Letters from California 1846-1847

By William Robert Garner

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520340268

William Robert Garner

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Monterey, June 5, 1847: A General View from Jones’ Fort by William R. Hutton. Garner’s balconied house is at the far right; the chute for carrying drinking water to the ships is seen in the center foreground; Larkin’s wharf with hoist is at the far left. The pole tripods were probably for cutting up beeve for the new butchershop, which is the odd double building near the Customhouse.

William Robert Garner

1846-1847

EDITED, WITH A SKETCH OF THE

LIFE AND TIMES OF THEIR AUTHOR,

BY DONALD MUNRO CRAIG

University of California Press

Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London

1970

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1970, by

The Regents of the University of California

ISBN: 0-520-01565-7

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 71-124736

Printed in the United States of America

Designed by Dave Comstock

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Letters from California 1846-1847

Journal of Commerce (July 21, 1847)

October 1846

North American (April 26, 1847)

November 1, 1846

November 2, 1846

November 3, 1846

November 4, 1846

November 5, 1846

November 6, 1846

November 7, 1846

November 8, 1846

November 9, 1846

Journal of Commerce (July 29, 1847)

November 12, 1846

November 13, 1846

North American (April 26, 1847)

November 15, 1846

November 16, 1846

November 17, 1846

November 18, 1846

November 19, 1846

November 21, 1846

November 22, 1846

November 23, 1846

November 24, 1846

November 25, 1846

November 26, 1846

Journal of Commerce (July 30, 1847)

November 29, 18461182

North American (April 26, 1847)

November 30, 1846

December 1, 1846

December 2, 1846

December 3, 1846

December 6, 1846

December 7, 1846

December 9, 1846

December 12, 1846

December 13, 1846

December 16, 1846

Journal of Commerce (August 16, 1847)

December 29, 1846

North American (July 23, 1847)

January 29, 1847

Journal of Commerce (July 26, 1847)

February 1, 1847

February 7, 1847

North American (July 23, 1847)

February 13, 1847 — A Hint to Speculators. Whenever a stranger arrives in California, his first conversation with the inhabitants and his first questions are concerning the climate and the fertility of the soil. These being very interesting points, he is naturally led to inquire the size of a common farm in California, and the acres it contains; here the person questioned finds himself in a difficulty, either because he is no scholar, or else because he has never calculated, and consequently does not bear in his mind the number of acres contained in a Mexican league, and answers: We do not measure farms here by acres — we only measure by leagues. What, says the stranger, do all the farms in California contain leagues of land? Yes, replies the farmer, they all contain from one square league to eleven. Here the stranger looks around with

Journal of Commerce (July 29, 1847)

February 19, 1847

North American (July 23, 1847)

February 21, 1847

North American (July 24, 1847)

February 23, 1847

Journal of Commerce (July 26, 1847)

February 24, 1847

North American (July 24, 1847)

February 27, 1847

Journal of Commerce (July 27, 1847)

March 1, 1847

North American (July 24, 1847)

March 3, 1847

March 5, 1847

Journal of Commerce (July 27, 1847)

March 5, 1847

North American (January 29, 1848)

October 4, 1847—The affairs of California continue tranquil. Now and then a report reaches us of Mexicans having crossed the southern line of the Territory; but these are idle rumours. The Mexicans have enough to do at home. We apprehend no outbreak here, the sober portion of the community would regard such a step as one of frantic folly; and even that restless class which is found in every country would shrink from the idea of its fearful issue.

Journal of Commerce (January 29, 1848)

October 10, 1847

North American (January 29, 1848)

October 10, 1847

Journal of Commerce (February 2, 1848)

October 10, 1847

APPENDIX I

APPENDIX II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

IN APRIL 1847, almost exactly one year after the outbreak of the Mexican War, an extraordinary series of letters from Monterey, California, was published as a special supplement to the Philadelphia North American and United States Gazette. They were signed W. G. The editor of the newspaper prefaced them by explaining that he had asked his friend the Reverend Walter Colton, when he sailed as chaplain of the California-bound frigate Congress, to select for him able and accomplished correspondents who could not only furnish graphic accounts of the passing news of the day, but render their letters valuable by the introduction of historical, statistical, agricultural and political information in relation to countries of which we now know little.

