Coast to Coast (22 page)

So you sink into sleep, while the night traffic roars by; and in the morning, so gentle is the civilization of the automobile, you need only walk a pace or two across the carpeted floor before you can sink refreshed into your welcoming driving seat. But this manner of life, so highly refined by the southern Californians, is only a beginning. One city has conceived the idea of conveyor belts to carry pedestrians along its shopping streets; they will step from their cars first on to a slow-moving belt, then on to a faster one, and so proceed in elegant ease along the boulevards. Already the Californians need rarely walk; soon, if this is any kind of portent, they will have no opportunity.

Y
ou do not have to travel far up the Pacific Coast to encounter the very antithesis of this motor-society. San Francisco is famous as the most glittering, glistening, and cosmopolitan of American cities, as the home of the Beatniks and the haven of intellectual eccentricities; but I found there an integrity and earnestness of thought that reminded me of the life my grandfather led at the turn of the century, on the intellectual fringes of country society near the Welsh border. I was once flying over San Francisco Bay with my host in northern California, an eminent businessman with all kinds of knowledgeable interests, from mountaineering to typography. Below us stretched the fine wide expanse of water that divides San Francisco from the Bay cities of Oakland and Berkeley. All around it the hills were brown, and speckled with white houses; on an eminence to our right there was a series of tall radio masts. To the west, where the Bay joins the Pacific, the ineffably beautiful Golden Gate Bridge was softened by the sea mist; and perched on the hills beside it was San Francisco, crowned by a few skyscrapers, a mass of white buildings tumbling down the hillside, and stretching away to the ocean as far as the eye could see.

My friend leaned across me, more delicately than the Los Angeles millionaire had leaned. “Now
there
‚”
he observed, “he might very well have put in there. You see that bay down there, this side of the hill, where that little ridge comes down? That would be almost perfect—sheltered by the hill, d’you see, and out of the tide, but not too far inside the Golden Gate. They must have rowed in, you understand—they couldn’t sail directly in through there, and that would have done them perfectly. You can scarcely imagine a more suitable place, can you?”

He was saying all this half to himself, and with an expression of great
earnestness; primed though I was by earlier experience, it was some few moments before I realized that he was talking about Sir Francis Drake, who sailed down the Pacific Coast in 1579, in the course of his voyage around the world. Nobody knows, it seems, whether or not he discovered and entered San Francisco Bay, and among a minority of San Franciscans it has become a perennial intellectual exercise to worry out the facts, to conjecture the progress of his voyage and the needs of his quartermasters, to examine the chances and argue the likelihoods, to search through old documents and estimate the worth of those few records left by members of Drake’s company. My companion, thus considering a possible sheltering-place, was behaving rather as Mr. S. C. Roberts might, if he were taking a bus down Baker Street and pondering the situation of No. 221B.

This agreeable preoccupation with a problem at once academic and romantic is characteristic of the faintly old-fashioned intellectual activity of some cultured San Franciscans. They examine such a matter with tremendous thoroughness and enthusiasm, and pursue it if possible to a well-documented end. The Drake question, for example (which is extraordinarily fascinating, especially in surroundings so redolent of golden adventure) has been considered by San Franciscans in the minutest detail. The evidence that Drake ever put into San Francisco Bay is by no means conclusive. There is no doubt that he sailed down the Pacific Coast, and a nearly contemporary record says that he put into a “fair and good Baye”, a “convenient and fit harborough”, where he beached and careened his ship. Before leaving this haven, says the record, he erected a plate claiming possession of that country in the name of Queen Elizabeth, and naming it Nova Albion.

Until 1936 the historians, antiquarians and loyal Californians argued the point on the basis of this inadequate knowledge. It is perfectly possible that Drake sailed right past the Golden Gate without detecting the magnificent harbour inside it. San Francisco is often shrouded in a thick sea mist; the entrance is narrow; the Bay itself curves southward, so that you cannot appreciate its magnitude from the sea. On the other hand, if he did penetrate the Bay the fact is not likely to have been publicized. Drake’s voyage was of crucial strategic importance, and to give away to the Spaniards the existence of so fine a haven would have been so careless as to be criminal; about like publishing, let us say, technical details of one of the smaller hydrogen bombs. The admiral’s own journal and his charts were handed over to the Queen, and a full account of his voyage was never published. The only contemporary descriptions are generally thought to be unreliable.

