The colonial despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia 1846-1871
SS Sonora, 1853-1868
The SS Sonora, a wooden sidewheel steamer, 82 m long, was built for the Pacific Mail Steamship
Company in October 1853.1 It sailed the Panama—San Francisco route from May 1854 to May 1863; in 1865 it made
one more voyage to Panama, to deliver troops.2 In 1868, it was dismantled and broken up in Sausalito.3
An enclosure in this 1858 despatch reports that Captain Grant of the Royal Engineers, and a contingent of engineers, transfered to the Sonora, bound for San Francisco.
1. John Haskell Kemble, The Panama Route, 1848-1869 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), 247.