Golden Dreams and Ocean Graves

The Story of the SS Central America

Jennie Easton, future bride of Col. C.F. Crocker, was born on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, in 1858. The Earth was at full tilt, bathed in the electrifying, invigorating, exhilarating energy of the sun. No parents were more grateful and blissful and happy to be alive. Father Ansel Ives Easton and mother Adeline Mills Easton felt like they were the luckiest couple in the world. They were.

Jennie was a honeymoon baby conceived a few weeks after the Eastons’ San Francisco wedding, at the tail end of the previous summer, either in their posh stateroom on the S.S. Central America, or shortly after they abruptly, separately disembarked the ship. Adeline was a full six months pregnant when she returned from her long matrimonial afterparty.

Jennie’s full Christian name was Jennie Ellen Marine, an unusual but exceedingly meaningful choice.

While, to be sure, the Easton’s honeymoon included romance, it was certainly not heartwarming material for sonnet writers and balladeers.

It also wasn’t like cousin Aimée Crocker’s disastrous honeymoon at Tehachapi in ’83, when 16 of the 19 people in her Southern Pacific bridal train car were killed in the first passenger runaway train wreck in world history.

What Addie and Ansel lived through was a far more wretched, cursed, deadly and god forsaken nightmare. The bone-chilling, gut-wrenching story of the Easton honeymoon continues to haunt and horrify. And to make the news.

“In the presence of God and goodly company” Ansel and Addie promised to love and comfort one another until death parted them, before friends and family, and Rev. Samuel H. Willey at the Howard Presbyterian Church. A horse-drawn carriage carrying the newlyweds still in their wedding attire galloped pell mell to San Francisco’s Vallejo Street wharf. They nearly missed their boat. The groom whisked his bride from the carriage and together they merrily skipped up the gangplank of the SS Sonora.

The Eastons’ frilly frocks and wedding gifts were packed in trunks in the hold, along with hampers of fine wine and choice biscuits and cakes, given with laughter and good wishes for a bon voyage. Last goodbyes were cried out, kisses were blown, God was in His Pearly Heaven, and in the sunshine of love, with the joyous hopes of a long, happy, fruitful life ahead of them, the Sonora sailed down the bay, out through the Golden Gate, over the waters of the blue Pacific. Their final destination was Europe. Their first stop was the equatorial haven of Panama.

The ship cast off carrying 38,000 letters and 1.6 million dollars worth of California Gold Rush gold, (not including the dust and nuggets brought back by passengers) bound for the safe harbor of East Coast banks. A sizable cache of the newly built San Francisco Mint’s production of $20 Liberty Head gold coins for the year 1857 was on board. There was no Tinsel Town in California at this time; pure gold was coursing through the veins of the Golden State.

The honeymooners, both New York natives, were a privileged couple who were able to afford the $283 fare ($10,300 today) for a first-class cabin ticket. The steerage ticket holders paid an inflated $179 ($6500). The groom was a well-to-do ship chandler who owned laundry and mattress manufacturing businesses, and was a pillar of the community. His bride was the only sister of the wealthy Gold Rush entrepreneur Darius Ogden Mills, who was shipping today’s equivalent of 1.2 million dollars worth of gold back East for his banking establishment.

A trip from remote California to United States proper in 1857 was an overseas journey. The Crocker brothers’ Transcontinental Railroad was a dozen years off. The six-month odyssey on the dreaded California and Oregon overland routes was formidable and wrought with dangers: rough, inhospitable terrains and extreme weather events; cholera and Rocky Mountain spotted fever outbreaks; combative Native Americans and rowdy, ruthless, and money hungry gold diggers.

The Cape Horn route around South America, which was comparable in nautical miles to a trip from New York to Hong Kong, was rendered obsolete, thankfully, in 1855, when a new 47-mile long Panama Railroad line, the Ferrocarril de Panamá, from Panama City to the Caribbean port city of Aspinwall (now Colón) was completed. After a two-hour open-air train ride, the passengers and cargo were transferred to another steamship for the nine-day voyage to New York City with a stop in Havana. Travel time was cut down to a little over three weeks.

The voyage to the Isthmus was one long delight, “with smooth waters, sunny skies, and a joyous, congenial company,” wrote Mrs. Easton in her account of her honeymoon journey published in 1911. Addie further described the cheerful assemblage as, “A wonderful cargo of souls and gold.”

On the same day the Sonora left San Francisco, the United States Mail Steamship Company dispatched for Aspinwall, Panama the well-known, fast, and recently renamed steamship Central America, formerly the George Law. Passengers embarked at the wharf at the foot of New York’s Warren Street. The steamship company was then offering a discounted ticket, at the still hefty sum of $100 (around $3,650 today).

The gregarious and well-liked Ansel, nicknamed “Pony” for his love of horses, joked that it was bad luck that the name of the vessel had been changed. He also didn’t like seeing the first officer and paymaster Charles Watkins Van Rensselaer “drunk as a lord” before boarding the ship.

On September 3, 1857 they left the port of Aspinwall for New York City. Of the 477 passengers and 101 crew, only 32 were women. A majority of the male passengers were miners returning back East with Gold Rush winnings from newly discovered lodes.

The layover in Havana was brief. Mail was delivered and some coveted Cuban cigars were purchased. The Caribbean jungle island was riddled with the deadly yellow fever disease so the passengers did not go ashore.

Second Officer James M. Frazer reported that the steamship was “stout, staunch and strong; Her cargo was well and sufficiently stowed and secured; she was well mastered, manned, tackled, victualed, appareled and appointed, and was in every respect fit for sea, and the voyage she was about to undertake.” At 4:15 p.m. on that lovely, late summer afternoon, Capt. William Lewis Herndon gave the order to cast off.

Orphaned as a youngster, Herndon entered the Navy at the age of fifteen. During the Mexican war he was captain of the Iris under Commodore Perry. As a lieutenant in the Navy, he led an expedition in South America that was later turned into a widely read book Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon.

Herndon rose to the rank of commander by 1855, but took a leave of absence to helm the Central America. This would be the ship’s 45th voyage from Panama to New York. The ship enjoyed fine weather and moderate breezes blowing fresh when they set sail and steam for New York City from Havana at 8am on September 7th. The sea was running high, with a light rain.

After crossing the Tropic of Cancer, the captain took her into the Gulf Stream, which he would follow most of the way to New York. The extra two-and-a-half-knot push lightened the work of the engines.

On Wednesday the ninth at 5:30 a.m., second mate Frazer wrote in the ship’s log that Cape Florida passed 75 nautical miles to the west. At noon he noted that there was a fresh breeze and head sea, and that since leaving Havana the Central America had traveled 286 nautical miles.

The Tempest

The first report came on Saturday September 12th, in The Wilmington Daily Journal, of a “pelting, pitiless storm” hitting the mainland. It charged in like a roaring lion. The tide rose to a very unusual height; the water courses, ponds, creeks, etc, were swollen. Overflows injured low-ground crops. Delicate Chinaberry, mulberry and willow trees went down along with telegraph lines. A number of the bathing and boat houses of the resident inhabitants, and several bridges were swept away. The railroad trains were obstructed south of Petersburg.

The tremendous gale weakened to a tropical storm not long after it made landfall and then returned eastward into the Atlantic. All became anxious thinking of those at sea. News outlets dreaded looking over their exchanges fearing intelligence of additional devastating catastrophes.

The damage to vessels on the well traveled shipping route along the coast was extensive.

Dilapidated boats came ashore, one after another. The steamship Columbia arrived at Charleston on Monday, September 14th, reporting that they encountered a very heavy gale of wind off Hatteras from E.N.E., on September 11th at 10 am, with a heavy sea from the southeast. By 10 pm, the storm accelerated into a full-fledged category 2 hurricane from E.S.E. Wind and sea increased until around 4:00 am, when there was an temporary lull as they passed through the eye of the storm. The awful sea wind then shifted to the northwest and blew much worse than ever, lasting for some 20 hours. Columbia’s paddle boxes were washed off. She lost a pair of fine horses during the hurricane and part of the deck load.

Days later journalists reported about the damage to the barks Colin McRae and John W Blodgett, and the schooners New Republic, Emily Ward and Abdel Kader, as well as the steamer Spray, which was beached near Orion and later towed.

The steamship Empire City, who initially sailed off alongside the Central America from Havana, ran short of coal, and was compelled to burn her furniture and her wheelhouses in order to get up steam to reach Norfolk. The steamship Norfolk was abandoned after having gone to pieces from the violence of the gale about 10 miles south of Chincoteague. The passengers and crew took to the lifeboats.

The non-arrival of the gold-filled steamship Central America from Aspinwall on her September 13th due date at New York’s Warren St. wharf excited considerable remarks from city newspapers. Wall Street, which was then dealing with widescale bank runs, reacted. Stocks declined by an additional 1 1/2 percent.

