Strange Yesterday (19 page)

The finger moved—slid over and across.

“This is Darien, and here is the Gatun, and back here, further yet, is Chagres, the river Chagres snaking out. Only the mountains are between, but notice how the Gatun cuts in, and how many trickles of water there are. But that is all a dream, though some day it will all be fact, and men will sail their ships from one ocean to another, and the hell of the Horn will be forgotten. It will be through the Gatun; then, perhaps, to Chagres, or, it may be, to Limon Bay. But that is all a dream; this is fact. Here, where my finger rests, is this mad Panama City; now come north through the gulf. We are at Point Mala, and this spot is Naos Island. Cut in again to the coast, and you are at Point Batelo, and then Venando, which is indeed a hovel and a hole of hell if ever there was one, but where Indians are to be had, and where there is anchorage. From there—follow me, my friend—it is but fourteen miles to the Bay of Chorrera, to the mouth of the Rio Caimito. It is at this point, where the river flows into the ocean, that our little ship went down. The hull is broken. That will take time and effort to fix, but that is a detail, should we only find the ship. It is of two masts, rigged like a schooner, fore and aft, and of some ninety tons; small, but easy for half a dozen men to handle, and like a witch upon the rudder. It is six years, but a ship in the water is like meat well jerked. I do not doubt for a moment that I can find it. And when we have it—my God, man, do you realize that these fools will pay from five hundred to a thousand dollars for the privilege of lying like cattle upon the deck, or being stuffed into the hold! This will be only the beginning. If we cannot buy ships at San Francisco, we will build them. Listen, the day of the east is on the wane; the day of the west has not yet begun. Some time, mark my word, they will cut into the Darien, and where we have to drag ourselves through rotten jungle, men will sail calmly upon ships—ships driven by steam. Those are the two things we must think of, Panama and steam. In the east they are building their pretty clipper ships until the sea stinks of them; but the clipper ship has seen its day; the clipper ship is no more than a lovely and archaic toy. But get a seaman or shipper to admit that! It is this new propeller screw which has destroyed the clipper. The future will be erected upon steam. Perhaps you and I shall have something to say in that, eh, my friend?”

“It will cost money,” John Preswick said warily.

“Yes, labor here is more valuable than gold. We shall need carpenters and a sail-maker, and perhaps a sailor or two. But we will average twenty-five thousand dollars a trip.”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars a trip!”

The candles were guttering, and John Preswick was weak and tired from his illness and the strain of words. Closing his eyes, he lay back, and he let Michael Brian's terse sentences roll through his brain. The money was still in his fingers. Very probably, the man was mad, but he was a man to trust. He was the first man John Preswick had ever encountered whom he could trust. Softly he said:

“I owe you my life—and more, Michael Brian.”

“You do,” Michael Brian assented.

“We will work together.”

Michael Brian smiled as he eyed the long, lean figure. With his short, stubby fingers, he pinched out each of the candles.

Then it was night. The little Irishman sat in his chair; John Preswick lay with his length on the bed; they both might have been dreaming in that hot, wet, unhealthful Panama night.

A sick moonlight streamed in through the open window. Outside the air crawled with a night-mist.

6

T
HEY
chose their men, and for five hundred dollars apiece they purchased two long native canoes, and, a week after that night, they set off up the coast. In the Bay of Chorrera, after sounding west and south from the mouth of the river, they found the wreck, wedged deep into the sand, with just the top of the deck-house showing when the tide was at its lowest. Attacking it with picks and shovels and loosening it from the wet muck, they made fast two lines, and with a dozen Indians straining upon each, with others up to their necks in water and clearing away the sand, they drew the hull slowly onto the beach. Almost to its weight in gold was the value of that wreck, for there were thousands of gold-mad men in Panama, and so scarce were ships that many set forth to make the trip of thousands of miles by canoe, and others trusted themselves to craft that would founder upon a lagoon.

Progress was slow. In a day, they had drawn it only a few feet. But they fastened it to trees upon the bank, rigging up pulley attachments; after that, they worked daily, from dawn to sunset, putting temporary tar-cloth patches, and cleaning out the sand and water from the hull. When eight days had passed, it was above the lowest tide water, on its side, green and slippery, the forward part of the hull on the port caved in entirely, but most of the other timbers tight and in good condition. Now they were able to make a water-tight patch, to bail it put, batten it down, and float it in on the tide. Dragging it well up on the beach on rollers, they made a crude cradle from tree trunks, and righted the vessel, so that at last it rested upon its keel. Then the carpenters went to work, and the natives with rough sand and glue scrapers.

