Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

earlier. Then the first glimmer outlined El Morro, and slowly dawn touched the greenhills of Cuba, following them down to the sea, as the flag of Spain brightened to crimson and gold, and the Central America emerged from the darkness as the biggest ship in the harbor.
    She was sleek and black, her decks scrubbed smooth with holystones, her deckhouses glistening with the yellowed patina of old varnish. Along her lower wale, a red stripe ran nearly three hundred feet stem to stern, and three masts the height and thickness of majestic trees rose from her decks. Spiderwebs of shrouds and stays held her masts taut, and in moments she could sprout full sail, but she rippled with real muscle amidships: two enormous steam engines with pistons that traveled ten feet on each downstroke and turned paddle wheels three stories high. Between the paddle wheels, the funnel rose thick and black above all save the masts.
    One of a new generation of sidewheel steamers, the Central America departed New York Harbor on the twentieth of each month, bound for Aspinwall, Panama, where she traded five hundred New York passengers bound for San Francisco for five hundred California passengers returning east. Since her christening in 1853 as the George Law , she had carried one-third of all consigned gold to pass over the Panama route. And in quantities rivaling her official gold shipments, unregistered shipments of gold dust and gold nuggets from the Sierra Nevada, and gold coins struck at the new San Francisco Mint, and gold bars, some the size of building bricks, had traveled aboard her in the trunks and pockets, the carpetbags and money belts of her passengers.
    At sunrise the morning gun sounded from El Morro; trumpets blared and drums rolled from high on the fortifications, announcing to the international flotilla of ships that the harbor was now open for the business of the day.
    Lighters immediately surrounded the Central America , the small boats filled with oranges and bananas and thin men wearing blue and white checkered shirts and hats made of straw. The boatmen spoke only Spanish, but they chattered and gesticulated, peddling their fruit for dimes thrown by the passengers, who in turn received oranges twice as large as any they had ever seen.
    In another hour, the ship’s bell resounded across the brightening harbor, and the captain ordered his crew to weigh anchor. Coal smokeand ashes rose from the funnel and roiled into the air over the afterdeck, the paddle wheels of the Central America churning the water white. With her bowsprit pointed onward as gracefully as the arched neck of a stallion, she glided through the mouth of the harbor beneath El Morro and out onto the sea, climbing to her cruising speed of eleven knots, the American flag rippling off the yardarm.
    For many of her passengers, the final five days to New York would be the last leg of a long journey that began when news of the rich gold strike in California had first trickled east. “Many of us had been away for years,” recalled Oliver Manlove. “We awaited the time of meeting our loved ones again. We were jubilant and made the old ship ring with our voices.”
    The Central America crossed the Tropic of Cancer, and with the green hills of Cuba shrinking above the whitened wake, the captain took her into the Gulf Stream, which he would follow most of the way to New York. The extra two-and-a-half-knot push lightened the work of his engines.
    â€œAs near as I can recollect,” the second officer reported later, “we left Havana, Tuesday, September 8, 1857, at 9:25 A.M. , and proceeded to sea, steering for Cape Florida, with fine weather, moderate breezes and head sea.”
    For half a day the seas remained clear and sapphire blue, the breeze in from the trade winds quarter and the surface smooth.
    A NGLING NORTHEAST ACROSS the Straits of Florida, Captain Herndon followed the inner edge of the Gulf Stream, which flowed within a few miles of