So for half a century the San Franciscans contented themselves with hypothesis. Could he have brought the
Golden
Hind
into the Bay, supposing that he had indeed found its entrance? Where could he have beached her, safe from winds and seas? What course would he have followed inside the Gate? Many are the citizens who have tried, over the years, to re-enact the Captain-General’s arrival, struggling through the vicious currents of the Golden Gate in heavy rowing-boats or sailing skiffs, laboriously progressing, in the interests of history, towards some sheltered inlet or likely creek. Many are those who, flying back from a conference in Portland or a half-term celebration at Andover, have leant over their neighbour to peer through the window and murmur: “
Perfectly
possible! Almost an ideal spot, don’t you think?”

In 1936, however, a scholarly bombshell burst, disintegrating many a rigid opinion. In the library of the University of California at Berkeley I was taken to a table in the middle of a room, placed there reverently like a shrine, and shown an old and battered brass plate, preserved under glass. There was a small hole in it, about the size of a sixpence, and on the hoary surface of the metal I could just make out the following inscription:

Here was evidence indeed! Just 375 years after Drake sailed down the coast, this plate was found near the shores of San Francisco Bay. It was not on the beach, and had certainly been moved recently; but it would appear to prove, if genuine, that Drake had at least landed in the close vicinity of San Francisco, if not actually inside the Golden Gate. People naturally took the first news of this plate with a distinct pinch of salt. The thing looked old enough, but its patina might easily be faked. The inscription was authentically Elizabethan in sense and in manner, and corresponded with what was already known about Drake’s landing; but at any time during the past century an informed hoaxer might have composed such a message.

San Franciscans are not the people to take such phenomena lightly. They subjected the plate to the most intensive scientific and scholarly examination. First they tried to narrow the possible limits of its age. It was not, for example, made of rolled brass (which would have proved it to be modern); nor did it contain any other ingredients that were unknown to metallurgists of Drake’s time. Its mucky coating had not been recently applied, and seemed to be a natural covering which had been formed slowly over many years. There were tissues in the cracks which appeared to show that the plate had been lying on the ground for some time. Into the hole in the brass the scholars exactly fitted an Elizabethan sixpence, such as the old adventurers habitually used as a substitute for the royal seal. The cleverest and most confident researchers in America would not hazard an exact date for the plate, but it was generally agreed that it was more than a century old; and before 1836 not enough was known about Drake’s voyage to make such a counterfeit possible (and anyway the virtual non-existence of San Francisco at that time would make the purpose of such a fake singularly obscure).

So on the whole San Franciscans accept the plate as genuine, and believe it to prove that Drake beached the
Golden
Hind
somewhere near their enchanted city. The conclusions of the scholars and scientists exactly suited their temperament, for while the fundamental evidence has become firmer, their Drake problem remains unsolved in detail. They still do not know precisely where he landed, and can spend their Saturday afternoons examining again the contours of the Bay, and imagining that weather-beaten warship, with its great captain writing sonnets in his cabin, straining out of the mist into the shelter of the hills.