By this time John Preswick had back most of his strength, though he was leaner than ever and his skin had taken on a yellow tinge which it was never to lose, making him appear like a person with severe jaundice. With Michael Brian at his side, he drove his men, working against time, against the hot, wet weather, against the inherent laziness of the Indians. The hull was scraped; the broken planks were removed, and new ones were braced in; the old oakum was pried out, and the planks were calked; three coats of paint were put on in quick succession, and masts were raised and rigged; and across the stern, in crude letters, was painted: P
RESWICK AND
B
RIAN
—S
HIPPING
. Then, still in a half-completed state, the little schooner was rolled into the water—exactly twenty-nine days after they had located her in the sand. The makeshift gaff slid up, the crude sails looked for the wind, and they were off for Panama.

And in that manner, with the salvaging of a wrecked vessel, John Preswick started off to the building of a fortune that was to resound even to the other sea, where other Preswicks had once seen their ships come and go. It seemed much as though fate had led Michael Brian to John Preswick, as though fortune had chosen out the two of them to lavish her hand upon. Their venture with the first ship proved fantastically successful, but the trip they made from Panama to San Francisco was their last. After that time, when they had carried sixty-five men in their burning hold and upon their decks, their schooner sailed under hired hands. John Preswick took long to forget—though he did, in time—the horrible discomfort of that voyage, or realize what it was in men that made them hunger so for gold—to the extent of paying five hundred dollars and more for room to lie upon the deck. Amazingly successful was that first voyage. But it was their last. Michael Brian assured him that their necks were entirely too valuable to be risked on such a cockle-shell as the hull they had raised.

They came to San Francisco while the gold fever was at the height of its first flush. San Francisco had become favored above the old name of Yerba Buena, and its deserted frame building licked at the water where now Market Street goes into First and Battery. But the sudden, fire-like growth of the city had lapsed; its population had abandoned it for the lure of the gold fields; stores closed; labor was unobtainable; real estate touched bottom values. And in that time, at the insistence of John Preswick, who had a passion in his breast for things concrete and material, they invested forty thousand dollars in almost worthless property and in piles of the merchandise that crowded the waterfront, dumped there by shippers who saw in human flesh the only freight worth carrying. Their title was dubious, but Michael Brian, resigning himself to John Preswick's judgment, made preparations to defend by force what they had acquired. They had remaining to them almost thirty thousand dollars' clear profit from the first trip.

But the property burnt as a flame in the mind of John Preswick as the reports came back from the gold fields. He said to Michael Brian: “There must be a boom. What does time matter? Sooner or later, the boom will come, and then the world will flock through San Francisco to the fields and back again. You see it in ships. I see it in property. While those fools hunt for then-gold, we'll hold to the coast. Wait until food begins to be scarce. Wait until they pour over the mountains. Wait until they finish crossing the plains and find themselves starving. Then they'll come with their gold! Can they eat their gold? Can they hold off the rain with it? Wait until they come!”

And smiling tolerantly, Michael Brian took their remaining capital and invested it in an unseaworthy ketch scarcely worth half of the price when new. But he smiled, painted their name upon the stern, and sent it off down the coast with a crew of three, to whom he was forced to pay ten dollars a day.

And then, after months, the boom began, and slim, graceful clippers, lumbering brigs, fast barques, and grotesque steam side-wheelers, overburdened and retarded by huge spreads of canvas they did not need, came flocking through the Golden Gate and unloaded, with feverish haste, tons of merchandise and thousands of men from every part of the world, until the waterfront and the ragged, shapeless streets swarmed with an aimless, bewildered humanity, who picked their way in and out of the piled baggage in a vain quest for sleeping and eating quarters. They sprawled in the mud-filled avenues; they rolled their blankets on the beaches; they lay unmindful of mud and rain; and for food and shelter they paid fabulous prices. John Preswick and Michael Brian bought another boat, a sloop this time; they bought food and clothing as fast as they could roll it into the sail-, cloth and frame shelters they had built, before which armed men paced. With a speed that was as ridiculous as it was unbelievable, the deserted shell of the city had become a place throbbing with a life it could not contain. And still John Preswick and his partner bought and bought, writing their notes, after their money had given out, for what, a year ago, would have been inconceivable sums.

