The Age of Gold (9 page)

It was obvious to Archer that conditions had improved since the colony’s nadir.

(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.)

The 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:

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.”

L
EAVING 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.

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.

Yee Ah Tye was one of the emigrants. Like the great majority of Chinese gold-seekers, he left to historians no written records; the tale of his removal from China to California survives only in the memory of his descendants and their friends. The date of his birth is vague—but not the location, a fact of fundamental importance to traditional Chinese. The Yees had been living in the Sunwui District of Kwantung Province for eight hundred years. At one time they counted prominent government officials among their number, but for the last few centuries they had been farmers and fishermen. Yet Yee Ah Tye had love for neither crops nor catch. He moved from the village of his birth, Chang-wan, to Hong Kong after the British wrested that colony from China as part of the Opium War settlement; in Hong Kong he learned to speak English, evidently with an eye toward lifting himself from manual labor to commerce. He heard the news from California and read the notices of the departing vessels. He watched other Chinese leave for the land of gold and determined to follow. The longtime nurse of his eventual widow heard this part of the story from her: “Yee Ah Tye came to America in a junk. He was about twenty years old. The voyage started with twenty-two young Chinese men and ended with twenty.”

Whether this rate of attrition was typical of ships sailing from China to California is hard to tell; passengers weren’t counted carefully at either end of the voyage. Yet enough arrived at San Francisco—Dai Fow, or Big City—that by the end of 1851 there were perhaps 25,000 Chinese in California. Already they were a familiar, and simultaneously exotic, sight. A San Francisco parade included a contingent of Chinese; the
Alta California
reported that the “Celestials” (as the Chinese were often called, after a traditional name—“Celestial Kingdom”—for China) carried “a banner of crimson satin, on which were some Chinese characters and the inscription, ‘China Boys.’”

Miss Jessie, although extremely intelligent, lacks the docility of a model student. Moreover, she has the objectionable manner of seeming to take our orders and assignments under consideration, to be accepted or disregarded by some standard of her own.”

The young lady in question was Jessie Ann Benton; this letter from her teachers was addressed to her father, Thomas Hart Benton. The two were the talk of Washington and St. Louis during the 1830s and 1840s. Thomas Benton was a senator from Missouri, a bruising frontiersman who had once tussled, nearly fatally, with Andrew Jackson. Jackson had agreed to second a friend in a duel with Jesse Benton, Thomas Benton’s brother. Thomas arrived at the City Hotel in Nashville late but angry, and a general melee of knives, clubs, and pistols ensued. Thomas Benton was thrown headlong down a flight of stairs while Jackson’s shoulder stopped a Benton bullet. The wound would have killed many a lesser man; as it was, Jackson’s blood soaked through two mattresses before being stanched, and the bullet remained in Old Hickory’s flesh for years. (In a coincidence that astonished the principals when they eventually discovered it, another Benton bullet ripped a hole through the wall of an adjoining guest room, in which slumbered a nine-month-old baby named John Charles Frémont, visiting Nashville with his parents.)