Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (8 page)

Trading practices had changed just in the four years since his first visit. Enough merchant ships, both American and British, had touched at the Northwest Coast in the rush for fur that the natives trading with the “Boston men,” as they knew whites, charged far higher prices in nails, knives, and other goods than during his first voyage. Gray wasn’t inclined to negotiate. He and other sea captains began to take furs by force. The Indians retaliated, and the violence escalated in the Coastal Indian villages of today’s Vancouver Island.

“I was sent,” wrote John Boit, one of Gray’s officers, in his journal entry for March 27, 1792, “with three boats all well man’d and arm’d, to destroy the village of Opitsatah. . . . [I] am grieved to think Capt. Gray shou’d let his passions go so far. . . . This fine village [of two hundred houses and massive ceremonial wood carvings], the work of Ages, was in a short time totally destroy’d.”

Investigating the coast southward for new trading opportunities, Captain Gray guided his ship across a treacherous bar ripped by currents and pounded by heavy surf. He found himself in the mouth of a large and powerful river that discharged into the Pacific. On May 12, 1792, Captain Gray, during his second visit to the Northwest Coast, thus became the official Euro-American discoverer of the long-rumored Great River of the West. Sailing thirteen miles up it, he named it after his ship—the
Columbia
. He realized from its volume that it was a very large river but he had no idea how far into the North American continent it might reach.

Five months later a rival explorer, British naval officer George Vancouver, on a four-year mission to chart the entire Northwest Coast, arrived at the river’s mouth. Sending small boats one hundred miles up it, Vancouver officially claimed the river and its enormous unexplored interior basin for Britain, setting up a potential conflict of claims to a chunk of territory whose size no one knew and to a river whose source was unknown.
*

By the time Astor’s ship, the
Tonquin,
arrived at the Columbia bar in 1811, American and British merchant ships, using Hawaii as a port of call, had been sailing to the Northwest Coast for more than twenty years, since Captain Gray’s first arrival. Thus John Jacob Astor didn’t originate the idea of trading goods for furs on the Northwest Coast and selling them across the Pacific in China. What Astor did was to conceive it on a scale far larger, more global, more intricate, more elegant, and more profitable than anyone had before. His innovation was to link the interior North American fur trade over the Rockies with the Pacific coastal fur trade and link that to the Russian Alaskan fur trade, and link that to China, to London, to Paris, to New York. Astor’s thinking revolved on entire continents and oceans.

Astor, along with Thomas Jefferson, understood the global implications of the Pacific Rim and its role in a future world far more clearly than his contemporaries—that one day it would serve a role equal to or greater than the Atlantic’s, and finally knit the globe into one great trading empire. Those passengers arriving at the mouth of the Columbia aboard the
Tonquin
under Captain Thorn’s command in late March 1811 would be the first emissaries to make that global empire a reality.

O
NE WONDERS WHY
C
APTAIN
T
HORN
simply didn’t wait for the weather to settle a bit before sending Mr. Fox in a small boat into the tumult of wave and squall and current to look for a channel through the Columbia Bar. Trying to fathom the captain’s exact reasoning is as imprecise an exercise as trying to sound the Columbia Bar. Captain Thorn had been undermined and humiliated by the Scottish partners, clerks, and voyageurs throughout the six-month voyage from New York Harbor. He trusted no one aboard his ship. In his eyes, even his first mate, Mr. Fox, had grown far too friendly with the Scottish partners. In Hawaii, Captain Thorn had heard rumors from passing ship captains that diplomatic tensions were rising between the United States and Britain. He prepared himself should the partners who were British citizens attempt mutiny aboard his ship. Deeply isolated—from his passengers, his own officers and crew—and surrounded by the infinite and uncaring Pacific, Thorn’s mind took its own turns. No one, including Thorn himself, could say exactly what those were. Irving and Ross claim that it was simply malice on Thorn’s part. It’s conceivable, however, that in his regimented adherence to mission, configured with his anger and humiliation and paranoia, he believed he was doing his commander in chief, Mr. Astor, a favor by dispatching the whaleboat over the bar in this tumultuous weather, carrying a load of bad apples, and thus weeding out these, the most expendable of the men.

In the shrieking northwest squalls, the Scottish partners could see that this mission amounted to near suicide for the men assigned to the boat. McKay and McDougall approached Captain Thorn on deck and asked that he wait for a break in the weather.

