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

the Florida Keys, his course set for the point where the Keys broke loose of the mainland and arced westward. As the day wore on, the sun rose higher, blistering the sides of the ship. Tropical heat filled the hold, and the iron furnaces and boilers burned and bubbled at near capacity, running the temperature even higher.
    Most of the passengers littered the weather deck, many of them still nursing mouth boils raised by the tropical sun and layers of raw skin peeling from their hands and faces. Some sat on wooden benches bordering the deck, some leaned over the rail, some coiled on top of the paddle guards, others sat in chairs or on seats under a large awning, anda few watched it all from the rigging. The air was so warm that even with the breeze many could remain in one spot for no more than ten minutes.
    â€œThe sky was bright overhead,” noted Oliver Manlove, “while there was a slight ripple of the waves. But the hours were passing and by the middle of the afternoon quite a breeze was blowing. The waves were rising, dark and tossing, but were chopping up into little white hills that rose and fell.”
    That evening at sunset, the first- and second-class passengers took supper at the long tables and railroad benches in the dining saloon. Afterward, they retired topside again to stroll in the cooler evening breezes and amuse themselves with impromptu skits, or readings, or poems put to music and accompanied by a banjo, a guitar, or an old fiddle. Mostly they talked about loved ones and wondered silently how things had changed since they left their homes in the East.
    While Captain Herndon entertained guests at his table, Manlove stood on deck, looking across the water, and recorded in his journal the end of their first day out of Havana. “The sun was shining brightly,” he remembered, “and dropping down in the west with magnificent splendor, and when it reached the waves it was like a red fire upon them for a moment before it sank away, leaving a crimson flame above it in the sky.”
    C APTAIN W ILLIAM L EWIS H ERNDON sat at the head of the captain’s table, wearing thin gold spectacles. Gold epaulets hung from his shoulders. Married and the father of one daughter, Herndon was slight, and at forty-three balding; a red beard ran the fringe of his jaw from temple to temple. Though he looked like a professor or a banker more than a sea captain, he had been twenty-nine years at sea, in the Mexican War and the Second Seminole War, in the Atlantic and the Pacific, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean Sea. He knew sailing ships and steamers and had handled both in all weather. He was also an explorer, internationally known and greatly admired, who had seen things no other American and few white men had ever seen.
    Seven years earlier, in August of 1850, while at anchor in the harbor of Valparaiso, Chile, Herndon had received notice that orders wouldarrive by the next steamer with instructions for him to explore the Valley of the Amazon, from the trickling headwaters of its tributaries sixteen thousand feet high in the Peruvian Andes all the way to Para Brazil, where the Amazon emptied into the Atlantic, four thousand miles away. “The route by which you may reach the Amazon River is left to your discretion,” read his Navy Department order. “It is not desired that you should select any route by which you and your party would be exposed to savage hostility beyond your means of defence and protection…. Arriving at Para, you will embark by the first opportunity for the United States, and report in person to this department.”
    Herndon had departed Lima on May 20, 1851, and arrived at Para nearly a year later, traveling the distance by foot, mule, canoe, and small boat. He had compiled lists, kept timetables, taken boiling points, recorded the weather, studied the flora, and measured and skinned small animals and birds. But he filed his report to the navy as a