Voyage to California: Written at Sea, 1852
The Journal of Lucy Kendall Herrick

edited by Amy Requa Russell, Marcia Russell Good, and Mary Good
Lindgren with an introduction by Andrew Rolle

148 pages, 7 3/4 x 10, illus., cloth, ISBN: 0-87328-165-9, $24.95

Table of Contents  Sample Pages  

Page 1 of the Introduction to Voyage to California:

On May 25, 1852, the good ship Josephine sailed out of New York Harbor past Sandy Hook, bound for California. She was a 947-ton freighter with forty-two persons aboard. In addition to her captain and crew members, she carried eight "cabin passengers." Among them was the author of this journal, Lucy Kendall, accompanied by her mother; a teenage sister, Annie; and Harry East, an old family friend who had helped the Kendalls bear family financial burdens.

Lucy, born and educated in England, was an articulate twenty-four-year-old. No longer an adolescent like Annie, she was sensitive to her surroundings and, above all, highly intelligent. Lucy recorded both the ship's daily routine as well as the human details of her long voyage. Whether written at sea or by overlanders, such diaries became virtual live companions, onto whose pages their writers could pour out even intimate thoughts.

Although numerous women wrote overland diaries, there are few by those who traveled to California via Cape Horn. Sometimes ship captains (particularly whalers who stayed at sea for years) brought along their wives, who kept records. But Lucy's account of a voyage that lasted 137 days, from May to October 1852, stands almost alone in its excellence.

The twenty-thousand-mile trip to California via the Cape Horn route might take as many as two hundred days at sea. In March of 1849, the head of the family, Joseph Kendall, had boarded the three-masted bark Canton for San Francisco. That year alone 775 ships cleared eastern ports for California. Kendall's trip on the Canton took 188 days to complete. After a brief stay in the Sierra goldfields, he sent back enough money for his family's trip. His wife Charlotte paid $250 for each passage, or a total of $1000 for herself, her two daughters, and Harry East.

The voyage from coast to coast was a complicated one that involved crossing the tropics twice, over a period that might well last four to nine months—in both hot and cold weather. Bypassing Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, a "long easting" was necessary in order to clear Brazil's Cape St. Roque, the most easterly point of South America. This maneuver helped sailing vessels take advantage of strong northeastern trade winds.

While some clippers averaged more than two hundred nautical miles per day, Lucy recorded that at times the Josephine was becalmed, seeming hardly to be moving. After Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury, however, published his new Wind and Current Charts (1855), a number of beautiful clippers—among them the Flying Cloud ,as well as the Swordfish and Andrew Jackson—were able to round Cape Horn more rapidly. Light in weight, they did this by also cutting down the number of nautical miles formerly required. In 1851, the year before Lucy's voyage, the 1,310-ton Witchcraft, with her figurehead displaying a grim Salem witch on a broomstick, set a new record: she sailed from New York to San Francisco in only ninety-seven days. In 1852 the Flying Fish set another record with a passage of ninety-two days. Most ships took much longer. Unlucky ones foundered in heavy gales, forced to drift off a given course until the weather improved. Furthermore, like the Josephine, not all sailing vessels were even seaworthy.