Читать книгу The Conquest of Our Western Empire - Agnes Christina Laut - Страница 4
ОглавлениеPART I: The Lodestar of the Western Sea. The First Ship to Carry the Stars and Stripes Around the World. 1787-1792.
Romance, adventure, that sense of wonder which imparted the rosy light seen on neither land nor sea but gleaming in men’s souls, leading on to engulfing ruin or new vistas—all these have passed in our modern world.
So sighs the cynic, cooped up in his own imprisoned soul. So regrets the business drudge, making a marker of time to pawn his happiness for crust of bread or fortune won too late for zest of life. So say all the prisoners of the walled towns and the pens dipped in the gall of unrealized hopes.
Come to the shores of the Pacific, on that high point called Coxcomb Hill above the outlet of the Columbia.
Magellan may have thought the Pacific a peaceful sea when he emerged from waves smoking with spray and frost, which had furred the sails and ropes, and then raced the roaring winds that tossed the chopped-off crest like sea demon’s flying hair, and staggered drunkenly with spars splintered to matches out on the painted hyaline of glassy waters; but no peaceful sea greeted the sea rovers in this world of waters, from Drake’s keel, which first plowed round the world for England, to Gray’s ship, first belting the chartless main for the United States.
Whether Coxcomb Hill be named from the blood-red flower that decks Alpine meadows, or from some vain Indian gallant, is not known. The great Astor monolith points to the sky toward that lodestar which had guided the rovers over chartless seas. On the spiral panels is told in fresco of imperishable stone the story of the finding of that Western Sea.
As in tracing the peopling of the New World by the Indians you must follow the two great treks—white men from the East westward, Asiatic wandering savages from the West eastward, so now to understand the final clash between savagery and civilization that created a Pacific Empire on the northwest coast of America, you must again follow two converging tides of Destiny.
One is European diplomacy, playing a game of cunning on a great international checkerboard.
The other is the game of sea adventure pure and simple, lured by the hope of personal gain through trade in furs.
THE THEATRE OF EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY ALONG THE WEST COAST OF AMERICA WAS COMPARATIVELY CONCENTRATED. FURTHER THAN THIS, DISCOVERY BY SEA AND EXPLORATION BY LAND AT THE SAME TIME.
When Balboa strode pot-valiantly through the malarial, sweating thickets of Panama tropics and, reaching a height of land, glimpsed the Pacific or South Sea—and in resounding language claimed everything in sight to the zenith of Heaven for Spain—began the European game of diplomacy for exclusive possession of the Pacific Coast. The Pope confirmed the claim. That trod on England’s toes. Spain was Catholic. England was Protestant. England and Spain were about to grapple in the war for supremacy on the seas. It was a war inspired by religious prejudice, international hate, plot and counter-plot to displace Queen Elizabeth from the English throne. Devon Coast was the great school for the daring English seamen, who scoured the ocean main “to singe the beard” of the King of Spain. England called these seamen patriots. Spain called them pirates. Among them was one, the greatest navigator of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—Drake. Drake had invaded Balboa’s old stamping ground of Panama and carried off such loot of gold and silver bullion as pirate never dreamed; and when he set out again “to singe the Don’s beard,” it was with the blessing of the valiant Queen Bess, with a pomp that put to the blush the pirate’s wild crew with flag of skull and cross-bones. England’s ensign flew from his masthead. Gold and silver plate decked his private table. “Viols and harps” plied their strain of national songs while the great commander dined. Young noblemen waited on tables. Wines were of the oldest and best. Plumed hats, satin breeches, tinsel decked coats, swords with pearl handles and gold and silver scabbards, pistols aplenty in every man’s sash-belt, gauntlets to elbow, high boots almost to thigh—gave these sea adventurers a pride and an arrogance almost akin to knights jousting in a tournament. Yet the sole object of the expedition was to sail right into the Spanish Main of the Pacific, prove no sea could be locked against English prowess in all the world, pay the costs and win a fortune by loot of every Spanish ship and Spanish port found on the west coast of America.
Every schoolboy knows the rest of Drake’s story. It is one of the glories of English sea annals. His ships were so heavily laden with Spanish gold and silver that he could not go back the way he came—across the Atlantic exposed to attack by corsairs of Spain, but had to flee up the Pacific Coast and home around the world—“plowing a silver chart” for England’s ships to belt the globe.
Why England did not follow up Drake’s discoveries is no part of Pacific Coast history. If she had, his Nova Albion—New England—might have been on the Pacific Coast instead of the Atlantic. How far did Drake go north? That is in dispute; for the old charts and compasses were faulty; but certainly to the southern bounds of Oregon. Then, as far as England was concerned, discovery on the Pacific Coast slept for two hundred years.
Not so with Spain. Her high-hulled caravels and little sloops kept poking north along the Pacific Coast for two centuries; but Spain had not yet discovered that profit in furs could exceed profit in gold. It was gold and silver she coveted—such temples as she had looted in Mexico and Peru; and finding nought up the Pacific Coast but wild cannibal tribes with only fish and furs to barter, Spain, too, lapsed in zest for Pacific Coast discovery north of California.
It was Russia that revived the race to the Western Sea, which never again lagged to the winning of the Pacific Empire in our own day. Peter the Great had learned shipbuilding in English shipyards. He was a man to carve his own course and follow no precedent. His reign was marked by such a revival of learning and outburst of scientific endeavor as rendered Queen Elizabeth’s reign or Charles II’s restoration illustrious. The libertine ran rampant in Peter the Russian, as in Charles the Englishman; but liberty to pursue scientific aims was freed of mental and governmental tyranny. Peter’s court was the rendezvous of the scientific men of Europe; and the geographers of the period had a mythical Gamaland lying between Asiatic Siberia and Europe with a mythical channel right through the breadth of the American continent giving a passage by water from Pacific to Atlantic; so Peter the Great sent Vitus Bering, a Dane, coursing across the two Siberias to build ships on the Pacific, find that water channel and claim Gamaland for Russia.