He congratulated Mr. Colton on his choice of the Monterey correspondent. His letters afford, to our view, the best description of California we have yet seen. Today they still have a freshness, a frankness, and intimacy that is astonishing. Unlike the travelers’ tales of the period, the letters cater neither to sensationalism nor to the desire to be picturesque; they are advertisements, honest propaganda. Their unfeigned intent was to draw to California a solid body of American farmers, craftsmen, and merchants who would develop the land, break the trading monopolies, and forestall any idea of returning the territory to Mexico after the war. For this reason they teem with facts illustrated by the author’s personal experiences over a period of twenty-two years.

In fact, the letters are the most authoritative and complete description of the customs and life of the Californians and the resources and economic prospects of the country to reach the general American public before the Gold Rush. The rare supplement to the North American was only brought to light in 1924 by William Abbati as Extra No. 103 of his long-defunct Magazine of History, but he missed an equal amount of correspondence by W. G. in other issues of the Philadelphia North American and the New York Journal of Commerce. These previously undiscovered letters are an integral part of the series, and the entire text is now collated and presented here as a unit for the first time.

Who was W. G., and why was he peculiarly fitted to record the California scene? When William Abbati published the North American supplement letters, he did not identify their author. It is now clear that he was William Robert Garner, an Englishman who came to California in 1824 and in 1846 was secretaryinterpreter-guide to Walter Colton, the American alcalde of Monterey. He was a rancher, a lumberman, a miner, a constable, an officer in the recurrent and bloodless revolutions that distracted Mexican California. He worked hard, shone briefly in the world of letters, fought to clear his name of libelous charges, and died of Indian arrows in the Sierra Nevada, aged forty-six. Unlike most other writers of the period on California, he was linked by ties of marriage and citizenship to the native Californians. He was privy to their councils, their fraternal bickering and political intrigues, their social and religious customs, their ambitions and fears for the future of California.

Inspection of Garner’s letters immediately brings up a question. If Colton chose him as correspondent for the North American, why did Garner also contribute to the New York Journal of Commerce? From the tone of the Journal of Commerce’s opening statement on July 21, 1847, the voluminous correspondence came to it unsolicited. None of the material duplicates the letters received three months earlier by the North American. Did Garner decide on his own initiative after reading a copy of the Journal brought out by a ship, or did he discuss his hopes for California with Colton and get advice to spread his advertisements through a wider territory? Colton’s hand seems evident in this, for Garner wished to reach manufacturers and investors, and Colton knew that the Journal was the organ of these groups.

There seem to have been three shipments of letters to the North American and two to the Journal of Commerce. The North American received dispatches in late April and July 1847 and January 1848; the Journal of Commerce received its share only in July 1847 and January 1848. If parcels were lost in an October 1847 shipment, this would account for the gap in the letter sequence from March 6, 1847, to October 4, 1847. Conceivably, Garner may have sent that sheaf to a third newspaper or even to England, but search in the sources at hand has not revealed it.

It is difficult to recognize any system in Garner’s division of letters between his two publishers. The North American printed an almost unbroken run from November 1 to December 16, 1846. The Journal of Commerce confesses that it threw away many letters, presumably covering the period July-September 1846, because they dealt with the military occupation of Monterey and had lost their interest by delay. However, it did print one, or a combination of several letters, that antedates the North American series, and three more that fill in dates left blank in the Philadelphia columns.

