded before our eyes at such a distressing moment. We described to the south the black Farallones, which had held such danger; and to the east, to which we were steering under a clear sky and with a fresh wind, the mouth of the Golden Gate, which inspired awe but at the same time smiled, seeming to open wide to receive us.”

W
HILE PéREZ ROSALES
and his Chilean shipmates were creeping north toward the equator, far across the Pacific in Australia an ambivalent Tom Archer pondered the startling news from America. Archer had come to Australia in his teens after his Scottish parents, transplanted to Norway, feared he would grow irretrievably Scandinavian and accepted the
offer of an uncle to take the lad down under. Tommy wasn’t consulted, being just then at death’s door from typhus. By the time he recovered, the decision had been made, and the fourteen-year-old boy, after a brief visit to England, arrived at Sydney in company with two hundred Irish emigrants, at midnight on December 31, 1837, following a passage from Plymouth of 120 days.

During the next dozen years Tom Archer grew up with the country. Most of his time was spent in the outback herding sheep and some cattle, fending off larcenous and occasionally murderous “bushrangers,” intimidating certain aboriginal “blacks” and employing others, and generally learning to survive in some of the most unforgiving country on earth. Years later he would summarize his lessons: “Morals—don’t make shortcuts through the bush without food, matches, or tinder; don’t attempt the impossible feat of rubbing a fire with a dry branch on a big log; don’t imagine you have slept for hours when you have only slept for minutes; and finally, don’t forget to be thankful for the exquisite luxury of sleeping on a sheepskin beside a roaring fire, having consumed a pot of delicious hot tea, with the usual accompaniment of damper and mutton.” Archer regularly spent months at a stretch far from anything that passed for civilization, and longer than that from various accoutrements of domestic life. He remembered distinctly a day when he went to a creek to bathe. “I caught sight of the reflection of a tall broad-shouldered young man, who, on closer inspection, turned out to be myself.” The Australian Narcissus gazed in wonder at his own figure. “For the first time, it occurred to me that I was verging upon eighteen, and nearly grown up. The knowledge of this inspired me with much veneration for myself.” He added wryly, “But I was unable to perceive any approach to that feeling in anyone else.”

Outback life was rigorous in other ways. A mate developed a severe toothache and begged the local doctor to pull the offending grinder. The doctor explained that he lacked the requisite tools. The patient moaned that the tooth must be removed or he’d die. A helpful bystander suggested that in the absence of pliers a bullet-mold (hinged and handled to accept the hot lead) might do. The doctor was game and the patient imploring, so into the mouth the instrument went. Much larger than pliers,
it nearly choked the patient, who made awful noises as the doctor grappled for the tooth. Finally, after a mighty yank, the doctor triumphantly displayed the bloody molar. The patient, by now in shock, discharged a mouthful of gore before telling the doctor that what he had been trying to say—while the doctor was apparently trying to kill him—was that he had the wrong tooth. The doctor’s face fell, and the patient fled as if from a torturer. But soon he was back, determined to have done with his malady or his life. The second operation succeeded.

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.