Some guessed that she was either disabled or ran out of coal. Mr. M.O. Roberts of the United States Mail Steamship Company dispatched the Daniel Webster to cruise in search of the Central America. Roberts believed that the steamer was blown toward the West India islands, and took refuge, perhaps, at the port of Nassau. He said that the Central America had on board an ample supply of coal provisions, with an unusually large supply of beef and pork.

On, Sep 18, 1857, the New York Tribune reported that the steamship Thomas Swann arrived at the port in Charleston with news that on the 15th, about 15 miles north of Cape Hatteras, the Norwegian bark Ellen had on board passengers of the steamship Central America. One of them stated that she foundered on the 12th off the Carolinas and all but 60 of her passengers (later recalculated) and the $1.6 million in gold on board, principally ensured in London, sank with the ship.

The Central America was the richest ship, passengers and cargo that was ever engulfed in the waves of the ocean, and the worst peacetime sea disaster of a U.S. flag vessel in history. It remains one of the worst natural disasters to affect the state of California in its storied history.

Go West Young Man

For many SS Central America passengers, the passage from Havana to New York would be the last leg of a long journey that began when news of the rich gold strike in California had first trickled east. Untold numbers of miners on board had been away for years, longing to meet their loved ones again.

On January 24, 1848, while in the process of building a water-powered sawmill for Swiss pioneer settler and colonizer John Sutter, a carpenter named James W. Marshall found flakes of gold in a streambed. “Boys,” he announced, brandishing a nugget to his fellow workers, “I believe I have found a gold mine!”

The Californian reported on the “considerable quantities of gold” found at Sutter’s sawmill on March 15th. New York newspapers spread the word by August, and President James K. Polk reported on the “extensive and valuable” discoveries in his State of the Union message to Congress on December 5, 1848. On the 12th of that month, the New York Herald reported about a monumental gold field 400 miles long and 150 miles wide with lumps found in the highlands from the size of an ordinary duck shot to the size of a man’s hand. The front-page story went on to give tips on the dangers and difficulties of crossing the Isthmus.

Marshall had pulled the starting trigger that set the world on a thoroughbred race to the California Territory and a 24-carat winner’s circle. The impact was dramatic if not overwhelming. In 1848 California’s non-Indian population was around 14,000. By the summer of 1849, the tiny seaside village of San Francisco, known two years earlier as Yerba Buena, exploded from a few hundred humble fishermen to a population of 30,000 bold dreamers and adventurers. The Gold Rush population soared to 90,000 by the end of 1849 and to 300,000 by the end of 1853. Mark Twain later famously described the NorCal invasion as, “A driving, vigorous restless population … an assemblage of two hundred thousand young men – not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves…” Among those numbers were more than a few wily speculators, some flim-flam claim jumpers, an insufficient supply of sex workers, and a few genuine visionary empire builders.

Aimée Crocker’s future uncle-in-law Bayard Taylor, a correspondent for Horace Greeley’s NY Tribune arrived in San Francisco on the Golden Age on August 28, 1849 to report on the frenzy. Taylor at 24 was already a folk hero and celebrated adventurer known for dispatches he wrote during his European Grand Walking Tour, which he later compiled into his best-seller Views A Foot or Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff.

During the next five months, Bayard visited the placer mines of the Tuolumne, Stanislaus and Mokalume Rivers, as well as Sacramento and the new city of San Francisco. He described the phenomenally rapid physical growth of SF and the great amalgamations, the kaleidoscopic interplay of peoples as diverse as Hawaiians, Chinese, Chileans, Sonorians, and Kansans. Taylor marveled at the juxtaposition of gambling dens and churches.

The journalist and travel writer wrote West Coast articles for his East Coast following, which he later compiled into another book–Eldorado: Adventures in the Path of Empire. 

Bayard assumed that the California Territory after the initial Gold Rush and before statehood would be wrought with anarchy and lawlessness throughout the mining districts. What he found, however, was that in spite of a complete absence of laws or available protection, (they had neither guards nor prisons) these miners respected an honor system that depended on the good humor and honest disposition of the population. The people were the peace keepers. They adopted rules for their mutual security by consensus. Alcaides, which were sort of fortress commanders, were elected, who decided on all disputes of rights or complaints of trespass, and who had power to summon juries for criminal trials. Taylor pontificated:

…in a district 500 miles long, and inhabited by 100,000 people, who have neither government, regular laws, rules, military or civil protection, or even locks or bolts, and a great part of whom possess wealth enough to tempt the vicious and depraved, there is as much security to life and property as in any part of the Union, and as small a proportion of crime. The capacity of a people for self-government was never so triumphantly illustrated. Never, perhaps, was there more to provoke license or a community formed of more unpropitious elements, yet from all this seeming chaos has grown a harmony beyond what the most sanguine apostle Progress could have expected.

A man could dig a hole in the dry ravines, and so long as he left a shovel, pick or crowbar to show that he intended on working it, he was safe from trespass. His tools could remain there for months without being disturbed, according to Taylor.

Bayard thought that California could become “the most democratic country in the world.” He was taken aback by this civility which was demonstrated by such a diverse, international population. He told his readers:

Abundance of gold does not beget, as moralists tell us, a grasping and avaricious spirit. The principles of hospitality are as faithfully observed in the rude tents of the diggers as they could be by the thrifty farmers of the North and West. The cosmopolitan cast of society here, resulting from the commingling of so many races and the primitive mode of life, gives a character of good fellowship to all its members; And in no part of the world have I ever seen help more freely given to the needy, or more ready cooperation in any humane proposition.

Immediately after statehood was granted in 1850 and American style rule of law was established and imposed, California passed the Foreign Miners’ Tax Act, assessing a monthly rent for access to prospect the land. Wild West lynch laws began to predominate in the Golden State and some Anglo-Americans, male and pale, did their best to push out foreigners and people of color in the rough ‘n’ tumble gold field camps along the Sierra Nevada riverbanks. Utopian idealism fell away among the Argonauts and new citizens. Stories surfaced of planters kidnapping and enslaving California Indians for under $100 per person. Slavery was illegal, but so was Indian testimony.

At any rate these cowboy entrepreneurs set out to make their strike, guns blazing, and go home a hero. A few did, but the vast majority weren’t so lucky. Optimism often turned to despair and treachery. Tales of wretchedness and depravity far outnumbered the stories of prosperity and virtue. The miners onboard the SS Central America were among the more valiant and hard-working gold diggers, who were going home to rejoin their families or marry their sweethearts, many carrying leather satchels full of seed money to start a more comfortable life back East.

Crocker and Mills

Following the initial California Gold Rush uproar, Charles Crocker, aka “Bull,” took the harrowing overland route with a small band of men, including two of his brothers, Henry and Clark, and a collection of picks and shovels. In 1845, he discovered an iron deposit in northern Indiana and established a forge. He thought he would have a leg up on his California competition. The journey took Crocker nearly six months. They arrived in Placerville in 1850, a few months before California became a state.

Crocker had no luck as a prospector. After six months he opened up a small hardware/dry goods store. There was, in the end, more money to be made by selling shovels to miners (some with more gold than sense) than by digging with them.

Insatiably ambitious and hard working, Bull Crocker soon leased a larger store on Negro Hill, Sacramento County, and expanded his inventory, selling high end household goods for California’s new citizens, and fashionable frivolities for the growing female population.

D.O. Mills, Adeline’s brother, came West in December of 1848, not to mine for gold but to mine the miners and help build an empire city on the West Coast. He first established an Eastern exchange general store, like Crocker, in Sacramento and then founded the Gold Bank of D.O. Mills and Co. He later bought up a vast quantity of timberlands, purchased a considerable interest in the principal quicksilver mines in California and subsequently engaged actively in the mining development of the Comstock load. Mr. Mills helped to organize the financial Gibraltar–the Bank of California–in San Francisco in 1864.

Before Crocker and the Big Four built their railroads and their vast fortunes, Meidas touch Mills, as he was known to some, was the richest man in California.

The discovery of gold in California’s American River coincided with the ascendancy of “Manifest Destiny” as a national doctrine of expansion and colonization. These combined forces launched one of the most impactful social movements in world history. It was the country’s first large scale media event. The old American dream, where honest work, integrity and ethical conduct would be duly rewarded, was infused forever with the fast track, strike-it-rich California dream. A literal pot of gold was possible for any man with grit, gumption and vision. Lack of pedigree, education, seniority, and virtue be damned.

With the American dream 2.0 came the birth of the self-made man archetype. Manhood had been rooted in community and family ties, land ownership, and artisanal skills. In the mid-1800s, a new type of man was needed to navigate a fast-paced, industrial, impersonal, and risky world. Self-reliant men with gusto. Rugged individualists. Independent. Persistent. The new aspiration in America was overnight success–rags-to-riches–through meritocratic bootstrapping. The chief figureheads held an uncompromising, often cut-throat dedication to status, profit and wealth. No men exemplified that persona/storyline better than the early California pioneers like Charles Crocker and Darius Mills. This collective of Gold Rush era entrepreneurs were but the first glorified get-rich-quick schemers and restless go-getters to hit the Wild West.

