Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (7 page)

“For other traits, they are very lascivious,” he reported, “and far from observing a modest reserve, especially toward strangers.”

An old man led the visitors down the beach to a shelf of coral rock. He pointed out the very spot where Captain Cook had fallen, on February 14, 1779—which Franchère realized was exactly thirty-two years before, to the day. The old man filled in the details of Cook’s famous demise. Initially the Hawaiians had welcomed Cook; and Cook in turn had treated them with respect. After several misunderstandings, however, the Hawaiians had stolen a rowboat. Captain Cook and his marines rowed ashore and marched under the palms to the Hawaiian king’s house to take him hostage until the islanders returned the ship’s boat.

Hawaiian chiefs and warriors clustered around their sacred leader to protect him. Captain Cook, “not accustomed to have his intentions frustrated,” recorded one crew member who was an eyewitness, “ . . . had but little command over himself in his anger.” A crowd of two or three thousand Hawaiians pressed in. The enraged Cook beat them back with the butt of his shotgun. His Lieutenant Phillips warned Cook that he was in mortal danger and should leave immediately. Cook fired once, wounding a Hawaiian, then again, killing one. Followed by the crowd of angry Hawaiians, he retreated to the nearby beach with his marines while other marines in his oared boats just offshore opened fire.

Cook strode into the surf and, facing the ocean, raised his hands to order the marines in boats to cease firing at the Hawaiians and pick him up. James Cook, like so many of the sailors of the era, had never learned to swim well, either; if he knew how, he may have waded out from shore into deeper water and events could have transpired very differently. As Cook stood in the shallows facing seaward, one of the Hawaiian chiefs, “more daring than the rest,” stepped forward with dagger in hand and stabbed Cook between the shoulders. Instantly, another warrior clubbed him over the head. Cook collapsed into the shallow surf. They pounced on him, holding him underwater for several minutes. Then they dragged him up and beat his head against the nearby coral rocks to ensure that he was dead.

Thrown into chaos by the sudden fall of their vaunted leader, and some of them also falling under knife stabs and club blows, Cook’s men scrambled for the boats and retreated to the ships anchored in the bay, unable to retrieve their commander’s body. They then opened fire with cannon loaded with jagged iron shrapnel aimed at the hundreds of Hawaiians gathered on the beach.

Three decades later, the
Tonquin’
s partners and clerks strolled about the beach, enthralled by the old Hawaiian’s story and their own presence on the very spot where one of the greatest British heroes of the age had forever fallen. Captain Thorn would have been well served to learn from Captain Cook’s temperamental treatment of the native peoples, but the captain had apparently remained aboard ship. Accompanied by their knowledgeable local guide, the
Tonquin
contingent ashore was, in effect, one of Hawaii’s first tourist groups. Like most tourists, they now wanted souvenirs. Pulling out pocketknives, they pried chunks of wood from the coconut trees that still bore the bullet and shrapnel scars of Captain Cook’s last stand and chipped off pieces of the coral rock where Hawaiian warriors bashed his head.

Finally, the enchanting day ashore drew to a close and they headed for the rowboat. The Scottish partners and young clerks had an incentive to return to the
Tonquin
—the possibility of great wealth as founders and shareholders of Mr. Astor’s West Coast empire. The
Tonquin’
s sailors, however, faced only the prospect of Captain Thorn’s harsh discipline at sea for many months to come. Several deserted right there on the paradisal beach at Kealakekua Bay.

When, with the shore party back on board, Captain Thorn heard that several of his sailors were missing, he flew into a rage.

“Storming and stamping on deck,” Ross wrote, “the captain called up all hands; he swore, he threatened, and abused the whole ship’s company. . . .”

The captain demanded that the Hawaiian islanders bring back the deserters, which they eventually did. He had one deserter confined belowdecks. Another was tied up and flogged. A third, reported Ross, was put in irons. Captain Thorn didn’t bother to round up the deserting boatswain Anderson, however, because he felt Anderson was worthless as a sailor anyway.

