File:Challenge (ship, 1851) The clipper ship era 1843-1869 (1910) Page 186 14595892388).jpg

Identifier: clippershiperaep00clar (find matches)
Title: The clipper ship era : an epitome of famous American and British clipper ships, their owners, builders, commanders, and crews 1843-1869
Year: 1910 (1910s)
Authors: Clark, Arthur Hamilton, 1841-1922
Subjects: Clipper ships
Publisher: New York : G.P. Putnam's Sons
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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edits grasp upon public affairs. Now, a number ofthe newly-converted thugs, murderers, and outlaw^sof the town, whose necks had narrowly escaped thehangmans noose, formed themselves into a newVigilance Committee, to deal with CaptainWaterman and the officers of the Challenge. Theseoutcasts, crafty and unscrupulous as they were,possessed neither the courage nor the mental capa-city to carry out their own plans. They accord-ingly called a public meeting, held somewhere amongthe sandhills, at which it was decided to executeCaptain Waterman and his officers on sight, andthen burn or scuttle the vessel at her wharf. Nat-urally, the real Vigilance Committee were the firstto learn of these proceedings, and at once took thecaptain and officers under their protection, holdingthemselves in readiness to scatter the mob shouldthis measure become necessary. The crowd that gathered at the sandhills con-sisted of two or three hundred men who had latelybeen hunted from one end of San Francisco to the
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California Clipper Passages of 1851 187 other, and had prudently kept themselves stowedaway in order to escape the righteous wrath of theVigilance Committee. One can scarcely conceiveanything more grimly grotesque than the spectacleof these inexperienced reformers, in their red flan-nel shirts and black slouched hats with pistolsand bowie-knives stuck in their leather belts, andtrousers tucked into the tops of their cowhide boots,the odor of the gin palace and dance-hall clingingto their unwashed skins and clothing, as theywended their way to Pacific Wharf, where theChallenge lay moored, and demanded that CaptainWaterman and his officers be delivered over to themfor purposes of justice. As might have been expected, these gentlemen hadvanished and no one but a few members of theCommittee knew where they were. So finding thatCaptain John Land had been placed in commandof the ship, the mob seized this venerable seaman,and for more than an hour wrangled among them-selves as to whether the

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