It is not only in historical matters that San Franciscans employ this thorough-going approach. Their whole city gives the impression of being well-ordered, neatly filed and classified. In some ways, it is true, San Francisco is a topsy-turvy place, built on the flanks of impossibly steep hills, so that driving home is an adventure, and walking back from the theatre in high heels or long skirts an hilarious impossibility. (When a furniture van recently ran away down one of these hills, it reached a speed of 100 m.p.h. in its breakneck progression towards the sea.) It is a city, too, of many races, jumbled in narrow streets and crowded quarters, Chinese and Mexicans and Italians, and sailors barging by from the quaysides; with the beloved cable-cars scurrying up the hills and swaying perilously around the corners; and cluttered wharfside restaurants, all mixed up with fishing-boats and wayside stalls, and smelling of prawns, lobsters and the succulent abalone; and gay gardens
perched on the flanks of hills, with dainty shambles of artists’ houses all around; and beautiful elegant shopping streets suddenly degenerating into alleys, full of swarthy grocers and newspapers in Chinese. But though it has all this lovable profusion of facets, San Francisco still feels competent, self-possessed and mannerly; a city with the seams of its stockings straight, and no buttons undone. It is also a kindly city, where few people carry chips on their shoulders. I once parked my car, with a sleeping baby in the back seat, outside the door of my hotel in the centre of the city. Two policemen approached me, and one asked me rather brusquely what I was doing, parking the car there, right in the middle of the traffic, couldn’t I see I was obstructing the street, why, the cable cars couldn’t get by, and where was my licence, anyway? I was just about to reply when I was interrupted by a sudden appalling noise from the baby, who was sitting up in his cot, nebulous draperies falling about him, howling like a banshee. The policeman’s jaw dropped (as the novelists say); and his companion turned to him with an air of infinite reproach. “There now, Ed,” said he, “why d’you have to shout at the guy? Look what you’ve done—
you’ve
woken
the
baby!
”

A powerful contributor to San Francisco methods, and at the same time a characteristic product of them, is the California Academy of Sciences, a splendid institution with a wide popular membership. (You may become a regular member for 10 dollars a year, and a life member for a deposit of 250 dollars; but to be classed as a Benefactor of the Academy you must put down no less than 50,000 dollars, which is a lot of money even by Californian standards.) The Academy maintains a planetarium, housed in a building in Golden Gate Park—a park famous for a garden in which devoted gardeners of pragmatic tastes have planted specimens of every plant mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. The planetarium is probably the finest in the world, and was the first of comparable complexity to be built in the United States. Its story is another lesson in the unwearying resolve of intellectual San Francisco.

The planetarium was invented soon after the First War by Dr. Bauersfield, of the Zeiss company at Jena. Between the wars the company built twenty-seven of them, and six were brought to America, where they occupy a place in the public mind halfway between a scientific lecture and a strip-tease. The last war came, the Zeiss people turned their attention to more urgent matters, and by the time the California Academy of Sciences had raised enough money to buy its own planetarium Jena was in Russian hands and there was no planetarium to buy.

This was maddening, for the campaign to raise funds had lasted for many years, and plans were already far advanced for the building to be
erected in Golden Gate Park. For a moment or two the Academicians were stymied. However, their spirits quickly recovered. During the war the Academy had repaired and manufactured optical parts for the United States Navy. This, in itself, was odd. It had happened that the curator of palaeontology had been interested in such matters, as a hobby, and had become an authority on optical instruments. All his fossils were therefore moved out of his department, and an instrument workshop was substituted. The curator of paleontology soon recruited willing help. The curator of herpetology, for instance, learnt the trade quickly; the curator of ichthyology became a repairer of binoculars. Amateur telescope makers were recruited for their skill with glass, and soon fifty people were working where the fossils had so long dreamed their empty dreams.

The Academy authorities, faced with the extinction of Zeiss as a supplier of planetaria, suddenly remembered this reservoir of optical knowledge; and, looking at each other with a wild surmise, rushed off to Los Angeles to examine the Zeiss instrument there. They came back next day and reported to their trustees that the problem was solved: the California Academy of Sciences would make its own planetarium.

They launched the project with unorthodox enthusiasm. Working drawings were made on the backs of envelopes; suggestions were considered from the most unlikely quarters; the designers had no detailed plans of the Zeiss instruments, so they struck off boldly in altogether new directions. The instrument is so complicated as to be frightening. More than thirty separate projectors throw the image of 3,800 stars on the dome of the building, and the machine portrays the motions of sun, moon and visible planets at any period of any century. There are 321 different lenses in the machine, and 158 gears. I cannot begin to describe the intricacy of the automatic card system which ensured that the right stars were correctly tabulated, nor the minute labour with which each single star was represented on the plates of the projector.