Westbound

CHAPTER ONE

WITH HIS LEATHER SATCHEL in his lap, Elliott Madison gazed out the window of the northbound bus, amused, as always, by the ritual lunacy playing out on Polk Street. Through the smudged glass, he looked out at a uniformed meter maid standing beside her motorized cart, waving her ticket book at the outraged driver of a delivery van double-parked in front of a Korean restaurant, while a woman in a tight black dress and stiletto heels burst out the door of a nail salon, reaching up to catch her platinum white wig as she fled down the sidewalk. All Elliott could do was shake his head. For nearly forty-five minutes, he’d been looking out upon the daily bedlam, ever since he boarded the bus at the Civic Center. The 19 Polk was running so far behind schedule that he’d been tempted to get off and flag a cab. But he reminded himself that he was in no particular hurry. It had been a productive day at the library, and he liked to think of himself as a patient man, even when at the mercy of the city’s maddening public transportation system.

When the bus finally crossed Broadway at the foot of Russian Hill, he rose from his seat behind the back doors, gripping the overhead railing as he waited for the bus to pull over to the curb. As the doors folded back, he stepped down onto the sidewalk and started up the block. In his brown corduroy coat and gray felt hat, his satchel in his left hand, he was walking gingerly, his lower back stiff and tender. Several years ago, his doctor had sent him to a neurologist, who put him through a battery of diagnostic tests and determined the discomfort was caused by a herniated disc putting pressure on his sciatic nerve roots. The neurologist recommended an injection of steroids to relieve the pressure, but Elliott was hesitant. He had a lifelong aversion to needles, and the thought of having one inserted into his lower back was disconcerting, to say the least. So for now, he adhered to a pain-suppressing regimen that consisted primarily of daily doses of ibuprofen, augmented by the occasional glass of bourbon. He would submit himself to the steroid injection only when the drugs and liquor lost their efficacy, only as a last concession to his age.

At the corner, he turned onto Vallejo Street and started up the hill, the street lined with three-story apartment buildings, Edwardians mostly, painted blue and white and gray, their bay windows looming above the sidewalk. The gray shingle building he had inherited from his father was just across Larkin. He walked past the gingko planted in front of the building, across the sidewalk covered with the bright yellow leaves the tree shed every autumn, then climbed the marble steps and let himself in through the metal grate across the front porch. As the grate closed behind him, he crossed the porch and unlocked his door. After picking up the mail the carrier had slipped through the slot at the bottom of the door, he started up the two flights of stairs that led to the flat he had lived in for the past forty years.

Waiting for him at the top of the stairs was his granddaughter’s dog, a small black mutt of indiscernible breed, its left ear folded over as if he’d been sleeping on it.

Hello, Hank.

At the sound of his name, the dog turned and trotted down the hall, his tail whipping back and forth, leading Elliott to the back door with a sense of purpose if not urgency. Elliott opened the door, and Hank hustled through it, heading down the back stairs to conduct his business. As Elliott closed the door, he reminded himself that he needed to clean up the yard. It was a chore that by all rights should have been performed by his granddaughter, who had brought Hank home as a puppy three years ago, pleading with him to let her keep him, promising to attend to his every need. Elliott had agreed – but reluctantly. He could not say he was surprised to discover Alissa’s commitment to Hank’s care was aspirational, at best.

After tossing the mail onto the hutch beside the kitchen door, he noticed that the dishes he’d left in the sink that morning were no longer there. He knew Alissa hadn’t washed them. It was only when he saw the dishwasher was on its dry cycle that he remembered his housecleaner had come that day. And that was always cause for concern. After taking off his hat and draping his coat over the back of one of the chairs at the table, he made his way into the living room to conduct a quick inventory and assess the damage. He proceeded directly to the fireplace. It was only a month ago that his housekeeper had managed to knock the daguerreotypes of his great-grandparents off the mantel, the glass over the portrait of his great-grandfather cracking when it landed on the tile hearth. Elliott had had every intention of admonishing her, of reminding her just how much those daguerreotypes meant to him, but when she returned two weeks later and he saw how badly she felt about what she’d done, he found himself consoling her instead.

