Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (5 page)

The early French also enjoyed a lighthearted streak and cheerful resilience about their travails in the North American wilds that the English decidedly lacked. While the Pilgrims grimly read their Bibles through the long dark nights, the first winters for the French in the New World wilderness centered around an eating and drinking society they named L’Ordre de Bon Temps—“The Order of the Good Times”—whose mission was to provide nightly feasts of wild game and generous quantities of wine accompanied by song and even comedy theater.

The cultural mix of the French fur trade changed fundamentally after 1763—a change that was reflected in the cultural mix aboard the
Tonquin
—when Britain won Canada from France in the Seven Years’ War. From then on, Scottish Highlanders, immigrating from Britain, took over management of what had been the French-Canadian fur trade. With their main headquarters at Montreal, these Highland Scots eventually ran long strings of wilderness trading posts out of a great baronial hall on the shores of Lake Superior known as Fort William. Indians brought furs to the posts to trade for manufactured goods. Scots or French Canadians usually managed the posts and employed the French-Canadian voyageurs, as well as Indian guides and interpreters, to transport the ninety-pound packets of beaver and other furs. They loaded several tons of these packets into the big birch-bark freight canoes, carrying the furs from the wilderness posts back through the interior waterways of North America and into the warehouses in Montreal. From there they were shipped to the East Coast, or across the Atlantic to Europe.

The fur trade embodied the economic differences between these groups that coexisted on the North American continent. The trade in Canada came under regulation by the British Crown, the great swaths of territory held by Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company granted by royal charter as monopolies. In the United States and its territories, despite the efforts of merchants to acquire government-backed monopolies, the trade was unregulated by charter and fell to individual operators. These American traders competed fiercely and with a free-for-all and cutthroat—at times literally—attitude in their dealings with one another and with Native Americans who supplied the furs. Certain aspects of the economic systems of North America remained works in progress.

At least three distinct cultures were jammed together on the
Tonquin,
cheek-by-jowl, for five or six months: the chummy Scottish fur traders who had run Canadian wilderness posts and managed the Canadian trade, the good-time French-Canadian voyageurs who paddled their canoes, and the iron-fisted Yankee naval hero and his crew of American sailors. The Scotsmen and voyageurs had worked side by side for several decades in the fur trade and understood each other’s quirks. Not so the Yankee and the Scots. Tensions still ran deep between Americans and British from the Revolutionary War and its aftermath. Captain Thorn, an unyielding disciplinarian and ardent patriot, clearly hated the Scotsmen. And the Scotsmen, like a clannish yet argumentative family that sticks together against all outsiders, gladly—and en masse—returned the favor.

B
Y MID-
N
OVEMBER,
they’d crossed the equator and sailed well down into the Southern Hemisphere. The ship now had altered course, once again taking advantage of the winds, and steered southwest toward the tip of South America and Cape Horn, advancing from tropical calms toward the powerful winds of the southerly latitudes known as the Roaring Forties and the Furious Fifties. On the night of November 11, the wind suddenly shifted and a tremendous storm struck. While they had paddled their canoes through plenty of storms on Canada’s lakes and rivers, it was the first time many of the voyageurs and clerks had ridden out a tempest on a ship on the open sea—“with nothing,” as Franchère put it, “but the frail machine which bore me between the abyss of waters and the immensity of sky.”

It was a frightening experience. The gale shrieked through the rigging, and rain and wind lashed the sea into a ghostly fury. Flashes of lightning and blasts of thunder surrounded the tossing ship, so that the tumult of the sea, wrote Franchère, “appeared all a-fire.”

“[The] terrible tempest,” he wrote, “seemed to have sworn our destruction.”

Toppling seas washed over the deck’s wooden planking, which, over the past weeks, had shrunk in the hot tropical sun. Seawater poured through the resulting gaps and drenched the men in the hammocks below.

The gale subsided. Crew and passengers scrambled about belowdecks and worked together to plug a leak that had sprung in the ship’s hull, as well as to repair a jib boom that the wind had ripped. The wind shifted again, to the southwest. Now came a difficult judgment call for the commanding officer. On a square-rigger, fully bringing in the sails was a big job—the crew had to scramble aloft on ratlines, or rope ladders, then gather up and lash the canvas sails in tight bundles to the horizontal spars of the yardarms. On a large square-rigger, bringing in all the sails could take several hours, so if a gale threatened, the timing of an order to “shorten sail” was of utmost importance.

