By Fanny Loviot, Trans. Amelia B. Edwards, Foreword by K.L. Webber
There is not a great deal known about Fanny Loviot, so this will necessarily be a short foreword. The facts, as we know them, will follow a brief historical background of her era.
In 1843, gold was found in San Fernando in Southern California. This discovery went largely unrecognized, given that the area was then a part of Mexico, and limited communication was available to outsiders. On the 24th of January 1848, James Marshall discovered gold in the river at Sutter's Mill. It was this discovery that ignited the California gold rush. Despite the efforts of Marshall and Captain John Sutter to keep the news quiet in order to finish the construction of the mill, news of the bonanza leaked. The rush was on. By the following August, thousands of people were panning along the banks of the river. Servants vanished, soldiers and sailors deserted, and local newspapers folded due to insufficient staff to carry on the publication.
On the far side of the planet, the French Revolution of 1848 took place. King Louis-Philippe abdicated, fleeing to England, and Louis Napoleon Bonaparte took office as the first president of the Second Republic of France. He would in 1851 stage a coup d’état, becoming Emperor Napoleon III of France, ushering in the end of the Second Republic to birth the Second French Empire. To raise funds, the French government instigated the Lottery of the Golden Ingots. Would-be participants could purchase tickets to win a series of valuable gold ingots, the profits of which would be used to send purportedly lucky French citizens over to California to the gold fields. The drawing of lotteries for the ingots was a sham. Many of the lottery tickets were been issued with duplicate numbers, and political allies of the new Emperor were, for the vast majority, recipients of the gold bars.
The lottery served a dual purpose to mere revenue raising. After the massacres in Paris during the fall of the Second Republic, tens of thousands of citizens had been executed, jailed, or deported to the French colony of Algeria; others were encouraged to emigrate to Corsica and the French West Indies. Exporting their revolutionaries, poor, and criminals overseas would alleviate some of the social and political turmoil faced by the new government. Thousands of French citizens embarked upon seventeen ships[i] headed to America.
In May 1852 Fanny Loviot sailed from Havre, France with a woman that she called her elder sister, bound for California via Rio de Janeiro on board the schooner INDEPENDENCE. On the 7th July, they departed Rio for the trip around Cape Horn to San Francisco, making landfall on 21st November 1852. They settled in Montgomery Street, San Francisco, sold undisclosed merchandise, and travelled throughout California.
Some eighteen months after their arrival, Loviot made the acquaintance of a woman called Madame Nelson, who was keen to travel to Batavia[ii] with Loviot to undertake a business venture. While considering the proposition, a fire broke out in the building next door, spreading rapidly. Loviot and her sister escaped with only a few possessions; the rest of their belongings were destroyed, to the value of four thousand piasters. Fifty-two houses were burnt.
Being no longer burdened with personal items or merchandise, Loviot agreed to travel with Madame Nelson on the proposed venture, while Loviot’s sister decided to return to Eureka, where “commercial affairs were said to be unusually prosperous.” Loviot and Madame Nelson planned to travel through Canton, Macao, Hong Kong and Batavia. In modern terms their itinerary was to be Guangzhou, Macau, Hong Kong and Jakarta. On 14th June 1854, they departed for China on the ARCTURUS. Fifteen days into the voyage, in sight of the Sandwich Islands, Madame Nelson became ill. Despite the best efforts of some Chinese passengers to treat Nelson’s illness, she died eight days later.
Loviot landed in Hong Kong during a period civil unrest, and soon made arrangements to return home to her eldest sister. She departed Hong Kong on 4th October 1854 on board the brig CALDERA, captained by a Mr. Rooney, bound for California. One of her companions on the voyage was a Chinese merchant called Than-Sing: “Good-nature was expressed in every line of his countenance, and his smile was kindness itself.” Shortly after leaving port, the CALDERA was caught in a typhoon, which broke the mainsail, the topgallant and the mizzen masts. When the storm subsided, they were attacked and overcome by pirates. After managing to survive a period of time as prisoners, Loviot and Than-Sing were rescued by the British Navy, and returned to port at Hong Kong as celebrities.
News of Loviot’s sensational experience spread widely to Europe, and she would eventually be contacted by the artist, amateur archaeologist, and author Amelia Edwards, who convinced Loviot to write a memoir of her experiences. Edwards translated the resulting manuscript into English upon completion; her own riveting accounts of adventure in the Dolomites of Spain (Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys), and up the rivers in Egypt (A Thousand Miles up the Nile), along with her novels, had already captivated contemporary audiences. The details of Fanny Loviot’s later life is unknown.
There have been some suggestions that Fanny Loviot was a prostitute, and certainly, given the target émigré populations of the Golden Ingot Lotteries, it would be a plausible reason why she and her sister may have been selected. Once they arrived in California, sex work would have been an accessible and potentially financially-rewarding occupation in the gender-imbalanced gold fields. Evidence in either direction remains scarce, and Loviot only ever referred obliquely to the merchandise in which she traded.
K.L. Webber, June 2018
[i] Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Rush to Gold: The French and the California Gold Rush, 1848-1854, (2013) Yale University Press
[ii] Modern-day Jakarta.