ABSTRACT
After calling at Batavia, China and Manila the Columbus proceeded to Japan, which was then closed to foreigners. The crew were not permitted on shore, but parties of prominent Japanese were allowed to visit the ship where young Nordhoff was fascinated by the great curiosity they showed:
They walked about drinking in with their eyes greedily all the wonders of our ship, many of them carrying little notebooks in their hands, in which they made memorandums of what struck their attention most forcibly. 5
Honolulu at that time Uust before the discovery of gold in California) was a straggling, rather poorly constructed town. It contained a number of respectable-looking houses, but the great body of the town was made up of small huts, and on the outskirts not a few tents were to be seen, reminding me somewhat of a camp-meeting in the Western woods at home. The whole place had a listless, impassive look, as though the inhabitants were only taking a rest, preparatory to starting on ajourney. Except just down by the waterside, where the sailors by their uncouth gambols along the shore gave some life to the scene, a sabbath stillness reigned throughout. 6
7 houses, and the Columbus remained there for nine months. On this visit, California struck Nordhoff as a country of vast but unrealized potential:
The California of those days was a most unproductive or rather nothing-producing country - a great fertile waste in which everything would grow but nothing was made to grow except, indeed, beef' ... The hills surrounding San Francisco Bay yet swarmed with cattle ... there was not a vegetable on the whole coast, nothing eatable but beef, beef, beef - a never-ending round of boiled beef, of which we grew so tired that to this day the sight of a soup bone takes away my appetite. 7
Charles Nordhoff remained at sea for a total of nine years, serving in whaling, fishing and merchant ships. He came ashore for good in 1854 with no more savings than an English sixpence, but with a vigorous constitution and boundless energy that never left him. Resuming his printing connections he became a newspaper reporter, finding time to write three books on his nautical adventures before taking up a post as an editor for Harper and Brothers in 1857. The following year he went over to the New York Evening Post where he championed the Union cause during the American Civil War (1861-5), and argued for positive and sweeping measures of reform and reconciliation during the postwar Reconstruction.
