We Bore Round The Point Toward
The Old Anchoring-Ground Of The Hide Ships, And There, Covering The
Sand-Hills
And the valleys, stretching from the water's edge to the
base of the great hills, and from the old Presidio
To the Mission,
flickering all over with the lamps of its streets and houses, lay a
city of one hundred thousand inhabitants. Clocks tolled the hour
of midnight from its steeples, but the city was alive from the salute
of our guns, spreading the news that the fortnightly steamer had come,
bringing mails and passengers from the Atlantic world. Clipper ships
of the largest size lay at anchor in the stream, or were girt to
the wharves; and capacious high-pressure steamers, as large and
showy as those of the Hudson or Mississippi, bodies of dazzling
light, awaited the delivery of our mails to take their courses up
the Bay, stopping at Benicia and the United States Naval Station,
and then up the great tributaries - the Sacramento, San Joaquin,
and Feather Rivers - to the far inland cities of Sacramento,
Stockton, and Marysville.
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."
I could not complain that I had not a choice of places of worship.
The Roman Catholics have an archbishop, a cathedral, and five
or six smaller churches, French, German, Spanish, and English;
and the Episcopalians, a bishop, a cathedral, and three other
churches; the Methodists and Presbyterians have three or four
each, and there are Congregationalists, Baptists, a Unitarian,
and other societies. On my way to church, I met two classmates
of mine at Harvard standing in a door-way, one a lawyer and the
other a teacher, and made appointments for a future meeting. A
little farther on I came upon another Harvard man, a fine scholar
and wit, and full of cleverness and good-humor, who invited me to
go to breakfast with him at the French house - he was a bachelor,
and a late riser on Sundays. I asked him to show me the way to
Bishop Kip's church. He hesitated, looked a little confused,
and admitted that he was not as well up in certain classes of
knowledge as in others, but, by a desperate guess, pointed out
a wooden building at the foot of the street, which any one
might have seen could not be right, and which turned out to be
an African Baptist meeting-house. But my friend had many capital
points of character, and I owed much of the pleasure of my visit
to his attentions.
The congregation at the Bishop's church was precisely like one
you would meet in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston. To be sure,
the identity of the service makes one feel at once at home, but the
people were alike, nearly all of the English race, though from all
parts of the Union. The latest French bonnets were at the head
of the chief pews, and business men at the foot. The music was
without character, but there was an instructive sermon, and the
church was full.
I found that there were no services at any of the Protestant
churches in the afternoon. They have two services on Sunday;
at 11 A. M., and after dark. The afternoon is spent at home,
or in friendly visiting, or teaching of Sunday Schools, or other
humane and social duties.
This is as much the practice with what at home are called the
strictest denominations as with any others. Indeed, I found
individuals, as well as public bodies, affected in a marked
degree by a change of oceans and by California life. One Sunday
afternoon I was surprised at receiving the card of a man whom I
had last known, some fifteen years ago, as a strict and formal
deacon of a Congregational Society in New England. He was a deacon
still, in San Francisco, a leader in all pious works, devoted to
his denomination and to total abstinence, - the same internally,
but externally - what a change! Gone was the downcast eye, the
bated breath, the solemn, non-natural voice, the watchful gait,
stepping as if he felt responsible for the balance of the moral
universe!
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