Dana, Richard Henry, 1815-1882; Sailors; Seafaring life; Voyages and travels
The dock into which we drew, and the streets about it, were densely
crowded with express wagons and hand-carts to take luggage, coaches and
cabs for passengers, and with men,--some looking out for friends among
our hundreds of passengers,--agents of the press, and a greater
multitude eager for newspapers and verbal intelligence from the great
Atlantic and European world. Through this crowd I made my way, along
the well-built and well-lighted streets, as alive as by day, where boys
in high-keyed voices were already crying the latest New York papers;
and between one and two o'clock in the morning found myself comfortably
abed in a commodious room, in the Oriental Hotel, which stood, as well
as I could learn, on the filled-up cove, and not far from the spot
where we used to beach our boats from the Alert.
Sunday, August 14th. When I awoke in the morning, and looked from my
windows over the city of San Francisco, with its storehouses, towers,
and steeples; its court-houses, theatres, and hospitals; its daily
journals; its well-filled learned professions; its fortresses and
light-houses; its wharves and harbor, with their thousand-ton clipper
ships, more in number than London or Liverpool sheltered that day,
itself one of the capitals of the American Republic, and the sole
emporium of a new world, the awakened Pacific; when I looked across the
bay to the eastward, and beheld a beautiful town on the fertile, wooded
shores of the Contra Costa, and steamers, large and small, the
ferryboats to the Contra Costa, and capacious freighters and
passenger-carriers to all parts of the great bay and its tributaries,
with lines of their smoke in the horizon,--when I saw all these things,
and reflected on what I once was and saw here, and what now surrounded
me, I could scarcely keep my hold on reality at all, or the genuineness
of anything, and seemed to myself like one who had moved in "worlds not
realized."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account