The mosquitos at Acapulco were as numerous as any I remember to have seen, and, in certain constitutions, every bite produced a sore, which was aggravated by the climate. We are accustomed to look jocularly on the attacks of these, or any other hungry insects, but to an invalid their bites are often productive of most serious consequences.
I was enabled at last to secure a passage in a large steamer, which touched at Acapulco on her voyage to San Francisco. She was a magnificent boat, but, having eight hundred passengers on board, it was with difficulty we could procure accommodation. We secured, however, a couple of sofas in the main saloon, and, two bags of bones as we were, we managed to find either sofa much too big for us.
Asiatic cholera broke out on the day we left Acapulco, and I began to think that we brought ill luck with our presence. It was sad to hear the groans of the dying passengers in the cabins right and left, but perhaps less so to us than to others, for we had seen so much sickness on our voyage that we had come to look upon it in a stolid sort of way, and were free from those fears and anxieties which the more robust about us experienced. We arrived at San Francisco with a loss in one week of fifty passengers, and if we did not thank God for his mercy in preserving us we were surely the most ungrateful of his creatures.
I would gladly have been spared this record of a very miserable voyage, and yet without it my narrative would have been incomplete, as presenting but one side of the picture. At the same time I can assure the reader that I have not described one half its horrors.
As we glide swiftly down the stream one day without a care, so, on the next perhaps, with the pole to our breast, we must sturdily stem the rushing current to arrive at our goal with a fainting frame and panting heart, if God so wills; or otherwise, with broken oar and shattered bark, meet our destruction in the cruel eddies of the swollen river.
* * * *
During my absence the State of California had progressed in the seven-leagued-boots manner which had characterised it from the first.
The vast blocks of brick houses that had risen on every side in San Francisco looked so very new and red that, the streets being filled with empty packing-cases, it seemed as if the city had been sent out piecemeal, packed in shavings, and put together like a box of toys.
Let us take one final glimpse at this colony of six years’ growth.
The wharves of the city still grow, and the clipper ships appear to grow proportionately; each “Flying Dragon,� “Flying Fish,� or “Flying Cloud,� that arrives requires more room for her pinions than those that have come before her.