The order went out from the quarterdeck for the crew to furl the top and topgallant sails, but, whether for lack of anticipation or underestimating its force, the
Tonquin
still carried too much sail when struck by the full force of the second gale. A particularly powerful gust typically appears like a dark shape ruffling across the sea’s surface. When it slams into a square-rigger, the whole ship strains, the deck tilting as she heels over, the hull surging forward through the swells, the rigging running taut like the strings of a giant musical instrument, the scream of wind through the lines suddenly jumping to a shriek. If a ship has too much sail, with a sudden
BOOM
the sails will start to “blow out,” the fabric splitting apart under the enormous pressure of the gust like an overfilled balloon, the canvas exploding into ragged shreds. Then
BOOM,
another, and another, the shreds flapping madly from the yardarms like kite tails while the ship careens over the sea.

The
Tonquin,
Ross reported, lost many sails in this storm. As the ship tossed through the heavy seas, six cannon tore loose from their moorings and rolled about on the deck “like thunder.” For seventeen straight hours, the ship “scudded” or was shoved from behind by the gale, making a distance downwind of 220 miles, or close to fourteen miles per hour, madly sailing on the verge of control.

At 8:00
A.M.
on November 14, a rogue wave curled ten feet above the stern of the
Tonquin
and toppled downward. Voyageurs, clerks, crew, Scottish partners, Captain Thorn—whatever their animosities toward each other—all grabbed for rigging and rails as the giant wave smashed onto the
Tonquin’
s deck around the mainmast and broke into a tumult of white water.

“[B]y that means,” reported Ross, “[we] saved ourselves.”

The concussive force of the wave threw the sailor manning the wheel clear across the quarterdeck, slamming him into rigging or rail, breaking two of his ribs, and sending him to his berth for a week.

After forty hours of battering the ship, the gale eased. The ship’s carpenter went to work repairing leaks in the
Tonquin’
s otherwise solid and copper-sheathed hull while the sailmaker stitched his canvas.

With the pause in the gales, Captain Thorn reassessed the ship’s supplies of freshwater and realized they were running dangerously low. On November 20, he reduced the water ration further to a pint and a half per day. Ten days later, on December 2, he cut it yet again—to a pint per day. This, the passengers complained, was a hardship when the diet consisted of so much salted meat. Thirsty men bargained with one another, saying they would give a gallon of brandy for a pint of water. Finally, on December 5, an officer in the masthead spotted one of the Falkland Islands.

“[I]t is only those who have been three or four months at sea,” wrote Franchère, “who know how to appreciate the pleasure which one then feels even at the sight of such barren and bristling rocks as form the Falkland Isles.”

Only whaling ships visited the treeless and surf-battered isles far out in the South Atlantic, inhabited by great numbers of seals, penguins, and seabirds. To the relief of everyone, Captain Thorn ordered the
Tonquin
to put in at the barren and unpeopled islands for freshwater.

The trouble at the Falklands started when several of the
Tonquin’
s passengers, who were amusing themselves by casually exploring onshore, discovered two graves. While the carved lettering on the old wooden headboards was barely legible, they discerned that one was the grave of a young sailor who died in a fall from a Falklands rock in 1794, and the other a victim of smallpox in 1803. The little group of touring
Tonquin
passengers decided to ask the ship’s carpenter for two fresh boards so they could recarve the lettering.

“This pious attention to two dead men,” wrote Franchère, who was one of the carvers, “nearly proved fatal to a greater number of the living.”

It took several days for the ship’s cooper to repair the water casks, and the sailors to fill them at a spring a few hundred yards inland, then row them out to the
Tonquin,
anchored just offshore in the sheltered bay. To pass the time, the clerks and voyageurs had been exploring ashore and the Scottish partners had been hunting the island’s abundant waterfowl with their shotguns. On this particular day, as the sailors finished filling the casks and rowing them to the ship, and the clerks carved the new headboards, Captain Thorn came ashore, carrying his own fowling piece, with the idea to do a little hunting. Stepping from the rowboat, he spotted a gray goose standing on nearby rocks. He raised his shotgun and fired. The goose fluttered. The captain quickly reloaded and fired again. The goose fluttered again. Captain Thorn hurried over to the presumably wounded goose before it fluttered away and escaped.

As he approached, he saw that the goose’s leg was tied to a rock. This had been the work of one of the clerks, Farnham, who wanted to have some “sport” with it.