Again, every schoolboy knows the story. Vitus Bering found no Northeast Passage from Pacific to Atlantic, and he perished miserably in a sand hole of the famous Seal Islands. Russian Alaska was the Gamaland added to the empire of the Czar; but the Russians did find the sea otter and the Alaskan seal; and these pelts promised quicker fortune than Spanish gold.
It was Russian activity that stabbed into alertness England’s lethargy regarding the Pacific Northwest; stabbed, too, Spain’s fear that her hermetically sealed South Sea might be invaded by a horde of fur hunters from what is now Alaska. Spain’s high-hulled men-of-war and little schooners again came creeping north from Mexico—Bruno Heceta in the 1770’s, Martinez and Don Quadra and Perez in Gray’s day of 1789 to 1792. Though the Spanish went as far north as Alaska and sighted Vancouver Island off modern British Columbia, and charted inland passageways from Vancouver Island up to Sitka; wild seas, Indian attack, scurvy, kept them off the shores of what is now known as the American Pacific Northwest. England went about her explorations in more thorough fashion. She sent Cook, one of her greatest naval commanders, to find out once and for all if any Straits of Juan de Fuca did cross from Pacific to Atlantic, as the pilot—Juan de Fuca—had related mistily in his old age to Michael Lok. Wild seas and the deep draught of his clumsy naval vessels kept Cook too far off shore to sight either Columbia River or Juan de Fuca Straits; but he did make anchor off Nootka, Vancouver Island. Here his crew picked up sea otter in barter for old nails—sea otter which some of the crew sold in China for $10,000 in modern money. In that crew were Portlock and Dixon and a middy, Vancouver, and an American youth named Ledyard, all of whom are met with in the race for the Western Sea. Though Cook perished miserably in Hawaii, as Bering had perished on the Seal Islands, when Cook’s voyages were published after his murder the effect was as electrical as the modern discovery of a new gold area or diamond field.
Here was quick fortune easy as the cast of gamblers’ dice—$10,000 worth of precious furs for a penny’s worth of old nails. Men’s ears buzzed. Portlock and Dixon resigned from the English navy and came out in ships of their own. So came Barclay, aged twenty-six, with bride of seventeen. So came Meares in English vessels, flying the Portuguese flag to avoid monopoly of the East Indian Company in Bengal and Bombay. To these privateers—whether we regard them as buccaneers or traders—England paid slight heed till Spain revived her claims and seized the forts and ships of Meares at Nootka. That was a serious matter for the diplomats. Though Spanish explorers may have sighted Vancouver Island, Cook, the Englishman, under official flag had landed and claimed all territory from Vancouver Island to Russian Alaska. Spain’s move on the checkerboard of European diplomacy looked like an effort to oust England’s prior right between Juan de Fuca Straits and Russian Alaska. Once more a great naval expedition to the Pacific Northwest was officially planned by England; and it was entrusted to that George Vancouver who had been one of Cook’s middies.
Now let us return to that Coxcomb Hill behind modern Astoria. Look at the spiral panels on the aerial Astor monolith and then out to the Pacific across the great river that eluded all search for three hundred years after Columbus discovered America. On hazy days you can just see to the north that Cape Disappointment, which Meares named late in the seventeen-hundreds because he could find “no such river as Saint Roc,” which the old Spanish navigator, Bruno Heceta, said must exist from “the efflux of muddy waters” against smashing tides. It is a high point but from this distance resembles a ridge of rock or sand extending swordlike across the Eldorado of mariners’ hopes. Anyway, said Meares—freebooter of two flags—“there is not a single river of any magnitude here.” So had Cook said ten years before Meares. So did Vancouver say ten years after Meares—“being persuaded that no such river even existed.” But Meares was in a rickety ship manned by mutinous whites and treacherous Lascars and dared not essay running too near that knife ridge against which a wind might smash him, or the tide rip his keels; and Cook and Vancouver had clumsy naval vessels, seaworthy in storms of the open sea, but too cumbersome in the shift and twist of whirling tide to risk a close-up of that rocky shore, where the white ghost fingers of the waves snatched with the mournful siren cries of baffled souls at rocks sharp-pinnacled as bayonets—snatched and climbed and crashed in storm higher than the highest sail.
Look to the south. The low-lying sands and swampy reaches and quicksand beaches of Point Adams, named by Gray; for he did find that lost river of old Spanish charts and Indian traditions—the River of the Shining Mountains, the lodestar of every explorer from Champlain to Lewis and Clark.
The river here is an arm of the sea itself, a great bay. Just below your feet is the little Lewis and Clark River, where the two young American explorers wintered amid drenching rains and used as dining table the great stump of an old fir tree which marks their camp to this day.
And between Coxcomb Hill and the great river stands the city named after Astor, whose ships missed not a whit of all the adventures of Magellan and Cook and Vancouver and came to such a terrible end as no Greek tragedy has portrayed.
On calm days the scene is of a painted hyaline peace. The great ferns of the surrounding forest lift their fronds to meet the dense greenery of the giant trees. The forest is an impenetrable thicket of densest growth, which has defied all fires. Where clearing has been made grow flowers of such gorgeous sun-tints you can hardly believe these huge waxen-white and blood-red blooms are the same species—roses, or fire-flowers, or painter’s brush, or rhododendrons, or dahlias—that grow in your own home gardens.
How did the little Boston ship—the Columbia, scarcely ninety feet in length—gain entrance across the seething broil of tide and river and wind and bar, when all the big English naval ships failed, and even one little Spanish brig of ninety tons had to run for life to open seas?
Come down from Coxcomb Hill and see. It is part of the story of American sea annals on the Pacific Coast.
CAPTAIN ROBERT GRAY, DISCOVERER OF THE COLUMBIA RIVER
When the tide is out, you can motor over the hard-packed sands for miles south of Columbia River between the water line of the Pacific and the shore rocks; but woe to you if the tide comes in before you have reached one of the cuts in the rocks to escape to the high line of the rocky coast. What wonder Spanish pilot and English buccaneer and sea rover of every flag under heaven lost their heads and sailed away in realms of fancy and fable when they emerged from the roaring billows of the Horn to these entrancing shores? Great snowy peaks hung in the clouds, opalescent and translucent as dwelling of Olympic gods—which by the same token was the reason Meares, the freebooter, gave the name Olympics to that outer guard of the Rockies up at Puget Sound. Whether Meares stole his charts from Portlock and Dixon—as they insinuated—or trumped up preposterous damages against the Spanish for seizing his fort under English flag, after sailing from India under Portuguese colors to escape the jealousy of the East India Company as well as the port charges levied on all but their own ships, the fact remains that his charts and descriptions of the Northwest Coast are, next to Vancouver’s, the most accurate.
