The Forty-Niners by Sea — 1849, Around the Horn and Across Panama

Summary

For the gold-seekers of the eastern United States and Europe, the great difficulty of the California rush was not finding the gold but reaching it. The continent's interior was a barrier of plains, deserts, and mountains, so tens of thousands of '49ers chose to go by water instead — committing themselves to one of two long ocean passages that became, for many, the defining ordeal of their lives. One was the voyage around Cape Horn, a journey of some 15,000 nautical miles and five to eight months that carried a ship the full length of the Atlantic, around the storm-battered southern tip of South America, and back up the Pacific. The other was the shortcut across the Isthmus of Panama, which could be done in as little as six to eight weeks but ran through a tropical lowland where cholera, malaria, and yellow fever killed travelers by the score.

The sea routes were the choice of the men who came to be called Argonauts, after the crew of Jason's ship in Greek myth — a name they wore half in earnest, half in irony. They sailed from Boston, New York, Salem, and a hundred smaller ports, often as members of joint-stock mining companies that pooled funds to buy or charter a vessel and divide the proceeds. Passage was expensive, frequently $300 or more at a time when that sum represented a year's wages for a laborer, and the price bought no guarantee of comfort, safety, or speed.

The ships that carried them met a strange fate at journey's end. When a vessel dropped anchor at San Francisco, its sailors — and often its officers — deserted en masse for the diggings, leaving the harbor crowded with abandoned hulls. By 1850 several hundred ships, by some counts five hundred to eight hundred or more, lay rotting or beached in Yerba Buena Cove, a forest of bare masts off the boomtown shore. Enterprising men turned them into storeships, hotels, saloons, warehouses, and even a jail; others were run aground and buried as the city filled in its waterfront, so that parts of San Francisco's Financial District today sit atop the buried timbers of the gold fleet.

For the men themselves, the passage was only the prelude. Many arrived gaunt and broke, months behind the first wave, to learn that the surface gold was already worked out and that the real fortunes were being made by merchants selling shovels and bread. The sea voyage is, in this sense, the truest emblem of the rush — an enormous expenditure of money, hope, and life to chase a prize that for most receded as they approached it.

Timeline

The Rush

When word of the strike reached the Atlantic seaboard in late 1848 — confirmed by President Polk's message to Congress in December, which lent the wild rumors the weight of the federal government — the eastern cities caught what one paper called 'gold fever' overnight. Men sold farms, quit trades, mortgaged homes, and formed companies with names like the Boston and California Joint Mining and Trading Company to raise the capital for the journey. For most of them, the question was not whether to go but how, and the overland trail across the plains would not open until the spring grass of 1849. The sea was available at once.

The two routes each promised what the other lacked. The Cape Horn passage was the safer of the two from disease and the choice of whole companies that wished to bring tools, lumber, and trade goods with them, since a ship could carry tons of freight that no mule train could. But it was punishingly long and uncertain: ships could be becalmed for weeks in the doldrums and then beaten back for days trying to claw around the Horn against westerly gales, where snow, ice, and mountainous seas tested every vessel. A passage of five months was good fortune; eight months was common.

The Isthmus route traded time for danger. A traveler sailed to the mouth of the Chagres River on Panama's Caribbean coast, poled and paddled upriver in native canoes called bungos through dense jungle, then rode mules over the mountains to Panama City on the Pacific. The crossing itself took only days, but the bottleneck came on the far side, where thousands of impatient men waited weeks or months for a northbound steamer that was always overbooked. In the crowded, fever-ridden towns, cholera and tropical fevers swept through the stranded crowds, and many a gold-seeker who had survived the jungle died waiting for a berth.

The Diggings

Life aboard a Cape Horn ship settled into a long monotony broken by terror. Diaries kept by the Argonauts dwell on the cramped quarters, the spoiling food and foul water, the seasickness, the boredom of weeks with no land in sight, and the simmering quarrels among men packed together for half a year. Companies that had begun as bands of brothers often dissolved into faction and lawsuit before they ever saw California. Then came the Horn itself — the climactic trial of the voyage — where the ship pitched in freezing gales and the passengers, soaked and frightened, glimpsed the bleak rocks of Tierra del Fuego and understood why generations of sailors had dreaded the passage.

