“Why not? Look! Look! He’s just going to catch him now.”
“Naw,” said the sailor, looking on without concern. “He stinks too much of tobacco. He’ll never touch him.”
Soon we sighted the Golden Gate, and later entered it in our ship the Golden Age. One could not but think there was much that was golden in those days of gold hunting, and yet many a poor fellow found out to his own sorrow that “it is not all gold that glitters.”
Thousands of men filled the streets of ’Frisco, nearly all bound for the Fraser River or Cariboo, as British Columbia was called in those days.
The steamboats, some of them not very seaworthy, were all overcrowded, bound north. A short time before the old steamer Republic, with eight hundred passengers, and the old Sierra Nevada, with nine hundred, had gone “up.” And now another old coffin, the Brother Jonathan, which had passed the Customs to carry only two hundred and fifty, took on eleven hundred men and was still selling tickets.
Some of our acquaintances who went north on board of her state that “they were stowed away like pigs, two in a bunk,” and they did not dare to leave their bunks for fear they would lose them. They were eight days on the trip, and hundreds of them never saw daylight but once, when they put in to Astoria for a few hours.
I, with a small party of Canadians, shipped on board the trim little barquentine W. B. Scranton, and had a lovely trip of ten days. On Sabbath we held religious services, the first we had had during our long journey.
As we passed through the Straits of Juan de Fuca, on the last night, and in sight of the lights of Victoria, a storm caught us. So severe was it that Captain Cathcart and his men were on deck all night, and were obliged to put about ship continually to keep her driving between the three lights of Victoria, Dungeness and Race Rocks.
At daybreak the wind subsided, and the morning found us in a dead calm away outside the Royal Roads.
The beauty of the sight which met our eyes as the day brightened can never be forgotten. The grand snow-capped Olympian Range lay to the south, and away to the east the rising sun cast rays of crimson light on old Mount Baker, as it nestled back from the great Coast Range of hills, while the glaciers seemed to shoot back light to the snow on its lofty peak.