Rosario Curletti Collection of A. M. Ebbets Papers

This collection was donated in honor of Southern California anthropologist Rosario Curletti. The collection consists of the 1849 sea voyage diary of Arthur Mercein Ebbets (121 pages) and supplementary material, including six letters by Charlotte White Penniman Ebbets, written while during her 1853 voyage on the steamer Tennessee (which ran aground near San Francisco); 14 folders of biographical manuscripts about Arthur written by his daughter Charlotte Penniman Ebbets; other family manuscripts, including family trees; and correspondence of Rosario Curletti regarding the diary and letters. It was Charlotte Penniman Ebbets who who supplied Rosario Curletti with several items in the collection. Nineteen pages of pencil drawings by Arthur Ebbets, depicting scenes from his 1849 voyage, accompany the diary. Seven other early California and Panama items supplement the Ebbetts items, including drafts of short stories or memoirs by K. V. Hastings ("A Visit to Acapulco," "A Day on Shipboard," and "From Panama to Aspinwall"), a copy of a long letter by Elizabeth Whitney Putnam detailing her journey west (she and her child sailed aboard the Tennessee and the Georgia on the same voyage as Lottie Ebbets), and Spanish and English versions of the diary of Pablo de la Portilla, a Mexican captain attached to Santa Barbara Presidio who led an unsuccessful 1824 expedition against a group of Chumash Indians who had rebelled against the San Buenaventura mission.

Finally, the collection originally included a photocopy of the Augustin W. Hale diary, the original of which the Huntington holds in the Hale papers. Hale also sailed to California on the Pacific in 1849, and the he and Ebbets were apparently friendly. Details and references in the two collections overlap occasionally. In addition, the ships Pacific and Tennessee are both discussed in detail in the John Goodman Papers at the Huntington.