A tinted line engraving of the New York-built merchant steamship Golden Gate, produced for ‘Stuart’s Naval and Mail Steamers of the United States’ (1863). She is shown under steam with her sails furled, in a flat calm. A long pennant streaming from her mizzen mast, smoke billowing backwards from both funnels and the spray from her paddlewheel imply that she is making swift progress through the water. The Golden Gate caught fire off the coast of Mexico in 1862, on a voyage from San Francisco to Panama, the flames spreading rapidly because she was built of wood. She was carrying 242 passengers and a crew of 95, of whom only 100 apparently survived. Some of her substantial cargo of silver and gold was salvaged by divers. (H. Parker and F.C. Bowen, ‘Mail and Passenger Steamships of the XIXth Century’, London, 1928, p. 125). The fineness of the engraving suggests that this may be the work of James Parsons Major, described in Mantle Fielding’s ‘Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors and Engravers’ (1983) as an Englishman born in Somerset in 1818, who went to the United States as a banknote engraver in 1830 and died in New Jersey in 1900. He was in charge of the engraving of American banknotes for over fifty-five years and resided in Brooklyn until 1872. Mounted with PAH0271.