HIGH SEAS TO HIGH STAKES: OR AROUND THE HORN TO THE GOLD RUSH, by Ruth S. Nash, 1st Books Library (www.1stbooks.com), 2001.

You’ve got to give this book’s author credit for gumption. In the best Down East tradition, she was 80 when she earned her degree in creative writing. Her skills in this modest but informative volume are held to a minimum by the subject matter, primarily pages from her great-grandfather’s daily journal begun when he was a passenger aboard the sailing vessel Belgrade when she set sail from the mouth of the Narraguagus River, Nov. 25, 1849.

Jared Coffin Nash of Addison was that great-grandfather, and like each of the other 55 young men aboard, he was on his way around the Horn to California to join the rush for gold. At age 32, Jared was already discouraged with the hardscrabble life imposed by a Maine-coast saltwater farm. As he told his 3-year-old son when the boy asked him why he was leaving, “Life is hard for us. If I can find some gold, we can buy the things we need. Maybe we can hire some help for your mother and buy some books for you.”

The 103-foot, three-masted bark Jared and his 55 fellow gold hunters purchased was built in Cherryfield by Maine craftsmen, and a lucky thing it was. The vessel was battered but not beaten by the storm-swept seas off Cape Horn where many larger ships had been dismasted, swamped, or shattered on the Cape’s unforgiving rocky shores. But the Belgrade sailed into San Francisco Bay on May 29, 1850, some six months after Jared had waved goodbye to his wife and son on the Narraguagus shore.

If you can, try to visualize just how much space a ship of 103 feet might provide for more than 60 men. One hundred and three feet is 13 feet more than the distance from the goal line to the 30-yard line at Bangor High School’s football field. Then put this little ship in the roughest patch of ocean on the planet where waves are routinely more than 30-feet high and you’ll begin to understand not only why most of the men were seasick, but how very lucky they were to survive.

Jared, as his journals will tell you, was far too much of an optimist to be afraid. As you’ll soon learn from his artless diary, he began the long voyage charged with excitement, “jolly spirits” as he puts it, and dreams of finding his fortune waiting to be scooped from the gold-clogged rivers and streams of California.

One thing we don’t learn from Jared is just how seriously gold fever had spread throughout Maine. The departure of so many healthy, young homesteaders from this state was a calamity that took years to cure. Followed as it was by the Civil War a decade later, the Gold Rush of ’49 stopped Maine’s already faltering economic engine in its tracks. As difficult as it is to analyze the logic of why a young husband and father would simply walk out the door with his dreams in hand, Jared’s journal gives readers a fine insight into the thoughtless optimism that fueled such departures.

There’s a bit of ironic amusement in Jared’s distress at not finding letters from his wife when he arrives in California. “I fear there’s something wrong at home” he writes. “I’ve not heard a word from my dear Wife.” The reader must wonder what Jared expected. One day he’s out plowing the back 40 in Addison, the next he’s walking out the door telling Wife he’ll come back a rich man. Meanwhile, however, she’ll have to make do alone and on her own. And she did, too, for two long years until Jared showed up at her door, skinny, humbled, and no longer suffering from gold fever. I asked myself why Wife didn’t give him a quick kick in his knapsacks.

Instead she welcomed him with open arms and Jared shaped up quickly, becoming the master of a shipyard that built some of Maine’s finest wooden sailing ships. His dreams of gold had proved a cruel illusion, but his quest, and that of thousands like him, helped open the American West, the region that has given us John Wayne and George Bush I and II.