Saratoga
The wooden sidewheel steamer Cortes, originally christened the Saratoga, was 67 m long.1 It was built in New York in 1852, for Davis Brooks and Company, for $198,000.2 It sailed for San Francisco on 10 July 1852 and operated between San Francisco and Panama for the New York and San Francisco Steamship Line until the following summer, when it was purchased by Cornelius Vanderbilt, who ran it between San Francisco and San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, until March 1855.3
In 1858 and 1859, it sailed between San Francisco and Panama, for the New York and California Steamship Company, and in 1860 for the Atlantic and Pacific Steamship Company.4 The Pacific Mail Steamship Company purchased it in 1860 and kept it on the Panama route until February 1861, when it sold it to Flint and Holladay, who chartered it to China in 1862, where it remained until 1865, when it burned at Shanghai.5
  • 1. John Haskell Kemble, The Panama Route, 1848-1869 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), 222.
  • 2. Ibid.
  • 3. Ibid.
  • 4. Ibid.
  • 5. Ibid.
Mentions of this vessel in the documents