And where it was all bringing them, John Preswick hardly knew, for of their three ships, one, the ketch, had gone down, and the other two were no longer commanding anything like the former prices. The property which he had purchased, and which he now transformed into hotels, was taking in a stream of gold, with rooms selling for two hundred a month. And Michael Brian sold, at a good profit, a small part of the merchandise, which he was accepting without limit from every ship that touched at the city. In an emergency, he sold one of the buildings, a stable, which he had acquired for a thousand dollars, for the fantastic price of two hundred thousand dollars, a quarter of it in a lump sum of gold. And buyers contended and bid for it. The fifty thousand dollars tided them over and enabled them to purchase a half interest in a clipper ship,
Salt of the Spray
, the first of what were to be the famous Preswick & Brian ships—sail and then steam. Just what their property was worth, they had not the faintest idea, nor could they estimate it, for prices and values were dancing a whirling waltz.

Then the value of their property rose in a dizzying crescendo. Their hotels were charging, and getting, a thousand dollars a month for the larger rooms; and a discreet brothel which John Preswick had launched had an income of almost fifty thousand dollars a week—not all profit, though, for women were difficult to obtain, and with a knowledge of the prices they commanded. They were white women, and expensive.

And all of it was gold—gold. It seemed that here money had become quite worthless.

With armed guards, they defended the validity of their titles, John Preswick himself going about with a revolver strapped to his waist, with a long knife thrust into his shirt. He and Michael Brian, garbed in slouch hats and overalls, worked like madmen. Their goal was a million by eighteen fifty.

The food, clothing, and timber they had bought, and which was piled in great heaps in the streets and on the waterfront, was shipped inland to Stockton and Sacramento, where it commanded a better price than in San Francisco. The exchange of money and of gold was too rapid for them to keep any sort of books; and because banking facilities were of the poorest, they reinvested their money as soon as they received it. They sent an order east for the building of two small steam vessels; and they organized the Golden Gate Freight and Shipping Company, and the San Francisco Land Holding Company, both of which were later to incorporate into the famous Golden Gate Land and Shipping Company.

In eighteen fifty-one they disposed of all their property except that directly upon the waterfront and reinvested the proceeds in ships, which were now to be had for a fraction of what they had commanded years before, and in real estate in Oakland and in the straggling inland sections of the city proper. Their million had been passed long since. This disposal of their property when prices for land were still at their height, and when titles were still doubtful, enabled them to escape the rather sudden fall in values that came with eighteen fifty-two and eighteen fifty-three, although they lost out theoretically in the reoccurrence of the boom in the latter part of eighteen fifty-three, when values again went sky-rocketing.

In the crash of eighteen fifty-five, they lost hardly a hundred thousand dollars in surplus deposits, a comparatively small sum, and by this time their steam and sail lines were solidly set upon a paying basis. Already they were many times millionaires; but their goal had crept ahead.

The war came, and their open and published sympathy for the South kept their ships free of the privateers who preyed upon the west coast. They prospered. Their wealth grew with the freight their ships carried about the Horn, for as yet Michael Brian's dream of a canal through Darien had not been realized. They built themselves a home in Oakland, where they lived together until, in the year of eighteen sixty-two, John Preswick took a wife. Then, not so much angered as hurt, Michael Brian left and built for himself a separate and smaller house upon the other side of the street. But a woman could not break the curious love the two men had for each other. Of an evening, they would sit side by side on the porch, and pull thoughtfully on then-pipes, and speak of the Darien, and the long, bright, jungle-walled length of the Chagres, and the lakes, and Panama—to which they had never returned—the city of calculated madness. Now it was a city of dead dreams. And of the already old San Francisco they would speak, which they had known, and which, was no more, of the turbulent, spinning city, swarming with a conglomeration of humanity no city had ever seen before…. They would sit, and they would dream, and the smoke from their pipes would curl lazily upward, and they would stare after it and wonder just what they had, in spite of their fleet of ships that sailed about the Horn, in spite of their tremendous property holdings, and whether all they had was not behind them and lost….