Initially, there was probably a spate of letters for September, October, and November 1846, as Garner, excited about the stirring events in California, tried his hand at the new field of journalism. The stream dwindled in mid-December and almost dried up in January, 1847, either because of severe editorial cutting in Philadelphia and New York or a lack of inspiration on their author’s part once he had made clear his basic points for immigration. February again gives a good flow into the first week of March, then a drought for six months, a freshet in October including three on October 10, and then — nothing. Garner had tired of the unaccustomed task, or he was distracted by his libel suit and other business.

William Robert Garner and his role in California’s history have been almost forgotten. There is neither monument nor plaque commemorating him; his fine two-story adobe home was razed years ago; no portrait gives us his lineaments; no family letters survive to illuminate his private life. Despite the dramatic circumstances of his life, William Robert Garner has never been the subject of a biography. His aloof self-sufficiency, the lack of personal, intimate correspondence, and the difficulty of checking archives in England and Australia have kept him a shadowy figure in the wings of history. Therefore, to give perspective and background to the California Letters, a sketch of his life precedes them, and to unravel the tangled web of mystery that clings about the man, a thorough investigation has been made of the sensational charges in the unresolved Garner v. Farnham suit for libel.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

IN 1803, when William Robert Garner was born in London, England was girding herself for the long struggle against Napoleon. The great ports of the island hummed with preparations for war. The shipyards never turned out fighting ships so fast as from 1803 to 1815, for on the strength of those wooden walls depended the safety of England. William Garner’s life was to be fatefully linked to the sea and to a warship readied for launching in 1804.

William’s father had come to London from a quiet Norfolk hamlet, Massingham, halfway between Norwich and Lynn. Work was scarce, the crops were poor, and the cost of food very high. In the towns there were food riots. Charity kitchens, where hot pease soup was ladled into the plates of the poor three times a week, were set up in the streets of Lynn by the town council in 1801. Not in all Norfolk was there a future or even a present for a newly-married young clerk. Like many others, Henry Gardner and his wife Anne moved to the great city.1

In London government offices burgeoned under the heat of war like plane trees in spring. Henry Gardner settled into place on one of the high stools in the Office of Seamen’s Wages at the Admiralty. The unimposing brick building on Parliament Street was only a short ten minutes’ walk from his lodgings on Southampton Street in the Strand, where his son William was born. Henry Gardner did his work competently but not brilliantly; in 1824 he was still in the same office, a junior clerk.

Anne was of different metal. She was proud of her connections with the merchant Godfreys of Norfolk. She was an expert seamstress and milliner. Years later William told his son José that she was not only needlewoman to Queen Caroline, but her confidante as well. The story is difficult to verify, but it has the ring of truth. Although Anne Gardner’s name appears on no list of palace servants, her claim to acquaintance with the queen in those chaotic times is very likely valid. Many a humble Londoner could say as much.

Caroline of Brunswick, the injured queen of George IV, was lonely, unconventional, and warm-hearted. She had all fashionable London whispering behind its fans at her free and easy manner, her unaffected kindness to common people, and habit of stopping to chat affably with anyone. The humble citizens of London adored their queen, and upon George’s insulting attempt to divorce her and force her abdication in 1820, mobs rose ready to defend her cause. With pride William Garner related how his mother had loyally sewed for Queen Caroline both before and after the great trial in the House of Lords.²

The fact that lends credence to his boast is that Southampton Street was then famous for its dressmakers and milliners. Caroline, who loved elaborate hats and fine clothes as much as she did the theater, must often have looked in at her seamstresses before going to a new play at her favorite Covent Garden or at those just beyond in Drury Lane. The flying needles would then have paused for a few moments while the queen walked among the flattered women to inspect their work. Little wonder, when all London gossiped about the royal scandal, that Mrs. Gardner treasured her intimacy with the unfortunate queen and that her son never forgot it.

There are no intimate personal papers in the archives or in the possession of Garner’s descendents to give further detail to this sketch of his early life. It is obvious, however, from his beautiful penmanship, his meticulous spelling, his choice of words, ability to use legal terms correctly, and the organization of his writing that he had received far more schooling than most English boys of his day. Despite the modest place in London society of William’s family, it evidently had influential friends.

