Читать книгу The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). The History of Sea Voyages, Discovery, Piracy and Maritime Warfare онлайн

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These remarks are not made to deter adventurous spirits from going abroad; but we would advise them to “look well before they leap.” But how utterly unfitted for mining-work were the larger part of the young men who had travelled so far, only to be disappointed. There was no doubt of the gold being there: two hundred ounces of the precious metal have been “washed out” in an eight hours’ “shift” (a “shift” is the same as a “watch” on board ship); and this was kept up for many days in succession, the miners working day and night. But that mine had been three years in process of development, and only one of the original proprietors was among the lucky number of shareholders. A day or so before the first gold had been found—“struck” is the technical expression—his credit was exhausted, and he had begged vainly for flour, &c., to enable him to live and work. The ordinary price of a very ordinary meal was two dollars; and it will be seen that, unless employed, or simply travelling for pleasure, it was a ruinous place to stop in. Fancy, then, the condition of perhaps as many as 4,000 unemployed men, out of a total of 7,000 men, on the various creeks, a good half of whom were of the middle and upper classes at home. But for one happy fact, that beef—which, as the miners said, packed itself into the mines (in other words, the cattle were driven in from a distance of hundreds of miles)—was reasonably cheap, hundreds of them must have starved. Everything—from flour, tea, sugar, bacon, and beans, to metal implements and machinery—had to be packed there on the backs of mules, and cost from fifty cents and upwards per pound for the mere cost of transportation. Tea was ten shillings a pound, flour and sugar a dollar a pound, and so on. Those who fancy that gold-mining, and especially deep gravel-mining, as in Cariboo, is play-work, may be told that it is perhaps the hardest, as it is certainly the most risky and uncertain, work in the world; and that it requires machinery, expensive tools, &c., which, in places like Cariboo, cost enormous sums to supply. If labour was to be employed—good practical miners, carpenters, &c. (much of the machinery was of wood)—received, at that period, ten to sixteen dollars per day. This digression may be pardoned, as the sea is so intimately bound up with questions of emigration. Apart from this, from personal observation, the writer knows that quite a proportion of miners have been sailors, and, in many cases, deserted their ships. In the “early days” of Australia, California, and British Columbia, this was eminently the case.