THE CASCADES OF THE COLUMBIA
Over the shore line hang ferns higher than a man’s shoulders. Great Douglas firs torn in the wrench and assault of a thousand years by wind and tide come churning out to sea, tossed by the inrush and backwash, floating corpse trees. Cypress roots polished by sand and water, gnarled and twisted in snaky coils, glisten cinnamon-brown as roped braid against the mossed rocks; and the drooping cedars tremble to the tremor of tide and wind in rhythmic sigh to the moan and rush of waters. As for the flowers, what with drenching rains for three months of the year and almost unbroken sunlight for nine, their tints are not excelled in all the world except the tropics. They are all fire-flowers dyed with the mystic blood of the sun. At dawn the turquoise sea is bathed in rosy glow, at sunset incarnadined in fire and blood; but as you motor mile after mile—for forty miles you can run between shore and tide south of the Columbia—you begin to realize why the seamen heard siren voices in the moan of the tide. Here the tide has undermined the beach and left a wet sinkhole of quicksand, which sucks under rash wheel or foot like a ship smashed by billows. In fact, as we swerved up the black rocks from one such hole south of Seaside near Haystack Rock, men were pushing their car out of the quicksand, and you could see their own feet sinking as they got the rear wheel out.
Look far out to sea. The white wave-fret, the crest of foam chopped off backwards before waters have time to curl, the spray that reflects rainbows in the sun or blooms in water roses that vanish as you look, the fleecy herds of the tide shepherded by the crooning wind, tell you where lie submerged rocks or sucking quicksand; and you understand why the mildest breezes in America were called “frozen nymphs” in Drake’s old annals. Compared to the genial air above, these waters are deadly cold. With wind and tide driving sailing ship ahead at race-horse speed, if men in rowboats were caught athwart in the billows and swamped, there was not one chance in ten they could be picked up by the mother ship or get ashore against the backwash of the fierce tide. This explains the amazing loss of life among the old navigators before this coast was charted.
Gray, Vancouver and Cook, Meares, and Portlock and Dixon were all naval men; but whereas the British ships were manned with Lascars, Sandwich Islanders and impressed riffraff, who would not risk their own hides for pay of a hundred dollars a year, the little Boston ship was manned by sons of New Bedford whalers, willing apprentices, sons of the proprietors or men promised a share in trade profits, or lads keen to get ships of their own for the next voyage if they succeeded on this. Such men were Ingraham and Haswell and Coolidge, and Boit, the seventeen-year-old boy of Gray’s crew. The leader could depend on their courage as he could on his own. They were comrades, not mutinous underlings; and it was their courage and their loyalty that nailed down title to Oregon for the United States.
A word as to the character of the American ships. The clipper type did not come into vogue until later; but whether these early ships are called schooners or sloops, they were forerunners of the clipper. They had the long slim streamer-line of the clipper, the same great cloud of sail, the same low dead-line and yet not too deep draught for gull-like flight over shallow waters. The English and Spanish ships carried even greater clouds of sail but they stood high-hulled and squarish of prow and stern and ran too deep draught to risk rock or sand-bar.
Gray’s discovery of the Columbia River has been told many times but never can be told adequately. Only scraps of the ship’s log and of his assistant’s log exist to-day. The venture was a private one; but it was in no sense secret, as were Spain’s voyages, for fear of attracting other discoverers to the coast. Whereas, the British voyages, with instructions in secret, were given to the world for the purpose of affixing British title to the country between Russian domain in Alaska and Spanish domain in San Francisco Bay.
Cook’s voyage had just become known and set the adventurers of the world all agog over the quick fortunes to be won in the sea-otter trade. Men’s ears tingled and men’s palms itched at the tales told by Cook’s crew of the great black “sea beaver” whose silken pelts were bartered from natives of the Pacific Coast for handfuls of old nails and then resold for $10,000—yes, $20,000—though half had spoiled with rain-rot before reaching the markets of China. Cook had established British title from Vancouver Island to Russian Alaska; but there was still the No-Man’s Land from California to Nootka—and no one knew how far that domain extended eastward before it met Louisiana. Hearne had all but proved there was no Northwest Passage from Hudson Bay westward. Alexander Mackenzie was just about to make his dash down from Athabasca to Arctic Seas and over the mountains to the Pacific, to reaffirm that proof. Sea otter were plentiful as fish in shoals; but would they remain plentiful with East India vessels and buccaneers of every flag planning to hie them to that golden harvest of far Eldorado seas? Besides, tea was just coming in as a fashionable beverage. Boston’s “tea party” emphasized that, though the facile freebooter Meares from India, who did not scruple to carry fifteen tons of opium for trade, expressed the grave fears of the medicos that tea might demoralize the manners and morals and derange the nerves and minds of its votaries. If Boston, good Puritan Boston with conscience on a hair-trigger, demanded tea and Chinese mandarins demanded sea otter at from $200 to $1,000 a pelt, and sixty otter could be bartered for a handful of old spikes, or musket shot, or glass beads—why not make everybody happy by outfitting a Boston ship with such cheap trash to be traded for sea otter in the Pacific Northwest, to be traded for tea in China, to be reconverted into good coin back in Boston, morals and manners and nerves and sanity all to the risk or the discard? Not very high motive for a great endeavor—true; but hitched to the lodestar of that lure to the Western Sea—a perfectly workable and highly profitable arrangement to finance the adventure. Such pawns for her dice does Destiny use for her inscrutable ends.
One can see the good merchants of Boston up in the Coolidge Building, or in Dr. Bulfinch’s library on Bowdoin Square with legs sprawling under the table and hands turning the pages of Cook’s Voyages, discussing the pros and cons of such a frisky and risky venture all the winter of 1787.