Young Garner’s education did not run its full course. An anonymous note in the Vallejo documents states that the boy got into mischief while at school and, as a punishment, his father put him aboard a whaler to learn the trade. José Garner remembered his father’s telling him that at an early age he was apprenticed to Mr. Bennett, a shipowner and whaler. The records of apprentice indentures kept by the Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen date only from 1824 and therefore do not contain the name of William Garner, who entered into service at least five years earlier. However, in the lists available from 1824 to 1835, a number of boys were apprenticed to a Mr. William Bennett. In the archives of Lloyd’s of London, William Bennett and Son is noted not only as a well-established whaling firm but also as the owner in 1824 of the Royal George, a whaler bound for the South Seas with William Robert Garner serving aboard her as an experienced apprentice.

At this period the most prosperous whaling grounds were in the South Seas and the great rendezvous for the ships was the Bay of Islands on the northern tip of New Zealand. In the 1820’s, this area was a no-man’s-land, truly the end of the earth. Whalemen were a hard breed; they numbered among them the vilest of men. Rigid as was the discipline aboard ship, ashore debauchery and brutality reigned. No government kept order; on the loveliest of islands cannibal tribes waged incessant warfare. The most frightful accounts can be found in the log books of whalers and trading ships. Nothing was allowed to stand in the way of a profitable voyage.3

There was a little-known side line to British whaling in the South Seas. Many English vessels made the long journey down under Africa and east to Australia for a special reason: the first convicts transported to the penal colonies went out in South Seas whalers, and for years thereafter thrifty shipowners made a profit not only on the oil and whalebone carried home but also on each condemned man and woman they brought out on contract for the crown. The fee of £17/7/6 per head and sixpence a day for food made many an owner and ship’s captain close his nostrils to the stench of prisoners confined below decks in foul weather.4

There is a strong likelihood that young Garner served as apprentice aboard such a whaler-transport. His memories could not have been wholly unpleasant. A hostile witness in Garner’s later libel suit swore that he spoke of a passage made by himself and … convicts from England to the Penal Colonies on the Island of New Holland [Australia]. And that during his conversation that time, Garner boasted much of the favors of a very special character which were shown him by his fellow passengers the convict women on board.5 (Garner may have been merely tale-swapping. In any case, this would have been a whaler other than the Royal George, which did not call at the penal colonies between 1816 and 1824, according to the Australian Almanac.) On the transports such dissolute behavior was commonplace. In 1806 Captain Bertram reported, The captain and each officer enjoy right of selection. Each sailor and soldier is allowed to attach himself to one of the females. … As regards the crew themselves, poor Jack is planted in a perfect garden of temptation when among probably a hundred of such fair seducers, and is more an object of pity than of wrath. On one vessel which brought out 226 women from English prisons, the voyage lasted fifteen months. With less interesting passengers the trip ordinarily took from five to nine months, depending on stopovers at Cape Town and other ports. Unencumbered four-masters averaged 127 days from London to Sydney in the mid-1800’s.6

The transport-whalers unloaded their miserable live lumber at Port Jackson or Botany Bay and proceeded to New Zealand to take on water and firewood before cruising the coasts of the Americas and the wide reaches of the Pacific off Japan. They returned to England only after every cask had been topped with oil and every corner stacked with baleen.

