The Age of Gold (14 page)

After reeling, the status quo struck back. In France, the June Days were followed by the Red Fear. Chastened moderates joined convinced conservatives to muzzle the press, ban secret societies, and outlaw most public meetings. The nephew of Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon, was elevated to the
presidency on promises that he would save society and restore order—a project he commenced immediately, and which didn’t conclude before he had made himself emperor, with powers (although not talents) to match his uncle’s.

Jean-Nicolas Perlot was in Paris during the exciting, terrifying, and ultimately disillusioning events of 1848. Born in 1823 in the French- speaking part of Belgium, Perlot left home at twenty-two to seek his fortune in Paris, where an uncle found him a job as a
calicot
, or linen- draper’s assistant. The great city was a lonely place for a newcomer and at times overwhelming. But for two years the job fed him and left him leisure to explore. He prowled cafes and booksellers; at night he attended a trade school that taught mathematics, surveying, and engineering.

Neither more nor less political than most young men who had to work for a living, Perlot kept his distance from the rioting and urban warfare of 1848. More important to him than the effects of the revolution on Paris politics were its effects on the French economy. Hard times had helped trigger the uprising, which in turn made the times harder. Workers went hungry and cut down trees on the Bois de Boulogne for fuel. Perlot’s employer ran out of orders, and Perlot was soon out of work.

At just this moment arrived the news from America of gold in California. With business at a standstill and politics in turmoil, the El Dorado in the west was nearly irresistible. Of late a certain vogue had developed in Paris for the American frontier, largely as a result of the publication of French translations of the accounts of the expeditions of John Frémont, whom the French were happy to claim as one of their own. Now everything involving California was rushed into print and snatched from the bookstalls: correspondence from the few Frenchmen in California, memoirs by French sailors to the California coast, articles lifted from American publications.

As at Valparaiso and Sydney and Canton and New York, the gold reports sent an electric current through Paris and the surrounding country. Merchants hoped to profit from the sale of their wares at San Francisco; shipowners counted on an increase in traffic aboard their vessels; peasants and workers reckoned how to get to the goldfields to reap the harvest waiting there. Broadsides blossomed on walls across Paris, advertising passage
on ships preparing to set sail; companies of gold-seekers calling themselves L’Aurifère, La Toison d’Or, La Ruche d’Or, L’Eldorado, and scores of other such names appealed to prospective argonauts to join up. Shopkeepers offered to outfit those preparing to go—for a suitable price, of course. Even as the dreams set soaring by the February phase of the 1848 revolution crashed to bloody earth, the news from California provided an alternate hook for hope. A bimonthly journal called Le
Californie
predicted a golden end to France’s troubles:

Jean-Nicolas Perlot put the matter more succinctly: “The gold fever succeeded the revolutionary or reactionary fever, or, at least, gave it rough competition.”

Perlot watched in wonder as the advertisements went up. “The least lucky would have 100,000 francs, rather more than less,” he paraphrased the promises. Twenty-five years old, unattached, caught in a threadbare craft growing thinner by the day, he let himself be persuaded. “The chance to tempt fortune thus presented itself; I seized it and decided to leave for California.”

L
EAVING WAS LESS
simple than deciding to do so. The voyage to America cost a thousand francs, which Perlot didn’t have. Yet if he was
poorer than most of the French argonauts, he was more resourceful than many, and after much calculating and some negotiation he signed an agreement with the manager of one of the California companies, La Fortune, whereby Perlot would receive passage in exchange for serving as company steward on the way. Once in America he would have a standard share in the company’s earnings, which would consist of the pooled revenues (that is, the value of the gold dust and nuggets discovered) less combined expenses. The overall term of the agreement was five years; at the end of that period the company would return him to Paris, if he so chose. Perlot was delighted at this arrangement. “I was saved, I was leaving!”

The company gathered at Paris and traveled down the Seine to Le Havre. Their ship, the
Courrier de Cherbourg
, was supposed to be ready for immediate departure, but was not. For a month the men put up at a boarding house, chafing at the delay and costing the company—that is, themselves—a distressing amount of money. Steward Perlot supervised the packing of provisions and kept a sharp eye out for cheating by the provisioners.

Finally the preparations were finished and the vessel made ready to sail. The scene on deck at the last hour featured hugs, kisses, tears, and bon voyages from the wives, mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters of the brave adventurers.

Perlot, however, stood apart. “I had in this crowd neither relative nor friend, nor even an acquaintance, and none of these words of affection was addressed to me. I was leaving—would I ever return? Nobody asked himself this question, which interested nobody. As at my arrival in Paris, I had the bitter feeling of my isolation. Ought I, after all, to rejoice or regret not seeing anyone weep for my departure? I did not know. And nevertheless, witnessing these scenes of farewell, I began to be sorry that I too did not have someone to embrace, to shake by the hand.” The one other Belgian aboard was the sole person similarly stranded. Perlot approached him. “After some seconds of silence, I told him what I was feeling. Without saying a word, he looked at me fixedly, then, covering his face with his handkerchief, he fled. I remained alone, mournful, my eyes turned toward Le Havre, which was slowly receding.”

