And I Will Take
The Liberty, On Parting With My Reader, Who Has Gone Down With Us
To The Ocean,
And "laid his hand upon its mane," to commend to his
kind wishes, and to the benefit of his efforts,
That class of men
with whom, for a time, my lot was cast. I wish the rather to do
this, since I feel that whatever attention this book may gain,
and whatever favor it may find, I shall owe almost entirely to
that interest in the sea, and those who follow it, which is so
easily excited in us all.
TWENTY-FOUR YEARS AFTER
It was in the winter of 1835-6 that the ship Alert, in the prosecution
of her voyage for hides on the remote and almost unknown coast
of California, floated into the vast solitude of the Bay of San
Francisco. All around was the stillness of nature. One vessel,
a Russian, lay at anchor there, but during our whole stay not a
sail came or went. Our trade was with remote Missions, which sent
hides to us in launches manned by their Indians. Our anchorage was
between a small island, called Yerba Buena, and a gravel beach
in a little bight or cove of the same name, formed by two small
projecting points. Beyond, to the westward of the landing-place,
were dreary sand-hills, with little grass to be seen, and few trees,
and beyond them higher hills, steep and barren, their sides gullied
by the rains. Some five or six miles beyond the landing-place,
to the right, was a ruinous Presidio, and some three or four miles
to the left was the Mission of Dolores, as ruinous as the Presidio,
almost deserted, with but few Indians attached to it, and but little
property in cattle. Over a region far beyond our sight there were
no other human habitations, except that an enterprising Yankee,
years in advance of his time, had put up, on the rising ground
above the landing, a shanty of rough boards, where he carried on
a very small retail trade between the hide ships and the Indians.
Vast banks of fog, invading us from the North Pacific, drove in
through the entrance, and covered the whole bay; and when they
disappeared, we saw a few well-wooded islands, the sand-hills on
the west, the grassy and wooded slopes on the east, and the vast
stretch of the bay to the southward, where we were told lay the
Missions of Santa Clara and San José, and still longer stretches to
the northward and northeastward, where we understood smaller bays
spread out, and large rivers poured in their tributes of waters.
There were no settlements on these bays or rivers, and the few
ranchos and Missions were remote and widely separated. Not only
the neighborhood of our anchorage, but the entire region of the
great bay, was a solitude. On the whole coast of California there
was not a lighthouse, a beacon, or a buoy, and the charts were
made up from old and disconnected surveys by British, Russian,
and Mexican voyagers.
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