“But he was deaf to entreaties,” reported Ross, “stamped, and swore that a combination was formed to frustrate all his designs. The partners’ interference, therefore, only riveted him the more in his determination, and Mr. Fox was peremptorily ordered to proceed.”

Fox was now visibly upset. He had personal ghosts that haunted the Columbia Bar. He turned to the Scottish partners, Ross wrote, with tears in his eyes.

“ ‘My uncle was drowned here not many years ago, and now I am going to lay my bones with his.’ ”

Fox then shook hands with the partners and others standing near him on deck, and climbed down into the boat. One of the partners handed him a pair of bedsheets, which could serve as a sail.

“Farewell, my friends!” Fox called out. “We will perhaps meet again in the next world.”

The small boat then pushed off from the side of the tossing
Tonquin,
and all hands aboard lined the rail in silence to watch her row into the chaos.

CHAPTER SIX

W
HERE
J
OHN
J
ACOB
A
STOR LED WITH BROAD VISION AND
careful planning, and Wilson Price Hunt led with care and consensus, Captain Jonathan Thorn led with force. And in the face of danger, he insisted on raw, head-on bravery. Yet in the power of the Pacific Coast his approach may have met its match.

It was 1:30
P.M
. on March, 22, 1811, when Mr. Fox pushed off from the tossing
Tonquin
with three voyageurs and an aging sailor manning the oars of the small whaleboat. His shipmates watched the whaleboat pull out into the heaving seas from the
Tonquin
where she sailed on the open ocean a few miles off the Columbia Bar. Looking north and south, they could see the gray-green coastline of the continent’s western edge—the strip of sand, the rocky headlands, the band of forest, the coastline thinning and dimming for miles in each direction, slowly disappearing amid the fine sea mist tossed up by the crashing Pacific surf, without seeing a single trace of a human presence. Mr. Fox’s mission was to locate the channel across the bar for the
Tonquin
to follow and lay the first foundations of empire on this most remote of coasts.

Alexander Ross watched from the rail with the others. The seas were so rough that by the time the whaleboat moved one hundred yards from the ship, he wrote, the onlookers at the rail frequently lost sight of it among the whitecapping swells. Mr. Fox’s whaleboat soon became “utterly unmanageable.” It turned sideways to the “foaming surges,” spun around, then was flung up to a wave crest, before disappearing again into a deep trough.

“At last she hoisted the flag,” wrote Ross. “[T]he meaning could not be mistaken; we knew it was a signal of distress. At this instant all the people crowded round the captain, and implored him to try and save the boat; but in an angry tone he ordered about ship, and we saw the ill-fated boat no more.”

Ross believed Captain Thorn was taking his revenge on his first mate for befriending the Scottish traders and French-Canadian voyageurs during the six-month voyage. Or Captain Thorn may have thought he was doing Mr. Astor a favor by getting rid of them. There may have been other explanations for Thorn’s seemingly cruel behavior.

Captain Thorn had trained in a military and naval tradition in which lives were sacrificed in the name of a mission for the good of country. He remained an officer in the U.S. Navy, on leave with permission to pursue Astor’s hugely ambitious enterprise in the Pacific. He burned with an unrelenting determination and patriotism to carry out his mission per his orders from Astor—in this case, to cross the Columbia Bar as expediently as possible and land the first American colony on the West Coast. But Astor’s great expedition served at least as much a commercial as a nationalistic purpose. Captain Thorn appears not to have reflected on this: What cost in human lives was a commercial mission worth? Or if he did reflect on this weighty issue, he kept it to himself. He may have felt unsure of himself in this, his first command, but sealed it off with his outward toughness. The more perceptive passengers might have sometimes caught a hint of a softer Thorn. Franchère reported that when those aboard the
Tonquin
realized that Fox’s whaleboat was lost, Captain Thorn looked as distressed as anyone. Was this for the loss of human life, or the setback it represented to his mission?

The ship spent the next day searching for the missing boat, followed by “an anxious night” tacking back and forth a distance off the Columbia’s mouth in powerful winds and heavy seas. Captain Thorn, who surely had been forewarned about the extreme hazards of the Columbia Bar, was giving it a good deal of berth and respect. Should he run aground on the bar with the
Tonquin
amid the surging tidal currents and pounding breakers, the loss of lives and property would be far greater than what was lost with the whaleboat.