With the
Tonquin
now undermanned, Ross momentarily felt sorry for the captain, while also pointing out in his account of the incident that Captain Thorn had brought on all his woes himself. Thorn was steeped in a rigid system of order, discipline, and deprivation designed for the sole purpose of combat at sea. Through the long reach of Astor’s empire, this ethic had collided head-on at the beach of Kealakekua Bay with the charming allures of what appeared, for an outsider at least, to be a far more permissive, harmonious, and easygoing culture. Captain Thorn’s situation was a bit like that of a besieged summer camp director trying to corral his high-spirited lads from escaping during the night to the girls’ camp across the lake.

“[W]ith all his faults he had some good qualities,” Ross wrote, “and in his present trying situation we all forgot our wrongs, and cheerfully exerted ourselves to help him out of his difficulties.”

But the difficulties in Hawaii didn’t end at Kealakekua Bay, nor did Captain Thorn’s frustrations. Before sailing the 2,600 miles to America’s West Coast, the
Tonquin
needed more personnel to staff the emporium as well as a stock of live Hawaiian pigs, both to consume en route and to raise at the new colony. Royal Hawaiian decree, however, banned the villagers from selling their own pigs to passing ships, as this was a trading right reserved for the king. Two days after the shore visit to Captain Cook’s last stand, the
Tonquin
sailed about twenty miles up the west coast of the Big Island and put in at Tohehigh Bay, residence of the island’s governor, for permission to buy pigs. To the surprise of all aboard, the governor of the Big Island turned out to be a Scotsman and former sailor named John Young, who twenty years earlier had served as boatswain aboard a New England ship, the
Eleanora,
one of the first trading vessels to call at the Northwest Coast after Cook’s voyage.

Young had been taken captive during an altercation between the ship’s captain and the Hawaiians and left behind by the
Eleanora
. Kamekameha, the head of the Big Island at the time and a far-sighted leader, had taken in the boatswain, given him land, and used him as a trusted advisor on military matters and Western technology. Kamekameha eventually united the other islands and established his royal seat at the more fertile island of Oahu, with its good harbor at what is now the city of Honolulu. He promoted Young to be governor of the Big Island, where he had ruled.

Captain Thorn, the Scottish partners McDougall and McKay, and some of the clerks, such as Ross, were rowed ashore at Tohehigh Bay on the Big Island to meet Governor Young, then about sixty years old, shrewd, and in good health, to ask about buying pigs.

“He received us kindly,” wrote Ross, “and with every mark of attention peculiar to an Indian chief; showed us his wife, his daughter, his household, and vassals. . . . [F]rom his long residence among the natives, he has imbibed so much of their habits and peculiarities, that he is now more Indian than white man.”

But to buy pigs, Governor Young told them, they had to sail to Oahu and call on King Kamekameha himself, who kept a monopoly on the sale of pigs to foreign ships as a means of generating profits for the royal treasury.

The
Tonquin
sailed from the Big Island to Oahu and anchored in Waikiki Bay. Over several days, the Scottish partners exchanged formal visits with King Kamekameha to negotiate the sale of pigs. Arriving at the
Tonquin
in a huge double canoe paddled by sixteen chiefs and accompanied by three enormous wives in traditional garb, the Hawaiian king wore a mix of Western dress that included a blue coat with velvet collar, a beaver top hat, and a long sword given to him by his “brother,” King George III of England. The
Tonquin’
s passengers and crew, no doubt laboring under the popular image that savages and cannibals inhabited the islands of the Pacific, were impressed by the sophistication of the Hawaiians’ traditional culture. They noted the finely crafted outrigger canoes and seafaring skills, the hundreds of woven-walled, thatched-roofed houses of the town, the personal cleanliness and industriousness of the Hawaiian people, and their careful respect of taboos, religious customs, and rules laid down by their king.

