too,” says the porter, a stringy old man in a cap and a rumpled uniform. He flashes an abundance of gold teeth. A failed prospector? If the porter had been a youngster during the Gold Rush—and many Forty-niners were just kids—he could very well have scratched around in those golden-brown hills, panned the streams. Taking only a taste of fortune with him--a mouthful of gold teeth.
“Take me there.” Daniel scowls, his headache deepening. He can see it--the stringy porter’s years of searching, the frustration, his ultimate failure. Perhaps the porter wasn’t so stringy then. Perhaps he’d been a robust young man like Daniel. That is what failure does--wrings you out, plucks at your bones, sucks you dry. A failed man is a loathsome thing. And Father? Why, the eminent Jonathan D. Watkins, he is a failure, too.
“Sir, she don’t depart till half past three,” the porter says apologetically, unsure how he may have offended the young gentleman.
“Half past three! What in heaven’s name am I to do till then?”
“If you please, sir, the sights along the promenade is quite nice.” The porter points to where Miss Cameron and Miss Brownstone stroll arm-in-arm beside the rocks strewn along the steep grade of the beach.
“I think not.” Holy Rollers, indeed.
“Perhaps a gentleman like yourself would like to seek some refreshment?” The porter points in the opposite direction where sailors slouch about the docks and the murmur of distant merriment can be heard.
Refreshment. Exactly. Daniel hands more coins to the porter. “You shall watch my bags while I seek refreshment. And you shall come and fetch me when the Chrysapolis is ready to depart. Understand me?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Very good, sir. That way, sir.”
Daniel stalks along the waterfront, loosening his tie and collar. Get a hold of yourself, sir. Why should he be so disquieted by a porter? There is no such thing as equality, his friends in London say. You Americans are deluded if you believe in such nonsense. There are those who are superior, those who are inferior, and that is that. Yet the porter—if he truly is a failed prospector in more than Daniel’s imagination—is no different than Father. No different at all. In the whole scheme of things, they are truly equal.
Father fancied himself so clever. A friendship with a rich British lady during one of Mama’s many illnesses had enlightened him. Father realized that America’s rebellion could be turned to his advantage. This was the New World, replete with land and resources, cheap labor and huge ambitions. Funds were all the aspiring grubbers lacked. And funds, capital, gold could be secured from the old merchant families, royalty, continental capitalists hungry for higher returns, all eager to exploit the peasants and criminals and reprobates who were beating out a new life for themselves in this New World.
Consider the beauty of it. You loan the wretches money against their homes, their land, their businesses. Let them think they’ve won their freedom, then reinstate their servitude not by force, king, or country, but by debt.
This was part and parcel of Father’s insidious propaganda. If the strident communists and the clamoring workingmen infesting Europe are worrying you, then bring your gold to America where bold entrepreneurs are making a killing. Have you any notion, he would whisper in the ear of a French widow or a German dowager, how property values in San Francisco shot to the moon during the Gold Rush? Why, a little commercial front on Portsmouth Square with a bar slinging shots of rotgut and a rouge-et-noir game in the back was bought for six thousand dollars and sold but a few years later for one million. One million dollars, madame. El Dorado House, the first restaurant in the city serving hard-boiled eggs for five dollars apiece, leased its premises for twenty-five thousand dollars a month.
This, when men and women rolling cigars or shining shoes or stitching gentlemen’s collars earned fifty cents a day.
Oh, Father had them coming and going on both sides of the transaction. The dreaming settlers, the idealistic famers, the ambitious shopkeepers scraping out their survival in the cow towns, dead ends, tenderloins, and Chinatowns throughout the West. And the scheming capitalists, the jaded merchant dynasties, the indolent European royalty hungering for more profits, for greater cash flow.
The eminent Jonathan D. Watkins became a mortgage broker and from 1888 to 1892 extended twelve million dollars, mostly in European capital, in loans on real estate throughout the West. He put Daniel on H.M.S. May Queen on New