Young Bulfinch was just back from Europe full of the popular tales of Cook’s voyage. Why, a dozen men of Bristol and Hull were preparing to outfit ships for the Pacific Northwest! Barrell, the merchant, could supply the goods. So could Samuel Brown; or Pintard, another outfitter of New York. Derby of Salem and Hatch of Cambridge could supervise the purchase or building of ships with dry timber to defy splitting in the heat of crossing the Equator, or storms that tore hulls to skeleton ribs round the Horn. Their ships—with the great crowd of sail, and narrow prows to ride the waves, and sealine like a whale’s side to throw off the impeding waters—could show heel to any craft on the ocean. Because England and Spain were in strained relations, ship’s-letters could be obtained from the Spanish minister in Philadelphia to ensure fresh provisioning off Chile and Peru and Juan Fernandez, though how sincere those documents were may be inferred from the Santa Barbara governor’s letters to the Presidio of San Francisco stating that “when the ship named Columbia said to belong to Heneral Wanghington of the American States, which sailed from Boston in September 1787 [arrives] you will cause the said vessel to be secured with her officers and crew.” Spain still labored under the delusion of the Papal Bull preceding the days of Drake that, in partitioning off the New World, made the South and Western Seas her closed preserves.
Medals were struck by Joseph Barrell, the Boston merchant, showing the vessels and the outfitters. Such pitifully little craft they were, too: the Columbia under Kendrick, 212 tons, over 80 feet long, 10 guns; the Lady Washington under Robert Gray, 90 tons, a small sloop with 12 men; both captains still in their early forties.
Spite of twinges of conscience as to that wicked tea and the day being a Puritan Sabbath, visitors thronged the docks. Healths were drained in stronger than tea and all was “hilarity” as one log narrates, with the sailors running round the capstan bars singing their chanteys. Monday, October 1, the great adventure had begun. The course planned was to Cape Verde Islands, thence the Falklands east of the Horn, round the Horn, then the Selkirk Island of Juan Fernandez, then without stop up to Cook’s landfall on the west of Vancouver Island at Nootka, or Noot-wee-ka, “where the deer people” dwelt. If the ships showed swift heel to the sea, it was judged these stops would afford enough fresh water, provisions, hay and fodder for the hogs and cows on board, and replacement of torn sails and shattered spars to reach the Northwest of America.
At Cape Verde, Gray picked up as valet a colored boy named Marcus Lopez. His courage almost cost Coolidge, the first mate, his life. Kendrick proved a commander cautious almost to a fault; but the two chiefs never disagreed, though Gray was quicker and more daring to act. Kendrick frankly didn’t care to tackle the passage round the Horn in January. Yet the ships were only at the Falklands by January. Haswell got himself transferred over to Gray. They had only headed for the Horn by April of 1788, and enough storms were encountered in all conscience; for Kendrick had to put into Juan Fernandez on the west to rest his scurvy-stricken crew, replace masts, repair sails and get fresh provisions, the governor of the Island being afterwards removed from office for helping these sea rovers who invaded Spain’s closed sea. Again and again, in the hurricanes encountered, the little Lady Washington came off best; for Gray sped on north, when Kendrick had delayed for repairs; but when Gray on a later voyage transferred to the Columbia, again his ship led. Yet no ship passed the Horn unscathed. Billows crashed over rails, washing hogs and poultry out of deck pens. Bilge water poured from lee scuppers in torrents. Everything loose on deck rolled from side to side in the drench of crashing waves so that in a later voyage even a small cannon ran amuck and thrashed about before sailors asprawl could rope and anchor the rolling peril. When the ships came up from such plunges, reefed sails had been torn by the wind and were aflutter in rags. Though hatches had been closed, water poured through the heat-scorched seams of the deck and drenched sailors’ berths below until the kitchen tins were awash and the blankets a sodden mass, and there were six inches of water below decks. As for the masts, they might have been the crucified arms of ghost ships; and the men clinging to the ratlines came down stiffened with ice in their oilskins with eyes red-rimmed and half-blind by the flaw of salt spray; but New Bedford and Salem men knew such gales on their own northeast coast; and the fact remains, Gray’s little Lady Washington came through in such shape that she could spread her wings to the welcome warm winds of the Pacific and drive up the west coast of South America like a gull.
Why did men take such risks for chancy fortune, at best? I do not know, except that we are all pawns of a Divine Decree that drives on to Destiny with an urge neither man nor race can resist without extinction. If there is one lesson more than another, the exploration of the Pacific Coast teaches that. It is met with again and again.
Then came a wonder world—medusa-slime lighting the foam trail in phosphorescent gleam; sulphur whales gamboling about the ship in a way to make these New England seamen reckon of other fortune; sea lions roaring hoarsely from the black rock reefs; dreamy summer days on a silver sea; dreamy summer nights under a golden harvest moon; a haze of unreality and rest, such rest as only men whose muscles had been stretched taut to pain by sleepless nights and ceaseless labor could appreciate as an earthly heaven.
By August—nine months out from Boston—some one from the crow’s-nest shouted “Land.” It was Drake’s New Albion of two hundred years before. One can almost hear their shouts of “inexpressible joy” the ship’s log records. Latitude 41°, and next day above “black sand” by the plumb-line, only eighteen miles off coast, with Indians paddling out from what would be the modern border between California and Oregon if the latitude were correct. The Indians were in dugouts of “vast bulk” with paddles of “ashwood” and tossed “feathers” the signal for peace; but as the wind began to hum, Captain Gray could only throw out presents and press sail and speed on; and these boys of New Bedford and Salem—the majority of them, as you can gather from their subsequent service, a very few years past twenty-one—how did they feel in this wonder world? How would you have felt at seventeen to twenty-one?
