Embarcadero: True Tales of Sea Adventure from 1849 to 1906 by Dillon Richard

Author:Dillon, Richard [Dillon, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: California history, ships, ocean adventures, : San Francisco, San Francisco history., sea adventures
ISBN: 9781618090379
Publisher: The Write Thought
Published: 2012-06-01T06:00:00+00:00

Wakeman sailed up the Mississippi River on the second seagoing vessel to reach Vicksburg. Here he engaged in sundry duels and romances before hurrying off to the Mexican War. He served two years carrying dispatches for Commodores Perry and Kelly. He also took a prize schooner, the Relámpago, which he used to smuggle prisoners and gold out of Tabasco, escaping from the Mexican soldiery just in time and making for New Orleans.

In the Crescent City, the owner of the schooner put the Relámpago under his command, and Wakeman prepared to make her ready for San Francisco. The schooner began to leak off Havana and he had her towed to Key West. When the vessel was surveyed, it was found it would cost too much to repair her, so he abandoned the Relámpago. The fifty passengers, mostly cutthroats on their way to mines, spread tales that Wakeman and his crew were pirates. They even went so far as to attack the house in which he was staying, but were beaten off.

Ned turned to wrecking and repairing wrecks on Key West, making enough money in this fashion to refit the Mexican schooner and take her to New Orleans for a few trading ventures to Mexico. On one of these trips, he and his entire crew came down with yellow fever, but he managed to sail the vessel from Mexico to New Orleans with a crew consisting of himself, two sick ship’s boys and a crazy passenger. He made one of the boys, Alex Childs, “captain,” and taught him the rudiments of navigation and steering. Wakeman himself was too weak to stand a trick at the wheel and, as a matter of fact, was hauled off the New Orleans dock in the dead-cart when the Relámpago finally wallowed home. He came to, however, to the surprise of the Negro driving the cart and, as he said, “I drank freely of quinine, until my head rang like a brass kettle.”

When he arrived in New York, on the mend, he saw the spanking new steamer New World on the ways, ready to be launched. With his usual bluff manner, he managed to talk his way into the command of the new vessel, built for California’s Sacramento River run between San Francisco and the entrepôt for the mines.

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