None of it impressed Captain Thorn. Chafing to be under way, he wrote to Mr. Astor from Waikiki, “It would be difficult to imagine the frantic gambols that are daily played off here. To enumerate the thousand instances of ignorance, filth, &c . . . would require Volumes.”

Not to be outdone in the displays of power and refinement, the Scottish partners rose to the same level of formality as the Hawaiians. Dressing up in their kilts, they paid a visit to King Kamekameha and called themselves “The Great Eris of the Northwest,” using the Hawaiian word for king. They pledged to Kamekameha to establish permanent and very profitable trade relations with his islands once they’d founded their West Coast colony.

Finally the negotiations with King Kamekameha concluded. Dozens of canoes were dispatched from shore, heaped with more fruit, vegetables, and a hundred squealing pigs to stock the
Tonquin
. The Scottish partners wanted to hire thirty or forty Hawaiians to work at the West Coast emporium, impressed with their extraordinary ability to handle canoes, swim like seals, and hold their breath underwater for up to four minutes while diving deep for a pulley the ship had lost overboard. This was all encouraged by King Kamekameha. He urged his subjects to travel to foreign lands and learn new skills to bring back and further Hawaii. But Captain Thorn said no—the
Tonquin
couldn’t carry that many extra men and supplies. Eventually, he and the partners reached a compromise: twelve Hawaiians to serve as sailors and twelve to work the West Coast emporium for a total of twenty-four carried as additional passengers aboard the ship.

As the ship prepared to sail, it appeared that the
Tonquin
would achieve a tranquil leave-taking from Hawaii, unlike the stormy departures from New York Harbor and the Falkland Islands.

“[F]rom the good conduct of the sailors since our arrival, we began to think matters would go smoothly for the future,” wrote Ross, “but these hopes were of short duration. . . .”

One of the sailors, Edward Aymes, from New York, missed the longboat that was leaving the Waikiki beach for the
Tonquin
. He quickly hired Hawaiians to take him out to the ship, but an enraged Captain Thorn jumped into the boat when it pulled alongside the
Tonquin
where Aymes was ready to climb aboard, seized stalks of sugarcane in the boat destined to feed the pigs, and beat Aymes senseless with them. Then he ordered Aymes thrown overboard.

A native canoe nearby rescued Aymes and took him to shore. He returned a few hours later and, from a canoe alongside the ship, called up to Captain Thorn, apologizing and asking to be taken aboard. Captain Thorn threatened to kill Aymes if he set foot on the
Tonquin
. Aymes asked for his clothes and sailors papers. Thorn didn’t reply. The sympathetic first mate, Mr. Fox, surreptitiously threw down the articles into the canoe for Aymes.

And so sailor Aymes was left on Hawaii. As his canoe pushed off from the
Tonquin,
he shouted up to Captain Thorn that he knew his rights as an American citizen. If they ever met on American soil, he said, Captain Thorn would find himself in deep trouble.

CHAPTER FIVE

W
HEN THE
T
ONQUIN
ARRIVED OFF THE
N
ORTHWEST
Coast and mouth of the Columbia River on March 22, 1811, it had left all tropical antics far in its wake. Here wind squalls from the northwest swept across the charcoal sea. Huge swells tossed the ship. Roaring white breakers smashed against the shoreline of this far edge of the North American continent, stretching away endlessly north and south in a misty gray-green band of impenetrable forest and rocky headlands, backed by ranges of snowy mountains. Here was the fabled destination—the epicenter of the great empire-to-be! If they hadn’t understood just how wild and remote and storm-battered the Northwest Coast was when they left the bustle of New York and the scented islands of Hawaii, they did now. From this spot, sending and receiving any communication to their familiar world would take roughly one year.