Was the river seen between August 5 and 9, Rogue River or the Umpqua? I do not know; but I do know it was close to Drake’s farthest north of two centuries earlier. Says Haswell’s Log: “Columns of smoke we could see” and “many fires”—signals from the Indians to come in and trade. “Aug. 6—within quarter of a mile of a bold sandy shore.” Aug. 7—“within a mile of a small island, we hove to the jolly-boat and sent her to sound the channel—birds so numerous, could be compared to nothing else but a hive of bees swarming, most of them pelicans; long and very dangerous reef, lat. 43° 20′.” (A pretty safe bet they were now abreast what is known as the Bend Country.) “Sailed in the ship within a mile of the coast. Aug. 9, entrance of a very large river—lat. 44° 20′—vast numbers natives hostile and warlike shaking spears with air of defiance with hideous shouting.” One native in a dugout creeps up and by sign language explains the ship can find fish and fresh water here. It was probably to lure them to wreck. Aug. 10—the little boat searches a landing place and two dugouts full of Indians flourish sea otter skins for trade, though they kept their knives in hand ready “to strike”—faces “pitted with smallpox”—lat. 45° 2′. Aug. 14—a harbor with “waves breaking high”—“anchored half a mile from shore in 3 fathoms,” about (?) 45° 27′, “canoe brought berries and crabs,” which were a godsend to the sailor boys sick of scurvy “so advanced one month longer at sea would have been fatal” (so we have not all the hardships of the voyage recorded in the Log—no wonder Gray had scampered, leaving Kendrick far behind); “they would hand their [otter] skins on board and take what ever was given in return” (Meares corroborates this style of trade); “took off several boat loads of wood.”
“Aug. 16, boiled and roasted crabs for sale purchased for buttons.” Aug. 16, an old chief comes on board and Haswell goes ashore with Coolidge, while the crew cuts grass for the live stock. The seven scurvy-weakened men were rowed ashore. The Indians seemed so friendly, the crew of seven had gone ashore poorly armed—only two or three muskets but each sailor had a pistol and sword. The Indians entertain the whites by tossing arrows and spears in a war dance with “frightful howls” which “chilled my blood,” says Haswell. The men were digging clams, the most delicious sea food on the coast, and the colored boy Lopez, carrying the grass to the jolly-boat, had stuck his cutlass in the sand. An Indian snatched it. The black boy gave chase—the crew shouted an alarm, but the big ship could not fire for fear of hitting her own men. Coolidge proffered the chief a reward for return of the stolen article. The Indian signaled “go get it yourself” and the white men fell into the cunning trap by pursuing and putting greater distance between themselves and the ship. Behind a clump of trees was the black boy hanging on to the thief, when a dozen stabs and a flight of arrows felled him and before the sailors could prevent, the Indians were chopping the body to pieces. The crew then backed hastily for their own boat keeping face to the wolfish pursuit of their foes. Haswell shot one ring leader with his pistol, and Coolidge threw himself between the hostiles and bade his men race it for the jolly-boat. Coolidge himself was already bleeding, and one man had fainted from a barbed arrow and was gushing blood. Gray had but three people left on board, which proves the whole crew of the Lady Washington could not have exceeded a dozen, with seven of them almost dead of scurvy. “We jumped into the boat, put off, and were soon out of arrow-shot. Then they launched their canoes intending to cut us off, we keeping constant [pistol] fire from the [jolly] boat. As soon as we got on board, we discharged 2 or 3 swivel shot and in a few moments, not a canoe was to be seen. During the whole night, it was dismal to hear the whoops and howlings—fires on the beach where the lad was killed.” (No doubt the boy’s body was being devoured; for from Cook to Gray all navigators narrate these Indians were cannibals. So much for the halcyon condition of the Indian in his primitive innocence.)
Such was Gray’s introduction to quick and easy fortune on the Pacific Northwest Coast. Haswell calls this point Murderers’ Harbor, evidently thinking of that Martyrs Island where a Spanish crew were torn to pieces, or another Murderer’s Island where Meares’ and Barclay’s men suffered a like fate; but the point has now been pretty well identified with Tillamook. You can see the hunched headland as you motor south of the Columbia along the sands when the tide is out, where thousands of pleasure seekers to-day from Seaside and Cannon Beach dig for the selfsame delicate clam food.
No more loitering. Gray speeds on for a safe harbor, where he can get his half-ill men back on sea legs and his sloop repaired for sea-otter trade farther north. The ship scudded before a fine breeze. Haswell reports, “I am of opinion the Straits of Juan de Fuca exist though Captain Cook positively asserts they do not; for in the very latitude where they are said to lie, the coast takes a bend.” One can easily identify the famous Tatoosh Island glimpsed as they sped on, which Meares had visited in June of the very same year and where he had been hospitably received by one of the greatest scoundrels and assassins in Northwest history. Note the name! On the Island to-day stands the United States light-house, a guide to one of the greatest harbors and island-dotted bays in the world—Puget Sound. It was then Meares had named the Olympics. Indians here could utter a few words of English; but Gray hurried on for Cook’s Nootka on the west shore of Vancouver Island. There were both fogs and rocks with a wild surf, but behind the rocks lay a bay calm as glass. “We manned our sweeps, a light breeze sprang up. At the entrance [to Clayoquot] we hoisted out the long boat to tow and assisted by the natives late in the afternoon came to anchor over a bottom of sand in sheltered road stead.” The chief here—Wicanish—made it clear that though allied by marriage with Maquinna of Nootka, this was not Nootka. As Nootka was the rendezvous for Kendrick to join him, Gray was off on September 2, and though floundering off shore in heavy gales for two weeks, finally in a sudden calm neared Cook’s Nootka. A sail was seen. Was it Kendrick’s Columbia? The vessel proved to be one of two under Meares and Douglas from Macao, China, under Portuguese colors, where they had loaded on the opium while still squeamish as to tea.
In Nootka, Meares had established himself with a garrison in a sort of fort flying the British flag and was just prepared to launch a schooner of thirty tons built by Chinese carpenters under direction of Mr. Funter.
