Emperor Norton claimed to have arrived in San Francisco in November 1849, on a ship from Rio de Janeiro.
After the Emperor’s death, Theodor Kirchhoff — a friend of the Emperor’s who was a German poet and essayist — supplied a name for the ship: the Franzeska. (Actually, Kirchhoff said “Franzika” — but, that’s a small point.)
All of the Emperor’s major and minor 20th-century biographers ran with this narrative — even though it never has been independently documented.
Norton's San Francisco arrival narrative remains undocumented — BUT...
Here, we present our discovery of two previously unreported episodes from Joshua Norton’s first several months in San Francisco that appear to support his claim to have arrived in San Francisco in November 1849 — even if they don’t put him on the Franzeska:
Norton’s paid notice of a temporary business address in early May 1850, a few weeks before he arrived at what usually is regarded as his first recorded business address, and — even earlier —
what may be Norton’s signature on a February 1850 open letter published in the Daily Alta newspaper.
Joshua’s signature on the open letter would make this letter the earliest known newspaper reference to Joshua Norton in San Francisco.
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In October 1870, the Franco-Prussian War was headed into its fourth month. Emperor Norton was angry about the bloodshed and appealed both to Wilhelm, the future German emperor, and Bismarck to stop the fighting. The Emperor also was concerned about the war’s negative impacts on European trade. He stepped into this particular breach with a concrete solution.
To help illustrate what he had in mind, the Emperor sent an influential German publisher in Leipzig one of his new imperial notes, signed and made out to the publisher.
Presented here is evidence that the note reached its destination. If this note survives, it would be the oldest one in existence.
It’s a fascinating story.
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The familiar version of Joshua Norton's San Francisco immigration story — a narrative developed primarily between 1879 and 1939 by that period's leading writers about Emperor Norton — holds that the future Emperor made his way from Cape Town to Rio de Janeiro, where he booked passage on the Hamburg ship Franzeska and arrived in San Francisco on 23 November 1849.
The "story of the story" — of how this narrative came together and was canonized — is interesting on its own. What has yet to surface, however, is any primary-source documentation verifying Joshua's passage on any particular ship or his arrival in San Francisco in November 1849.
Absent such evidence, what we really have in the "received version" of this story — as with a number of details about the Emperor's pre-imperial life, in particular — is more a work of "collaborative intuition," a theory in search of documentation.
This is the first in an occasional series of articles on aspects of the Emperor Norton biography that should be regarded as "open questions" — and opportunities for research.
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