Survey of The Pacific Coast
On 27 October 1848 A.D. Bache, Superintendent U.S. Coast Survey, instructed him to go to San Francisco, California to begin "the survey of the Western Coast of the United States."
After sailing from New York McArthur was delayed in Panama by the influx of settlers in the California Gold Rush. In Panama, McArthur was asked to captain a former coal storage ship to San Francisco. The von Humboldt left Panama on 21 May 1849 and took 102 days to arrive at San Francisco, the first 46 of which were spent getting to the Mexican port of Acapulco. Among the four hundred passengers on von Humboldt were Collis P. Huntington, the future president of the Southern Pacific Railroad and San Francisco Society portrait painter Stephen W. Shaw.
In September 1849, Lieutenant Commander McArthur was placed in command of the US survey schooner Ewing. The survey faced huge problems including a mutiny when crew members rowing into the city from the Ewing threw an officer overboard in an attempt to desert to flee to the gold fields.
Faced with rainy weather in the early survey of Mare Island he wintered in Hawaii meeting the Hawai'ian monarch King Kamehameha III and returned to San Francisco in the spring of 1850 with the coastal survey beginning of northern California on 1850-04-03 and continued up to the mouth of the Columbia River.
He returned to San Francisco in September.
Read more about this topic: William Pope Mc Arthur
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“I need not tell you of the inadequacy of the American shipping marine on the Pacific Coast.... For this reason it seems to me that there is no subject to which Congress can better devote its attention in the coming session than the passage of a bill which shall encourage our merchant marine in such a way as to establish American lines directly between New York and the eastern ports and South American ports, and both our Pacific Coast ports and the Orient and the Philippines.”
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“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
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On which the Prince of Glory died,
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By a thin sea of flesh
And a bone coast ...”
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