Just the Facts

A full picture of the take down of the formidable steamship Central America was pieced together after the survivors of this horrific shipwreck off the coast of Cape Hatteras were questioned. The ship’s engineer, the second mate, the quartermaster, several other crew members, the captains of several rescue ships, and passenger sea Capt. Thomas W. Badger were among those interviewed. As soon as they came ashore, all the survivors became instant curiosities and celebrities. Ansel Easton was interviewed by the press as was popular blackface minstrel performer Billy Birch (known for his great ability of physical comedy and mimicry and his political satire), poet Oliver Manlove and many others. After the interviews, a formal inquiry concerning one of the ship’s officers would take place.

Tuesday, 8 September, 1857, 4 1/4 pm — Leaving Havana on the morning of September 8th, the Central America moves easily with the Gulf Stream current at 12 knots, her two 24-foot paddle wheels driven by twin Morgan steam engines each sixty-five inches in diameter of cylinder. The steamer is a compromise, hybrid design built to retain sail capabilities while depending for primary power on her steam engines driving the paddle wheels. She is nearly the length of a football field–272 feet–with a 40-foot beam, and a 32-foot depth. The ship is primarily designed as a passenger carrier. Berths are available for 494 passengers and a crew of 52, most of whom are inexperienced messmen and cabin boys untrained at sea duty, who cater to the first-class passengers. The Central America carries sufficient coal for the entire round trip. There are on board of her six-life boats, two of which were Francis’ metallic boats, and four with patented air-tight tubes attached. Each one is capable of holding fifty passengers. There are also between five and six hundred life-preservers on board.

Poet Oliver Manlove later wrote of the send off, “The sky was bright overhead, while there was a slight ripple of the waves. But by the middle of the afternoon quite a breeze was blowing… we crowded the deck and looked out over the waves… the sun was shining brightly and dropping down in the West with magnificent splendor and when it reached the waves it was like a red fire upon them before it sank away, leaving a crimson flame above it in the sky.”

Wednesday, 9 September, 1857, 1 pm — Passengers awake to a cool morning, a reprieve from the heat of the previous day. In the afternoon the barometer drops, the wind picks up and the rain begins. Talk of a “regular September storm” are afloat among the passengers. The gale grows worse as the day goes on; the dashing and splashing of the waves against the sides of the ship, and the howling of the storm as the wind surges through the steamer’s rigging, causes many to lose their sea legs and become nauseous. Down below, at this time, none of this wind-chiming is heard over the crying of children and the moans of those suffering seasickness.

Despite the wobbly waves and the sinister skies, a second night of poker in the main cabin goes on as scheduled.

Thursday, 10 September, 1857, 4 am, 200 miles east of St. Augustine — The storm has worsened overnight. Ferocious whistling winds produces a heavy head sea and thirty-foot waves. Water has seeped into some of the staterooms via the portholes, compelling some guests to move out into the dining room. An uneasy groaning of the ship becomes unnerving. Capt. Herndon is bombarded with questions from anxious passengers, but he remains cool and collected. The evening games of cards and other pastimes for diversion and amusement are dispensed with. A stewardess asks Addie Easton if she needs anything, but she is too ill to even think of eating.

Friday, September 11, 1857, 10 am — The gale intensifies becoming a category two hurricane with 105 mph winds from the N.N.E. and some rain. The third officer spreads canvas, bolts, sails, etc., in the main and mizzen rigging, but to no purpose, as the ship is so high out of water that she will not head to the wind and sea. The chief engineer discovers that the ship, which is rolling heavily in the rough of the sea, has sprung a leak. The leeward bilge is taking on considerable water, and her boiler is threatening to go out. The pumps aren’t getting enough steam power, and they need more coal to keep pace. The ship’s list and the violence of the sea, make it impossible for the coal passers to use wheelbarrows, so the captain orders all available crew to use buckets and baskets to pass coal to the engine room. An additional bucket brigade line is formed out of the wait and kitchen staff to bail water from the steerage area.

Friday, September 11, 1857, 11 am — The engineer discovers a second leak around the shaft leading from the engine to the starboard paddle. By noon the water covers the coal bunker floors, both forward and aft, making it impossible for the men to work, the steam from the water putting out nearly all of the lamps. The captain directs the assistant engineer to get up steam in the “donkey” auxiliary boiler, which is done at once. At the same time a gang of passenger bailers is organized. Another gang goes to work breaking up steerage berths for fuel.

Addie later reported:

One glance at the appalled faces made us realize the imminent peril we were in…Not a sound was heard; no tears or hysterics. Despair seemed written on every face, and there was only the marvelous silence of a hushed and awe-stricken throng. The captain’s voice at the door added a thrill of horror, as he said: “All men prepare for bailing the ship. The engines have stopped, but we hope to reduce the water and start them again.  She’s a sturdy vessel and if we can keep up steam we shall weather the gale.

Friday, 11 September, 1857, 1 1/2 pm — Cabins on the starboard side of the third deck have taken in a lot of water, which has been seeping in through the portholes as waves crash into the steamer. Crewmen bust out the floorboards of some of these cabins to drain the water down to the hold.

Friday, 11 September, 1857, 3 pm — Water in the hold of the Central America rises so high that it douses the flames in the steam engine furnaces both on the starboard and the larboard (port) sides. Bulk boards and other scrap wood from steerage are used to fuel the starboard boiler and it gets up steam. Water around the furnaces are superheated, burning crewmen in the vicinity, while steam fills the hold. The gas lanterns are splashed and extinguish themselves. The water again rises so high as to put out all the fires.

Two gangs are set to bailing water in the dark, hot belly of the steamship, in the lower cabin, and in the forward steerage. Pork barrels and milk cans are rigged into hoisting buckets, by which 400 gallons of water per minute are thrown out of the ship. The Worthington pumps, which had previously worked by steam from the main boilers, are worked by the donkey boiler.

Friday, 11 September, 1857, 5 pm — Second mate James Frazer cuts loose the starboard bow anchor, which weighs about 2 ½ tons, to lighten the ship’s head. He then rigs two whips between decks, to hoist water as high as the upper steerage and then discharge it through the scuppers of that deck. At this time the freight room is about one-half or two-thirds full of water.

Friday, 11 September, 1857, 6 pm — The SS Central America is at the mercy of a terrible hurricane. Her sails are shredded and her paddle wheels are still. The captain fears she will capsize. She is listing heavily to the starboard, so much so that her masts are lancing the incoming waves. Walking the main deck is a challenge. To make her less top heavy the second mate, boatswain, and Capt. Badger chop down the foremast. Going over, the rigging catches foul of the cat head, which causes it to shoot under the ship’s bottom, undoubtedly worsening the leak.

There is no talk of lightening the load of the ship by dumping the 3 tons of gold in the freight room. Some modern analysis puts that number at 10-15 tons.

The lee bilge pump heaves water all night. The weather pump heaves water until the chamber bursts just below the discharge pipe.

Friday, 11 September, 1857, 7 pm — The hurricane howls and roars, as if hungry for its prey. All hands work with energy to bail out the water, and gain upon it so much that the fires are rekindled. Addie learns that the water has been lowered and the engines have been started and is filled with joy. But this is only a momentary triumph. The water rushes in with renewed force, and the fires are again drenched.

Addie Easton later confessed, “Sitting close to my beloved, we committed ourselves calmly, quietly into His care, whose voice even the winds and sea obey. We spoke lovingly of our dear ones, and decided that when the last moment came we should go down together hand in hand.”

Ansel then interjected, “But until all hope is passed, we must work,” and after kissing his bride he returns to the men who are so strenuously trying to lower the water.

Friday, 11 September, 1857, 11 pm — Addie remembers that she has hampers of wine and biscuits in the state room, and passes them out to the men all night at intervals. According to passenger Joseph Bassford, “The liberal bestowal of the wine, and the spirit which prompted its donation, won the admiration of all. Not only was increased vigor given to the men, but it roused them to work still bravely on. Among the men they eagerly took the crackers and wine, only stopping long enough to eat them and then go on with the work of bailing.” She is declared the ship’s “angel of mercy.”

Meanwhile Chief Engineer George Ashby scours the ship pulling men out of their staterooms threatening to throw any man overboard who skulks from the labor of bailing the ship. The lives of all depend on the exertion of each. He is not especially gentle or refined in his use of terms.

Saturday, 12 September, 1857, 9 am — At daybreak the storm lulls a little, the clouds break away, and the sky lightens. Hope is renewed and all work like giants. The captain orders the flag hoisted “Union down,” that every vessel as she hove in sight might know that they were in distress. Many of the women and older children gather in the first-class dining salon. They offer to help bail water but are refused. During this time the men lower barrels by pulleys to assist in bailing the water. Despite the storm subsiding, the damage is already done, and they can’t stay ahead of the rising water. The ship is waterlogged. There is between 9 and 10 feet of water in the engine room. They are only buying themselves time and they know it. The Central America is in a frequently used shipping lane, and the hope now is to keep the steamer afloat until the passengers can be rescued.

