California’s economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was closely tied to the sea. The state’s Pacific ports, so integral to prosperity, included San Francisco Bay and its up-channel delta waterfronts at Sacramento and Stockton, Los Angeles, and San Diego.
California’s extensive maritime activity spread northward into Alaskan and Siberian waters, down the coast to Baja, up the Sea of Cortez and into the Colorado River, across the Pacific to China and neighboring countries, to various Pacific archipelagos, to the western coast of Latin America, and around Cape Horn - until the Panama Canal was completed - to ports on both sides of the Atlantic. Seaborne shipments of some foods and oil have been mentioned briefly above. More extensive illustrations of the geographical reach and scale of the state’s maritime economy can be seen in the shipping of wheat and wheat flour, quicksilver, and lumber, and in the shipbuilding, whaling, and fishing industries. In maritime matters, as has been implied in real-estate dealings, it makes sense to speak of a Pacific-oriented, “Greater California” whose reciprocal influences extended far beyond the state’s borders.
California wheat and wheat flour were dry enough to withstand spoilage on long voyages to distant markets in Europe and Asia. Largely as a result of Isaac Friedlander’s efficient organizing of the wheat and wheat flour trade in the 1860s and 1870s, San Francisco’s grain exports increased significantly. In 1868, 193 ships carrying wheat and flour departed from that port; the corresponding figure for 1882 was 559 vessels. In addition to a strong overseas demand, the trade increased because transportation costs decreased due to the improvement in ship design. In 1868 the British introduced iron-hulled clippers, which marked an advancement over earlier vessels in carrying capacity and durability in storms. By the 1880s shipping rates between San Francisco and Liverpool, England, were less than half what they had been in the 1860s.
Given the high demand and reduced shipping costs, California wheat exports to Europe increased from 4,732,787 centals (1 cental equaled a hundredweight or 100 pounds) in 1869-70 to 12,786,534 centals in 1889-90. This threefold increase spurred the development of San Francisco’s flour-milling industry. The plant of the state’s leading flour miller, Abraham Dubois Starr, reached a daily capacity of 2,200 barrels in 1885. Ships departing San Francisco laden with flour milled by Starr and others at times sold some of their cargo in East Coast cities before crossing the Atlantic en route to Liverpool.
As early as 1854 Friedlander sent a trial shipment of wheat flour to China. The venture paid handsomely. He became more drawn to China than Europe for three reasons. First,
Figure 7.2 Grain ships near Martinez, c.1880. Courtesy of the Contra Costa County Historical Society, ID 1144. These grain vessels are sailing westward from the inland ports of Stockton and Sacramento through the Carquinez Strait toward the Pacific. Reproduced by permission of Contra Costa County Historical Society.
“down easters” (fast ships constructed in Maine) could sail from San Francisco to Hong Kong, the usual Chinese terminus for the flour trade, in roughly one month, compared to 100 days for those vessels to reach England. Second, the China voyage did not entail rounding the treacherous Cape Horn. Third, there was as yet no competition in the Hong Kong grain market, which as early as 1863 received 40,000 barrels of California wheat flour. During the next two decades, wheat became a dietary staple of the Chinese, second only to rice consumption. The Chinese used the wheat flour, prized for its purity and high gluten content, to make noodles and cakes.
In the 1880s the Golden State’s wheat trade peaked before declining in the following decade. By 1885 California wheat flour exports to Hong Kong had reached nearly 450,000 barrels a year. California millers, with offices there, often reshipped some of their flour as far south as Singapore and as far north as the Russian port of Vladivostok. By 1900 Chinese farmers and factory operatives had learned enough about the growing and milling of wheat to supply their own market, and, consequently, California grain exports to the Celestial
Kingdom slumped, never to regain their once vaunted position. Still, those exports had provided a transpacific commercial bridge to China, opening that country in the early twentieth century to a brisk trade in other California-produced commodities, including lumber and kerosene.
Meanwhile, California led the nation in another article exported throughout the Pacific Rim in the latter half of the nineteenth century - quicksilver, or mercury. Until the 1890s, quicksilver ranked second only to gold in the value of the state’s mineral output. The substance had a number of uses. In addition to producing the prized orange-red pigment/dye vermilion, quicksilver served to manufacture explosives, plate mirrors, fabricate scientific instruments, and make medicines. Its main use, however, was to recover gold and silver from ore. The recovery was done by crushing, wetting, and adding salt, copper, and quicksilver to make an amalgam that was spread onto a large flat surface called a patio. The amalgam was heated, thereby vaporizing the mercury (some of which was recaptured for future use), leaving the precious metals separated from the mix. From 1850 to 1900, California’s mines, the most productive of which was New Almaden, supplied half the world’s quicksilver. Drawn from Pacific-bordering nations, the workforce at that mine was composed largely of immigrant Mexicans, Chileans, and Chinese. About 57 percent of California’s output, in the years 1852-90, was exported, mainly to the Pacific Rim nations of Mexico, Peru, and China (which used the substance for vermilion production). The remainder was sold to mining interests in the state and throughout the Far West, and to vermilion producers in New York.
