Frank Marryat

[1] He joined the Royal Navy at 14 years old as midshipman and made a number of drawings during his service on HMS Samarang in the Far East in 1843.

[2] In 1850, he left England for California via Panama with a manservant and three hunting dogs.

This provided the material for another book,[3] published in New York in 1855, a sportsman-tourist's chronicle of California in the early 1850s: hunting, horse races, bear and bull fights, and an Englishman's bemused comments on social life in San Francisco, Stockton, and the gold fields.

However, he had contracted yellow fever on board ship, which forced him to cut the trip short and return to England.

He died there shortly before his book was published, under the title Mountains and Molehills, or Memoirs of a Burnt Journal.