“[W]hen he discovered his mistake,” wrote Ross, “ . . . we all burst out laughing.”

Captain Thorn was not amused. He spun around and immediately returned to his boat and ordered it to take him back to the
Tonquin
.

A stray sailor ashore had already put Captain Thorn in a foul mood about lack of discipline on land. Nor was it exactly clear when the
Tonquin
was due to weigh anchor after refilling the water casks. The Scottish partners understood that it wouldn’t be until the following day. As the captain stalked off angrily to the
Tonquin
after being tricked, the passengers went on with their carving, and two of the Scottish partners hiked over a sand spit to hunt birds.

“While we were thus eagerly employed, little did we suspect what was going on in another quarter,” reported Ross, “for, about two o’clock in the afternoon, one of our party called out, ‘The ship’s off!’—when all of us, running to the top of a little eminence, beheld, to our infinite surprise and dismay, the
Tonquin,
under full sail, steering out of the bay.”

CHAPTER THREE

W
HILE THE
T
ONQUIN
WORKED ITS SQUABBLING WAY
toward Cape Horn that late fall of 1810, Wilson Price Hunt and his Overland Party stopped their travels for the winter about four hundred miles up the Missouri River from St. Louis. Already they’d fallen behind Astor’s schedule. Explored by Lewis and Clark only six years earlier, the Missouri was the only known route across the vast terra incognita of this part of the North American continent. It made sense to follow that known route and stay at the Lewis and Clark wintering camp at the Mandan villages, in what is today North Dakota. But Hunt’s accommodating and loyal nature, compounded by his inexperience, slowed the Overland Party from the start. He’d fallen a thousand miles short of the Lewis and Clark winter camp. The consequences of this and other delays would build like a gathering storm.

Hunt had insisted on stopping at various points along the way to recruit more personnel, though Donald Mackenzie, the Scottish partner traveling with Hunt, had warned him about the folly of this. Astor, valuing Mackenzie’s decade’s worth of wilderness experience with the North West Company, and thinking he would make a good counterbalance to Hunt, initially appointed Mackenzie and Hunt as co-leaders of the Overland Party, or had at least given this arrangement his tacit approval. Together they’d left Manhattan for Montreal in the early summer of 1810 to gather recruits for the Seagoing Party, passing around Astor’s “gilded prospectus,” as Ross, one of the recruited clerks, put it.

Hunt and Mackenzie had sent the Scottish clerks and French-Canadian voyageurs to New York to board the
Tonquin
. But when it came time at Montreal to hire for their own Overland Party, Hunt balked. Mr. Astor had instructed them to include as many Americans as possible for the West Coast settlement; Hunt didn’t want to go against his wishes, by hiring the British subjects available in Montreal.

Mackenzie objected—forcefully. Not only did the “Northwesters” possess far more experience in the fur trade than the Americans, but it would be tough to hire competent woodsmen of any stripe once the Overland Party traveled beyond Montreal. He told Hunt that the good men at interior settlements or posts would already be engaged in work, and only good-for-nothing rabble would be available to hire.

The big Scotsman presented an intimidating figure for young Hunt to challenge. Powerfully built, he was an expert marksman and woodsman who had received a “liberal” education as a youth in Scotland, but, as the embodiment of a man of action, he hated to sit still to write or keep a journal, except for the briefest of directional notes scrawled in charcoal on beaver skins.

“To travel a day’s journey on snowshoes was his delight,” wrote Ross, who knew Mackenzie well. “When not asleep, he was always on foot, strolling backwards and forwards, full of plans and projects; so peculiar was his pedestrian habit, that he went by the name of ‘Perpetual Motion.’ ”

Mackenzie’s presence on the Overland Party was a major reason Astor felt comfortable allowing Hunt, a neophyte in the woods, to co-lead it. But now the first difference in philosophy arose between the two, and the argument grew fierce before they could reach a compromise. Finally, they agreed to hire twelve voyageurs at Montreal to paddle them up the Great Lakes to Mackinac Island. The remainder they’d hire en route when they passed through two major fur trading centers in the continent’s interior—Mackinac Island and St. Louis.

