The colonial despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia 1846-1871
Panama
The Panama 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.2Panama 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 Juarez 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, 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.