David Dell is a researcher living in Nicaragua, studing the Cornelius Vanderbilts boats that sailed the Rio San Juan River in Nicaragua from 1851 onward. He is particularly interested in the "San Francisco" that Mark Twain sailed on in late 1866 and early 1867. He has located the wrecks of three boats and one that still has much of the boiler and some intact hull. He plans to make a documentary about the steamboats of Nicaragua.
Click "next" at the bottom of each page to see the photos David Dell sent in. Next
Susan Hopkins wrote:
I really appreciated seeing the information on Steamboats of Nicaragua. My husband has an ancestor who may well have traveled on one of them in 1853.
Lewis Francis Beers went overland from Ohio in 1852 to the California Gold Rush. He returned, family lore said, by ship to New York and then walked back to Ohio. (I think of this any time my own travel develops difficulties.) His wife died while he was gone, leaving three small children. He's back in Ohio by January 1854, when he marries wife #2. He kept a diary on the way out, but not on the way back.
Had a friend search for his arrival in NY using Ancestry.com's immigration database and found an L. F. Beers arriving 28 Oct. 1853 from San Juan del Norte, Nicaragua, traveling U.S to U.S. This was my introduction to this route through Nicaragua.
Although your photo of the Hollembeck is from a few years later, it still gave me a sense of roughly the time when Beers would have been there. All this is intriguing enough to encourage me to look into the feasibility of retracing the route across Nicaragua. What an experience it must have been.
Susan Hopkins, Urbana, IL email