H
UNT
O
VERLAND
P
ARTY
, J
ULY
–N
OVEMBER 1810

Before heading into the wilderness, the voyageurs accompanying Hunt and Mackenzie underwent their ritual leave-taking from their village near Montreal—farewells with family and friends, carousals with drink and women, a confession at the Chapel of St. Anne, the patroness of voyageurs. Their big freight canoe, called a Montreal canoe or a
canot du maître,
was close to forty feet long and about six feet wide, able to carry about four tons. Once the voyageurs were ready, and with Hunt and Mackenzie aboard, they paddled their canoe briskly from Montreal on the regular route up a network of rivers toward the head of the Great Lakes, about five hundred miles away.

A voyageur canoe, for several centuries, was by far the fastest mode of transportation into the wild heart of the North American continent. Propelled by the powerful arms of the voyageurs, commanded by the steersman, and paddling in exact unison at forty to sixty strokes per minute, these canoes surged through the water at four to six miles per hour, a remarkable speed. Paddling twelve to fifteen hours per day, with short breaks while afloat for a pipe of tobacco (they measured distances in terms of “pipes”) or a stop ashore for a mug of tea, they could cover fifty to ninety miles per day, unless they faced strong headwinds or waves that forced them to the shelter of shore, a state called
degradé
. During that single day each voyageur would make more than thirty thousand paddle strokes. On the upper Great Lakes, the canoes traversed hundreds of miles of empty, forested shorelines and vast stretches of clear water without ports or settlements or sails, except for the scattered Indian encampment. They camped along shore wherever convenient, kindling a fire and wrapping themselves in blankets or furs beneath the shelter of their overturned canoes. During portages, each voyageur hauled two 90-pound packets of pelts on his back—a staggering 180 pounds, one packet suspended from a tumpline around his forehead, the other resting atop it on his back—a half mile at a time between designated rest stops, then returned for additional loads. Some of the portages went on for ten miles, and a notorious one lasted for forty.

A Great Lakes traveler in the early 1800s timed the voyageurs with whom he rode during a shore break. They landed their canoe, climbed out, unloaded its cargo, kindled a fire, melted spruce pitch, repaired a tear in the overturned birch-bark hull, reloaded the canoe, cooked breakfast, shaved, washed, climbed back in the canoe, and paddled off, in fifty-seven minutes.

“I can liken them to nothing but their own ponies,” he wrote. “They are short, thick set, and active, and never tire.”

Wrote another: “[T]hey haven’t lost an iota of French gaiety, which differs so strikingly from the glacial sang-froid of Americans.”

Unlike the sprawling egalitarianism of the American trade, a strict sense of hierarchy prevailed in the Canadian fur trade. On its lowest rung stood the
mangeurs de lard,
or “pork-eaters,” so named because, subsisting on preserved or salted pork, they were mostly a waterborne porter service where newcomers started. They simply paddled the big freight canoes the hundreds of miles from Montreal to the main interior posts such as Mackinac Island on Lake Huron, or Fort William on Lake Superior. There they dropped off a load of trade goods and supplies brought from Montreal, picked up several tons of the ninety-pound packets of pelts, and paddled back to Montreal.

In contrast to the pork-eater, the higher-status
hivernant,
or “winterer,” lived off wild game while managing the remote wilderness fur posts of the interior throughout the winter, where he traded goods directly with the Indian hunters and trappers for furs. At the top of the hierarchy stood the
bourgeois
—or “proprietor” or “partner”—who actually owned part of the enterprise. Originally held by French Canadians, these proprietor roles were largely taken over by Scottish fur traders after Britain won Canada from France in 1763. For the ambitious Scots fur trader, usually a young immigrant from the Highlands, the system offered a vast hierarchy to climb to success and wealth, from apprentice, to clerk, to partner. For many of the French-Canadian voyageurs, however, the paddling life remained an end in itself:

“I could carry, paddle, walk and sing with any man I ever saw,” claimed one seventy-year-plus voyageur, as quoted by historian Grace Lee Nute, writing in the early 1900s. “I have been twenty-four years a canoe man, and forty-one years in service; no portage was ever too long for me. Fifty songs could I sing. I have saved the lives of ten voyageurs. Have had twelve wives and six running dogs. I spent all my money in pleasure. Were I young again, I should spend my life the same way over. There is no life so happy as a voyageur’s life!”