Saturday, 12 September, 1857, 2 pm— Capt. Burt and the crippled twin-masted brig Marine cross paths with the SS Central America 150 miles off the coast of South Carolina, while traveling northbound from Cardena, Cuba to the Port of New York hauling molasses, tar and sugar. Burt responds to Herndon’s distress signal and declares that he can take on passengers. Both ships must fight hard to stay near each other, as the storm once again intensifies. The passengers realize that the morning’s calm was only the eye of the storm.

Capt. Burt of the Marine later tells the press that they were so close at one point that a biscuit might almost have been tossed from one vessel to the other, and close enough to have received one of her hawser lines from a small boat; but to his dismay, no hawser was in readiness, and in a minute more he was drifting rapidly away. The Central America was provided with several noble hawsers, strong enough to have held the vessels together. Burt was confident that he could have saved every soul.

Saturday, 12 September, 1857, 3 1/4 pm— Capt. Herndon orders women and children only to board the lifeboats and be transported to the Marine which is one mile away and struggling to remain that close. Though nearly every man is armed with a pistol to protect his gold-filled money belt, there is no clamoring, no battle to get onboard one of the five lifeboats. Initially, there are six boats. One snaps off it’s moorings and is smashed to bits Friday evening. Two more are destroyed while being lowered to the rough seas.

Capt. Herndon has to decide who of this crew should be selected to man his boats. Would they desert him when they got off from the ship and not return for more passengers? One of his choices is a sailor who says simply and modestly, “I have hands that are hard to row, and a heart that’s soft to feel.” Finally, after dozens of harrowing descents of petrified passengers, the three remaining lifeboats shove off.

Addie leaves on the third boat. Ansel decries, “Hurry dear! We shall all be saved, but the women and children are to be taken off first.” She trembles at the thought of leaving him on the sinking ship, but soon regaines her courage.

Mrs. Easton later wrote about this moment of Truth, “Life had never seemed so attractive or dear to either of us, yet the wonderful truth, which has so often been told of absolute calmness in the moment of death, became a reality to us.”

Adeline’s grabs miniatures of her mother and her brother James from her trunk, and a shawl, then puts on a life preserver.

A rope is lowered and Addie is dropped into the bottom of the lifeboat. In this treacherous moment, while in great danger of swamping or being dashed to pieces, a touch of the ridiculous occurs–the contents of one of the barrels used for bailing comes down on Addie’s head, completely drenching her.

Ansel throws down a coat to put around his young bride’s shoulders, which contains $900 and some important papers rolled into a bundle.

Meanwhile as bailing continues post-haste, Herndon orders shipmates to cut away the hurricane deck and tear down doors from various parts of the ship, and bring them on deck to furnish rafts for the passengers.

Saturday, 12 September, 1857, 4 pm — On the heels of the Marine engagement, Capt. Stone, of the schooner El Dorado, on seeing signals of distress, rounds quickly to under the lee of the steamer, upon her quarter, within twenty yards of her–swimming distance. Again a hawser is not utilized. The El Dorado has trouble maintaining position, much as the Marine did. They offer assistance. Capt. Herndon asks them to lay by him until morning, as he is in a sinking position, which he could easily see from the ships being so low in the water, the wheel guards being considerably under, and to send a boat, as he had none left. Stone agrees to stand by and asks Herndon to set his lights, but the small schooner is quickly blown further and further away, then out of sight.

Saturday, 12 September, 1857, 6 pm — All of the women and children have been moved off the ship. The crew of the three lifeboats takes two trips to the Marine which had drifted five miles from the steamer. Boatswain John Black later states that in these two trips, the boats commanded by Finley Frazer and David Raymond became so damaged as to be rendered useless, the one having been stove alongside the brig Marine, and the other sprung a leak.

In total 32 women, 27 children and 41 men (six men from first class, two from second, 13 from steerage, and 20 crewmen) make it onboard the Marine.

Saturday, 12 September, 1857, 7 pm — Nightfall is setting in, and Herndon directs Frasier, the second officer, to take charge of the arm chest and send up a rocket every half hour. The first wave breaks over the upper deck. All hope is abandoned. There is now a scramble to secure life preservers and prepare for the final struggle.

Saturday, 12 September, 1857, 7 1/2 pm — The lifeboat commanded by John Black returns a third time much damaged, and requires a man to be constantly bailing. When he gets within hailing distance of the Central America, he ascertains that his boat is so damaged that she could not safely take another person on board. Capt. Herndon shouts from the steamer to stay away. If the lifeboat were to come alongside, she would be engulfed and pulled down with the sinking ship.

Saturday, 12 September, 1857, 7 3/4 pm — Every wave that hits the SS Central America rolls over her deck now, washing some of the nearly 500 men overboard. Capt. Herdon and Officers Van Rensselaer and Frazer have donned their dress uniforms. Herndon has taken to the pilot house, Frazer to the larboard wheelhouse. The ship is going down and Ansel Easton has secured neither a life preserver nor even a plank to float upon. In the nick of time he is given a high quality cork life preserver from his friend Robert Brown. He throws his coat over his shoulder, buttoning it at the neck. The captain turns to him and says, “Give me your cigar, Easton, for this last rocket.” As Ansel takes his cigar from his mouth and hands it to the captain, a huge wave slams into the ship, jarring every timber still in place.

Saturday, 12 September, 1857. 8 pm, latitude 31° 40′, longitude 75° 50′ — The stern of the SS Central America sinks below the waves. Men leap or are swept overboard. Others run to the rising bow of the steamship and away from the raging sea. She goes down stern foremost on a 45° angle, after giving three lurches. The ship sinks in a swift violent descent almost with the speed of an arrow, as if caught in an unfathomable centrifugal vortex. Everything near her is drawn down in her mighty wake. Some men sucked into the whirlpool bob back to the surface. Many do not.

The Struggle

Down, slowly, very slowly down, I went, till I was in the depths of the deep, and the pressure of the water on my ears and nose was excruciatingly painful. I think I fainted in consequence… Oh! it was heart rending to hear that shriek which rose from the belly of the waves as 500 men rose from the depths and found themselves floating on the surface of the ocean, in the night, miles and miles from land. They rose, thick as a shoal of fish, striking each other, and being struck by the fragments of the wreck which had submerged with the ship. What death grapples for pieces of the wreck! One of the last sites I saw was the gleam of a knife as a burly fellow cut the hands of a fellow passenger from a spar in order to keep it [for] himself. I needed all of my strength… to protect myself from drowning men.

Harper’s Weekly wrote this striking first person narrative of one man’s battle against a hurricane and the other miners as the steamer and her precious freight sank to the ocean floor.

Many who imagined they had securely fastened their life preservers about them, found after having been sucked down by the eddy created by the sinking ship, their own cries mingling into one inarticulate wail, that not only their life preservers, but their clothes were torn from them. Without some support, there was no living in that treacherous sea. The ablest swimmer couldn’t have breasted those waves longer than a minute.

It was by all accounts a mad free-for-all as the miners arose to the surface grasping whatever they could get a hold of to buoy themselves on the sea. Those who could not swim flailed and flung and tussled about after those who could. Though a large quantity of material was floating around, there was a good deal of desperate struggling and fighting to appropriate articles promising the most security.

Capt. Thomas W. Badger, master of the sailing ship Jane A. Falkinberg of San Francisco, who lost a carpetbag holding $17,500 in gold coins, who had a pair of tin life buoys and floated on a board 6 inches wide, had to shake off several men clawing at him, imploring him to save their lives.

W.F. Fletcher’s door that he secured to float on was seized by three desperate Irish marauders.

Adolph Friedrich claimed the life preserver he found to keep him afloat on the dark sea was cut from his back by an acquaintance, leaving him to swim unaided. When he spied the yard-arm of the ship with about 25 men already clinging to it, he swam to join them. He was met by a chorus of voices yelling, “Push him off!” Adolph was allowed to climb up only after firmly grabbing the nearest man by his clothes and convincing the others that he would take them down with him. Friedrich later jettisoned his own clothes and the four leather bags of gold, each weighing twenty pounds and swam to the wheelhouse of the ship floating nearby with only three men on it.

A Mr. Colwell’s fight began 20 or 30 feet underwater as the vessel went down when a man struggling for life clasped around both of his legs. With the exertion of all of his strength he freed himself from his unfortunate companion who sank to a watery grave. He came up in the middle of a group of men several of whom tore from his body his life preserver and his shirt. He finally succeeded in freeing himself from them and swam away in search of something to float on.

