1851 The Nicaragua Route

From San Francisco I took passage on the North America, one of the Pacific Mail steamers running the Nicaragua route, paying my fare in gold dust. Everything I’d earned in two years lay against my ribs, sewn into a belt of canvas and buckskin. The rest—assay packets wrapped in spare socks—rode in my valise. I meant to reach Maine with it all.

We made our way through the abandoned ships riding at anchor. Some had lain there so long they’d grown a beard of seaweed along the waterline. I took a long look at the Algoma, then watched the burned out city fade into the mist. If I was on the side of luck, I would be back by autumn, the rains and snow falling steady and San Francisco righting itself—this time with wider streets, cisterns, brick and fire codes.

On my first voyage, I had come to California over the long Mexican road—a journey of weeks. The newer Nicaragua line was supposed to be faster and safer. I didn’t yet know the jungle kept its own books and collected its debts in fever.

The North America was a side-wheel steamer—a wonder to me, who’d spent my youth building sailing ships in South Thomaston. Her paddles thrashed the gray Pacific, throwing spray higher than a mainsail, and her tall black stacks poured smoke where canvas ought to have been. The decks trembled with the thud of the engines. It was a new kind of power—noisy, ugly maybe, but sure. I stood at the rail a long while, thinking how the world was changing faster than a man could plane a plank.

We made good time down the coast. The decks were full—most of the men gaunt, clutching buckskin bags or tobacco tins that held all they had left. The talk was of the Great Conflagration, sickness, swindles. I kept mostly to myself, watching the long rollers come in from the west. The sea air felt clean. I was traveling light, but my purse was full.

On the eighth morning we dropped anchor at dawn in a blue bay hemmed by jungle hills — San Juan del Sur. It was hardly more than a notch in the coast, a crescent of white sand and palm thatch; it looked like another world. The air itself was alive — heavy, wet, and hot enough to make a man sweat just breathing. Another town in transition, full of men waiting for transport east.

Boats swarmed out before the anchor chain had stopped running. Bare-chested boatmen shouted in Spanish, their voices bright and sharp across the still water. The sea below was the color of melted glass, warm as a bath.

On shore, the heat deepened — a wall of it, thick with the smell of smoke, fruit, and tar. That tar hit first: sharp and familiar, pine pitch mixed with salt. Men were heating it in pots along the beach, brushing it into the seams of canoes and skiffs. The scent caught in my throat and steadied me — a smell I understood.

Sweat ran down my back in rivulets. The sand burned through the soles of my boots. The whole town tilted toward the water, a scatter of huts and sheds baking under the sun. A few wooden storehouses leaned on piles, their walls blistered and salt-streaked. The air quivered around them, as if the world itself were breathing.

Donkeys brayed in the road. Mules stamped and shivered under their loads. Women sold fruit from baskets — mangoes split open like hearts, pineapples with juice running down the sides, coconuts cracked with machetes. A boy handed me a mango, and its sweetness stunned me. I hadn’t tasted anything so fresh in two years.

The North America’s purser shouted us into line for the inland crossing. Baggage was weighed, stamped, and sent ahead to the mule yard. The animals shifted, tails flicking, their hides shining. The saddles were rawhide and rope — rough work compared to the joinery I knew, but they would serve. My mule was dun-colored with ears like paddles. I patted her neck and told her I’d built boats steadier than her. She flicked a fly and ignored me.

We rode inland in a long file, single and slow. The heat came down like a living thing. The trail climbed through vines thick as cables and dropped into mud that sucked at the hooves. The air was heavy with rot and sap, a sweetness that clung to the tongue. Parrots shrieked overhead; something answered from the brush — monkey, perhaps.

Every few miles a boy appeared with a gourd of water for sale. The water was warm and tasted of wood, but we drank it down. A man from Illinois fainted clean off his mule and never rose again. Two locals carried him toward a hut by the trail while the rest of us rode on, each pretending not to see.

By late afternoon the trail began to open. The green thinned. The air shifted. We crested a low rise just as the light began to soften, and there before us lay Lake Nicaragua — wide as an inland sea, the surface holding the sky in dull silver.

We kept on the trail and reached La Virgen just before nightfall. Near the landing a lake steamer lay quiet at anchor, her hull dark against the water. Beyond her rose the twin heights of Ometepe Island, one volanic cone clean and sharp, the other shouldered in cloud.

There was no town to speak of — only long sheds, a plank landing, stacks of freight, and men sprawled where they could find space. The steamer would not cross in darkness. We were told she would take on passengers at first light.

