(Infographic created by Google NotebookLM - Parts 1 and 2 of The Golden Shore)
The Golden Shore
A Story of the Schaffner Family
New York to San Francisco, 1855
Part One -- The Leaving
New York harbor, June 1855
The morning Frederick Schaffner decided to leave New York for good, the city smelled of fish and horse dung and something sweeter underneath — bread, perhaps, from one of the bakeries on Hester Street — and he stood at the window of their rooms on Orchard Street for a long time, breathing it in, trying to fix it in his memory like a photograph.
He was twenty-six years old. He had crossed one ocean already. He supposed he could cross another.
Behind him, Martha Matilda was folding their possessions into two leather trunks with the methodical calm she brought to everything. She was Irish, and the Irish, Frederick had observed, did not waste energy on dread. They simply got on with it. He loved her for this, among other things.
"Herman," she said, not looking up from her folding, "stop pulling at the strap, you'll break it."
Frederick looked down. His son was sitting on the floor beside the larger trunk, four years old and already in love with anything mechanical — buckles, hinges, the latch on the door, the gas lamp fixture in the hallway. Herman had his mother's dark eyes and Frederick's stubbornness, a combination that had already proven formidable.
"He can't break it," Frederick said.
"He broke the kettle," Martha Matilda said.
"That was different."
She looked up at him then, one eyebrow slightly raised in the way that meant she was not going to argue but also was not going to concede. Frederick smiled. She went back to her folding.
The passage had cost them most of what Frederick had saved from two years of cooking in various establishments along the Bowery — one hundred and twenty dollars for two adults, half price for Herman, in steerage class aboard the SS Illinois, a side-wheel steamship of the United States Mail Steamship Company departing Pier 4 on the North River at ten o'clock that morning, bound for Aspinwall on the coast of Panama. From there, they would cross the isthmus by the new railroad to Panama City, and then north on another vessel to San Francisco.
Frederick had read the advertisement in the Staats-Zeitung perhaps forty times. He had memorised it. He could recite the sailing dates and fares and the names of the agents in the way that other men memorised scripture.
He picked Herman up off the floor. The boy immediately grabbed his collar.
"Vater," Herman said. "Where are we going?"
"California," Frederick said.
"Is it far?"
"Yes."
"As far as Germany?"
Frederick considered this. He had told Herman about Germany — about Darmstadt, about the linden trees and the ducal palace and the smell of the city on a summer morning. Not that Herman would remember any of it. He had been born in New York.
"Farther," Frederick said. "But we go by ship, which is faster."
Herman seemed to find this satisfactory. He grabbed Frederick's ear instead of his collar, which was worse, but Frederick said nothing.
They carried the trunks down three flights of stairs themselves. Their neighbor Mrs. Kaufmann stood in her doorway and watched them go without speaking, which was unlike her — she was usually a woman of considerable verbal resource — and Frederick understood that she disapproved of the venture. Half the neighborhood disapproved of the venture. A man with a good situation in New York, they said, did not abandon it to chase rumors on the other side of the world. The Gold Rush was over. California was a gamble.
Frederick did not try to explain. He had tried explaining, and it hadn't helped. Some things you did not do because they made sense. You did them because you could feel, in the bones of your chest, that staying still was a kind of dying.
He picked up the smaller trunk. Martha Matilda took the larger one. Herman walked between them down Orchard Street toward the river, his hand in no one's, looking at everything.
— ★ —
The SS Illinois was not a beautiful ship, but she was big — nearly two hundred and fifty feet from bow to stern, Frederick estimated — and she sat in the Hudson like a great self-satisfied animal while a thousand things happened around her simultaneously: cargo swung aboard on cranes, passengers crowded the gangways, coal smoke thickened above her twin funnels, and somewhere below decks a steam whistle released periodic shrieks that made Herman cover his ears and laugh.
Steerage was below the waterline. Frederick had known this from the advertisement — had read the word and understood it in the abstract way you understand things you have not yet experienced — but the reality of it hit him as he descended the forward companionway with their smaller trunk under one arm and Herman's hand in his free one: the low ceiling, the smell of two hundred bodies and their possessions already close in the summer heat, the wooden sleeping shelves built two high along the hull, the single lantern swinging at the far end of the compartment.
He had crossed from Germany to New York in a ship not unlike this one. He knew what was coming.
"It's fine," Martha Matilda said, behind him. She said it the way she said most things — as simple fact, not reassurance. Frederick loved her for this too.
They found a shelf near the forward bulkhead — not the best position, he knew, for when the sea grew rough the bow moved most — but it offered a small advantage: a porthole the size of a dinner plate, filmed with salt, through which a narrow cylinder of grey harbor light fell onto the planking. Herman discovered this porthole within thirty seconds of their arrival and pressed his face against it with great concentration, as though the Hudson River were communicating something important.
"What do you see?" Frederick asked him.
"Water," Herman said. "And a bird."
"What kind of bird?"
Herman considered this with the gravity of a four-year-old confronting a serious scientific question. "A wet one," he said.
