All manor of people gravitated to San Francisco just prior to, during and after the Gold Rush years which roughly spanned 1848 to 1852. Over 200,000 men arrived during that short period. It is said that there has never been a mass movement in American history as large as that migration.
You would expect that some of them would be scoundrels or what my grandmother called “bad eggs”. One particular bunch were just that. They were known as the Sydney Ducks. At first glance, they were Australian, since that was the country from which they embarked to sail to San Francisco. But more accurately, most were convicts who were transported to Australia, the expansive British penal colony. Their origin could have been from any part of the United Kingdom. When convicted they were sent to Australia to serve their sentence. Society was well served and the location of their servitude was so far away that it was pretty certain that the convicts would never bother again.
A unique feature of the British penal code allowed the authorities to provide a “ticket of leave” to selected convicts, which allowed the convict to live in the community outside the prison. This privilege reduced the burden on the institutions to provide necessities to convicts who would otherwise be incarcerated.
That privilege was abused repeatedly, as convicts stole away on ships bound for San Francisco and the Gold Rush. One wonders if the authorities did not “wink” at such moves in order to ride themselves of their mischievous wards. In any instance, hundreds of recipients of tickets of leave washed ashore in San Francisco in the mid-19th Century.
The Ducks wreaked havoc on the burgeoning city. In no time they gathered in an area they named Sydney Town, later to be known as the Barbary Coast. With an overwhelming number of new arrivals, almost all men, the infusion of gold dust and a pervasive attitude that their stay in this wilderness was for a short time only, all manor of debauchery was extant.
They were pioneers in the viciousness and depravity that lasted decades. The Ducks were responsible for five devastating fires that each destroyed the city during the period from December 1849 till June 1851.
The Sydney Ducks play a large part in my novel Equal and Alike. Please join me to see how the plot thickens.