Perlot’s companions aboard the
Courrier
were a diverse crowd. Two were the sons of the director of La Fortune. Two more were the company’s doctor and engineer. Then there was “Clavel de Vérance, ex-Zouave, an imaginary nobleman, whom we nicknamed Portos, to humor him, for he was proud of his bodily strength, although it appeared as debatable as his coat of arms.” A cafe-waiter had recently returned from Madrid to discover that waiters went begging in Paris. A Norman son of a schoolmaster had been a clerk in England but had grown restless there and retreated to his native village, which had nothing more to offer than when he left. A lumber-seller with a weakness for drink, a tanner fleeing his wife, a student fleeing the friars who ran his school, an army veteran named Magraff, who “called himself a nephew of the Duke of Baden, and perhaps he really was,” and a man subsequently dubbed Tenerife, for his mountainous nose, filled other berths.

The ship also carried argonauts unattached to La Fortune. Badinier was a lumber dealer from Orléans who had been ruined by the recent revolution. Surprisingly, considering this personal history, he held no animus against the popular cause. “Quite the contrary. He was nicknamed ‘Mirabeau’ [after the great orator of the first French revolution] and ‘the Father of the people,’ because on any occasion, and even without any occasion, he talked to us about his love for the people and delivered harangues which were doubtless very beautiful, but which were Greek to us and perhaps to him too, so elevated was the point of view—and so incoherent the form.” The Abbé Laubert “was going to evangelize the savages of California, and in the meantime he evangelized us. In his character as missionary, he wore a long red beard. He was an educated and liberal priest, perhaps a little heretical. Was that why he was going far from the oldest daughter of the Church [that is, France]? It might be. The explanation which he gave us of the birth of Jesus Christ, son of a ghost, although he swore he did not believe in incubi, completely passed my understanding.”

N
OT UNUSUALLY FOR
a group of landlubbers, nearly all suffered the mal de mer their first days out. This eased Perlot’s job as steward, since the
collective failure of appetite freed him from having to distribute food ra tions. For almost a week a surly wind from the west confined them to the Channel; not till the seventh day did the lengthening swells indicate their entrance to the Atlantic. The slower tempo of the ship’s rolling, combined with the acquisition of sea legs by the passengers, eased the seasickness. Appetites improved, and Perlot found his services in greater demand.

During a brief stretch of clear weather in the Bay of Biscay, the novices concluded that sailing was a fine means of travel. This conclusion abruptly proved premature, as Perlot related.

The motions of two ships in distress which we had in sight made us aware of the movements which ours was performing. One of them seemed hardly out of gunshot; we could perceive it only when it found itself, like us, on the top of a wave; sometimes launched toward the sky, we saw it almost upright on its prow or on its poop; sometimes it appeared to us completely upset and let us see only its keel.

It was just the same with ours. Sometimes it stayed so thoroughly upright on its bow or stem that the deck fled from under my feet and I remained suspended from the rope which I had twisted around my arm; at other times, the roll put the deck on a vertical line and half the yards in the water. Then all at once, it dove between two waves and the surge passed over the deck, and I was astonished at not being engulfed.

The storm lasted three days, followed by fair weather that carried the craft to Madeira. The voyagers, like most making their first ocean crossing, were delighted to touch terra firma again. And Madeira was a delightful place to touch. “Madeira is a charming little island, a true earthly paradise,” Perlot remarked. Yet cheap supplies, rather than the picturesqueness of the place, were the reason ships like the
Courrier de Cherbourg
put in at Madeira. Although La Fortune didn’t buy much in new stores, others on the vessel did.

It was just as well Perlot and company didn’t provision at Madeira. The ship’s mate took aboard a quantity of tuna, which turned out to be bad. Nearly a quarter of the passengers and crew became acutely ill. None died, but most lost their taste for fish.

Amid the epidemic, Perlot devised a scheme for efficiently feeding his company. During the first weeks of the voyage his impatient partners insisted on receiving rations at whatever hour suited them; now he succeeded in imposing a more regular schedule. The men were divided into eight squads; each had its own kettle and mess kit, which served its seven or eight members. Each squad selected a cook, who at the appointed hour received the rations for the group and apportioned them out to the members.

In good weather the mess squads ate on deck, and accidents were few. But in stormy weather the men discovered another difference between life on land and at sea. They were forced to take refuge below, in a large room that served as a dormitory at night and a commons during the day. Here each squad clustered around its kettle, balancing and bracing themselves as well as they could against the rolling of the ship. They rarely held their positions for long. “How many times that damned wind came to disturb the order and the religious silence which ruled in that solemn moment!” wrote Perlot. “How many times we had the bitter experience of that truth, that there is many a slip’twixt the spoon and the lip!” The rolling didn’t merely disrupt the eating; it also frayed nerves and sometimes triggered violence. One man would splash soup on his neighbor and be cursed for his carelessness. Another would knock his neighbor down and receive a cuff in return.
A third would topple the mess pot of an adjacent squad and provoke a general melee.

T
HREE DAYS OUT OF
Maderia the
Courrier
sighted Tenerife, the summit of the Canaries, and then skirted southwest toward the Cape Verde Islands. Crew members told Perlot that the African coast was just over the eastern horizon; perhaps in the backlight of dawn he would see Cap Vert. But strain though he did, he failed.

Another week brought the social highlight of the voyage—in fact, the social highlight of nearly every voyage that passed from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern, and one encountered by thousands of argonauts. As the ship approached the equator, those who had already been initiated into the service of King Neptune prepared to repeat the procedure on those who had not, in this case including the entire membership of La Fortune. The ritual, like all rituals, assumed a certain timeless quality, not least in Perlot’s retelling.