Works Literary industries 1890 Author:Hubert Howe Bancroft Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V. HAIL CALIFORNIA! ESTO PERPETUA! Never despair; but if you do, work in despair. Burke. A Detailed description of an early voyage from New Y... more »ork to Chagres, across the Isthmus to Panama, and thence to San Francisco, belongs rather to the time than to the individual. So large a portion of the Californian's life, during the first twenty years following the discovery of gold, was occupied in the passage by the various routes from one side of the continent to the other, that a picture of that epoch, with this prominent and characteristic scene left out, would be unfinished. During the first fifteen years of my residence on the western coast I made the passage between New York and San Francisco by way of Panama no less than eleven times, thus spending on the water nearly one year, or what would be almost equivalent to every other Sunday during that time. Many made the voyage twice or thrice as often, and life on the steamer was but a part of California life. It was there the beginning was made; it was sometimes the ending. It was there the angular eccentricities were first filed off, and roughly filed, as many a soft-bearded fledgling thought. It was there the excrescences of egotism and the morbid superfluities fastened on the character by local training, or lack of training, first began the rub against the excrescences and superfluities of others, all of which tended to the ultimate polish and perfection of the mass. THE VOYAGE AND ARRIVAL. 121 In my California Inter Pocula I have given a full account of the voyage out. I have there given it in detail, not because of anything particularly striking, but to show what the voyage in those days was; for, excepting shipwrecks, epidemics, or other special hardships, they were all very like. I shall not therefore re...« less