Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [518]
The price of milk, coffee, work shirts, boots, and other necessities rose accordingly—a barrel of flour worth six dollars back in Manhattan would fetch two hundred in the goldfields—and merchants in the China trade soon saw that routing their outbound clippers west, around South America with a stop in California, rather than east, around Africa, was the way to maximize returns. Among the earliest China clippers out of New York to Frisco were the Samuel Russell and Sea Witch, each of which returned profits beyond the wildest expectations of its owners. Low and Brothers netted eighty-four thousand dollars on the initial voyage of the Samuel Russell, more than it cost the firm to build her. A load of flour, nails, and steam engine parts sent out on the Sea Witch made $190,000 for Howland and Aspinwall.
Other firms jumped into the business. When news of the strikes reached the William Street store of Joseph Seligman and his brothers, they plunged all they had into small merchandise, sent it posthaste to San Francisco, and made a fast fortune. The Strauss brothers, a family of Bavarian emigres in the dry-goods trade, sent young Levi to San Francisco in 1853 to peddle wares that Jonas and Louis sent him round the Horn.
New York shipbuilders designed scores of clippers for merchants working the California market. Some of the best of the new crop were the work of William Henry Webb, whose yards stretched from sth to 7th streets along the East River—notably the two-thousand-ton Challenge, which flew the checkered flag of N. L. and G. Griswold and was able to make San Francisco in 110 days or less. Webb’s father had taught the art of shipbuilding to Donald McKay of Boston, who now built the Flying Cloud—loveliest of all clippers on the California run—for Grinnell, Minturn, and Company of New York. On her maiden voyage, in 1851, she dropped anchor in San Francisco Bay eightynine days and twenty-one hours after leaving the foot of Maiden Lane, a week under the previous record.
The demand for speedy service to the West Coast tempted some merchants into imperial adventures. Back in 1847 William Aspinwall and a tough river steamboat operator named George “Hell Fire” Law had won federal subsidies to move mail and freight across the Isthmus of Panama. Law’s firm ran steamers from New York, by way of Havana and New Orleans, down to the east coast of Panama. From there their cargoes were conveyed overland by canoe and mule train to Panama City, and thence up to San Francisco on the ships of Aspinwall’s Pacific Mail Company. The entire trip took five weeks, and once the Gold Rush got underway it became fabulously profitable despite the unpleasant trek through the snake-infested, mosquito-plagued Panamanian jungle. Aspinwall’s Panama Railroad, completed in 1855, improved transport considerably, and Panama City became an economic satellite of New York.
Law and Aspinwall’s success whetted the cupidity of Commodore Vanderbilt, who calculated that a route across Nicaragua would be five to seven days faster than the one across Panama. Vanderbilt’s initial plan called digging for a canal, at a cost of thirty-one million dollars, through the twelve miles of jungle and mountains that separated Lake Nicaragua from the Pacific Ocean. When that idea ran afoul of British interests in the region, Vanderbilt set up the Accessory Transit Company and wangled a franchise from the Nicaraguan government to run a macadamized road that, combined with bay and river steamers, connected San Juan del Sur on the Pacific and San Juan del Norte on the Atlantic.