ENGLISH ADVENTURER STUDENT IN GERMANY: William Petty Hartnell had seven careers

+++   CHAPTER I  ++  Adventurer  ++  STUDENT IN GERMANY  ++  THE ENGLISHMAN, William Petty Hartnell, distinguished himself in seven separate careers, in as many countries.  At various times he became known as a scholar, trader, rancher, teacher, politician, peacemaker and diplomat in England, Germany, Chile, Peru, Russia’s Pacific empire, the Hawaiian Islands (then called Sandwich), and California, under Mexican rule and American conquest.  He never made money, though opportunities seemed unlimited.  But he was a man of faculties and influence such as seldom are found in a single individual.  ++  Accomplished letter writers abounded in England during the eighteenth century.  William Hartnell became one of them, at the very end of the Chesterfield era.  He was born in quiet Lancashire, a country squire and Church of England man without question.  He died a devout Catholic, in California, a few years after the wild Gold Rush.  ++  Between these terminals – 1798 and 1854 – this true citizen of the world lived through the post-Napoleonic misery in his own country, and through the unprecedented trade expansion across the Atlantic, across liberated South America to Chile, and north along the Pacific coast to Alta California.  Here he enjoyed a pastoral interlude which slipped away like a dream.  During these idyllic days he experienced a deep and abiding love for a Spanish-Californian named Teresa de la Guerra y Noriega.  At sixteen she became his wife, and eventually bore him eighteen children.  He was hard pressed to provide for such a family, even in a land of fabulous resources.  ++  Toward the end of Hartnell’s life, the cycle of uncertainty commenced again – of social revolution, war, peace treaties, and painful years of transition and reparation.  These years were complicated in California by the lawless rush for gold in 1849, followed by the Mexican war.  Perhaps in expiation of early sins… ++ …[Page one reprinted from 'The Lives of William Hartnell,' by Susanna Bryant Dakin, published in 1949 by Stanford University Press]…  +++