San Francisco Rice Imports From Late 1852 to Early 1853 Point to Market Specifics of Joshua Norton’s Gambit

Norton Biographer William Drury Overdramatized the Rice Shortage Leading Up to Fateful Contract

TO HEAR William Drury tell it, San Francisco was completely out of rice in the period before Joshua Norton and his partners contracted to buy a 200,000-lb. cargo of it on 22 December 1852.

Here’s how Drury set the scene in his 1986 biography, Norton I: Emperor of the United States.

China, which supplied the rice that California consumed, suffered a terrible famine and banned the export of grain. Norton's mule ceased to plod, the ship's wheel ceased to turn, and the price of rice climbed from four cents a pound to thirty-six. That would mean a windfall for the trader who could supply it, but there was none to be bought. At the Merchant's Exchange, where Norton went daily to bid for cargoes, he anxiously watched the board for news of a shipment. Then, one day, a shipping agent took him aside to whisper the word that would dramatically change his life.

The German firm of Godeffroy & Sillem was the largest mercantile banking house in the city. Alfred Godeffroy and Willy Sillem were members of the McAllister set, and not at all averse to doing a friend a favor that would also benefit themselves.

Sillem showed Norton some rice.

"That's from Peru, and there are two hundred thousand pounds of it in the Glyde."

Capital news! Where was the Glyde!

"In the bay. She cannot discharge because of the weather, but you may have the whole of her cargo if you buy it before anyone else gets wind of it.

And the price!

"Twelve and a half cents a pound. Twenty-five thousand dollars was an enormous amount to risk on a venture in those days, but the rice would be worth seventy-two thousand at the current retail price (and to arrive at a better understanding of today's value, simply multiply by ten).

Sillem, acting for the consignors, Ruiz Brothers of Lima, Peru, agreed to accept two thousand dollars as a down payment with this proviso written into the contract: "Payment to be made cash before delivery of any portion, and the whole to be taken away and paid for within thirty days." The date was December 22, 1852. Norton signed the agreement, paid the deposit, and told his stockman in the Genesee to clear the decks for rice.

And then the blow fell.

Next day, the Syren sailed into port with 218 barrels of Peruvian rice. And the day after that, Christmas Eve, the Merceditas arrived with two hundred thousand pounds. Then came the Dragon with two hundred and fifty thousand, followed by ship after ship with barrel upon barrel until the market was glutted and the price just three cents a pound.

The notion that the “rice spigot” was turned off then magically turned back on the day after Joshua put his money down on the only shipload of rice in San Francisco makes for a good story — which no doubt is the reason why this simplistic version of events is what it seems that most tellers of the Norton tale have been repeating for years.

But, much of what Drury relates here — including Norton’s dialog with Sillem and the claim that no rice cargoes had been arriving in San Francisco — is an imagined fiction, calculated for dramatic effect.

The reality was more complicated and nuanced.

The Daily Alta newspaper published a daily column during this period, “Importations,” that simply listed which commercial vessels had landed in San Francisco harbor and what each vessel was carrying — including rice.

A review of these listings for the period from late 1852 to early 1853 — the months leading up to, and following, Norton’s rice contract of December 1852 — suggests that, in his 1939 biography Emperor Norton: The Mad Monarch of America, Drury’s predecessor Allen Stanley Lane painted a more honest picture of the rice situation Norton sought to leverage. (See below for details.)

Here’s how Lane put it:

Some of [Norton’s] largest speculations were in rice. Owing to the extremes of scarcity of this staple during the summer and autumn of 1852, its price soared to sensational heights. From four cents a pound in June, it jumped to thirty-two cents in September. Then ships arrived with rice cargoes, and the market fell to normal. In December, the supply again became scarce, it grew less daily, and the newspapers reported that further exportation of rice from China had been prohibited.

In other words, there was indeed a “slow flow” of rice coming into San Francisco — but not the “no flow” that Bill Drury claimed some 50 years later.

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BELOW ARE the San Francisco rice arrivals between September 1852 and January 1853.

This is the period extending from four months before Joshua Norton and William Sim dba “Joshua Norton & Co.” on 22 December 1852 signed a contract with Jose Maria Ruiz, Francisco Ruiz and Manuel Ruiz dba "Ruiz, Hermanos” to purchase 200,000 lbs. of rice…

…until Ruiz, Hermanos sued Joshua Norton & Co. on 21 January 1853 for non-payment.

The information is from the regular “Importations” column of the Daily Alta newspaper. To view the columns in scans of the original newspaper editions, see (from the California Digital Newspaper Collection) the full chronologically ordered search results combining the terms “importations” and “rice” as these terms appear in the Alta in 1852 (here) and 1853 (here).

For each cargo listed below, the vessel name is followed by the amount of rice on the vessel.

The date is the date of publication of the information in the Alta — not necessarily the precise date of landing.

TWO CAVEATS…

Units of measure
There are numerous references to specific container-units of measure without information about per-container weights or volumes. I am out of my depth in translating these and have been unable to find a good resource on prevailing uses in mid-19th-century commerce.

For example: I know that barrels, tierces and hogsheads all are containers that look, to the modern eye, like barrels — but that these relate to relative sizes:

hogshead > tierce > barrel

I also know that “barrels” for whisky, for beer and for dry goods (like rice) all can be different sizes.