California’s logging industry, centered in the northern counties, shipped large quantities of lumber up and down the coast, inland to Sacramento, and across the Pacific. In some instances it was closely connected to timber and shipping enterprises whose operations extended from San Diego northward into Oregon and Washington. For example, lumber leviathan Pope & Talbot, Incorporated started as a San Francisco-based barge transport service in 1849. Several years later it entered the lumber trade. Headquarters were established in Oregon’s Puget Sound area, yet the company had marketing offices in San Francisco, the hub of a vast Pacific Rim business zone. Co-founder Andrew J. Pope ran the San Francisco operations, which provided lumber shipments to Chile, Hawai’i, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, and the West Coast of the United States. The firm’s California branches expanded significantly in 1887 when it opened the San Francisco Lumber Company. During the next 20 years Pope & Talbot chartered lumber companies and distribution yards in Los Angeles and San Diego. In 1895 lumber magnate Robert Dollar, who similarly owned huge stands of timber from British Columbia to northern California, entered the San Francisco shipping industry. His Dollar Shipping Company initially transported lumber from the Sonoma coast to San Francisco. In 1901 Dollar expanded his operations by developing a steamship line that became a major carrier in the growing China trade. Known as the Grand Old Man of the Pacific, he eventually took over the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, established the American Presidents Line of vessels, made the cover of Time magazine, and amassed a maritime shipping fortune of $40 million.
Reflective of California’s rising Pacific maritime profile, shipbuilding, concentrated around Humboldt and San Francisco bays, was a major business during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In both of these areas the transport of lumber was an important
Figure 7.3 African American whaling captain William T. Shorey and family. When the whaling industry moved from New England to California in the 1870s, African Americans comprised a large percentage of the crews. Courtesy of San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, Victoria V. Francis Collection, photo number POO.21578X.
Factor in establishing shipbuilding yards. On Humboldt Bay, Hans Bendixon’s yard supplied at least 113 vessels to the trade, one of which was the lumber schooner C. A. Thayer, currently on display at San Francisco’s Maritime National Historical Park. In the 1880s, as steam schooners began to displace wind-powered vessels, the San Francisco Bay area emerged as a prominent West Coast shipbuilding center. Benicia, a port on the bay since the 1850s, served as such a center for Matthew Turner, his brother Horatio, and John L. Eckley, beginning in 1882. Their firm, Turner and Eckley, specialized in constructing some of the fastest sailing vessels in the cargo trade between San Francisco, Hawai’i, and Tahiti.
Like shipping, whaling contributed greatly to American California’s economy. In the mid-nineteenth century, New England ports, especially New Bedford, and the port of Lahaina on the island of Maui in Hawai’i, were the world’s centers of deep-sea whaling. By the 1880s, however, San Francisco emerged as the unrivaled leader of the multi-million-dollar international whaling industry. From the Gulf of Alaska to Mexico’s Sea of Cortes, San Francisco hunters preyed on the California gray whale, whose oil was used as a lighting fuel and lubricant, and whose bone matter strengthened women’s corsets. Humpbacks and blue whales were also hunted. Crews came from diverse ethnic and national backgrounds, including Portuguese, Anglos, African Americans, Caribbean islanders, Hawaiians, and more. San Franciscan William T. Shorey gained fame and some fortune as the only African American whale boat captain of record on the Pacific Coast.
Fishing, too, brought wealth to the Golden State. Salmon and cod catches enriched the owners of the California-based Alaska Commercial Company, whose vessels traversed waters as far north as the coast of Siberia. In southern California Latinos and Asians fished the abundant offshore stocks of sardines, tuna, halibut, mackerel, sharks, barracudas, mussels, clams, and abalone. As early as the 1850s more than 500 Chinese fishermen worked the deep waters off Monterey. Women, mainly Asians and Hispanics, staffed the canneries in Monterey, San Pedro, and San Diego in the early 1900s. Chinese shrimpers, following the lead of Italians, set up dozens of camps around San Francisco Bay to catch and dry the small creatures, a sizable share of which were exported profitably across the Pacific to China. From the 1860s through the 1880s, Chinese abalone hunters, operating out of San Diego, regularly voyaged southward down to Baja’s Cabo San Lucas in search of the lucrative mollusks whose iridescent, pearl-colored shells and prized meat brought high prices. Once caught, the abalone were dried and shipped from San Diego to China, where the demand was insatiable. As this maritime trade suggests, California’s Pacific Basin economic ties grew ever stronger in the half-century or so after statehood.
