The Rest of His Story The Rest of His Story As the character of Joseph sails off into the west, we can turn now to the real Joseph Jacobs. He probably left for the Australia gold rush sometime in 1852, and he probably knew that Dr. James Norcom was dead. What he didn’t know was that Norcom had played a vicious trick on the Jacobs family years before.
When Norcom sold Joseph and Lulu to a slave trader in 1835, he had indeed committed an illegal act. By law, the children and their mother belonged to his underage daughter, Matilda. But two years later Norcom repaid Matilda. He gave her two enslaved children in exchange for Joseph and Lulu.
The bill of sale is dated 1837. It states: “I, James Norcom . . . in consideration of the sum of five hundred dollars received from the sale of two mulattoe Slaves named Joe & Louisa, the Children of woman Harriet, do grant . . . unto Matilda Norcom two negro slaves, the children of Melah named Penelope and John.”
The substitution meant that the original sale was final. Unfortunately, no one in the Jacobs family ever learned of it. Joseph and Lulu were more free than they knew.
It would be nice to think that when Joseph and John went to Australia, they found a place where color didn’t matter. For many, it didn’t. The Australia gold rush was even more international than the one in California. It drew adventuresome gold diggers from around the world. These men were of every color and class.
A Polish miner named Seweryn Korzelinski described the mix in his memoir: “A colonel pulls up earth for a sailor; a lawyer wields not a pen but a spade; a priest lends a match to a Negro’s pipe; a doctor rests on the same heap of earth with a Chinaman; a man of letters carries a bag of earth; many a baron or count has a drink with a Hindu, and all of them hirsute [hairy], dusty and muddy, so that their own mothers would not recognise them.”
But sadly, color did matter to the native people of Australia. Aboriginals there were displaced by gold mining, just as the Nisenan Indians were in California.
It would also be nice to think that Joseph and John found gold. The truth is, we know only fragments of what happened to them. These tantalizing clues are in letters that mention their letters.
Joseph and John Jacobs probably arrived early in 1853. Four to six months later—about the time it took a letter from Australia to reach the United States—John wrote to a friend in Boston. He told the friend that he and Joseph were proceeding to the mines.
But Harriet had no word from them. “It makes my heart sad to tell you,” she wrote to a friend in October 1853, “that I have not heard from my brother and Joseph.”
While Harriet waited, she looked to spiritualism for comfort. Spiritualists believed that during a séance, a medium could contact the spirit world and speak to the living or dead.
A medium must have told Harriet that Joseph and John were alive. The anxious mother rejoiced when she received a letter in the summer of 1855. John and Joseph were mining in Parramatta, a gold-rush camp near Sydney.
It was “just as the spirits told me it would be,” she wrote to a friend, “even the very Language was in the letter. . . . I was so happy to know that they were living.”
Another letter arrived from John in 1856. We don’t know what it said. He may have told Harriet that he was planning to give up gold mining, because in 1857, he wrote again. This time he mailed the letter from England, where he was working as a seaman.
Joseph remained in Australia and wrote for a while. Then the letters stopped. Worried, Harriet wrote and begged him to give up digging and come home.
In 1860 Harriet finally received another letter from Australia. Written by a stranger, it asked her to send four hundred dollars in gold so Joseph could come home. The writer of the letter explained that Joseph had been suffering from rheumatic fever for some time. He could barely hold a pen.
Rheumatic fever is an inflammatory disease caused by an infection. It can affect the skin, brain, heart, and joints. Joseph’s supposed symptoms matched the illness, but we don’t know if he really had rheumatic fever.
The letter writer asked Harriet to mail the money to Melbourne, a gold-rush city south of Sydney. Harriet sent gold by a trusted lawyer, and it arrived safely.
The following year, the Civil War broke out in America. It lasted from 1861 to 1865. While Harriet watched the country rip itself to pieces over slavery, she also watched for Joseph. Perhaps she thought he was waiting for the conflict to end before coming home.
But even after the war was over, Joseph failed to arrive. The letter asking for gold was probably a fraud.
In November 1866 Harriet asked a fellow abolitionist, Lydia Maria Child, for help. Joseph’s trail ends with Child’s letter to a minister friend in Australia. In the letter, she encouraged him to ask other ministers to announce from their pulpits that a young man was missing. His mother, she wrote, “was in great distress about him.”
If the ministers read such an announcement, it never led to finding Joseph. As far as we know, he was never heard from again. Maybe one day another long-forgotten letter will turn up and give us a clue about his fate in Australia. Until then, the mystery remains unsolved.