On July 22, 1810, about three weeks after leaving Montreal, Hunt and Mackenzie’s birch-bark freight canoe surged into the cove and toward the crescent of beach at Michilmackinac Island. Known as “Mackinac” for short (and pronounced “Mackinaw”), the strategically placed island sits where lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior converge. It thus served as a major waterway crossroads for the interior fur trade. Atop a bluff over the cove and its crescent beach stood an imposing fort. Strung out along the beachfront directly beneath its ramparts and cannon tumbled an array of shacks and cabins from which fiddle music drifted out over the chill, crystalline northern waters.

The steersman directed the canoe toward the beach, paddling at top speed, voyageurs singing at the top of their lungs, their finest feathers and sashes flying to impress spectators ashore. The canoe glided into the shallows of the gravelly beach and out of it stepped Wilson Price Hunt, determined to hire
Americans
for Mr. Astor’s West Coast empire. He walked into a scene such as he’d never witnessed before.

“Every nook and corner in the whole island swarmed, at all hours of the day and night, with motley groups of uproarious tipplers and whisky-hunters,” wrote one contemptuous Scots-Canadian observer. “[It] resembled a great bedlam, the frantic inmates running to and fro in wild forgetfulness.”

“That Canadians in general drink, sometimes to excess, must be admitted,” he continued, “but to see drunkenness and debauchery, with all their concomitant vices, carried on systematically, it is necessary to see Mackinaw. . . . [I]n the morning [the Americans] were found drinking, at noon drunk, in the evening dead drunk. . . .”

Mackenzie had warned Hunt. It was going to be tough to hire competent voyageurs or woodsmen once they’d reached the interior, and, in any case, the Americans they did find would make far inferior hires to Canadians.

Established as an outpost nearly a century and a half earlier, in the 1670s, by Jesuit missionaries, Mackinac for a century had served as a major collection point of the Canadian fur trade in the upper Great Lakes. But in the late 1700s, the Canadians or “Northwesters” extended their reach still deeper into North America’s interior across what is today Minnesota, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. By this point, in 1810, their sophisticated system of canoe relays and fur posts threaded for one thousand miles through rivers and lake chains all the way from the western shore of Lake Superior to the foot of the Rocky Mountains.

As it pushed deeper into the continent’s wild interior, the North West Company shifted its regional headquarters from Mackinac Island another three hundred miles westward to Superior’s western shore. Here it established a post at Grand Portage—so named because the voyageurs and fur traders portaged nine miles over Lake Superior’s western bluffs to gain access to the river systems of the continent’s western interior. At Grand Portage, they transferred their trade goods from the huge Montreal canoes to smaller
canot du nord,
about twenty-five feet long and capable of carrying about three thousand pounds plus paddlers. With one of these smaller canoes, the
hivernant
and his voyageurs made their way to his remote wilderness post.

While Grand Portage opened the trade to the northern and western wilderness, the old fur post at Mackinac Island remained the hub of the fur trade to the south—what we’d now call the upper Midwest. After long, lonely fall and winter months tending their traplines, these “southwestern” woodsmen, many of them Americans, paddled into Mackinac with pelts to sell, eager for company and with a yen to cut loose—drinking, dancing, singing, whoring, fighting, buying knickknacks and finery from the beach’s shacks and stalls. These Americans were generally independent or freelance contractors compared to the northwestern company men, who considered themselves vastly superior professionals and looked down on this undisciplined southwestern mob that caroused at Mackinac Island, although many voyageurs were present at Mackinac, too.

“Perhaps Satan never reigned with less control in any place than he has here,” wrote one missionary’s wife in 1803 of the Mackinac Island beach scene.

The American woodsmen didn’t even bother with the offer from the earnest, young Mr. Hunt. A whispering campaign rippled among the Mackinac rum shacks that Astor’s was a losing enterprise headed on a death trip into hostile Indian realms and starvation deserts. Even if the rumors weren’t true, to sign the contract Hunt offered on John Jacob Astor’s behalf was a tremendous commitment, even by the standards of today; it would mean handing five years of one’s life to a start-up venture bound for the unknown.

Desperate to hire, Hunt and Mackenzie upped their offer—the recruits, if they wished, could sign for only three years instead of committing to a full five. Finally, on the last day of July 1810, the first Mackinac recruit signed—a French-Canadian voyageur, François Landry. This was a victory of sorts for Hunt and Mackenzie and their Overland Party. Landry might convince some of his fellow French-Canadian voyageurs at Mackinac to join the great Astor enterprise, serving, as one early Astorian chronicler put it, as the “stool-pigeon” to lure in more recruits.