Workmen began lifting the cargo from the mule packs and carrying it down to the steamer’s hold, their silhouettes moving back and forth in the last of the light. The animals stood blowing in the heat, tails switching, while the lake darkened beyond them.

I paid a coin for the luxury of a hammock strung between two poles near the shore. Supper came from a woman tending a small fire beside the landing. Two blackened pots simmered over the coals, and on the table beside her lay a neat stack of banana leaves in place of plates. She ladled out a mound of rice and beans, added a strip of fried plantain and a little salt fish besides, then folded the leaf around it like a parcel.

I carried it back to the hammock, sat down in the warm sand, and ate with both hands, the steam rising into the heavy evening air. I had not known how hungry I was until the first mouthful. The rice was soft, the beans rich with grease and smoke, the plantain sweet as honey.

Night settled slowly over the landing. The mules shifted in their lines and a bell clinked somewhere in the dark. Mosquitoes rose from the lake in clouds. Now and then something stirred in the water and the surface flashed faintly blue, as though the lake held its own small stars.

Keeping my belt tight against my ribs, my pack of belongings under my arm, exhaustion overtook me. Mosquitoes rose off the water in clouds. The air did not cool. Somewhere in the dark a man coughed and did not stop. The lake lay still as hammered tin. I covered myself in the net provided. Sleep came easily that night.

At dawn the whistle sounded.

I struggled out of the hammock, my legs aching from the mule ride the day before, but I managed to make my way down to the lake. The water was warm as bathwater. I splashed my face and neck, then headed toward the landing where the morning crowd was already gathering.

A line formed beside a cooking fire. Two women worked there with the steady rhythm of long practice. One tended a pot of coffee while the other turned tortillas on a flat iron plate. A third pot of beans simmered beside it, and fried plantains hissed in a shallow pan, their edges going brown and sticky.

For a few coins they handed out breakfast on folded banana leaves — a pair of tortillas, a scoop of beans, and a strip of plantain. If you had a tin cup, which I did at the ready, you could take a measure of sweet coffee strong enough to wake the dead.

Men stood wherever they could find room, eating with their fingers, belts and buckskin bags close under their shirts. The lake lay gray and still beyond the landing, and the steamer had begun to raise steam for the crossing.

When I'd finished eating, I stood in the line at another vendor selling food for the long lake crossing and bought a half a dozen tamales and small hoard of fruit — mangoes, oranges, a pineapple already cut and wrapped in leaves — enough food to carry me across the lake.

The steamer Director's purser took our names and marked them in a ledger with ink that ran in the damp. Soon we were ferried to the boat, crowded aboard, every man claiming a patch of deck or railing.

The Director’s paddles began to turn, sluggish at first, then steady, churning brown water into foam. A shout went up from the wharf, and we eased out across the lake. The wind freshened as we gained distance, and the smell of green things fell away. I could feel my shirt drying on my back for the first time since the Pacific. I found a place to sit at the bow, leaned my back into a crate and nodded to the man beside me. We exhanged names and a few plesantries, but neither of us were in a talkative mood.

The mountains in the distance were violet, the volcanos mostly swallowed by clouds. Paddle wheels thumped a steady beat like a heartbeat in the hull. Men were quiet for once, except to sigh.

I thought of all that lay between me and home—a river still to descend, another steamer to catch, the wide Atlantic beyond—but for that hour, with the lake stretching out like a sheet of pewter and a cool wind on my face, I felt nearer to Maine.

After some hours, I got up to stand at the rail, watching the volcanoes rise out of the lake—their tops lost in cloud—and felt an old ache settle in me. In the same breath, I looked forward to seeing my family, but longed to get back to California.

The lake was quiet under us, smooth as hammered pewter.

The boat kept on toward San Carlos, her paddles beating steady, but part of me stayed behind. The breeze turned to a wind pefect for sailing and the clouds moved on, giving us a pefect view of Ometepe Island, home to the Maderas volcano.

When evening came I found the place by the crate still empty. The man beside it told me he'd saved it. I shared tamales and fruit with the fellow and we talked until dark.

By morning we sighted San Carlos, where the lake narrows and pours itself into the San Juan River. The current was brown and swift, flecked with driftwood. A low fort stood on the bluff above—old Spanish stone, half swallowed by vines. Beyond it lay the river, winding east through a dense forrest.

We transferred to smaller boats—long dugouts and flat-bottomed barges, each with native boatmen at the poles. The Director’s engineer sold us canvas awnings for shade, but the air below them turned thick as soup. The first stroke of the poles set us gliding into a world of water and green shadow.