Ansel Easton was pulled down when the steamer made her final plunge. Having on a cork life-preserver, he arose disoriented to the surface fairly quickly. At the same instant that he popped up gasping for air, he was seized by the chief mate and paymaster of the steamer Charles Watkins Van Rensselaer. This man was unprovided with a life preserver and latched onto Pony, the drowning man next to him. Charles was a scion of the Van Rensselaer patroons – lords of the manor of Rensselaerwyck, the 700,000 acre land holding in the Hudson River Valley. Great-great-grandfather Hendrick Van Rensselaer, built the family mansion, Crailo. The strapping 34-year-old Charles was born with both the bluest of blue blood and a predilection for a seafaring life.

Under dark skies, a death grapple ensued between Charles and Ansel on the angry, phosphoric waves. In this old money-new money life preserving showdown, the nimble and quick-thinking Pony managed to squirm out of the jacket that Van Rensselaer was grabbing desperately, and keep the life preserver underneath. In a gurgle Charles sank to rise no more.

After 20 minutes the ocean was filled with a school of 300 uncoffined bodies.

The miners were holding thousands of dollars each on the ship, an estimated 250K (9.2 million) total, the product of years of arduous and persevering labor in the hardest of fields of California. Their riches would keep them financially afloat but might prove a distinct liability in those turbulent waters. A few hours earlier they would not have shrunk from spilling blood to defend their spoils. Patent locks, revolvers, and extra prudence had all been called into play to transport their gold thus far safely. It was a “your money or your life” scenario. Most tossed their money belts not wanting to be weighed down. More than a few fellows sank with rolls of gold round their waist, (some of it stolen). Others spent their final hours inebriated with gold on their person and cards in their hands.

The 200 lb. Colwell sustained himself and 20 lbs. of gold dust and coin belted around him with the aid of a board nine inches wide and three feet long.

When the remaining men finished battling for flotsam to float on the real horror began. What was previously a man to man physical struggle (by exhausted miners and mariners who had been bailing for 20+ hours) became also an existential/emotional/spiritual wrestling match. The awful torment of the ocean; the terrific force of waves; the blackness of the furious clouds; the sweeping, almost omnipotent course of winds, the utter helplessness produced profound dread. For a few it was the wish to live in order to enjoy the treasure which was stowed away on their person that kept them afloat. Thoughts of family and friends naturally kept some going. Some who had lost everything, wanted to begin life anew, and make their fortune over again. Minstrel player Billy Birch was unreasonably cool as a cucumber. To keep up the spirits of the drowning men, he mimicked sea monsters, and told humorous stories, in his own peculiar way.

A species of fatalism consoled some. If their time was come it was come. They saw their exhausted comrades in misfortune drift off peacefully with scarcely a pang. They simply went to sleep in the water. One man acknowledged that he thought of precipitating his end by plunging into the sea many times and didn’t really know why he repelled it. The men, in their darkest hour, in the dark Atlantic, mid-ocean, turned to some great sympathetic power, either for rescue, or for convoy and guidance beyond the gates of death.

Ansel Easton came up alongside a deacon, as they were all paddling away, who said, “Oh, Mr.  Easton, this is a terrible moment! You have led a worldly life. Do you feel prepared for the great change which is about to overtake us! Shall I offer up a prayer?” Ansel later told the press, “Now, if the fact must be known, I was at that very time doing my own praying, and didn’t want anybody to hold my proxy. I spied a man a little way off holding on to something, and as the deacon was discouraging, I thought I would swim away from him. It turned out to be Billy Birch, and, as I came up to him, he sang out: ‘Hello, Pony! Is that you? Terrible wet weather ain’t it?’”

As the hours passed, it became hard to keep spirits positive. Fear of sharks certainly began to set in. Poet Oliver Manlove gave his rendition of the terror:

An occasional flash of lightning showed to each other a sea of struggling forms, and all cheered and encouraged each other. At first we were all in a mass together, appearing at a glance like a crowd of cattle swimming, but soon the waves separated us and at each succeeding flash of lightning we discovered that we were being separated and scattered over a wider area, until we soon found ourselves apparently alone on the ocean.

It was a dreary and desolate night, the waves dashing over us and the sea running with great fury, the sharp wind chilling the blood in our veins. After being an hour in the water I saw none of my fellow sufferers. Three fourths had doubtless sunk from exhaustion, and the balance were drifting over the ocean, hoping against hope for relief.

The New York Times reported the story of a man, floating in solitude and terrified at his loneliness, after shouting himself hoarse to find a companion, saw in the distance a man with two life preservers fastened around his body drifting toward him. His heart leapt with joy at the welcome sight, for the feeling of desolation which had overcome him was excruciating to endure. He called to the other man to join him, if possible, and made every exertion to meet him halfway. There was no reply, but the other drifted nearer and nearer. A wave threw them together. The lonely man shrieked into the face of a corpse, drowned by the dash of the billows, or perished from exhaustion.

The Brig Marine

Lifeboats started to come in with some of the men on board. Ansel was not one of them. Addie recalled in her memoirs:

The old captain welcomed us with cheering words, though he afterwards told me he feared we’d left one sinking ship for another. My only thought was for my husband, and I could not be prevailed upon to go down to the cabin, but waited on deck, to watch for the boats which had returned to the sinking ship. Soon one came near enough to see the people who were in her. Surely he would be there, but no. However, close behind came another boat, and hope was centered on her. Alas, another disappointment, and then with anxious heart and a choking fear I saw a third boat come close to the ship and in it was not the one I’d longed to see.

Chief Engineer George Ashby was pulled on board of the Marine, who then asked for the use of the brig’s lifeboat. The engineer was informed that it was in a condition unfit for use, and would not live five minutes in the turbulent waters. Ashby then called on the seamen who had come from the ship to man one of Central America’s lifeboats with him and return to the passengers. This they positively refused to do, declaring that the ship would go down before they could get to her. The sinking steamship was now five miles away.

Capt. Burt gave Adeline a note from her husband brought by someone in the last boat. It read: “My dear wife–If the captain of the Marine will send the boat forward for me you can give him what he will ask. I will watch for it and be on hand. Your aff(ectionate) husband, A.I.E.”

“Ohh Captain, do send one more boat back!” she begged him.

“My dear Mrs. Easton, I wish I could, but in such a sea as this and in the darkness above I could not make the trip,” he replied sympathetically.

“But Captain, Captain they may all die before morning. Anything. Ten thousand dollars if you will send another boat,” said Addie, her heart sinking more rapidly than the steamer.

“My dear, dear lady, if I could send it, one should go without a cent of money, but a boat such as we have would not live a moment,” was his solemn answer.

“Suddenly a rocket shot out obliquely, the lights disappeared beneath the waves, and all the world grew dark for me,” wrote Addie Easton in her memoirs. Fourteen of the women on board the Central America who had husbands watched in horror as the ship sunk.

Addie’s bed for six long, weary nights on board the Marine was a hatchway covered with a heavy piece of canvas. All on board the brig were served rations three times a day consisting of Indian gruel, baked and stewed beans, and hard bread. On the third day out they met a schooner, Euphrasia, bound for New Orleans, which was hailed. They asked for provisions and water. The captain came aboard and looked at the survivors, disheveled, sunburned, blistered, and said with tears in his eyes, “Heaven knows I’m sorry for you. You can have anything I have.” He supplied them with bread, meat, chicken and water as well as some brandy, which in their wet and exhausted state was very refreshing.

During the voyage to shore, one of the women died, a stewardess named Louise, which further intensified the grieving among the distraught, traumatized passengers.

The only sounds of cheerfulness on the bedraggled, crowded vessel came from a canary saved from the stateroom of Virginia Birch, wife of the minstrel performer, who placed her pet bird in her bosom before she was lowered onto one of the three lifeboats.

The Bark Ellen

Around 1 am on Sunday the 13th, the crew of the Norwegian bark Ellen, on course for Falmouth, England carrying a load of mahogany from Belize, were startled by haunting voices in apparent agonizing peril shrieking in the middle of the ocean. Capt. Anders Johnsen and his crew sailed right into the middle of the debris field of the shipwrecked Central America. They immediately set about the work of rescuing the floating men, and in a few minutes succeeded in dropping their lifeboats and getting four survivors on board, not one of whom could speak, being perfectly senseless from exhaustion.

Ansel Easton was spotted by Capt. Johnsen in the water and then lost site of. A shipmate soon came across him again. The captain threw him a buoy, which he clutched tightly, and they then drew him on board.

Of the steamship crew, second officer James M. Frazer; Henry Keefer, second assistant engineer; brothers John James and Bartholomew McCarthy from the fire-room; Aaron Holcom, the saloon cook; Henry Harden, the ship cook; and seaman Tim McKugh were all rescued by the Ellen. When Randolph William Casey and his twin brother Jacob were reunited on board the bark all men conscious and upright jumped for joy.

Easton’s friend Robert Brown and Mexican-American War veteran John Dement were seen floating leeward lying on two doors bound together with a handkerchief under the bowsprit at 3:00 in the morning, but immediately afterwards unaccountably disappeared. Ansel implored Capt. Johnsen to continue to make additional passes to find his friend. At 9:00 am on the final tack of that area where they were first spotted, Ansel, crying out eagerly from the deck, saw Brown and Dement.

