The wharf below him was tumultuously crowded with merchants and longshoremen and hotel agents, and the noise of shouting and hammering and whistling was deafening. Collis hadn’t expected a hero’s welcome. After all, those San Franciscans who hadn’t struggled across the plains and mountains of America by horse or wagon train had made the same 5450-mile voyage and crossed the isthmus of Panama just as he had. But he would have thought a modest cheer and a handshake might have been fitting instead of this avaricious hubbub. Almost the entire population of San Francisco seemed to be swarming like a colony of termites, ready to overrun the ship as soon as the gangplank was down and pillage everything that wasn’t firmly screwed to the deck.

He remembered Andrew Hunt’s cautioning words, and he elbowed his way forward through the passengers lining the rail, and found his trunk. He stood by it, and even when a portly roofing salesman stepped backward on to his foot, he determined to remain by it at all costs.

At last, the gangplank was dropped to the wharf with a resonant bang, and before any of the passengers had the chance to step on to it, a feverish crowd of men in beaver hats and chequered vests and shapeless tailcoats came arguing and pushing and scrambling on to the steamer’s deck and collared each of the passengers in turn to see if he had any cargo on board the California he wanted to part with — any dry goods, perfumes, haberdashery, digging tools, or liquor. Most of these men carried a small sack of gold dust, which they waved in front of the startled passengers’ noses, or poured out into the palms of their hands, glittering and yellow, to tempt the unwary into making a quick sale. What most of the greenhorns hadn’t had time to understand was that a case of beans out here was worth more than gold dust, and that any luxury items like soap or perfume could fetch a fortune among the ladies of South Park, or the prostitutes in the centre of town.