All the romance woven round a Captain Kidd, or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, pales beside the ridiculous events that shifted in moving-picture scene at Nootka for the next six years. Picture the dinner of the merry captains together that night! Ham and eggs and wine, Meares plied. All had been navy men and all were easy-give and easy-take except on one subject—furs; and “upon his sacred word and honor” Meares vowed there were not fifty skins to be got on the Pacific Coast. Gray and Haswell and Coolidge and all the other Americans smiled: for Meares’ own vessel was loaded to the water-line—if not with furs—what? Meares sent his blacksmiths to assist in repairing the rudder of Gray’s ship and offered to carry letters to China with him for the Americans, which he afterwards sent back with an apology. He was not sure these Americans were not more friendly to the Spanish than to himself. Sept. 23, in rode the Columbia with Kendrick. On October 1, in anniversary of the departure from Boston, guns enough were fired by the Meares and Boston ships to set the mountains round the fort rumbling in thunderous rip-rock echoes and the waves splashing. There was a hilarious dinner on the Columbia. The Northwest America—the first vessel built on the Pacific—was launched with more salvos of cannon; but the little schooner slid so precipitately from her skids, she almost got away in the backwash of the tides; and the Indians, who had shouted “wacush-wacush,” “good friends, good friends,” had to get out their whaling boats and race to the rescue. Meares had forty Europeans in his crews besides Chinese and Lascars. How he cursed Portlock and Dixon for their treatment of him up in Alaska, and laughed over the experience of his surgeon up there walking right over the top of an Aleut underground house and falling through the roof almost into the boiling fish kettle of the astounded natives. He was a good talker, was Meares, and kept referring to Sir Joseph Banks, one of Cook’s patrons, as a friend, though he himself was under what were practically pirate flags—that is, flags unauthorized by either England or Spain. Nor did he think there was any Great River of the West. That was why he had called the big headland Cape Disappointment; but he had got sixty sea otter for a handful of old nails and the site of his fort for a pair of old pistols. And then the Americans heard of Barclay the Englishman, aged about twenty-six, up Juan de Fuca Straits with his bride aged seventeen. As for a Northwest Passage, Meares scouted the fable. Hudson Bay was 2,000 miles away if it was an inch—not a bad guess considering the geographers on paper were still chasing that Northwest Passage. He may have been a scamp, but Meares was second to none as a navigator and romancer. This was his second voyage out and he called the natives “filthy brutes,” “murderers,” though he failed to add he got many of his own furs by shooting the end off their dugouts, and sinking the swimmers. He failed also to add that he had kidnaped Comekela, the brother of Maquinna, Chief of the Nootkas, to use him as interpreter; but he raised shouts of laughter over the return of Comekela to his family in scarlet coat with a cockade hat and brass buttons and bells on his feet and enough rings on his toes to dance the whole tribe into the Indian’s Paradise; but Comekela proved “a surly brute.” He wanted all the glory from the moment of his triumphant return. He had plaited his hair in long greasy braids down his back. The bells and buttons were all right, but some of those shining little copper saucepans with handles hanging in the ship’s kitchen would add to the resounding ding dong from the ends of his long braids; so began a battle royal in hide and seek between the ship’s cook and Comekela. Comekela would dive and snatch one pan. The cook would pursue up the hatchway with rolling pin or poker, and the rest of the crew scampered out of the way.
Suffice it to say the Nootka Indian won. He had all the little saucepans that could clang from his braids to his heels.
All the same, the Americans, or Bostonais as the Indians dubbed them, noticed when the big canoes circled round the foreign vessels, there was a certain fierce melancholy in the chants of welcome; and the beating of the paddles on the gunwales had a hideous resemblance to the war-drum. Maquinna at this time was about thirty years old; Callicum, another brother who was shot in June by Don Martinez, the Spaniard, about forty. Trade was potlatch-feast fashion—a gorging with (no doubt, drugged) rum and then each side made reciprocal presents, if sixty otter skins for old nails could be called fair exchange. Human skulls with fresh flesh bore only too terrible proof of cannibalism. “I, myself, have seen them eat human flesh,” says Haswell. To their amazement, the Americans learned of a degenerate white surgeon, McKay, left by a Bombay vessel, living among the fierce tribe of the Tatoosh warriors to act as an interpreter. Both Maquinna and Wicanish of Clayoquot warned the Americans that Tatoosh was a dangerous, treacherous man. He had 400 of a bodyguard and not less than 7,000 people and 3,000 warriors, and he ranged from the modern Fraser River to Cook’s Cape Flattery. Though married into Maquinna’s family, his people did not speak the same language as the Nootka people.
Yes, Meares knew all about those Three Brothers Islands, and the Quicksands of Tillamook, and Tatoosh had murdered some of his men—which the Indians denied. One mistake the Boston men thought Meares had made. He had put half a dozen mutineers ashore as slaves for the winter to be taken back on promise of good behavior. The men were finally given full pay in China; but the example was a bad one for Maquinna—“white men as slaves.” Vancouver has been accused of using the lash too often on his subordinates, but it was wiser than putting mutineers ashore to stir up treachery among the Indians.
Meares drew smiles when he related how he had been made “King of the Indians by a tiara being placed on his head.” The tiara was a war-bonnet and the ceremony nothing more or less than complimentary adoption in the tribe.
It was significant when Gray’s men towed Meares’ ships out of Nootka on October 26, that the Indians who had been shy of the English buccaneers came in flocks to the Boston men. The boasted English fort had been torn down for firewood and the slabs turned over to Kendrick. The winter of 1788-89 proved cold. Though Indians professed friendship, they were always inveterate thieves and trundled off five small cannon given by the English to Kendrick. A house was rushed up for wintering quarters. The Indians had retired upstream for the cold weather, and the Columbia narrowly escaped a terrible explosion in January when an accidental fire almost reached the powder magazine. Wicanish of Clayoquot paid them a visit, and in March Gray set out to scout trade. April saw him at Tatoosh’s Island, coasting Cape Flattery, then back to Nootka, where Kendrick was still dallying. May, again to sea; then just as the Americans prepared to leave the Sound, in glided a Spanish brig with twenty guns under Don José Martinez, with two consorts and the avowed purpose of ousting Meares and making a prize of his vessels. Douglas, Meares’ partner, had already come in, and Martinez was an old hand on this coast, having been here as pilot in 1774 under Perez, and knew the coast as far up as Alaska. Gray’s cruising round Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands filled the early summer. Two hundred sea otter were bartered for one chisel; so Meares was not the only trader to drive hard bargains. The tribes proved even more uncouth and savage farther north. When the Spanish had erected a fort on Hog Island and seized Meares’ ships under Colnett and Hudson, the little Northwest America was christened Gertrudis and Coolidge engaged as her captain. Poor Colnett, Meares’ captain between rage and chagrin went violently insane.