The extent to which the Golden State’s maritime economy aroused global attention is seen in the 1893-4 Midwinter International Exposition in San Francisco. This marked the first time the world’s fair was held on America’s Pacific slope. During the fair’s five-month run, one and a half million visitors strolled through the 160 acre site at Golden Gate Park, in view of the state’s spectacular fruit, wine, and olive displays. California’s deserved reputation as an Eldorado on the shores of the Pacific was greatly enhanced by the extravaganza.
While San Francisco was clearly the Pacific Coast’s dominant port city throughout the 1800s, Henry Huntington foresaw a time in the near future when the center of maritime trade and influence would shift southward as the United States became increasingly Pacific-oriented. Los Angeles, he said, was “destined to become the most important city in this country, if not the world. It can extend in any direction as far as you like; its front door opens on the Pacific, the ocean of the future. The Atlantic is the ocean of the past. Europe can supply her own wants. We will supply the wants of Asia.” As the Pacific world loomed ever more important to the United States, California and its ports served as America’s primary gateway to that vast ocean basin.
Pacific Profile: David Laamea Kalakaua, King of Hawai'i and Visitor
David Laamea Kalakaua (1836-91), Hawai’i’s monarch from 1874 until his death, was one of several Hawaiian rulers to visit California in the nineteenth century, and because the Golden State was part of the Union after 1850, he became the first monarch to enter the United States. He visited California three times: in 1874, 1881, and 1890. The first visit was of particular importance in that it greatly strengthened the island kingdom’s economic ties to both California and the United States,
Facilitating eventual annexation of Hawai’i to the Union in 1898.
His 1874 visit to California and Washington, D. C., was for the purpose of supporting passage of a treaty of commercial reciprocity, whereby Hawaiian cane sugar and other products would enter the United States duty free, and American articles would likewise not be subject to tariffs on entering Hawai’i. Kalakaua sailed from his island kingdom aboard the U. S.S.
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Benicia, accompanied by an entourage of advisers, including U. S. Minister to Hawaii Henry A. Peirce. Arriving in San Francisco, the royal party was greeted with aU possible courtesy and fanfare. On behalf of the U. S. government, Kalakaua was welcomed by General John M. Schoefield, and on behalf of the city the king was greeted by Mayor James Otis. After spending a week in San Francisco the monarch traveled by railroad to Washington, D. C., where he met with President Ulysses S. Grant. The American president pledged his support for the reciprocity treaty, which was ratified by both governments and took effect in June 1875. Hawaiian cane growers thereafter became dependent on the market advantage of shipping their sugar to San Francisco, the West Coast’s leading port and refining center. Under the treaty, island planters reaped millions of dollars in profits by underselling their tariff-paying foreign competitors. Kalakaua worked closely with Hawaiian grower and San Francisco refiner Claus Spreckels, and they both enjoyed the benefits of trade reciprocity.
The occasion for Kalakaua’s 1881 10-day California stay was his round-the-world trip, undertaken in part to strengthen Hawai’i’s standing in international affairs. His first and last stops were in San Francisco. After being entertained by U. S. officials and Spreckels, the king traveled to Sacramento before sailing across the Pacific to Japan. On encircling the globe, he returned to
San Francisco for 11 days, visiting the Lick Observatory and spending two days at Spreckels’s Aptos ranch, where the king was presented with a pair of bay horses and a thoroughbred colt. From there the monarch returned to Hawai’i.
In 1890 Kalakaua’s health was in decline. On his physician’s advice, he sailed to California in search of a cooler climate. Arriving in San Francisco on December 4, the king received the usual warm welcome and met with many of his longtime friends. In a private letter he wrote of his reception: “A spontaneous ovation. I have never seen the like before. . . . Not one moments rest. . . . Receptions, Balls, Dinners. . . Sunshine, Rain, Storm. . . Wonder that I am not half dead yet. . . . Good People and all that but awfully damn cold, Whio!” He was banqueted at the city’s exclusive Union and Bohemian clubs, and ushered everywhere by high-ranking naval and civilian officials. After a visit of two weeks, the king traveled to San Diego, staying at the posh Hotel del Coronado, and to Mexico. On returning north, his health rapidly deteriorated. In Santa Barbara he suffered a slight stroke. Shortly after reaching San Francisco, his physician diagnosed the king’s malady as Bright’s Disease, a serious kidney ailment. On January 20, 1891, Kalakaua, staying in the city’s Palace Hotel, slipped from unconsciousness to death. By then California’s economic bond with Hawai’i was stronger than the island kingdom’s connection to any other American state.
World History