By noon two days after they’d arrived, March 24, the wind had dropped. Now Mr. Mumford, the second mate aboard the
Tonquin,
made another attempt at finding the channel across the bar. Joining him in the longboat were two Scottish partners, Alexander McKay and David Stuart, as well as clerk Alexander Ross, and several others at the oars. The longboat, wrote Ross, was “well manned and armed” and hoped to cross the bar and make a landing on the “wild and gloomy” shore.

They were approaching the bar but still two miles from shore when those in the longboat suddenly found themselves pulled into the ripping maelstrom of current and surf and wind and shallows for which the Columbia Bar was already infamous. Ross, at the oars, described “the terrific chain of breakers . . . rolling one after another in rapid succession” while a “fearful suction” pulled the longboat toward the bar. Before they had time to respond fully, the current had dragged the longboat into the bar’s breakers, the crashing tons of water spinning them this way and that.

“[A]t this instant, Mr. Mumford, who was at the helm called out, ‘Let us turn back, and pull for your lives; pull hard, or you are all dead men.’ ”

For twelve minutes, Ross wrote, the longboat hung in the balance, the men pulling with all their strength, but neither winning nor losing the battle against the current sucking them farther into the bar’s breaking surf. Finally, “the boat obeyed the oars,” he wrote. They managed to row themselves out of the imminent danger and to the relative safety of the heaving but open sea.

The next morning, March 25, 1811, Mumford and crew again attempted to find the channel, now probing southward along the bar. Although the wind was calm, and the sea not choppy, the big smooth-backed swells rolling in off the Pacific still crashed over the bar in heavy breakers, almost trapping them again. They returned to the
Tonquin
without locating the channel. Captain Thorn, reported Ross, appeared dissatisfied with his officers—as well as himself. He surely felt the weight of the enterprise resting heavily on his shoulders. For four days the Seagoing Party had been stuck outside the mouth of the Columbia. How could they launch Mr. Astor’s great Pacific trade empire if Captain Thorn and his ship couldn’t even cross the Columbia Bar?

Captain Thorn now summoned one of Astor’s men, Job Aiken, a Scotsman and ship’s rigger, who was a strong sailor. He ordered Aiken to take the pinnace, the ship’s launch used to ferry passengers and supplies back and forth to shore, and sound the bar slightly farther north, with a crew made up of sailmaker John Coles, armorer Stephen Weeks, and two Hawaiians. Aiken and his crew were to measure the depth of the water by dropping a sounding line with a lead weight attached. If they found water deeper than three and a half fathoms—three and a half times the distance of a man’s outstretched arms, or about twenty feet—they were to raise a flag to signal the
Tonquin
to follow this channel across the bar.

It was already late in the day, 3:00
P.M.
, when Aitken and his crew rowed away from the
Tonquin
. A slight sea breeze had sprung up over the swells, a favorable and gentle wind to ride across the bar toward shore. Soon the hands aboard the
Tonquin
spotted the flag hoisted in Aitken’s boat—they had found the channel across the bar. Captain Thorn ordered the
Tonquin’
s anchor raised. The ship now slowly sailed toward the bar, moving at three knots on the gentle breeze, toward the calmer gap in the heavy breakers that indicated where the deeper water of the channel lay. The task demanded Captain Thorn’s utmost concentration—looking seaward to gauge the wind, looking up to determine the set of the sails, looking ahead to keep a steady course toward the gap in the breakers.

At the same time, Aiken’s pinnace, after sounding for the channel, rowed her way back out toward the ship coming in. As the pinnace neared the ship, Aiken veered a bit off to the ship’s starboard to let the ship pass, expecting the
Tonquin
to pause or throw a rope so Aiken and party could rejoin the ship. But no one aboard ship made a move to help, reported Ross. As the pinnace began to fall to the rear, McKay finally spoke up.

“Who is going to throw a rope to the boat?”

No one replied. No sailor left his post to help.

Aiken’s boat had now dropped behind the
Tonquin,
which was still gliding in toward the bar, aiming at the channel through the breakers, threading this needle of calm in the chaos of surf and current. The men in the pinnace began to row to catch up to the ship sailing landward but the powerful current of the outgoing tide worked against them.