For as long as Elliott could remember, the daguerreotypes had resided there on the mantel, the wooden case propped open to display the two portraits mounted in oval frames. They had been taken in San Francisco in the James Ford studio on Clay Street on July 26, 1863. Photographed in the prime of his life, his great-grandfather – William Henry Madison – was a formidable, intensely serious man with dark eyes, a pronounced forehead, and robust mutton-chop sideburns. In a black frock coat and a white linen shirt with a cravat tied into a bow at the collar, he was sitting stiffly upright, unmistakably aware of the solemn image he was projecting for posterity. Elliott’s great-grandmother – Amelia Snyder Madison – was wearing a dress with a high ruffled collar, her long brown hair spun up onto the top of her head with a few errant strands brushing her slender neck. She had high cheekbones, smooth white skin, and a modest smile. Not yet thirty years old, she was uncommonly poised, her dark eyes beholding the camera, entirely unafraid in the sudden burst of flash powder.

Although his great-grandfather died in 1864, his great-grandmother lived well into her nineties, and on those occasions when Elliott and his father drove up to visit her on the family ranch, his father told him about their remarkable lives – his great-grandfather’s terrifying voyage around Cape Horn and his grim travails in the Sierra gold fields, his great-grandmother’s heartbreaking journey across the continent on the California Trail, the homestead they developed into a prosperous sheep ranch. Elliott had listened, absolutely rapt, absorbing every word. He had carried those stories with him all his life, clutching them as if they were memories of his own. And yet, it was not until he retired from the San Francisco Chronicle, where he had worked as an editor for more than thirty years, that he had finally resolved to write a book about his great-grandparents to insure they received their proper recognition as two of Mendocino County’s early pioneers.

HE HAD DECIDED to prepare a pot of clam chowder that evening. Although his granddaughter was a vegetarian, at least philosophically, she was nonetheless willing to eat clam chowder. In her view, the mollusks didn’t count, even as fish, and she was always willing to set her ethical concerns aside when it came to bacon. As he began cutting the bacon into pieces and sautéing them in a cast-iron skillet, he had no idea where Alissa was or what she might be doing, much less when she might come home. But that was nothing new. She would call when she wanted to call. She would make an appearance when the mood struck her. With regard to his granddaughter’s plans, he lived in a state of sustained ignorance, and he saw no reason to believe that might change in the foreseeable future. She had just turned twenty-three, and there were days still when he found it hard to believe that she had been living with him for the past nine years.

As he diced the onion on the cutting board, he imagined Alissa was with her bandmates, Martin and Walter, her two closest friends. To be perfectly honest, Elliott didn’t care for their music. Why his granddaughter wanted to become a drummer in a heavy metal power trio was beyond his comprehension. As a young girl, she had reluctantly consented to sit for lessons on the piano in the living room. But upon entering high school, she declared the piano lessons were over and announced that she intended to play the drums. Ignoring his own best judgment, he purchased a five-piece drum kit for her and had it set up in the garage, and that’s where she and her bandmates practiced. He had no one to blame but himself for the ghastly din that rocked the building three or four nights a week. They called themselves The Sores.

When the bacon was slightly browned, he tossed the diced onion into the skillet, sautéing it until the pieces were soft and translucent before scraping the bacon and onion into the pot of clam juice and vegetable broth. As he stirred the pot with a long wooden spoon, he realized how tired he was. It had been a long day at the library, reviewing what he hoped would be a final draft of his book about his great-grandparents, nearly fifteen years after his research began with the cache of letters and journals in the drawers of his great-grandmother’s secretary, now standing beside the fireplace in the living room.

He had read through his great-grandfather’s journals first, poring over them assiduously, page by page, taking meticulous notes. They were nothing less than a biographer’s dream. The entries in his journals are precise and unambiguous, recorded by date, typically offering a concise summation of the events of the day, and yet other entries included longer meditations on his great-grandfather’s broader ambitions and intentions. William Madison was articulate and insightful and intended for his journals to be read. He was not the kind of man to forsake the opportunity to influence his legacy. He regarded himself as one of that rare breed of men who define their time as much as their time defines them, and even in a life that would be cruelly cut short, that would, in Elliott’s humble opinion, clearly prove to be true.

He had spent that afternoon reviewing the section of his manuscript that concerned his great-grandfather’s passage around Cape Horn, a voyage that began in Charleston, South Carolina, where Madison had been born on October 3, 1819. His family had lived there since the early 1700s, residing in a brick three-story mansion complete with two tiered piazzas from which to stand in the evening breeze and gaze out at the bay. Madison had been a sickly child who suffered from severe asthma that largely confined him to bed for the first four years of his life, but he gradually outgrew his health problems, nurtured by a nanny who cared for him as if he were a child of her own. He excelled in school, and at the age of seventeen enrolled at South Carolina College in Columbia. He later earned a degree in law. At the urging of his father, a federal judge, he joined a law firm in Charleston that represented some of the most prominent men in the city, and for the next several years, he practiced law with distinction, resolving disputes among the city fathers in service of the title and authority of the Southern aristocracy.