The jungle leaned close on both sides. Trees arched overhead, their roots in the current, their branches hung with orchids and vines like ropes, the smell of earth, rot, flowers, and the sour breath of animals we couldn’t see. Birds flashed by in streaks of blue and red; monkeys barked from the canopy; and all around us, the din of insects rose and fell like wind through tangled rigging.

The river steamed and the air sat still. Sweat ran into my eyes then down my face until I could taste salt. A man heading to his home in Boston started shivering before noon and lay under his coat, teeth chattering. By evening his skin had gone yellow. The boatmen said nothing; I figured they’d seen it too often.

Rain came the next day—not in drops but in sheets that turned the river to mist. We pulled to shore under a curtain of vines and waited it out. The ground was spongy underfoot, frogs shrilling, leeches on our boots. The rain passed quickly; the forest turned steamy. The man from Boston didn’t take his place in the boat.

At night we tied up to the bank, hammocks slung under awnings. Fireflies drifted over the water. Somewhere an animal screamed—sharp, human-sounding—then silence. I lay awake listening to water drip through leaves and thought of cold nights on the Maine coast, the sound of surf under a wooden hull.

Days blurred together. Fever carried off another man; one fell overboard and vanished before we could reach him. Yet the river pulled us on. We passed villages—children waving from the bank—and once, the wreck of a boat caught high in a tree, left there by a flood.

At last the water widened, the current slowed, and a salty smell came on the wind. Palms thinned to open marsh. We had reached San Juan del Norte. The steamer Crescent City was waiting at anchor, her black hull streaked with rust.[1] The sight of her—massive and solid—was a joy to see.

We loaded into surf boats for the run out to the ship. The Caribbean Sea was rolling high across the bar, the color of an emerald. Our boatmen timed their pull between the breakers, shouting in Spanish, the oars rising and falling in rhythm. Spray came over the bow, warm as bathwater.

The steamer loomed above us. A rope ladder hung down from the rail, swaying against the plates, the lowest rung slapping the water. When our boat rose on a swell the boatmen steadied it and one by one we grabbed the ladder and climbed. The rope was stiff with salt, rough under the hands. My boots slipped on the wet rung, and the sea dropped away beneath me as the boat fell back. For a breath I hung in the air, my weight on my arms, before the next wave lifted the boat, the ladder steadied, and I regained my footing.

I climbed because there was no choice. Wind tore at my hat and my shoulders burned. A sailor leaned over the rail, caught my wrist and hauled me up and over. I hit the deck on my knees, breathing hard, seawater running off me. I crawled out of the way and hauled myself to my feet. Below us the surf boat pulled away to load another line of passengers. I could feel the sea swell beneath the hull, blue-green water over the bar. I leaned on the rail, heart still hammering, and caught my first clear glimpse of the eastward horizon.

For several days we steamed our way east over open water, the sea changing its moods with the weather—emerald in the morning light, deep blue under the noon sun, and black as ink after dark. Flying fish skittered from the bow wave, and now and then the trade wind freshened enough to make the rigging hum.

As we came into the Jamaica early morning, the ruins of Port Royal slid past on our starboard side—the old pirate town half sunk in the sea. The steamer slowed, her paddles turning easy, and I could see church spires leaning out of the water like broken masts. Sailors along the rail pointed them out, saying an earthquake had taken the town whole.

As for Kingston, the town was as colorful as any I'd ever seen. The harbor ringed with green hills, and beyond them rose the Blue Mountains, their tops lost in cloud. Along the water’s edge the city sprawled, palms waving above red-roofed warehouses. I filled my pockets with small coin and went ashore with my knapsack—no plan except to find food and walk. The air was salt and sweet at once.

A woman, more black than brown, had a stall under a canvas awning, her charcoal brazier glowing red, She wore a yellow headscarf and a blue cotton dress, her laughter carrying over the noise of the crowded street. On her pan, plantains sizzled beside a heap of salted fish.

“Mawnin’, sah. Come get yuh breakfas’—hot plantain, salt-fish, coffee fresh-brew.”

The words came quick and warm, the vowels long and rolling, every syllable touched with music. I couldn’t catch it all as she bantered with familiar customers, but the sound of her voice was like sunlight breaking over the harbor.

She served me a tin plate with fried plantains, a generous strip of fish, and pile of johnny cakes. The coffee was black and strong enough to nearly knock me out of my boots. I ate sitting on a low wall by her kitchen on the wharf. Boats creaked at anchor, gulls screamed overhead.

When I finished, she handed me a coconut shell filled with mango, grinning. “Sweet, eh?” she said.

“Sweet,” I agreed, juice running down my chin. “Delicious breakfast, best I’ve ever had.”