The Panama crossing was shorter but more lurid in the memory of those who made it. The poling of the Chagres in open canoes under a blazing sun, the nights ashore among insects and rain, the mule ride along muddy mountain tracks past the bones of earlier travelers — all of it unfolded in a landscape utterly foreign to men from New England. The travel writer Bayard Taylor, who crossed in 1849 and published his account in 'Eldorado,' described the river journey with a mixture of wonder and dread, and his book did much to fix the Isthmus in the public imagination. Worst of all was the wait at Panama City, where the sick lay in improvised hospitals and the desperate paid extortionate sums or forged tickets to escape on the next steamer north.

The shortcut grew steadily more organized as the rush matured. William Henry Aspinwall's Pacific Mail Steamship Company and its Atlantic counterpart built a regular steamer service to the Isthmus, and in 1855 the Panama Railroad opened across the neck of land — one of the deadliest construction projects of the era, its rails laid at a cost of many laborers' lives — cutting the overland transit to a matter of hours. By the mid-1850s the Panama route, for all its dangers, had become the standard fast passage between the coasts, while Cornelius Vanderbilt ran a competing line across Nicaragua. The age of the long sailing voyage around the Horn faded, though it never entirely ended.

The Reckoning

The men who came by sea arrived into a California that had already been transformed by the men ahead of them. The Argonauts who rounded the Horn in 1849 and 1850 stepped off their ships into a San Francisco that had exploded from a village into a chaotic city of tents and clapboard, where eggs cost a dollar apiece and a night's lodging more than a week's eastern wages. Many discovered that the romance of the voyage had consumed their savings and their season, and that the richest placers were already claimed. Some pressed on to the diggings; others, broke and disillusioned, took whatever work the boomtown offered, and a fair number never reached the mines at all.

The abandoned ships in the harbor became the strangest monument of the sea rush. Crews who had signed for the voyage simply walked away the moment the anchor dropped, and captains found themselves unable to hire men at any price to sail home. The hulls that filled Yerba Buena Cove were pressed into every use a frantic city could imagine — the storeship Niantic became a warehouse and then a hotel, its name preserved in the Niantic Building raised over its buried remains. When the waterfront was filled in to make new land, dozens of vessels were buried where they lay, and to this day construction crews in the old cove occasionally strike the timbers of a forty-niner ship beneath the streets.

The sea passage also knit California to the wider world more tightly than the overland trail ever could. The steamer lines and the Panama Railroad made the gold coast reachable on a schedule, carried the mails and the bullion that financed the young state, and drew migrants and merchants from Latin America, Europe, Australia, and China into the same Pacific traffic. The voyage that began as a desperate gamble by individual gold-seekers ended by building permanent arteries of commerce and migration around the Americas — an infrastructure of empire laid down, like so much of the rush, almost as a byproduct of the chase for gold.

What Decided It

What Became of Them

The great age of the sea routes was brief. Within a few years of 1849 the wild improvisation of canoe and mule across Panama had been tamed into a railroad and a steamer timetable, and the long sailing voyage around Cape Horn dwindled to a freight trade as faster options multiplied. When the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, the necessity that had driven the Argonauts to sea vanished altogether, and the passage that had once seemed an epic undertaking became a curiosity of an older era.

What the sea rush left behind was both literal and lasting. Beneath the streets of San Francisco's old waterfront lie the buried hulls of the abandoned fleet, rediscovered piece by piece whenever the city digs deep — the ships that carried men to the gold and then could find no crew to carry them home. The steamer lines and the Panama crossing that the rush called into being became permanent arteries of American commerce, and the Panama route foreshadowed, by half a century, the canal that would finally cut the Isthmus in two.

The Argonauts themselves scattered into the general fate of the rush. A few made fortunes; most made a living or less; many turned around and went home poorer than they came, by the same long water that had brought them. Their diaries and letters — the journals of the Horn passage, Bayard Taylor's 'Eldorado,' the recollections of the Panama crossing — survive as some of the most vivid records of the whole gold era, the testimony of ordinary men who measured their hope for California in months at sea.

Lessons

References

• California Gold Rush Wikipedia
• The California Gold Rush, 1849 National Park Service
• Gold Rush Voyages and the Sea Routes to California Library of Congress
• Buried Ships of San Francisco National Park Service (Maritime)