Collis paid for the ferry, a quarter, and climbed the swaying ladder up the black-varnished side of the ship. His luggage was hoisted aboard, and he was directed by a steward with a face like an old walnut down towards his shared cabin. There were dozens more cabins and cots on the California than there had been on the Virginia, but she was still crowded, mostly with salesmen and fortune hunters and ladies in stained and crumpled dresses who looked as if they had suffered quite enough of steamships and railroads.

While he was still below, unpacking his shaving things, Collis heard the anchor rattle up, and the steam engines begin to turn over. He went to the porthole and looked out at Panama City, cluttered on its curved promontory, and he could just make out the roof of the hospital.

‘Dear God,’ he said, under his breath. Then he went back to his bag, and took out his nightshirt, his tortoise-shell comb, and his travelling clock.

Chapter Five

The paddle-steamer California passed through the Golden Gate on the morning of 21 September 1857, a month and a week after Collis had sailed out of New York harbour. The fog made the bay seem silvery and haunted, like the lake which dying Norse heroes had to pass across to reach Valhalla; and when the California started to protest mournfully with her foghorn, and when dozens of rotting and abandoned ships came mysteriously into view, still riding at anchor where their owners had left them years and years ago, rising and falling with ocean swell, Collis was almost convinced that they had reached the end of the world, the final graveyard of dreams and ambitions. For the first time since he had bought his ticket from the steamship office in New York, he felt a twinge of real apprehension. He knew from Andrew Hunt that San Francisco was less than comfortable; that it was populated by thieves, opportunists, and speculators; but at the very least he had expected to see a sunny, welcoming bay, with people waving and shouting. At the very least, he had expected some kind of rough-cut jollity. Instead, under this pall of pearly grey, ghostly and muffled, the California paddled her way past makeshift warehouses, tumbledown shacks, and half-collapsed jetties; and although the wharves and the landing stages were bustling with longshoremen and expressmen and men banging at crates with hammers and mallets, they seemed to be going about their daily business with a preoccupied grimness that was unmoved by the arrival of another steamship.

Eventually, with a last honk, the California slowed, and turned, and nudged her way into Broadway Wharf, the landing stage at the foot of Telegraph Hill. The engines were stilled and the steamer drifted gradually inshore, until her hull bumped against the wharf’s wooden supports.