Colonial Despatches

The panama_steamerPanama was one of the first steamers built for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company's coastal Pacific trade.1 It was built for $211,000 by William H. Webb in New York, and launched on 29 July 1848; it measured 61 m by 10 m by 7 m.2 panama_steamerPanama arrived at San Francisco on 4 June 1849 and served the San Francisco to Panama run until 1853, but it made only one voyage in 1854, and in 1856-57 it served as a spare steamer in Panama city.3

From 1858 to 1861 the ship ran between San Francisco and Puget Sound; in February 1861 it was sold to Holladay and Flint.4 Holladay and Brenham gave it to Mexico in 1868, as part of a mail contract, then the Mexican government renamed it panama_steamerJuarez and employed it as a revenue and transport steamer on the Mexican coast.5

In this despatch from 1852, Douglas reports on the arrival of the panama_steamerPanama, with 750 passengers aboard, to Victoria, and that its arrival was driven by the gold excitement throughout this Colony.

• 1. John Haskell Kemble, The Panama Route, 1848-1869 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), 242.
• 2. Ibid.
• 3. Ibid.
• 4. Ibid.
• 5. Ibid.