.192 THE VOYAGE TO CALIFORNIA.
on foot with two or three companions from Agua Dulce, on the coast of Lower Cahfornia, to San Fran- cisco, about twelve hundred miles. They had been obliged to land by reason of the slowness of their ship, scarcity of water, and stubbornness of their captain. They arrived at San Francisco before the ship. The latter took 166 days for the trip.
But even crazy sailing vessels were better than dug-out canoes, in which some started on the long voyage from Panamd, to San Francisco. Bayard Taylor states that in the early part of 1849, when three thousand persons were waiting on the Isthmus for conveyance to the new El Dorado, several small parties started in log canoes of the natives, thinking to reach San Francisco in them. After a voyage of forty days, during which they went no farther than the island of Quibo, at the mouth of the gulf, nearly all of them returned. Of the rest, nothing was ever heard. On other authority, we are informed that twenty-three men left Panamd, on the 29th of May, 1849, in a dug-out canoe, for San Francisco. None of these madmen ever proceeded far on the road; neither did many of them ever return.
Returning to our voyage by steamer. **Ah ! " ex- clahiis the enthusiastic lover of California, immediately his foot touches the well-scrubbed deck of the Pacific Mail steamer in Panama bay, "such is California, such the superiority of the new over the old. As the Atlantic st'jamer is to the Pacific steamer, as Aspin- wall is to Panamd, so is your cold, dull, eastern coast to our warm, brigbfc, western coast."
In due time a steam ' tender conveyed travellers from the company's wharf to the steamer at anchor some three miles away. On account of the tide, which rises and falls about senv^enteen feet at neap, and twenty-two feet at spring tides, the tender can float at the wharf only twice in twenty-four hours. Low water spring tides lay bare the beach for a mile