“The boat, the boat!” shouted the partners at the rail on the
Tonquin
. They turned to Captain Thorn “entreating” him to pick up the pinnace and its crew.

“I can give them no assistance,” he replied coolly, according to Ross.

“Back a sail, throw a rope overboard,” shouted the partners. Second Mate Mumford said it would not take a minute.

“No,” replied Captain Thorn. “I will not endanger the ship.”

As the pinnace disappeared off the ship’s stern in the swells, the
Tonquin
sailed in toward the bar and the chaos of breakers, “the sight of which,” reported Ross, “was appalling.” She steered accurately into the channel through which the Columbia’s current exited the continent. Then the water suddenly grew shallower. She struck bottom on a second sandbar. The breakers tossed her up and slammed her down onto the hard sand bottom. Breakers ten feet high crashed over her stern. Everyone aboard who was able leapt up to grab the rigging before being tossed or washed overboard. She slammed seven or eight times with a keel-jarring shock. Then she broke free into deeper water on the inside of the bar. The wind now had died. The sails flapped. As darkness fell, the
Tonquin,
now without wind or headway of her own in order to steer her, but still surrounded by breakers, was being washed toward the foot of the high rocky headland that lay just inside the bar, called Cape Disappointment.

M
OUTH OF
C
OLUMBIA
R
IVER AND
C
OLUMBIA
B
AR

“We are all lost,” someone shouted, wrote Ross. “The ship is among the rocks.”

Captain Thorn ordered two anchors dropped to hold the ship in place. They were, in effect, caught inside the line of scrimmage between two opposing continental forces. Pushed by the Pacific surf in the darkness, pulled by the flow of the outgoing tide and current coming out of the Columbia, the ship slowly began to drag her two anchors over the bottom toward the rocky base of Cape Disappointment, which would surely smash her to pieces even if the sandbar had not.

The pinnace, meanwhile, was caught outside the bar. The breakers had worsened. Now that the ocean’s tide had turned, it flowed outward, drawing water out of the Columbia’s mouth. This outward flow pushed against the incoming waves—in effect shoving the rolling, breaking inbound waves upward into steep, high peaks. Aitken ordered the boat to drift with the outgoing tidal current, farther out to sea, trying to keep her steady in the turbulence. But one of the steep, toppling waves slammed into the pinnace amidships and knocked her over, spilling the crew.

The surf instantly washed away Aiken and sailmaker John Coles. Stephen Weeks, the armorer, grabbed hold of an oar and used it for flotation while managing to stay near the overturned pinnace. The two Hawaiians immediately stripped off their clothes in the surging breakers and set to work righting the pinnace. After they managed to flip it right side up, the boat remained full of water. Swimming beside it, they emptied the pinnace by jerking the boat rapidly back and forth, end to end, so the water inside her slopped out over the gunwales. It was an extraordinary display of boat handling in rough seas.

One of the many ironies of the Astoria story is that the expert swimmers brought from Hawaii—and they were indeed expert swimmers, ocean canoeists and longboard surfers—had never before touched a cold ocean. The water temperature at Waikiki Beach in Hawaii is about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature of a swimming pool. The water temperature at the mouth of the Columbia in March, when the
Tonquin
arrived, averages about 45 degrees, the temperature of an ice bath. At this temperature, someone who is immersed and lightly clothed loses body heat at an astonishing rate. In the first one to two minutes, as the water’s cold hits sensors buried deep in the skin, the victim will hyperventilate and the heart rate will jump—the gasping, yelping “shock” of hitting cold water—before elevated heart rate and breathing level off. For the expert Hawaiian swimmers, this moment must have come as a painful surprise.

After about ten minutes, the body’s core temperature begins a steady decline of roughly one-tenth of a degree per minute, although humans with thicker skin fold and more subcutaneous fat will show a slower cooling rate. After about fifty minutes of immersion, when the body’s core temperature reaches about 93 degrees, the average victim has lost a good part of his or her ability to manipulate extremities—fingers, arms, and legs. (The hands of “cold-water immersion” survivors have been found totally “locked” on to frozen ropes to which they clung during their ordeal; the ropes had to be cut to free them.) After roughly two hours in the water, when the body’s core temperature falls to 86 degrees, the subject typically loses consciousness. At this point the victim usually drowns. After four hours in water this cold the victim is almost surely dead.