Were the dry-goods volumes for each of these containers standardized in 1852? And: How did these relate to casks and kegs?

Likewise, there are references to mats, sacks, bags and packages with no weight specifications. Were the weights of these standardized?

The rice that Joshua Norton contracted to buy was listed as being in 100-lb. “sacks.” A month later, a listing shows an arrival of rice in 50-lb. “bags.” Were “sacks” always 100 lbs. and “bags” always 50?

I’d be grateful to hear from anyone with knowledge of mid-19th-century commercial shipping.

Search results
At historical newspaper database sites like the California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC) — or Genealogy Bank or Newspapers.com, two other historical newspaper resources that I use on a daily basis — search results like those I’m presenting here from CDNC are based on the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) texts auto-generated by digital scans of the papers themselves.

So, the quality of search results is only as good as the quality of the OCR text. The text would need to be entirely corrected “by hand” in order to approach 100% reliability. But, with anywhere from 10 million to several hundreds of millions of newspaper pages just in the three databases I mention, that level of reliability is a human impossibility.

This means that the results of searches on given terms reveal a percentage of what is in the newspapers themselves.

Almost certainly, the Daily Alta reported rice cargoes that are not reflected in the search results.

With that said, here are the San Francisco rice arrivals that a baseline search of the Daily Alta for September 1852 – January 1853 reveals:

1852

11 Sep — the most recent previous rice cargo being reported on August 18th
Desdemona — 144 sacks & 297 mats (per-sack and per-mat weights not given)

12 Sep
Hannibal — 400 bags (per-bag weight not given)

26 Sep
North Carolina — 145 packages (per-package weight not given)

29 Sep
Union — 3 hogsheads

1 Oct
S.S. Bishop — 50 half-barrels

3 Oct
Walter — 400 bags (per-bag weight not given)

7 Oct
Berkshire — 2,370 bags (per-bag weight not given)

11 Oct
Antelope — 50 tierces & 50 barrels

16 Oct
Lady Franklin — 45 half-barrels

19 Oct
Carioca — 24 casks

20 Oct
Duke of Brontes — 1,500 bags (per-bag weight not given)
Racer — 10 tierces

21 Oct
Hurricane — 1,000 packages (per-package weight not given)
Hyppogriffe — 50 barrels
Samoset — 100 half-barrels & 200 kegs

27 Oct
Mary A. Jones — 40 bags (per-bag weight not given)

3 Nov
Cohota — 200 half-barrels & 100 kegs

9 Nov
Eureka — 1 tierce

13 Nov
Volant — 5,340 packages (per-package weight not given)

14 Nov
Harkaway — 55 barrels

15 Nov
Jamestown — 10 barrels

23 Nov
Sarah Hooper — 3,500 bags (per-bag weight not given)

27 Nov
John C. LeGrand — 252 bags (per-bag weight not given)

28 Nov
Winged Arrow — 20 barrels & 100 kegs

1 Dec
J. M. Ugarte — 300 sacks (per-sack weight not given)
Raven — 8 tierces

2 Dec
Onward — 20 barrels

3 Dec
Defiance — 5 barrels

5 Dec
Hamburg — 69 barrels
Tropic — 1 cask
Union — 156 bags (per-bag weight not given)

9 Dec
Polynesia — 20 casks

10 Dec
Sea Witch — 11 tierces

11 Dec
Samuel Russell — 70 barrels & 10 half-barrels

15 Dec
Palmetto — 800 bags (per-bag weight not given)

20 Dec
Comet — 25 barrels

22 Dec (see column below)
Glide — 2,000 100-lb. sacks — the cargo that Joshua Norton & Co. contracted to buy
R.B. Forbes — 50 barrels

“Importations” column listing rice cargo of the Glide, which Joshua Norton & Co. contracted on 22 December 1852 to purchase, Daily Alta California, 22 December 1852, p. 2. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

23 Dec
Lion — 972 sacks (per-sack weight not given)

24 Dec
Syren — 118 barrels & 100 half-barrels

The following ad that Joshua Norton placed in the Daily Alta indicates (“Ex Syren”) that he and his partners purchased some, or all, of this rice cargo as well.

Joshua Norton & Co. ad selling rice from the Syren, Daily Alta California, 28 December 1852, p. 2. Source: California Daily Newspaper Collection

25 Dec
Mercedita — 2,082 bags (per-bag weight not given)

1853

5 Jan
Golden Fleece — 225 barrels & 136 half-barrels

6 Jan
Arcole — 1 barrel

7 Jan
Monsoon — 5 hogsheads

9 Jan
Charles Mallory — part of 4 boxes that also included shovels
Dragon — 2,465 bags & 533 mats (per-bag and per-mat weights not given)
Souter Jonny — 11 barrels

10 Jan
Malay — 6 barrels

11 Jan
Ocean Queen — 8,762 bags (per-bag weight not given)

13 Jan
Albatross — 20 casks

18 Jan
George Fyfe — 13, 353 bags (per-bag weight not given)
Zara — 4,375 50-lb. bags

25 Jan
Pilar Soldedo — 20 sacks (per-sack weight not given)

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