A woman across the aisle laughed — a stout German woman of perhaps fifty, with grey hair pinned severely under a black bonnet. She caught Frederick's eye and nodded.
"Erste Reise?" she asked. First voyage?
"To California," Frederick said. "Not the first time on a ship."
"Nor mine," she said. "I came over in 1838. I told myself: never again on a ship. And here I am." She shrugged with magnificent resignation. "My son is in San Francisco. He sends money."
"Mine will be in San Francisco too," Frederick said. "Someday."
He looked at Herman, who had abandoned the porthole and was now investigating the latch on their trunk with the systematic patience of a locksmith.
At ten o'clock precisely, the Illinois shuddered beneath them as her engines came alive, and the last mooring lines were cast off, and the dock and the city and the life Frederick had built there over five years began, slowly, to move away.
Part Two
Part Two -- The Caribbean Sea
Eleven days south of New York
The Atlantic treated them gently at first, which was a mercy, and then, south of Cape Hatteras, with considerably less mercy, which was not. For three days the ship rolled and plunged through heavy swells that turned steerage into something between a laundry and a hospital. The bucket at the end of the aisle became the most important object in the world, and was passed from hand to hand with a cooperation that no other circumstance could have inspired among such a varied collection of strangers.
Herman was not seasick. Frederick found this almost offensive. The boy moved through the pitching ship with unconscious ease, gripping whatever presented itself — shelf edges, belt loops, the arm of the German grandmother, who had given her name as Frau Bauer and who bore Herman's attentions with tolerant amusement — and seemed to find the whole experience merely another variety of interesting.
Martha Matilda was sick for two days and did not complain once, which Frederick thought was either saintliness or stubbornness and was probably both.
He himself managed, barely. He had managed on the Atlantic crossing from Germany too, and had sworn he would never do it again, and here he was. It seemed to be a pattern.
On the fourth day the swells subsided and the sea turned the color of deep slate and then, as they moved south, a color Frederick had no word for — a blue so saturated it looked painted, like the blue in a church window. The air changed too. It grew dense and warm and smelled of salt and something green and living underneath. Herman spent every possible hour on deck, leaning on the rail with his chin on his hands, watching the flying fish break the surface beside the bow.
"They fly," he told Frederick, with the urgency of someone reporting a miracle.
"They do," Frederick agreed.
"Why?"
Frederick thought about this. He had wondered the same thing on his Atlantic crossing and had never found a satisfactory answer. "To escape something chasing them," he said finally. "Or perhaps just because they can."
Herman absorbed this. "I would fly," he said, "if I could."
"Where would you fly to?"
Herman pointed ahead, roughly southward. "There," he said.
"That's the way we're going anyway," Frederick said.
"I know," Herman said. "But I would fly."
— ★ —
Life in steerage found its own rhythms after the first week. Frau Bauer, who had been a baker in Frankfurt, organised a small trading economy among the German passengers — a piece of sausage for a portion of hard cheese, a shirt-mending for a reading of the ship's broadsheet that was distributed every few days by one of the officers. Martha Matilda, who spoke no German but communicated with Frau Bauer through a combination of English, mime, and the universal language of shared exasperation, was drawn into this economy naturally; she could sew faster than anyone else in the compartment and her stitches were invisible.
There was an Irish family from Cork — the O'Briens, Patrick and Brigid and their three children, the oldest of whom was perhaps seven — and Martha Matilda talked with them for hours in the low voice she used when she was homesick but didn't want anyone to know it. Frederick listened sometimes without letting on that he was listening. They talked about Cork, about the crossing, about what Patrick O'Brien hoped to do in California. He wanted to work in construction. Half the men on the ship wanted to work in construction. San Francisco, from everything they'd read, was building itself as fast as men could move lumber.
"And your husband?" Brigid O'Brien asked one afternoon, nodding toward Frederick, who was sitting a few feet away mending his boot.
"He was a cook in New York," Martha Matilda said. "A good one."
"And in California?"
Martha Matilda was quiet for a moment. Frederick pretended great concentration on his boot. "Whatever is needed," she said. "He's not a man who sits still."
Frederick kept his eyes on the boot and said nothing, but he felt something warm and solid in his chest, like a coal that had been banked and was now quietly glowing.
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A work of historical fiction
Characters based on the real Schaffner family of San Francisco.
All dialogue and scenes are imagined.
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The AI Google NotebookLM Video Overview of this story is in:
This is historical fiction based on known events in the lives of my ancestors - it might have been this way. The family mentioned is my wife's ancestral family (Frederick Schaffner is her 2nd great-grandfather), and I have significant information about their lives from the available records, but know nothing about their day-to-day lives.
After I read these types of social history summaries, I wish that I could be a time traveler for one day to visit the Schaffner family in New York and San Francisco and witness their daily lives. I'm glad that the general lifestyles and occupations are known from historical records and witness accounts.
Information like this is very helpful to add historical events and social history content to a person's biography.
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Links to my blog posts about using Artificial Intelligence are on my Randy's AI and Genealogy page. Links to AI information and articles about Artificial Intelligence in Genealogy by other genealogists are on my AI and Genealogy Compendium page.
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