ble, had been regularly practised by men appearing to be New Englanders and New Yorkers from the establishment of the steamship line. Passengers as a rule were helpless; for when the steamer was ready, they were obliged to go on board, and their baggage was not worth the cost of hunting it. From the first appearance of foreign travellers in these parts, it has been a notorious fact, and of current remark, that of all robbers and swindlers on the Isthmus white men were the worst, and compared to them the natives were humane, faithful, and honest.

The steamers here took in coal and provisions, beef, fowl, and swine, flour and general groceries, oranges, pineapples, citrons and bananas, and liquors of all sorts. Quite a traffic was sometimes done here in tickets by brokers; some, to save, would sell their steamer ticket and take passage on a sailing vessel, which they afterward too often found of that class whose captain and officers were accustomed to take in so much wine and spirits that they would forget to take in any

water.

After a week's detention the steamer Panamá announced her readiness to receive passengers, of which opportunity we all made quick avail. With our ef fects shrunken to the easy compass of our hands, we left our hotel, walked down the street, and out through the great gate, to the shore of the bay. There we found stationed just beyond the surf that broke upon the white beach, a row of boats ready to convey passengers to the steamer, with porters and boatmen to carry us through the foam to the boat. Wading to the edge of the water the boatmen would stoop their ebony shoulders and back up to us invitingly. Women were picked up in their arms, and handled most tenderly for such sooty savages. Sometimes stepping on a slippery stone, down man and rider would both go into the brine, amidst the shouts of the lookers-on. But this happened very seldom; the wide, bare, leathery feet of the carriers were usually quite sure.

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Mounting a naked broad back, we were carried through the surf, dumped into the boat and rowed to the ship. On arriving at the gangway, we were obliged to show our tickets, every species of trickery being resorted to by a certain class on shore to get themselves forward without paying their passage. The passengers then formed themselves into a line before the purser's office window, and when all were on board rooms and berths were allotted.

Thus in this Isthmus transit, we find the history of every man who made it a unique experience, which acted powerully upon the recasting of his character— a fit preparation for the baptism which was to follow his landing in California.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE VOYAGE TO CALIFORNIA–PANAMÁ TO SAN FRANCISCO.

We have had enough of action, and of motion we,

Rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard, when the surge was seething free, Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.

-The Lotos-Eaters.

While here upon the Isthmus, and before proceeding on our journey to San Francisco, let us glance at the route round the continent, that we may be better able to make comparisons as we go along.

There have been many remarkable voyages to California by sailing vessels, as well from Panamá to San Francisco as round Cape Horn; there have been many adventures connected with them far more thrilling than any that occurred in the voyages by steamer. The voyage round the Horn, as it was called, did not differ materially from sea voyages elsewhere; that from Panamá to San Francisco had at this time a marked individuality, a few examples of which I will give.

The rickety schooner Dolphin, of 100 tons, left Panamá in January 1849, with forty-five persons. After putting into several ports for supplies, the passengers had to abandon the craft at Mazatlan and transfer themselves to the bark Matilda. They finally reached San Francisco on the 6th of May, having spent 110 days on the voyage from Panamá.

But the career of the Dolphin was not yet at an end. Certain gold-seeking waifs then in Mazatlan, anxious to reach California, bought and refitted her.

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She sailed on the 15th of April with no less than sixty-eight persons, among whom were some who in latter years acquired more or less distinction in California. In the course of the voyage they underwent much suffering, scarcity of water contributing thereto. A number of the company, driven to desperation, landed in Lower California, and made their way north on foot. Reaching Rosario with the greatest difficulty, they sighted two vessels, one the Dolphin and the other an Italian bark. The latter took some of the schooner's passengers away with her, and a few of the land party returned to their own old craft, the rest preferring to continue their journey up the coast. The latter after undergoing many hardships reached San Diego on the 24th of June. As for the Dolphin, she went into San Diego harbor in a sinking condition, and was condemned and sold without more ado. her passengers had died on the voyage.

One of

The vicissitudes of a party on board the schooner San Blaseña, of thirty-five tons, which sailed from Mazatlan in May of the same year, were in many respects the counterpart of those suffered by the Dolphin's people. Some of their number were taken off by another vessel at sea; the rest abandoned the craft on the coast of Lower California, and made their way on foot, carrying their effects on their backs, to Todos Santos, where they procured mules, and on the 24th of May set out for La Paz. On the journey they suffered greatly for want of provisions and water. Finally, on the 11th of August, they fell in with Emory's surveying party at the initial point of the Mexican boundary line. Meanwhile the San Blaseña left San José del Cabo, and completed her voyage at Monterey, after the manner of the Dolphin, on the 1st of July.

Another of the land journeys up the peninsula was that of J. W. Venable, who came from Kentucky via Panamá in 1849, and was a member of the state assembly from Los Angeles in 1873, and who travelled

on foot with two or three companions from Agua Dulce, on the coast of Lower California, to San Francisco, about twelve hundred miles. They had been obliged to land by reason of the slowness of their ship, scarcity of water, and stubbornness of their captain. They arrived at San Francisco before the ship. The latter took 166 days for the trip.

But even crazy sailing vessels were better than dug-out canoes, in which some started on the long voyage from Panamá to San Francisco. Bayard Taylor states that in the early part of 1849, when three thousand persons were waiting on the Isthmus for conveyance to the new El Dorado, several small parties started in log canoes of the natives, thinking to reach San Francisco in them. After a voyage of forty days, during which they went no farther than the island of Quibo, at the mouth of the gulf, nearly all of them returned. Of the rest, nothing was ever heard. On other authority, we are informed that twenty-three men left Panamá on the 29th of May, 1849, in a dug-out canoe, for San Francisco. None of these madmen ever proceeded far on the road; neither did many of them ever return.

Returning to our voyage by steamer. "Ah!" exclaims the enthusiastic lover of California, immediately his foot touches the well-scrubbed deck of the Pacific Mail steamer in Panamá bay, "such is California, such the superiority of the new over the old. As the Atlantic steamer is to the Pacific steamer, as Aspinwall is to Panamá, so is your cold, dull, eastern coast to our warm, bright, western coast."

In due time a steam tender conveyed travellers from the company's wharf to the steamer at anchor some three miles away. On account of the tide, which rises and falls about seventeen feet at neap, and twenty-two feet at spring tides, the tender can float at the wharf only twice in twenty-four hours. Low water spring tides lay bare the beach for a mile