But whatever safety and shelter was offered by this wild coast was blocked by a four-mile-long sandbar across the Columbia’s mouth. Still today one of the world’s most dangerous navigational hazards, here the power of the largest river of the western continent, discharging an average of 265,000 cubic feet of water per second, collides head-on with the power of the world’s largest ocean. The Pacific tides and swells entering the river’s mouth fight against the outgoing river’s discharge. This battle throws up ferociously steep mounds of water, up to twelve feet high, known as standing waves. They can literally stand a boat up on end. At the same time, incoming swells from the North Pacific, generated by powerful storms thousands of miles out at sea and thirty feet and more in height, tower over the shallows of the bar. Crashing down in a tumult of foam and spray further churned by the winds and tidal currents, these waves create what seems to be a giant cauldron where the earth’s hydraulic forces converge.

Somewhere in this chaos of wind and wave and powerful tides the Seagoing Party had to find the gap in the shallow sandbar. It was only through this single channel that the main current of the Columbia River exited the continent, and they could enter.

“The wind was blowing in heavy squalls, and the sea ran very high,” wrote Franchère, about their arrival off the Columbia’s mouth, adding that they could plainly see the breakers crashing from three miles off.

Captain Thorn gave orders to prepare the whaleboat. Mr. Fox, he ordered, would act as captain. For his crew, Mr. Fox would take the French-Canadian brothers Lapensée, in addition to Joseph Nadeau, and John Martin. Their mission was to row into the wild confusion of wind and wave and current and “sound” the bottom—measure the water’s depth to locate the deeper channel across the shallow bar.

Fox was taken aback. Three of the four men assigned to pull the oars of the whaleboat into one of the most treacherous spots in the world’s oceans were French Canadians who had never before been to sea—Nadeau was a barber from Montreal and the two brothers had worked as porters at Lachine Rapids, just above Montreal. John Martin, an experienced but aging Yankee seaman, didn’t have the power of youth at the oars.

Couldn’t Captain Thorn assign a more experienced crew to man the oars? asked Fox.

No, replied Thorn. He needed all experienced sailors aboard the
Tonquin
to handle her in these conditions.

“Mr. Fox,” wrote Alexander Ross, who witnessed this scene unfolding on the deck of the
Tonquin,
“then represented the impossibility of performing the business in such weather, and on such a rough sea, even with the best seamen.”

“[T]he waves [are] too high for any boat to live in,” Fox pleaded to Captain Thorn.

The captain had already turned away. He now spun around to face Fox.

“Mr. Fox, if you are afraid of water, you should have remained in Boston.”

Fox didn’t reply. He simply turned to the crew and issued the fateful order:
Lower the boat.

A mere twenty ships had, by this time, crossed the Columbia bar. The Columbia River itself had been discovered by Europeans only eighteen years earlier. For European sailing ships, almost all the other coastlines of the world were on the way to somewhere. The Northwest Coast was not and remained obscure, unknown, and impossibly remote for centuries after most other coastlines of the world had been charted.

Spaniards first had sailed northward from their colonies in Mexico as far as today’s Oregon in the 1600s. But the cool, wet, rugged Northwest Coast inhabited by Indian tribes living in wooden longhouses and traveling in large cedar canoes didn’t compel them like the benign climates and monumental, gold-encrusted civilizations of the Aztecs and Incas far to the south. For a century and a half, the Northwest Coast, in geopolitical terms at least, remained a vast no-man’s-land while Europe’s seafaring powers, such as Spain, France, and Britain, assembled their colonial empires elsewhere on the globe.
*

In the second half of the 1700s, a flurry of interest from several European powers converged on the Northwest Coast. After pushing their empire across Siberia to the Far East, the Russians, with the Bering Expedition in 1741, sailed across the North Pacific to the Aleutian Islands and Alaskan coast, and quietly began to develop a fur trade with natives there. With Russia poking around Alaska’s Pacific Coast, Spain felt threatened and swung her attention northward from Mexico. Starting in 1769, Franciscan Father Junípero Serra planted a string of missions up the Pacific Coast as far north as today’s San Francisco Bay. Beyond this point, however, the coastline grew colder, wetter, more forested, and less attractive for settlement.