They were the last survivors to board the Ellen–49 forty-niners in total were scooped out of the raging waters.

Harper’s Weekly wrote about the rescue of one of the miners, “How I got on board I hardly know. That I was saved; that I lay down on board the deck of our preserver and cried like a child for an hour or more; that I was most generously and humanely treated; and that a lifetime of devotion would be but an adequate return for the obligation I incurred, I am here to testify.”

Norfolk

The Ellen arrived at Norfolk on Thursday, the 17th of September. Capt. Burt determined the only way the Marine would be able to make it into Norfolk Harbor was to be towed. They found help at Cape Henry near the entrance to Chesapeake Bay in the form of Capt. Greene and the propeller-driven steamship, City of Norfolk, who extorted Burt and the passengers out of $500 for his services.

The faces of the man, women and children were brown and red from long exposure to a burning sun. Their skin had peeled off in various places all over their necks and heads. Some, particularly the children, suffered from blaring blisters, aggravated by contact with the salt water.

Upon her arrival a Capt. McGowan from the SS Empire City sang out the news to the docked Marine, “Tell Mrs. Easton, her husband is waiting her arrival in Norfolk!” Addie perked; her heart skipped a beat and then began to race; she sighed briefly in disbelief and then darted to the railing to find the man who gave the startling announcement.

She later recounted:

As the captain came aboard he took me by the hand and we both felt too deeply to speak for some minutes. Then he said, ‘let us sit down here, for I must tell you all about it. He is safe and hale and hardy as ever, only very anxious about you.’ I scarcely knew what I did for a few moments. A number of ladies threw their arms around me and kissed me while the captain and other gentlemen, and even the rough sailors, shook me heartily by the hand, and congratulated me to the safety of my dear husband.

When she reached the hotel where Ansel was staying in town, Addie looked quickly from face to face, expecting to see him, but he was not among those there to greet the survivors. He had discovered that the Marine was at quarantine, and in his impatience to find Addie, he immediately had left the hotel with Capt. Johnsen, and in a small boat the two men rode out to the brig, unwittingly gliding by Addie in the dark.

Another hour passed before Ansel returned to the hotel, and there he found his bride of four weeks in the immense parlor, still wearing the night dress and wrapper she had worn when she was lowered into a lifeboat six days earlier. Surrounded by the other women survivors, the hotel proprietor, numerous maids ministering to their needs, and by townsfolk aghast at the stories the wrecked women had to tell, Ansel and Addie held each other in a long embrace unable to articulate anything, struggling to process the omnipotence of the disaster, the miracle of meeting again face to face, the ecstasy, the perplexing eternal gratitude that would be forever chained to a purgatorial dungeon at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Uproar

The Easton honeymoon reunion was about the only celebrated positive narrative to come out of the deadly shipwreck. Hundreds of family circles, in all parts of the land, were suddenly bereaved and desolated. The electric spark that carried the dreadful tidings sunk the entire world into simultaneous sorrow; all were shocked by the sheer magnitude of the disaster. Every face was darkened. The deadly storm that took down the Central America represented nature in its wildest and most ruleless disarray and devastation, a malignant force of great sublimity that the human senses and imagination lacked the capacity to comprehend. All that were touched by it, all that caught wind of it, looked to others for help in deriving morals and meaning.

Not one of these catastrophes ever take place without some traits of heroism and self-sacrifice being exposed, but not one of them ever takes place without placing human folly and disgrace in an unhappily strong light. A scapegoat is inevitably selected by the newspapers as the villain, upon whom a sympathizing chorus may heap curses in the pauses of their sobbing.

Out of the gate, the public’s number one enemy became Chief Engineer George Ashby. The most damaging report against him came from testimony given to The New York Times by Capt. Thomas Badger, a passenger, who began monitoring the engine-room early on Friday morning when he noticed the engines moving very slowly. At around 1:30, after two or three heavy lurches of the ship, they stopped altogether. Badger then looked down into the lee bilge, but saw no water, nor could he see any in the engine-room. As soon as the engines stopped the ship fell off into the trough of the sea and began to labor very badly. While the men were getting buckets and preparing to pass the coal, Capt. Badger went down into the fireroom, and there saw that there was considerable water in the lee bilge.

Other passengers corroborated the testimony of Capt. Badger. The direct cause of the stoppage of the engines as well as all the pumps attached to the engines was the neglect of the fire and engine department in getting coal along from the bunkers to the fire-room fast enough to keep up a sufficient and continuous head of steam. The leaks which caused her to fill were the effect, not the cause, of the stoppage of the machinery.

Ashby claimed that the ship sprang a leak before the engines were stopped. By his account, when the hurricane became more furious, the ship laid down on one side, causing her engines to labor heavily from the total immersion of one paddle wheel, and increasing the difficulty of passing the coal and firing. This angle caused the ship to strain heavily at the turn of her bilge, either working the oakum out of her seams or working the timbers apart, causing extraordinary leakage. Water in the engine room splashed against the hot boilers, leaving firemen standing waist deep in scalding water. One by one, the boiler fires were extinguished by the steam and vapor.

Survivor Dr. C. Harvey, of Placerville, testified that he had it on excellent authority that Ashby was never authorized to leave the vessel by the captain for any purpose whatever. As the final lifeboat pushed off and George jumped in, according to one report, a general murmur arose and a cry was heard, “Shoot him!” Adeline claimed that Ashby was the only officer on the Marine who had deserted the ship and felt that his negligence in allowing the engines to die down had caused the great disaster. She reported that when he attempted to enter the boat to be taken to the Empire City, Capt. McGowan refused him. He instead took a train with Capt. Johnsen of the Ellen who claimed that people along the route, and particularly in Philadelphia, protested at the depots and stations, some proposing to lynch him on the spot.

When the SS Central America ceased to be a topic of public conversation and became a theme for editorial comment, some called into question not only the actions of the chief engineer, but the captain and the steamship company. While natural causes were at the bottom of the deadly downfall of the steamer, it became clear that several human errors placed the odds against the steamer ever making it to shore. While little schooners and brigs could outride the storm, one of the largest steamers inexplicably went down.

The Central America was judged to be ill equipped–the crew was too skeleton, the pumps woefully inefficient. A carpenter could not be found when he was wanted, as well as suitable carpenter’s tools. The discipline on board the ships of this line was slow and loose, each department appearing to be independent of the others, instead of being strictly subordinate and responsible to the captain. This independency of action was all the more observable in the department of the engineer. There was “an antagonism of the most fatal character” between the captain and the chief engineer according to one report.

Capt. Herndon was, according to some, a good and brave man with amiable qualities, who always acted according to his best judgment. But his character was wholly unqualified to handle such an unmitigated disaster, and he was handicapped further by the criminal, heartless stinginess of the steamship owners. The issue of the hawsers not being utilized came to light. The fact that two of the lifeboats were stove almost immediately on being lowered into the water was questioned, as was the use of tin life preservers which were rendered useless by the least dent.

The El Dorado also became a target of critics. Capt. Stone acknowledged that he saw the rockets and the ship when she sunk. Had he shook out his reefs and made all sail, which he could easily do, there being little wind at the time, he could probably have rescued many of those lost from their watery grave.

A Harper’s Weekly editorial “Unpunished Murderers” wrote, “It is monstrously palpable that some individual or individuals are directly and immediately responsible for that awful catastrophe. It was not the act of God; it was the guilty act of Man.” The storm was not so violent as to wreck a seaworthy vessel, duly manned and properly handled. There was fault and mismanagement somewhere. Either the ship was unseaworthy or the engineer grossly incompetent. They wanted the United States District Attorney to issue indictments, “We presume that, in the event of the ship’s unseaworthiness being established, an indictment for manslaughter would lie against the officers; and, in the event of faulty conduct being proved against the engineer, that a like recourse might be taken against him.” They were outraged that a vigilant police department and a careful government, would allow innocent people to set foot on such an unseaworthy vessel, and that President Buchanan was conspicuously silent on the matter.

A New York Times editorial demanded citizens get beyond the mere rudiments of mourning writing, “Christianity and civilization should teach us not simply to lament the lost but save the living.”

Instead of a federal investigation, John M. Weeks and Henry B. Renwick of the U.S. Board of Local Inspectors, Port of NY, gave a briefing after their probe–All the licensed officers did their duty, and, no blame, therefore, could be imputed to the chief engineer. Case closed.