From 1800 to 1810 a whaling venture from London to the South Seas fisheries lasted only two years and three months on the average. By the decade 1820 to 1830 the figure had risen six months because of the competition and the need to go farther and farther to make a cargo.7 Monthly wages did not enter into the scheme of whaling. A whaling voyage was a speculation, and captain and crew shipped upon the lay, or a share of the value of the cargo at market in London. According to the usual practice, the owners were entitled to one-half the profit to recompense them for assuming all expenses. The captain would claim between 1/llth and l/15th share, each officer and harpooner proportionately less, and the man before the mast hoped for anything from a 1/110th to 1/200th share. From the sailor’s share, of course, was deducted the cost of the exorbitantly priced articles he had purchased on credit while at sea.⁸

Apprentice boys like William Garner had little but experience in seamanship and accounting to show for a three-year voyage. The period for which they were bound ranged from five to seven years. They messed and berthed near the officers’ quarters, but traditionally the apprentice led a dog’s life, being neither child nor man, fo’c’s’le hand nor gold braid. Some were serving at twelve years of age; most began between thirteen and fifteen and took their place as officers in their early twenties.

Although the records do not show when William Garner was apprenticed to Mr. Bennett, it must have been before the age of fifteen. The 1824 voyage of the Royal George bears this out. It was clearly not his first nor his second, for a shipmate, James Watson, later testified that the captain remarked that Mr. Garner’s apprenticeship would expire in two or three months and that he was so satisfied with his work that he would then put him on the ‘lay.’ 9 Since the Royal George sailed from Gravesend on the Thames about the first of January 1824 and Garner left her in November at the age of twenty or twenty-one, he must have served at least five years as apprentice and made two previous trips to the South Seas.

The Royal George was a fine looking little ship. She had been built at Cowes, Isle of Wight, in 1804 as an eighteen-gun, twodecked, ship-rigged sloop-of-war. After Waterloo many such a small ship was retired from the naval list. At 250 tons the Royal George was somewhat small for a whaler — most were 300 to 400 tons burthen and carried a crew of 28 to 33 men — however, she was bought about 1817 by William Bennett, who refitted her, raised the upper deck, and sent her off to the southern whaling grounds in 1818 under a hell-roaring master, Captain William Buckle. Within three years she was back in London with a fat profit, and Captain Buckle sailed her out again in 1821. He brought her back toward the end of 1823, deep in the water with a full cargo of oil, and was rewarded with the command of a larger ship, the Daniel IV.10

Captain D. Barney replaced Buckle on the Royal George. Once again repairs were made, iron cables bent on, and her bottom sheathed with shining copper for the 1824 cruise. But the Royal George was getting old, and her costs were rising. Bennett and Son cut them by economizing on her provisioning. The beginning of the cruise promised well. She made the run to the Pacific with a bone in her teeth all the way, took up station on the new grounds south of Japan, and then, for seven months, through fair weather and foul, her boats pursued whales without bringing one alongside.

In his haste to make a fast and profitable voyage Captain Barney had not anchored the ship anywhere long enough to give the men recreation or to supplement the skimped and poor provisions taken aboard in London. Now, with such a run of ill fortune, he did not dare turn about and sail for some island where fresh food might be procured and the water casks refreshed. He could not spare the time nor take the risk; whaling captains were notoriously reluctant to allow sailors to leave the ship on the voyage for fear that they would never see them again. Desertion was as common as accidents and sickness on a cruise, especially if the hunting was bad and prospects of a good lay poor.

Neither could Captain Barney put into a Japanese port for relief. Japan was closed to foreigners. The shogun had prohibited intrusions by whalers, and those who violated the edict lived to rue it. So month after weary month the whaleboats were rowed away on their fruitless chases, and aboard ship the discouraged officers and men morosely ate shortened allowances of the whaler’s fare. A whaleman of the period feelingly described such food:

salt junk [beef] or pork, often putrid, and as dry and with about as much nourishment as a rope-yarn; biscuits so alive with maggots and weevils as to crumble into dust between the fingers; black, stinking water, in such a state of decomposition that upon a lighted candle being applied to the bunghole of a cask, the ignited pestiferous hydrogen gas would blaze out like gunpowder.11

The lack of proper food aboard the Royal George took its toll. The officers and crew fell ill with scurvy. They grew weak and listless, blood vessels broke beneath the skin and formed great purple weals, their bodies so tender that the least touch was torment and it was torture to move. In their mouths the gums swelled so that the teeth could not touch but became so loose that the sailors spat them out with the saliva. Captain Barney reluctantly turned the Royal George and let the sails fill with the fresh westerly wind blowing toward California and health.