As Father Serra built his missions for Christianity in California, and small Russian ships traded for furs up in the Aleutians, Captain Cook explored the South Pacific for Britain and for science. On his Third Voyage in 1776, however, British authorities assigned Cook a secret mission in the North Pacific that also had much to do with commerce—locate the Pacific end of the legendary Northwest Passage. The Passage had been a coveted geographical object sought since Columbus—a water route across North America that offered European merchants a shortcut to the trading wealth of the Orient.

Hoping to find the Northwest Passage—and to collect the resulting 20,000-pound prize from the British government—Cook captained two ships, the
Resolution
and
Discovery,
which made landfall at present-day Oregon, then coasted northward all the way to the Arctic Ocean probing for the Passage or the mouth of the long-rumored Great River of the West. Legends abounded about this river, passed along from Indian tribes deep in the interior. The European explorers fervently hoped that the rumors referred to an actual waterway that linked the Great Lakes with the Pacific Ocean. Almost the entire stretch of this coast was terra incognita—outside the arctic realms, this was the last major section of the earth’s continental coastline that hadn’t yet been charted. The expedition, however, didn’t work out as planned. Cook didn’t locate the Pacific mouth of the great cross-continental waterway on his first attempt. It was while resupplying and repairing in Hawaii for another foray that he was killed by islanders in the surf at Kealakekua Bay. But Cook’s surviving officers and crew nevertheless made a discovery that would determine the future of the Pacific Rim.

While seeking the mysterious waterway amid the deep inlets of the Northwest Coast on their initial visit, Cook’s men had traded trinkets with Indian tribes for furs. To the amazement of Cook’s officers and crew, when they reached China after his death they discovered that the spectacularly lustrous sea otter furs purchased for one dollar’s worth of trinkets from Northwest Coastal Indians sold for the equivalent of a hundred dollars cash in Macao and Canton.

“The rage with which our seamen were possessed to return to [the Northwest Coast],” reported one of Cook’s officers, “and, by another cargo of skins, to make their fortunes, at one time, was not far short of mutiny.”

Although its huge and wealthy empire had existed for millennia, China was then an inward-looking country hardly known to the West. The Son of Heaven, as China’s emperor was called, ruled over an elaborate and entrenched bureaucracy of mandarins who, besides carrying out his bidding, celebrated their refined tastes in literature, cuisine, and dress. This official class happened to covet robes trimmed with luxurious furs. They had caressed the lustrous pelt of the sea otter furs brought by the Russian
promyshlenniki
from Alaska that made it across the Middle Kingdom’s restrictive borders. There may have even been official decrees that mandarins trim parts of their robes with sea otter fur.

Among the Cook expedition’s British sailors hoping to make a fortune in sea otters was a lone New Englander, John Ledyard. With the Cook voyage, he had become the first native-born American citizen to set foot on North America’s Pacific Coast. A romantic and footloose son and grandson of sea captains who had died young, Ledyard had dropped out of Dartmouth College and a career in the ministry, built a dugout canoe, and paddled down the Connecticut River and out into the wide world, eventually signing on with Cook and his
Resolution
and
Discovery
.

After the Third Voyage’s end in 1780, the thirty-year-old Ledyard returned to New England. In a four-month flurry of writing, Ledyard knocked out a memoir about his travels with Cook in which he reported the sea otter discoveries, as did other memoirists of the voyage. Promoting with his memoir the idea of setting up a beaver skin and otter fur trade, Ledyard assembled a consortium of Philadelphia and Boston merchants to finance ships to the Northwest Coast and launch the first American—or European—fur trade with China. As the plan neared fruition, however, the partners intrigued against each other. Ledyard’s great scheme collapsed. He would, however, play a significant if largely unsung role in planting the first American colony on the West Coast.

