A Ship of '49

"A Ship of '49" by Bret Harte is a vivid and engaging novella that captures the spirit of the Gold Rush era in California. Through the eyes of its characters, Harte explores themes of adventure, ambition, and the complexities of human relationships in a rapidly changing society. The story revolves around the experiences of a ship's crew during this tumultuous time, highlighting the struggles and hopes of those drawn to the promise of fortune and new beginnings. With Harte's trademark wit and rich descriptive style, the narrative offers a compelling glimpse into the lives of those who sought their fortunes on the windswept shores of the Pacific.

• Novel

								
It had rained so persistently in San Francisco during the first week of
January, 1854, that a certain quagmire in the roadway of Long Wharf had
become impassable, and a plank was thrown over its dangerous depth.
Indeed, so treacherous was the spot that it was alleged, on good
authority, that a hastily embarking traveler had once hopelessly lost
his portmanteau, and was fain to dispose of his entire interest in it
for the sum of two dollars and fifty cents to a speculative stranger on
the wharf. As the stranger's search was rewarded afterwards only by the
discovery of the body of a casual Chinaman, who had evidently
endeavored wickedly to anticipate him, a feeling of commercial
insecurity was added to the other eccentricities of the locality.

The plank led to the door of a building that was a marvel even in the
chaotic frontier architecture of the street. The houses on either
side--irregular frames of wood or corrugated iron--bore evidence of
having been quickly thrown together, to meet the requirements of the
goods and passengers who were once disembarked on what was the muddy
beach of the infant city. But the building in question exhibited a
certain elaboration of form and design utterly inconsistent with this
idea. The structure obtruded a bowed front to the street, with a
curving line of small windows, surmounted by elaborate carvings and
scroll work of vines and leaves, while below, in faded gilt letters,
appeared the legend "Pontiac--Marseilles." The effect of this
incongruity was startling.

It is related that an inebriated miner, impeded by mud and drink before
its door, was found gazing at its remarkable façade with an expression
of the deepest despondency. "I hev lived a free life, pardner," he
explained thickly to the Samaritan who succored him, "and every time
since I've been on this six weeks' jamboree might have kalkilated it
would come to this. Snakes I've seen afore now, and rats I'm not
unfamiliar with, but when it comes to the starn of a ship risin' up out
of the street, I reckon it's time to pass in my checks."

"It is a ship, you blasted old soaker," said the Samaritan curtly.

It was indeed a ship. A ship run ashore and abandoned on the beach
years before by her gold-seeking crew, with the débris of her scattered
stores and cargo, overtaken by the wild growth of the strange city and
the reclamation of the muddy flat, wherein she lay hopelessly imbedded;
her retreat cut off by wharves and quays and breakwater, jostled at
first by sheds, and then impacted in a block of solid warehouses and
dwellings, her rudder, port, and counter boarded in, and now gazing
hopelessly through her cabin windows upon the busy street before her.
But still a ship despite her transformation. The faintest line of
contour yet left visible spoke of the buoyancy of another element; the
balustrade of her roof was unmistakably a taffrail. The rain slipped
from her swelling sides with a certain lingering touch of the sea; the
soil around her was still treacherous with its suggestions, and even
the wind whistled nautically over her chimney. If, in the fury of some
southwesterly gale, she had one night slipped her strange moorings and
left a shining track through the lower town to the distant sea, no one
would have been surprised.

Least of all, perhaps, her present owner and possessor, Mr. Abner Nott.
For by the irony of circumstances, Mr. Nott was a Far Western farmer
who had never seen a ship before, nor a larger stream of water than a
tributary of the Missouri River. In a spirit, half of fascination, half
of speculation, he had bought her at the time of her abandonment, and
had since mortgaged his ranch at Petaluma with his live stock, to
defray the expenses of filling in the land where she stood, and the
improvements of the vicinity. He had transferred his household goods
and his only daughter to her cabin, and had divided the space "between
decks" and her hold into lodging-rooms, and lofts for the storage of
goods. It could hardly be said that the investment had been profitable.
His tenants vaguely recognized that his occupancy was a sentimental
rather than a commercial speculation, and often generously lent
themselves to the illusion by not paying their rent. Others treated
their own tenancy as a joke,--a quaint recreation born of the childlike
familiarity of frontier intercourse. A few had left; carelessly
abandoning their unsalable goods to their landlord, with great
cheerfulness and a sense of favor. Occasionally Mr. Abner Nott, in a
practical relapse, raged against the derelicts, and talked of
dispossessing them, or even dismantling his tenement, but he was easily
placated by a compliment to the "dear old ship," or an effort made by
some tenant to idealize his apartment. A photographer who had
ingeniously utilized the forecastle for a gallery (accessible from the
bows in the next street), paid no further tribute than a portrait of
the pretty face of Rosey Nott. The superstitious reverence in which
Abner Nott held his monstrous fancy was naturally enhanced by his
purely bucolic exaggeration of its real functions and its native
element. "This yer keel has sailed, and sailed, and sailed," he would
explain with some incongruity of illustration, "in a bee line, makin'
tracks for days runnin'. I reckon more storms and blizzards hez tackled
her than you ken shake a stick at. She's stampeded whales afore now,
and sloshed round with pirates and freebooters in and outer the Spanish
Main, and across lots from Marcelleys where she was rared. And yer she
sits peaceful-like just ez if she'd never been outer a pertater patch,
and hadn't ploughed the sea with fo'sails and studdin' sails and them
things cavortin' round her masts."

Abner Nott's enthusiasm was shared by his daughter, but with more
imagination, and an intelligence stimulated by the scant literature of
her father's emigrant wagon and the few books found on the cabin
shelves. But to her the strange shell she inhabited suggested more of
the great world than the rude, chaotic civilization she saw from the
cabin windows or met in the persons of her father's lodgers. Shut up
for days in this quaint tenement, she had seen it change from the
enchanted playground of her childish fancy to the theater of her active
maidenhood, but without losing her ideal romance in it. She had
translated its history in her own way, read its quaint nautical
hieroglyphics after her own fashion, and possessed herself of its
secrets. She had in fancy made voyages in it to foreign lands, had
heard the accents of a softer tongue on its decks, and on summer
nights, from the roof of the quarter-deck, had seen mellower
constellations take the place of the hard metallic glitter of the
Californian skies. Sometimes, in her isolation, the long, cylindrical
vault she inhabited seemed, like some vast sea-shell, to become musical
with the murmurings of the distant sea. So completely had it taken the

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