At the end of October or the first of November, 1824, Captain Otto von Kotzebue of the Russian frigate Predpriatie, anchored in San Francisco Bay while her corps of scientists explored the region, was astonished to see a boat, rowed in from the open sea by six men, lay to alongside his vessel. It belonged to the scurvy- stricken English whaler, which was tacking back and forth outside the strait unable to cope with the contrary winds. As a last resort, the rowers said, the captain had sent the ship’s boat for the fresh provisions so desperately needed aboard. Von Kotzebue noted:

I immediately furnished the boat with an ample supply both of fresh meat and vegetables, and having completed its little cargo, it proceeded again to sea forthwith. The next day the whaler succeeded in getting into the bay, and came to anchor close alongside. It was evident, from their manner of working the vessel, that she had but few hands on board capable of labour. The captain, who shortly afterwards visited me, was himself suffering severely, and his mates were all confined to their beds. … The scurvy with which the crew was afflicted was mainly attributable to unwholesome food, selected on a principle of unpardonable economy, and to the want of cleanliness; a vice not usual among the English, but which, during so long an absence from land, is scarcely to be avoided.12

How long the Royal George lay at anchor while the men drew strength back into their bodies is uncertain. There is evidence that she sent eight men ashore for treatment, and William Garner has been counted as one of these, but however long the empty whaler idled there, it was too long for the anxious captain and not long enough for the crew. In a scant two weeks she was at sea again, the sailors sullen and glowering, Captain Barney chafing at the loss of time. The great whales were migrating along the California coast from the cold North Pacific to their spawning grounds in the tropics. Finback, gray, humpback and spermwhale, sulphur-bottom and right whale rolled and spouted off the Faralones, each one worth from 60 to 150 barrels of oil.13

The Royal George turned south with the favoring wind, but she had only been under way a few days when the resentment of the crew broke through the surface discipline. They complained angrily about the quality and quantity of the food and refused to obey commands until their demands were met. Garner, an officer by now, championed them and spoke for them. It must have been tantamount to open mutiny, for Captain Barney took an exceedingly unusual step.

José Garner remembers his father’s telling him that he and his friends deserted the ship at Santa Barbara. He was glossing over a humiliating memory: James McKinley, testifying on oath twenty-three years later, said: They were manacled and put on shore. He knew of what he spoke; he was one of those five ringleaders marooned at Santa Barbara on November 16, 1824.¹⁴

The deserted five — two London lads, William Garner and James Watson, two Scots, James McKinley and Thomas Stewart, and a Negro named either Dixon or Robinson — were reported to the comandante, Don José de la Guerra y Noriega, and taken into custody for unlawful entry. After a brief preliminary examination by Don José, the sailors were packed off to Monterey, the capital of Upper California, for official disposition. As in other such cases where no ship’s captain offered a reward for runaway sailors, the men were given a hearing and allowed to stay in California and earn their living. Garner, Watson, and McKinley chose to remain in Monterey; Stewart and Dixon (Robinson?) drifted back to southern towns.

What William Garner did immediately after he was released by the authorities is uncertain. He was only twenty-one. Tall, blueeyed, and blond, with long lanky legs, he soon acquired the nickname of Patas Largas or Long Shanks.15 Such nicknames were indispensable in a sparsely settled land like California, where almost everyone was related, families averaged ten children, and all were named after the same popular saints. Patas Largas was aptly descriptive but not unpleasantly so; other men were saddled for life with names such as Pinacate and Stintyug.

Like his shipmates, Garner soon made up his mind to stay in California and go no more a’whaling. Watson and McKinley became clerks, then storekeepers in Monterey, but William Garner had little interest