The ever-restless Ledyard didn’t quit after the Boston fiasco, sailing for Europe in 1784 and assembling a consortium of Brittany merchants. When this also fell apart, he traveled to Paris and called on the newly appointed American minister to France, forty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson. The two hit it off instantly. They shared a passion for exploration, geography, native tribes, and Indian vocabularies. Both of their fathers had been adventurous men who had died young. Ledyard, having visited both Asia and the Northwest Coast, expounded to Minister Jefferson on his innovative theory that native tribes had traveled from Asia across the narrow Bering Strait to populate the Americas. Jefferson was fascinated. They often dined together at Jefferson’s Paris house in Jefferson’s fine gilt chairs, in front of a crackling fire, amid a wide-ranging welter of conversation with other footloose young Americans who were living in the Paris of the Enlightenment. Jefferson also lent the ever-broke Ledyard sums equivalent today to a thousand dollars simply to survive.

“My friend, my brother, my Father,” Ledyard wrote to Jefferson, “I know not by what title to address you. . . .”

Jefferson’s own father had been a Virginia planter and pioneering surveyor who, when Thomas was a young boy, had joined an exploratory surveying expedition deep into Virginia’s western wilderness. Due in part to this legacy of exploration and mapmaking, Jefferson grasped the geography of North America on a far more continental scale than most of his contemporaries. Starting as a young man, he looked west to the wilderness that lay beyond the Appalachians. As governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781, he commissioned military expeditions far beyond Virginia’s settlements into the wilderness lands that lay over the Appalachians, including a proposal to erect a fort—its design meticulously sketched by his own hand—where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi some seven hundred miles west of Virginia’s coast.

Ledyard’s stories opened Jefferson’s eyes to the wealth in furs and geographical possibilities of the Northwest Coast. At their “petite soupers” in front of his Parisian fireplace in 1785 he enthusiastically embraced Ledyard’s scheme for an American sea voyage to the Northwest Coast to trade for furs and sell them on the rich Chinese market. Jefferson was also suspicious of a French scientific expedition similar to Cook’s that was just then sailing for the Pacific under Lapérouse; he believed it, too, had hidden commercial designs on the West Coast.

After a third attempt to assemble a consortium of merchants came to nothing, a frustrated Ledyard, brainstorming with Jefferson, hatched a plan to set off alone to the Northwest Coast. Like the ancient native peoples in his migration theory, Ledyard planned to cross Siberia by foot and coach, hop the Bering Strait by small Russian fur boat to Alaska, then, as explorer rather than trader,
walk
across North America to his home in Connecticut.

“[M]y tour round the world by Land,” Ledyard described it to Jefferson.

And off John Ledyard went—twenty years before the Lewis and Clark expedition—having planted in the future president’s mind a glimpse of the potential economic and political significance of the Northwest Coast and Pacific Rim.

As the lone romantic adventurer struck off into the Russian winter (later to be arrested by Russian authorities), expeditions from several nations simultaneously prepared to sail for the Northwest Coast in the mid-1780s with the exclusive commercial purpose of trading at high profit for sea otter and other valuable furs. John Meares, a former Royal Navy officer, sailed for the Northwest Coast in 1786 to trade and got trapped in ice far in the north, in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, losing twenty-three of his crew to scurvy. Russian traders built a permanent fur post in Alaska in 1784. Boston merchants under Charles Bulfinch raised funds for two American ships, the
Columbia Rediviva
and the
Lady Washington
. Commanded by Captain Robert Gray and Captain John Kendrick, these sailed out of Boston Harbor in 1787 to round Cape Horn and head for the West Coast.

It’s a measure of the scale and remoteness of the Northwest trade that it took three years for Captain Gray to complete his trading mission. (Kendrick didn’t return with him.) After acquiring sea otter furs in late 1788 and early 1789, he sailed across the Pacific to Canton, traded the
Columbia’
s cargo of pelts and loaded up with Chinese tea, and sailed across the Indian Ocean, around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope then up the South and North Atlantic, finally returning home to Boston Harbor in August 1790. He was welcomed by a parade celebrating his feat for captaining the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe. Captain Gray, however, wasted little time celebrating. Seeing vast opportunities in the Pacific, a mere six weeks after arriving in Boston, he and the
Columbia
again sailed for the Northwest Coast.