News of the disaster didn’t hit California for another month. After this second West Coast wave of grief and anger, much more intense than the East Coast outrage, meetings were held and proclamations were issued. They attributed the loss of the Central America to the negligence and indifference of the steamship company. They declared:

It behooves the people of this state to demand of Congress an immediate settlement of the Pacific railroad question, and that this great national work be prosecuted without delay. That in the meantime another steamship company, the stock of which should be owned in this state, is absolutely necessary. That it is necessary to adopt, and faithfully carry out, some practical plan to ensure a greater degree of safety, comfort and speed in all the seagoing steamships navigating the Atlantic and Pacific oceans…

Panic on the Streets

The 1850s had been a time of great economic growth. New banks popped up throughout the country, which increased banknote circulation; railroad mileage and capital tripled from 1850-57; textile and cotton mills, foundries and factories greatly increased production. An astounding amount of gold was pulled from the ground in California and into the U.S. economy: $10 million in 1849 ($410 million in 2025 dollars), $41 million in 1850, $75 million in 1851, and $81 million in 1852. After that, the take gradually declined until 1857, when it leveled off to about $45 million per year (1.85 billion today).

The bubble finally burst in 1857, thanks in part to the sinking of the SS Central America.

Four days after the Eastons married, a cashier embezzled funds at the New York division of an Ohio Investment house and it went under. The magnitude and importance of the operations of this institution throughout the country, amounting to millions of dollars, and involving many individuals and corporations, rendered its suspension a fearful disaster. The announcement fell like a bomb in the money circles. Within five days a Boston paper reported the failure of five banks in New England and one in Virginia. Days later more country banks in New England, upstate New York, Missouri, and Nebraska Territory suspended payment on their banknotes.

The U.S. Treasury was still years away from issuing paper money. If a bank or other financial institution issuing a banknote went under, the banknote became worthless. To many they were nothing but I.O.U.’s, fictitious money made out of a piece of paper. Only hard “specie” (gold and silver), the true instrument of trade and the only medium of commerce, held real transferable value. Confidence in the banks in the East was shaken and the negotiation of new loans, even on the best securities, became nearly impossible on any terms.

Banks, fearing a run on their gold reserves, started calling in loans from commercial firms and brokers, leading to asset sales at fire-sale prices and bankruptcies. After a couple of weeks there were some indications of approaching improvements. But the announcement of the loss of the Central America, with the semi-monthly remittance of treasure from California happening at the moment when the usual receipts of gold from that quarter were most anxiously awaited, greatly aggravated the financial panic that had just begun to shake and shatter the foundations of the business world.

Soon after the shipwreck announcement it wasn’t just provincial country banks effected. By September 26th, banks in Philadelphia suspended convertibility. They would not allow gold to be withdrawn from their vaults though all other banking services continued. Two days later all banks in Baltimore suspended specie payments. New York banks held on until October 13th, when a large run that day caused all but one bank to suspend. Suspension then swept the nation as part of a defensive strategy, supported by local business interests, to prevent the panic from spreading.

“Everywhere in the Atlantic States, the distress is all-pervading,” wrote The National Era on October 15th, “The currency is disordered, money has disappeared, the best houses suspend, business is paralyzed, laborers are losing employment, the panic is universal…The bubble has burst. Paper expansion has done its work–fortunes are ruined, or change hands–the currency is in chaos–no man knows what he is worth–universal panic and want of confidence prevail.”

Wall Street became a sinking ship. The oldest, heaviest, richest, and firmest moneyed institutions, corporations, companies and firms, which were considered equal to any pressure that might be brought to bear against them, were daily chronicled as having “gone to the wall.” The financial havoc created by the sudden and violent panic swept the whole country like a hurricane.

The panic triggered an economic depression, or “revulsion,” that lasted for at least eighteen months, reverberating until the beginning of the Civil War. The South was less affected by the depression, which for some was evidence that their economic policies, including the use of slave labor, were better than those used in the North.

Men of God

These combined disasters on land and at sea, interrelated as they were, brought some to the conclusion that what America was experiencing was a visitation of Providence. Clearly there was an epic “wrath of God” showdown dominating the culture.

Clergymen, like novelists, knew that there has always been widespread fascination with the perils of the sea. A calamity like a shipwreck touches society on the nerve. Sea-deliverance narratives that focused on God’s purpose in allowing tragic shipwrecks to happen and His unfathomable providence in allowing some people to survive them, have been themes for both fiction and sermon writers since Shakespeare.

The public was awestruck, grasping to comprehend the magnitude of this wondrous, horrifying, overpowering event. Their normal faculties of sensibility and imagination were shortsighted and inadequate. They eagerly needed something resembling sound rhyme and reason to kick in. While the nation grieved, experts studied the data, and vigilante committees formed, preachers offered up the “avenging God” character ruling with a rod of iron, condemning unrighteous sinners. The shipwreck, the Great Panic of 1857 and the sunken treasure awakened solemn feelings in some who were strangers to penitence and prayer. They found refuge in church and answers from God’s earthbound representatives.

Protestant preachers spoke to their congregations stressing the transient and fragile nature of human life, emphasizing moral dangers and the necessity of faith. The shock made people more receptive to the call for conversion. “Death is waiting somewhere in ambush for our approach,” according to these fundamentalists. A man’s worst fate would be to look into an open grave, death yawning before him, and yet to know and feel he is an unrepentant sinner and therefore unforgiven. Yonkers pastor D. M. Seward, speaking of the sinking of an earlier shipwreck, urged his congregation: “Repent, repent. You, too, must die. You may die in an unexpected hour, and if you die without repentance your doom of darkness is inevitable. Repent! is the message of every calamity to the living.”

Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims pastor Henry Ward Beecher was the most famous preacher, perhaps the most famous man in America in the 19th century. He wrote a lengthy diatribe about the losses of ships, chiefly new and first class vessels, after the foundering of the glorious Arctic in 1854. He linked sunken ships to God’s judgments over the unparalleled and unblushing wickedness and worldliness in the cities.

God was striking thundering strokes at the unbridled greediness and materialism among the ruling class, and the “monstrous and infidel legislation that favored the interest of moneyed circles.” Beecher, an early abolitionist, also took aim at the Fugitive Slave Act whereby runaway black people were, “hunted over our highways, throttled in our streets, hurled back into loathed and hated bondage.”

The loss of the SS Central America’s vast treasure offered preachers an added opportunity to stress the idolatry of wealth. In the nation’s frenzy for speculation, (the contagion of the time), in an overheated gold rush economy, the entire populace followed the inclination to “dash along with a dashing world,” in a breathless race for gain.

Beecher beseeched:

Let our public men revere justice. Let citizens hold back from greediness, and love righteousness. God lives. He watches. He governs. He punishes. He rewards. Nothing can reach a soul embosomed in God, to harm it. Though cast down they shall rise up again. Nothing can secure the soul that is not so at rest.

The Reverend issued the dire warning, flat out, that God, “shall slay those which despise His law, and trust in their own riches or wisdom.”

Beecher claimed that in taking down the steamers, which embodied the very highest reach of science, and the most consummate art, God was breaking the confidence of man in man. The winds, the waves and the storms were God’s messengers tasked with “preaching upon the ocean, and going preaching all over the land in terms that men do hear, and with the doctrine which men do begin to understand.”

The famous Pilgrim asserted that there were, however, some shipwrecked victims who, when facing their final reckoning, sat serene, and that, although the sea roared and catastrophe ensued, they, “gave up their trusted souls with sweet resignation to the convoy of Christ’s angels that waited around the spot to give them swift deliverance and instant passage heavenward.”

Rev. Dr. George Barrell Cheever was a populist firebrand known for causing whiplash from his scorn and denunciations. He preached that there was a definite connection between the storm at sea and the financial disasters on shore. A hurricane was certainly a visible “act of God” according to the gentleman reverend, and, a mode of His discipline. Cheever claimed that, if God’s secrets were known, all calamities, individual as well as national, could be found to be providential. The loss of the Central America and the commercial crisis, were two parts of a great whole, being God’s chastening of a national sin–the great sin of slavery.

As an abolitionist he was a daunting, formidable figure.

At Bowdoin College, George Cheever was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in the famous class of 1825 containing, among other notables, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne. As pastor of the Church of the Puritans in New York City, he spoke out against the Mexican War, the treatment of the American aborigines, and the Fugitive Slave Act, but in condemning and demolishing the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, which stripped citizen’s rights from black people, he was made a national leader of the abolitionist movement. The landmark case took place a few months before the Great Panic on land and at sea, and, according to Cheever was a direct cause of both.

Dr. Cheever’s sermon on Dred Scott in April, which called for civil disobedience and holy war, was printed on the front page of the New York Herald, filling all six columns, and also a column and a half on the reverse side, under the following caption: “Incitement to Revolution.” “Religious onslaught on the Government and Supreme Court of the United States.” “Resistance to Tyrants is Obedience to God.” “Maledictions Against Unjust Judges in General, and Chief Justice Taney and Associates in Particular.” “Shall we have Civil War?” “Etc., Etc., Etc.”

There it was. The thought of civil war was interjected and predicted. A civil war was on the horizon.

Rev. Cheever and the renowned Henry Ward Beecher were, for a while, the only clergymen of prominence in the New York district to preach publicly the religious idea that the maintenance of slavery was a sin, and that slave holders were sinners, being men-stealers and kidnappers. Many others who spoke out against slavery lost their pulpits as a consequence.