She laughed again, shaking her head. “See, sah, Jamaica feed yuh good.”

I thanked her and left her an extra coin. As I walked away, her voice followed me through the market, rising above the bustle of the crowd.

Women, if not in white, wore bright cotton dresses, balancing baskets on their heads—bananas, oranges, mangoes, and limes shining like jewels. Boys darted between carts with coconuts, the tops cut clean off and ready for drinking. Sailors, soldiers, clerks, and barefoot porters all mixed together. Every face was different—white, brown, and black.

It was a British town, though no one could mistake it for England. The soldiers in red coats looked out of place under the palms, while the bells of the churches rang—for what reason I didn’t understand. Yet the city had its own kind of order—commerce, noise, and laughter holding it together. I’d read about Jamaica’s old days, the sugar ships, revolts that ended slavery, and the earthquake that sent Port Royal into the sea, but seeing it pulsing before me was something else.

By noon the sun grew fierce. I followed the smell of spice and smoke to a narrow lane near the market, where a woman tended a pot that steamed like a forge. She ladled out a dark stew thick with peppers, beef, and cassava—pepper pot, she called it—and set a wedge of bammy beside it, crisp and golden from the fire. I sat on a bench and ate slow. The broth was hot enough to bring tears, but the flavor was deep—smoke, salt, and a sweetness I couldn’t name. The bammy, as it was so-called, soaked it up like a sponge, soft inside, with a taste of earth and woodsmoke.

The woman handed me a stone bottle of ginger beer to chase the fire. It was cool and sharp, bubbles stinging my tongue, the ginger burning in a good way down the throat. I finished every drop and set the bottle on the table. She laughed and said I looked “half alive again,” and I reckoned she was right.

Colors of the market seemed brighter after that meal. The afternoon passed slow and golden. I walked the length of King Street, stopping now and then in the shade of an awning to watch the traffic of carts and horses, bought another ginger beer, and sipped it under a palm. The rum shops spilled music and laughter into the street; children splashed in the shallows by the pier. The whole city seemed to move to the rhythm it created.

Toward evening the light turned soft and honey-colored. The Blue Mountains glowed faintly in the haze, and cooking fires sent ribbons of smoke up through the palm trees. I made my way back to the docks, first filling my pack with oranges, limes and a linen bag filled with pineapples—gifts for the family that weren’t expecting me.

I found a cook-shop not far from the pier—just a shed with tables under a thatched roof, lanterns swinging from the beams. The smell of chicken and peppers reached me before I’d even stepped inside.

A woman behind the counter dipped her ladle into a black iron pot and served me a plate of brown-stewed chicken with rice and peas. The meat fell off the bone, and the rice was soft with coconut milk and spiced with thyme. I ate slow, each bite full of heat, salt, and sweetness. When I finished, she set down a mug of rum without asking. “You look like yuh need it, sah,” she said with a grin. She was right. I drank deep. The rum went through me warm as sunlight, and the noise of the city—the laughter, the fiddles, the soft call of drums somewhere up the street—seemed to settle into one steady rhythm.

The smell of spice and smoke followed me down the pier. I hadn't had my fill of Jamaica—its food, its clamor, its warmth—but Maine called.

The ship's whistle began blowing. As we raised anchor, I looked back at Kingston under the mountain’s shadow—the white sails in the harbor, the swirl of people along the quay—and thought it one of the liveliest and loveliest places in all of my travels.

Night came quick in the tropics. The stars came out fierce and close, and the sea ahead was smooth as glass. I leaned on the rail, the engine’s thrum steady underfoot, and watched the last lights of Jamaica go out.

The voyage had blurred into days, days into weeks, and before I understood how far the world had carried me, the Crescent City was easing into New York Harbor on June 18th. Within days I was back in South Thomaston.[2]

When my father caught sight of me, he met the distance and took me in his arms so hard he knocked my hat off. His first words, once he could form them, told me that Josiah had left for California in April and Nathaniel had left home soon after—but disappeared without a trace. As for Josiah, father expected to get a letter before summer was out.

Mother came out of our big farmhouse, grinning and flapping her apron. She sprinted down the steps and when I reached her I picked her up into a long embrace. Word spread fast. I hadn’t been home but an hour when relatives and neighbors began filling it.

NOTES

1 New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820–1957, entry for E. S. Graves, age 29, occupation Trader, arrived June 18 1851 on the Crescent City from Chagres and Kingston, Jamaica; digital image at Ancestry.com (accessed March 2025); citing National Archives Microfilm Publication M237, Records of the U.S. Customs Service, Record Group 36, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

2 Ibid.