Eight pages into “The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World” (Viking), Nathaniel Philbrick tells us why he wrote this. Seventy-year-old Philbrick lives in Nantucket, the source of his career for the past four decades. After publishing two books about its history — “Off the Shore: Nantucket Island and its People, 1602-1890” and “The Eyes of Abram: The Native American Heritage of Nantucket Island” — he turned his attention to one of the numerous whaling ships that sailed from the island in the nineteenth century. This was the Essex, which docked there in 1819 and was later destroyed by a sperm whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, stranding its dwindling crew at sea for three fear-filled months and inspiring Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.”
Philbrick’s own riveting account of the fate of the Essex, “In the Heart of the Sea,” marked a turning point in his career. It won the National Book Award in 2000 and spent forty weeks in New York. Times The book, which became a bestseller, was adapted into a Hollywood movie and earned its author a respected place in the field of Father History. Philbrick’s later books include popular accounts of the Mayflower, the Battle of Bunker Hill, and the Battle of Yorktown in both senses. Except for one book about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, these were set on the East Coast or the ocean or both; Natural enough contexts for a man who spent most of his life on an island off the coast of New England.
So why California all of a sudden? Because Philbrick tells us that many Nantucketans before him suddenly became interested in the subject. After gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, men born and bred to earn their living from the sea sailed fourteen thousand miles to San Francisco on whaling ships, leaving them in the harbor and rushing inland to earn their living by land instead. “For nine months in 1849,” Philbrick writes, “Nantucket, once the whaling capital of the world, lost a quarter of its electorate to the goldfields.” This is a surprising fact; It’s a fact that has driven an entire ghost book about what happened to Nantucket and countless other places across the country after many citizens left to strike it rich in California.
That’s not what Philbrick is about, but pretty much everything else is. “The Rush” is a sprawling book, full of claims as much as the gold fields it describes, whose characters and stories spread everywhere. Two of these emerge as dominant. The first, woven throughout the book, is that the discovery of gold in California—though it literally appeared and disappeared—set off a mad scramble for wealth, land, labor, and power that contributed to the beginning of the Civil War and then helped determine its outcome. Secondly, the most important thing in the gold rush was the rush, not the gold. Philbrick argues that the sudden rush with which Nantucket whalers packed up their lives and headed West was representative of America’s distinct new appetite for speed, innovation, and transformation that defined our character and shaped our future from the time of the ’49s to the planned Anthropic IPO.
“The Rush” is not very convincing on any of these claims. This is partly because they are both a bit rickety, and partly because they are too different to comfortably co-exist in a single book: one is about history and causality, the other is about psychology and culture. But mostly this is because Philbrick is moving towards a larger, more complex, less instrumentalized narrative of the gold rush and its aftermath. A better title for his book might be “California History, 1848-1878.” Lest this sound boring to you, consider that these are three of the most exciting, harrowing, and action-packed decades since our nation’s founding. In a sense, then, the implicit question “The Rush” asks isn’t about the history it covers, but about history in general: Does the past need to explain the present in order to be worth our attention?