From his church podium, a fearless Cheever told his captivated audiences, “We are now like shipwrecked strugglers snatching at each others life preservers. When a nation suffers selfishness to take the place of justice, and permits stock jobbers, instead of patriots, to rule, nothing can prevent its ruin. We are now like the steamers, in danger of foundering at sea, with the water just reaching the fires.”

By stirring the national conscience, Cheever and Beecher made possible the formation of a political party whose cardinal principle was opposition to the extension of slavery and Lincoln’s successful presidential candidacy in 1860.

Cheever opponents who defended slavery, claimed that black people in the South, unlike the 200,000 laborers in the principal cities of the North, would not be out of employment because of the Great Panic, and would not be found homeless dying in the cold that winter or begging in the streets for bread. They claimed that the Puritan preacher was merely shuffling the responsibility of untoward events, diseases and misfortunes to the shoulders of the Almighty, the source of all goodness and wisdom, from the Prince of Darkness, demonology, or some deformed old crone, like the Plymouth Rock Puritans did two centuries earlier.

Aftermath

The survivors attempted to return to a semblance of their lives before the disaster, but they would never be the same. W.F. Fletcher, a police captain in Oakland, was interviewed 39 years after the shipwreck and claimed that he couldn’t look at a steamship or cross the bay on a ferryboat without shuddering.

Survivor Jabez Howes entered the annals of American steamship history a second time when he, along with his two brothers, purchased the the 331 feet long United States man-of-war SS Vanderbilt once owned by the Commodore himself. They ripped out all of the machinery and constructed what the Boston Globe called, “the largest sailing vessel afloat.” Renaming her Three Brothers, she was designed to sail 21 knots under canvas alone, the same speed that she moved under steam. Three Brothers could, according to Howes, weather any storm and carry all her canvas in the severest gale.

Jabez Howes also headed a marine insurance firm, the Merchants’ Mutual Marine Insurance Company, on California St. in San Francisco, whose business plan was to help future widows, survivors and owners of wrecked vessels.

Shipwrecked newlyweds Ansel and Addie sailed back on the Sonora with fellow passenger and future Crocker partner C.P. Huntington, landing in San Francisco on March 20, 1858.

Post SS trauma, the resilient Pony Easton brought back to California his pregnant wife and a valuable stock horse–a dark steel gray stallion named “Prince,” who was six years old, sixteen hands and two inches high, and weighed 1275 lbs. After the Central America nightmare, Pony tried his luck, which he clearly held in excess reserve, at horse breeding. Among his prized colts were 16 champions sired by the great David Hill. Average value–$1,612.50 (41K) each.

In 1860, Ansel purchased 1700 acres of rich pasture lands on the Peninsula just south of San Francisco and christened his property “Black Hawk Ranch.”

Along with eight gentlemen associates, including brother-in-law Darius and his banking partner W.C. Ralston, Pony erected a splendid racecourse dubbed Shell Park on his property. The world class track was covered proper with crushed shells and as level as a billiard table. A new modern electric start system was implemented. The investors built a handsomely furnished club house/ pool hall. Comfortable and commodious stables and a carriage house were constructed with private rooms and private stalls for each of the proprietors, their horses, and their invited guests, for when they wished to rusticate for a few days in the country and race their horseflesh. The mostly private track held public colt races with thousands in attendance and large purses. Emma, Queen Dowager of the Sandwich Islands, aka Hawaii, visited the racetrack during her San Francisco visit in the early autumn of 1866.

Adeline and Ansel had two children Jennie Ellen Marine, named after the two ships that separately saved the lives of her parents, and a son Ansel Mills Easton.

It was a happily ever after tale for Pony. Addie, on the other hand would face even more dour days than September 12, 1857. First the husband who she adored and clung to from the moment that they were reunited in Norfolk died young, aged 49, at San Mateo after a short illness. City mortuary records reported lung cancer. The press attributed pleurisy and “enlargement of the heart.” She would never remarry.

Addie, the angel of mercy on board of the SS Central America, raised the two fatherless youngsters with the ongoing support of Ansel’s four brothers and four sisters and her own five brothers–especially Darius.

She raised them well.

The Mills and Easton families married their fortunes together with the famous Crockers in 1880 when Jennie wed Col. Charles Frederick “C.F.” Crocker, Vice President of the Southern Pacific Railroad.

The wedding took place at Millbrae, the handsome estate of tycoon Uncle Darius, then Jennie’s chief father figure. The grounds were festooned with Chinese lanterns and exotic flowers (D.O. had the largest private conservatory in the country) and illuminated by locomotive headlights. Another uncle, the Rev. G.A. Easton, of the Church of the Good Shepherd, W. Berkeley, officiating. In addition to the handsome residence on the corner of Pine and Leavenworth streets in San Francisco, the wedding gift of Charles and Mary Crocker, and the costly summer mansion at Menlo, purchased for the couple by Darius, “there was such an array of gems and precious works of porcelain and painting, of massive gold and glittering silver, as would have furnished a feast to the eyes of the most aesthetic virtuoso,” according to the Sacramento Daily Union.

Within a few years, the jubilant pair had a girl and a boy, Mary and Charles Templeton. In February of 1887, Jennie gave birth to a third baby, a girl. Drs. Marshall and Dorr were in attendance. Serious symptoms immediately set in, however, and about an hour after the baby was born, Jennie Ellen Marine died. She had been in perfect health. C.F. was inconsolable. He wept uncontrollably at his sister Hattie’s wedding a few weeks later. The baby girl lived and Crocker named her Jennie Adeline.

Grandmother Addie was forever hollowed when she buried her only daughter at the prime of her life. She stepped in to care for Jennie and C.F.’s young children, moving into the home of the Colonel on Leavenworth St. When Patriarch Charles and Matriarch Mary Crocker died back to back in the late 1880s, Addie became their primary caregiver. Busy C.F. did his best to spend quality time with the children when he wasn’t running the Southern Pacific as the new head of the Crocker Empire.

Darius again filled in as father figure, ten years later, to his sister’s grandchildren, when C.F. died in 1897 of Bright’s disease at aged 42. He walked an effervescent Mary down the aisle with pride at her wedding in 1900 when she married future congressman and Governor of the Philippines Francis Burton Harrison.

Five years later, Adeline would suffer a third tremendous loss when a car carrying both Mary and Templeton, her adoring grandchildren that she raised as her own, collided into a telegraph pole. Templeton broke some ribs. Mary died en route to the hospital.

Addie experienced the enormous disproportion between the paltry strength and insignificance of man amid deadly forces which train under the banner of Nature, like earthquakes, volcanoes and rolling ocean storms. She understood that nothing is ridiculous in such a moment of Truth except strife or resistance. Addie experienced what she referred to as “absolute calmness in the moment of death.” Peaceful resolve was her road to Damascus. It carried her through many of her life’s disasters.

In 1911, the long suffering but ever positive Adeline Mills Easton, then in her eighties, wrote about her shipwrecked honeymoon. She opened her tragic tale with her own proverb and mantra, “The wondrous peril that is past makes present joys more dear.”

Postscript: The Serial Shipwreck Victim

 

Part two coming soon

The steamer trunk that Adeline and Ansel Ives Easton took on their honeymoon voyage finally reached shore in November of 1990, 133 years after they did. The story of the SS Central America is ongoing. The ship was located by the Columbus-America Discovery Group of Ohio, led by treasure hunter Tommy Thompson. Using the Arctic Discoverer as his expedition vessel, which deployed a remotely controlled vehicle, the Nemo, significant amounts of gold and artifacts were recovered in several stages between 1988-1991 and again in 2014 by Odyssey Marine Exploration Corporation out of Tampa. Life Magazine called it “The Greatest Treasure Ever Found.”

The total value of the recovered gold was estimated at between $100 and 150 million. A recovered gold ingot, dubbed the Eureka bar, weighing 80 lb, sold for a record $8 million and was recognized as the most valuable piece of currency in the world. Sotheby’s auctioned some of the gold in 1999 and Christie’s followed suit in 2000.

The Easton trunk and two others, made of heavily tan leather, landed intact and unbreached in the debris field. Jewelry, clothes, daguerreotypes, pistols, pottery and cigars, the captain’s portal, and other treasures of cultural interest were found and sold off in December of 2022 and March of 2023.

A 3-part BBC produced mini docuseries titled Cursed Gold: A Shipwreck Scandal aired in 2024 on the National Geographic channel for a British audience, about the shipwreck and Tommy Thompson’s arrest and imprisonment…

 

Selective References.

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“Alexander Grant, The Man Who Couldn’t Be Drowned,” Harpers Weekly, Oct 17, 1857, p1,42

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George Barrell Cheever God against slavery : and the freedom and the duty of the pulpit to rebuke it, as a sin against God. New York: Joseph R. Ladd, 1857.

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Wells & Friedrich: Disaster Survivors | Gold Rush Stories

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