But like the rest of the nation, Madison was intrigued by the initial reports of the discovery of gold in California. Although he had become engaged to a woman whose father owned one of the largest cotton gins in the state, with each new report from the gold fields, the greater Madison felt the temptation to join the thousands of men who had already left to seek their fortunes. Finally, he could resist that temptation no longer. A month before he was to be married, he broke off the engagement, resigned from the law firm and booked passage to California. His father pleaded with him to reconsider, but on May 17, 1851, Madison bid his family farewell, then boarded a ship named the Cordelia and sailed out of Charleston harbor.

With its two white pine masts towering 120 feet above the deck, the 320-ton brigantine promised to be a swift seaworthy vessel, and the consortium of New York investors that owned the Cordelia advertised that the passage around Cape Horn to San Francisco would take no more than four months. Elliott had studied the route the Cordelia would take, charting it on maps in the library, and he’d found it counterintuitive, to say the least, that to travel by sea to California often meant initially sailing east across the Atlantic. But that was the course selected by the captain, who wanted to avoid the heavy winds and strong equatorial currents that ran through the islands of the Caribbean. Instead, the Cordelia sailed up the Eastern Seaboard, stopping in New York and Boston before riding the Gulf Stream across the northern Atlantic.

His great-grandfather had never been out to sea for any length of time, and he and many of the other passengers became violently ill when the ship ran into a series of squalls shortly after sailing out of Boston Harbor. But Madison soon gained his sea legs and spent as little time as possible in the poorly lit, unventilated quarters below deck. He preferred standing on the foredeck and gazing out at the slate gray horizon, which is where he was on the morning of June 18, when he heard the cry from the crow’s nest that land had been spotted off the port bow.

Later that evening, he recorded that sighting in his journal, and Elliott had quoted him directly in his manuscript:

The Azores were almost impossible to make out against the horizon, but by late afternoon we could see the emerald green peaks rising out of the sea. The sight of the islands occasioned great excitement among the passengers and crew alike, for it meant we had successfully completed the first leg of our voyage.

After taking on water and supplies at Ponta Delgada, the Cordelia set a course to the south, picking up the trade winds, and soon the ship crossed the Tropic of Cancer and sailed down the west coast of Africa. Under a cloudless sky, the Cordelia glided effortlessly across the ocean, leaning away from the warming winds, skating across the waves as they sailed past the Cape Verde Islands and then bore down on the northeast coast of South America. They spotted Cape Sao Roque on the morning of June 29, and for the next six days, they made their way down the east coast of the continent, arriving at Rio de Janeiro on July 5.

The Baia de Guanabara was a magnificent natural harbor, surrounded by soaring granite monoliths with darkly forested ridges receding into the distance, and after nearly two months aboard the Cordelia, Madison and the other passengers were anxious to set foot on solid ground. The following morning, they climbed into the whaleboats and were taken ashore. Madison spent the day wandering through the city, admiring its decadent colonial architecture, walking its cobblestone streets and through its waterfront plazas and sun-drenched gardens. The steady fare of salt pork, hard bread and beans aboard the Cordelia had left him craving the simple pleasure of fresh fruit, so he indulged himself in the open markets, savoring the guavas, bananas and oranges. But he was anxious to resume the voyage to San Francisco.

Nearly two months have passed since we sailed out of Charleston, and we are not even halfway to California, he wrote. The voyage around Cape Horn is certainly going to take longer than the four months the owners of the ship advertised, which is a source of great frustration for us all.

Elliott could certainly understand that frustration. His great-grandfather was anxious to begin a new life, eager to seek his fate in the gold fields, and Elliott had to appreciate his quiet optimism and sense of anticipation. But with the benefit of hindsight, having read his great-grandfather’s journals, Elliott also knew that his great-grandfather had no idea what awaited him, the ordeal he and his fellow passengers would soon go through.

WHEN THE CLAM CHOWDER was ready, Elliott ladled it into a bowl and carried it over to the table. It was only as he set the bowl down that he realized he had forgotten to pick up some oyster crackers. He walked over to the cabinet above the counter to see if he might still have some from the last time he made the chowder, but he knew, even as he reached for the cabinet door, that he didn’t. Alissa loved oyster crackers. She ate them by the handful straight from the bag. He quickly scanned the shelves, but no, as he suspected, there weren’t any crackers. He hoped Alissa wouldn’t be disappointed. He knew she wouldn’t hesitate to let him know if she was.