Gray was transferred to the Columbia to carry furs to China and tea to Boston. Kendrick remained on the Coast. The voyage lasted from July of 1789 to August of 1790; 50,000 miles was the ship’s log record for the first American vessel around the world. The whole city of Boston welcomed Gray home. He marched up the streets abreast of Attoo, a Hawaiian lad whom he had picked up in Hawaii to take poor Lopez’s place, gay in cloak of yellow plumes. If a feather will show which way the wind blows, Attoo’s gay plumage was good omen; for Hawaii to-day is American territory.
Owing to the glut of too many furs on a market demoralized by war, the great adventure was a loss, as nearly all great adventures into the unknown are at first a loss. Barrell and Brown bought out Derby and Pintard. It was decided to send the Columbia back, and at once. Half a dozen new men were enlisted, among whom was the boy Boit. This time with less jubilation the Columbia left Boston on September 28, 1790, and anchored at Clayoquot, south of Nootka, June 5, 1791.
In 1789, Gray had noticed how Martinez had fortified Hog Island and taken possession of the Coast in even more flamboyant, loud-sounding manner than Balboa had claimed the South Seas at Panama two and a half centuries previously, though Cook had already established England’s prior title to Nootka. The Spanish may have sighted Nootka before Cook. There is no proof they had ever before claimed it by right of prior discovery; and to avoid cross-fire between England and Spain, the American privateers judged it wiser if not safer to go down to the friendly reception of Wicanish at Clayoquot, which was neutral ground for trade. Where Kendrick cruised in Gray’s absence is a guess—perhaps round Vancouver Island. He, too, like Meares, had got from Maquinna a grant of land for a fort at Nootka; but Nootka was an international volcano—not good trading ground for privateers. Perhaps with memories of Meares’ efforts to discourage them off the coast, they were not sorry Don Martinez had made a clean sweep of Meares’ fort at Nootka and replaced it with one of his own. There were ugly conflicting tales told of the Spanish intimidating the English by leaving a hangman’s rope over yard-arms; and no doubt old Maquinna smiled his sinister smile; but he did not love the Spanish any more than he did the English; for had not Meares kidnaped one brother and Martinez shot the other brother in a dugout and heaved the corpse over for the fish? These white men, whom the Indians had first mistaken for gods, were after all only men, bad men, “pishah, pishah.” Other Spanish explorers had been up the coast in Gray’s absence.
Gray was off for Queen Charlotte Islands within two weeks, and there he traded for six weeks. Off Cape Flattery, Puget Sound, he was almost shipwrecked and came in to Clayoquot to lay the keel for the second vessel built on the Pacific Coast, the first American shipyard of the Northwest. It was named the Adventure and launched in April of 1792; but in the crowded events of the next two fateful years, we are anticipating the story. Let us get back to Haswell’s faithful Log:
“Aug. 21, 1791—At noon, Cape Lookout N. E. 8 leagues. Advisable to make short stay. Aug. 29—made sail for Clioquot—canoe came off to inform us Captn. Kendrick was in harbor. Fired gun, hoisted our colors. This was answered. He came along side and was saluted with three cheers. Saw two ships, which we supposed to be Spaniards pass. He had hauled his brig on the ground and the place where provisions and stores were landed was fortified and dignified by the appellation Ft. Washington. People employed, scraping and repairing and painting. Sept. 8—stood out to sea and bore southward. Sept. 9—Cape Flattery coast. Stood to and fro off Tatoosh Island—within quarter mile of a most dangerous reef—hoisted out boats to tow and most narrowly escaped. Sept. 18—Clayquot went in to see if Captain Kendrick still remained. Found him nearly ready for sea. Sept. 20—towed up to our winter quarters. Sept. 21—landed and struck first blow towards building a log; house. Sept. 27—sailed the Lady Washington with Captn. Kendrick for China. Sept. 29—sails unbent; yards unrigged and stowed below, began frame our sloop. Oct. 3—laid keel of sloop Adventure, every person employed. Oct. 7—suddenly awakened (11 o’clock) by report musket and every cove was full of Indians. Sprang out of bed, armed myself and 7 persons and marched down to beach. Savages turned out to be rocks, which the tide ebbing low had left dry. Our work jogging on with whip saws sawing planks. Oct. 12—visited by Wickananish and brother ... gazed with admiration at house and vessel ... dwelling house, smith’s forge and shop, carpenter’s shop, lodging rooms and cabins, 2 cannon mounted, one inside house through a port, loopholes for small arms and pistols, our party 10 in all. Oct. 23, intolerably rainy, only two days our men could work out of doors.
“Jan., 1792, end of month laid sloop’s beams ... end of January before we finished sloop’s beams. Feb. 2 preparing to lay ship on ground ... visited very much by chiefs and wives” (sign of peace, which ought to have put them on guard); “cordiality of warriors unusual ... partook at our table of such as we ate and drank” (spies as later events proved), “Captn. Gray supplied them with drugs, rice, bread, molasses to gain their esteem.” (Alas! for hopes to gain esteem by gentle means. The motive was mistaken by the Indians for weakness.)
It was on February 18 that the notorious Totoosh or his brother had stolen the boatswain’s jacket; and again Gray would not punish the thief but only recaptured the stolen jacket. Then the Indians threw off their mask of friendship. “Attoo, our Sandwich Island lad, informed Captain Gray of a plot to capture the ship. He [Tatoosh] had promised to make him [Attoo] a great chief if he would wet our firearms and a sea-otter skin for each musket ball, telling him he meant to come through the woods, board the ship from the bank and kill every person on board. Attoo asked when he would come ... Capt. Gray ordered the swivels to be loaded. All our great guns were landed on the bank.... The ship was immediately removed [from the bank]. I put the fort in a good position of defense ... I discharged and reloaded the cannon ... Our people being up to the waist in water, scraped to the bottom of the keel, when Mr. Smith told us the natives were coming ... I ordered Mr. Boit and all the ship’s people on board and joined the people in the house. I heard them [the Indians] whoop. One party seemed nigh the bank, the other the harbor to attack the fort. Having plans frustrated” (by finding the ships in position of defense—it was night) “they retired. The day broke ... the tide rose, the ship hauled to her berth and moored.”