He returned to the table and sat down, dipping his spoon into the chowder for a taste. As he raised the spoon to his mouth, he was surprised to hear the door at the bottom of the stairs creak open. He paused and listened to the soft thump of Alissa’s black high-top sneakers on the carpeted treads, relieved not to hear any other footsteps. He didn’t particularly care for it when Alissa brought her friends home. It made him uncomfortable to think what they might be doing behind her closed bedroom door.

As she appeared in the kitchen doorway, he said, You’re home uncommonly early.

So? she asked, as if it were an accusation.

She bent down and scooped Hank into her arms, the dog pawing at the air as she nuzzled his belly. She was wearing a pair of ragged blue jeans, ripped across her thighs as if she’d been caught in barbed wire, a black leather jacket adorned with chains. Her dyed-green hair rose from her scalp in spikes. Her bloodshot eyes were crudely outlined with dark mascara, her eyelids smeared with green eye shadow. Elliott dearly wished his daughter Claire was here to discuss these matters of dress and comportment, but he also knew that Alissa had stopped listening to her mother years ago.

I assumed you’d be out with the boys, that’s all, he said.

Martin has a cold sore on his bottom lip, she said. It’s disgusting.

I’m sorry to hear that, Elliott said.

And Walter’s in trouble for scratching his father’s car with his scooter.

I see.

Elliott pointed at the bowl on the table in front of him.

Clam chowder, he said. Shall I fix you a bowl?

I’m not hungry.

Are you sure? he asked. It’s not bad, if I do say so myself.

No, thanks, she said.

She leaned down and set the dog on the floor, then took off her jacket and dropped into the chair across from him, looking on as Hank sauntered over to his water bowl.

Has he been fed? she asked, watching the dog slurping water with his long tongue.

He most certainly has, Elliott said. And I must say his digestive system seems to be functioning properly, judging by the scale and volume of his deposits in the backyard.

Don’t be gross, she said.

Prodigious, actually, for a dog his size.

She turned to him, a stainless steel ring through her lower lip, a galaxy of stars tattooed on her neck. He wondered if she was under the influence of alcohol or marijuana. It always worried him to think his granddaughter might be intoxicated.

I’ll clean up the yard this weekend, she said.

You’ll forgive me if I don’t hold my breath, he said.

And what is that supposed to mean? she asked indignantly.

But Elliott didn’t want to argue. He was glad Alissa was home. She was often out well into the night, well into the morning, and he found it difficult to sleep when he didn’t know where she was. He tried not to worry about her; he tried to prevent his mind from indulging his darkest fears. But she felt no obligation to tell him where she was going or when she might return. And he knew better than to ask, just as he knew better than to call her on her cell phone. He certainly knew better than to let himself fall asleep in front of the television in the living room, where she might find him when she came home and think he was waiting up for her. He had to remind himself, constantly, that she was an adult, responsible for her own decisions, however ill-considered they often were.

It just means that I’ll do it, Elliott said. That’s all.

She rose from the chair and picked up her jacket.

Are you sure you won’t have a bowl of chowder? he asked.

Maybe tomorrow, she said.

Tomorrow, then, Elliott said, as if exacting a promise. I’ll try to remember to pick up some oyster crackers.

But she had already turned and walked out of the kitchen, trailed down the hall by her dog.

WHEN HE FINISHED EATING, he carried the empty bowl over to the sink, then poured himself a glass of bourbon and returned to the table. As he sat down and took a sip, he could envision the Cordelia sailing down the coast into the South Atlantic, the ocean clapping against the ship’s sturdy hull, the sails ruffling in the wind; he could see his great-grandfather standing at the gunwale, watching as an exotic new world revealed itself to him, league by league. At times they were escorted by as many as a dozen dolphins, flashing through the water alongside the ship, then bursting through the surface and arcing across the waves. Later, when they reached the colder southern waters, great blue whales rose from the depths of the ocean, spouting more than twenty feet into the air, waving their huge flukes before crashing back into the water. The days were cooled by the occasional thunderstorms that arose in the afternoons. As the storms broke apart, sunlight slanted down into the ocean.

But Madison and many of the other passengers had become increasingly concerned about the health of the captain, a former whaler named Joshua Pitts, a skeletal old man lured out of retirement by the sudden demand for passage from the great cities of the East to California.

The captain does not look well. He suffers from a violent cough that shakes the whole of his body and leaves him gasping for air. He remains in his cabin for days at a time. His first mate, a swarthy Hungarian named Spielman, has all but taken command of the ship and has proven himself to be a brutal tyrant who makes no attempt to conceal his contempt for the young seamen he commands, many of them having signed on for the voyage to California because they couldn’t afford to purchase a ticket of their own.

The weather began to turn after the Cordelia passed the mouth of Rio de la Plata. The mornings were cold and gray, the afternoons blustery. The days grew shorter and the nights longer. Above the southern horizon, they could see the Magellanic Clouds, the mysterious clusters of stars named for the Portuguese navigator who died attempting to sail around the world. The Southern Cross seemed to grow closer every night. Far to the west, they glimpsed the Patagonian coastline, the high cliffs crowned with blue-green forest, a dark plume of smoke trailing across the sky, its origin unknown.

But soon the winds drove the ship hard to the east, beyond sight of land.

After determining their longitude with his chronometer, the captain ordered Spielman to take down the mainsails and replace them with older sails stored below deck. I did not understand the purpose of the captain’s order until it was explained to me that the captain didn’t want the weather we would soon encounter to tear the newer mainsails apart. It was an explanation I found, in a word, ominous.

Five days later, the Cordelia entered the Strait de la Maire and charted a course through the uninhabited islands at the tip of the continent. The ship tacked to the north and south in the face of the heavy headwinds, heaving through the rolling ocean, rising to the crest of one wave before plunging into the deep trough below. The ocean seemed to grow angrier by the hour, the huge waves breaking over the deck. The sky darkened nearly to black, and the wind raged, as violent, Madison observed, as the hurricanes that periodically savaged the South Carolina coast.

Madison was forced to spend virtually all of his time below deck. There was no fire to warm their quarters. The whale oil lamps suspended from the ceiling were barely able to push their light into the darkness, making it virtually impossible to distinguish night from day. Many of the passengers had fallen sick again, and there was nothing that could be done for them. As the Cordelia pitched from side to side, all Madison and the other passengers could do was cling to their berths.

I am not a religious man, Madison wrote. But as I lie in my berth, listening to the quiet prayers of those who fear we are about to be lost, I envy the solace they find in appealing to their God for deliverance.

For the next eight days, the sky was clear and white, and midday on August 17, they heard the cry that land had been spotted off the starboard bow. All but the deathly ill climbed out of their berths and made their way onto the deck to look out upon the dark face of Cape Horn. The sighting cheered the assembled passengers, including Madison.

I could not but hope the worst of the voyage was behind us.

But the following day, the winds abruptly picked up again and a wall of dark clouds appeared to the west. The gale came upon them quickly. The wind howled and shrieked. As the ship plunged through the heaving ocean, the old sails began to tear apart. Hail raked down, rattling the deck and clogging the scuppers through which the water on the deck sluiced back into the ocean. The masts swung wildly across the sky, the hull groaning as if the ship might break apart. One seaman was washed overboard by the waves pounding the deck. Another, high in the rigging, lost his grip and vanished into the ocean.

The gale lasted three days before it blew itself out. Finally, they could see land on the eastern horizon. The captain emerged from his cabin, his eyes blood red and his face a pallid gray. The quartermaster had to steady him as he raised his looking glass and studied the faint blue streak of land. When Spielman turned and called out to the helmsman to set a new course to the northwest, they realized that they had finally reached the Pacific.

We felt an immense relief at having rounded the horn, Madison wrote. But I did not permit myself to participate in the extemporaneous celebration. We still face, even under the very best conditions, another eight weeks at sea before we arrive in San Francisco. Then, and only then, shall I celebrate.

ELLIOTT ROSE from the table and walked down the hall to his bedroom. His blue-and-black robe hung from a hook on the back of the closet door. After putting it on and loosely tying the sash, he made his way into the living room, where he sat at his great-grandmother’s secretary. In the right hand drawer was the first of his great-grandfather’s journals. The leather-bound volume was in poor condition, the result of its age and the difficult circumstances it had been compelled to endure. Secured with a thin strap, the cover had been embossed with his great-grandfather’s initials, but the spine had torn years ago, releasing the pages from their binding. As far as Elliott was concerned, the journal was more than a record of his great-grandfather’s voyage around Cape Horn. It was also an artifact, in and of itself, and he treated it, as