Henceforth four watches kept guard night and day—Boit the boy one of them. February 20, by way of putting fear in the hearts of the ambuscaded Indians, Haswell had the four cannons loaded with canister-shot to clear out the spies skulking among the trees. That day, innocent as a lamb, came Tatoosh asking the gentlemen why they no longer visit the Indian village. Gray ordered Tatoosh off the ship and told him if his father had not been along, he would have been shot on the spot. These Indians, said Haswell, now had from traders more than 200 muskets. He says Tatoosh had at least 2,000 warriors.
February 23, the Adventure was launched. The boatswain of the Columbia, Mr. Ben Harding, died in March. And now events come thick and fast. The Boston men must have known that Captain Vancouver was on his way up the Coast to settle that quarrel of Meares’ fort seized at Nootka. They also knew that Spain realized Don Martinez had gone too far and had now in 1792 sent one of their greatest sea commanders, who also knew this coast from apprenticeship as a pilot, Don Quadra, to restore what Martinez had seized. Haswell had gone North on the Adventure but Gray was coasting South on the Columbia. Not fewer than thirty trading vessels were on the coast this year. When the two ships of Gray’s command came together in June near Nootka there was an astounding piece of news reported. Let Haswell speak first: “We saw a ship ... I hauled for her and soon discovered it to be the Columbia ... they had had good success ... to the South, they spoke his Britannic Majesty’s ship Discovery George Vancouver and brig Chatham Wm. Brounton.... They [Gray’s ship] discovered a harbor in lat. 46° 53′ ... Gray’s Harbor ... attacked by the natives and the savages had a considerable slaughter made among them. They next entered Columbia River and went up it about 30 miles and doubted not it was navigable upwards of 100 ... the ship during the cruise had collected 700 sea-otter skins and 150,000 skins of other species.”
Now let us follow Gray, himself. The log of Gray’s ship has been lost except from the 6th to 21st of May.
In 1775 Don Bruno Heceta, the Spaniard with whom Don Quadra had gone as pilot, recorded: “These currents ... cause me to believe that the place is the mouth of some great river ... I did not enter and anchor there because ... if we let go the anchor, we had not enough men to get it up. [Thirty-five were down with scurvy.] ... At the distance of three or four leagues, I lay to. I experienced heavy currents, which made it impossible to enter the bay, as I was far to leeward.... These currents, however, convince me that a great quantity of water rushed from this bay on the ebb of the tide.”
And now comes Gray in May of 1792, knowing if he would be first he must be swift; for Vancouver is on this coast and says there is no great river of the West. May 7, he is in Grey’s Harbor, where the Indians have become so threatening he fires into their canoes and kills seven. On the 10th, he is steering due south. On the 11th, he hugs the coast, though he hears a tide rip like thunder and sees a terrific collision of tide in and roiling river current out; but the weather is clear and he can see what he is doing. A wind was driving in shore at 8 in the morning, all sails set like the wings of the gulls, which Haswell had described as “the swarming of bees”; he rode the rolling billows in over the bar: “May 11th ... at four A.M. saw the entrance of our desired port bearing east-southeast, distance six leagues ... at eight A.M. being a little to windward of the entrance of the harbor, bore away, and ran in east-southeast between the breakers ... When we were over the bar we found this to be a large river of fresh water, up which we steered. Many canoes came alongside to [anchor] ...”
To this may be added the ship’s log of John Boit:
“The river extended to the SE. as far as eye cou’d reach, and water fit to drink as far down as the Bars at the entrance. We directed our course up this noble River in search of a village. The beach was lined with natives, who ran along the shore following the ship. Soon after, above 20 canoes came off, and brought a good lot of furs and salmon, which last they sold two for a board Nail. The furs we likewise bought cheap, for copper and Cloth. They appeared to view the Ship with the greatest astonishment and no doubt we was the first civilized people that they ever saw. We observed some of the same people we had before seen at Gray’s harbour, and perhaps that was a branch of this same River. At length we arrived opposite to a large village [Chinook] situate on the North side of the River, about 5 leagues from the entrance. Came to in 10 fm. sand, about ¾ mile from shore. The River at this place was about 4 miles over. We purchas’d 4 Otter skins for a Sheet of Copper. Beaver skins, 2 spikes each, and other land furs, 1 spike each.
“We lay in this place till the 20th May, during which time we put the ship in good order and fill’d up all the water casks along side, it being very good. These Natives talk’d the same language as those farther South, but we cou’d not learn it. Observ’d that the canoes that came from down river, brought no otter skins, and I believe the otter constantly keeps in salt water. They however always came well stocked with land furs, and capital salmon. The tide set down the whole time and was rapid. Whole trees sometimes come down the stream. The Indians informed us there was 50 villages on the banks of this river.
“May 15, N. Latt. 46° 7′; W. Long. 122° 47′. On the 15th, we took up the anchor and stood up river, but soon found the water to be shoal so that the ship took the ground, after proceeding 7 or 8 miles from our first station. However, soon got off again. Sent the Cutter and found the main Channel was in the South side, and that there was a sand-bank in the middle. As we did not expect to procure Otter furs at any distance from the Sea, we contented ourselves in our present situation, which was a very pleasant one. I landed abreast the ship with Capt. Gray to view the country and take possession, leaving charge with the 2d Officer. Found much clear ground, fit for cultivation, and the woods mostly clear from underbrush. None of the Natives come near us.
“May 18. Shifted the Ship’s berth to her old station abreast the Village Chinoak. Vast many canoes full of Indians from different parts of the River were constantly alongside. Cap’t Gray named this River Columbia’s ... and the South point Adams.”
So is told the first great adventure in American sea annals. Poets may embellish it and romancers revitalize it and savants dispute over the day’s difference in Boit’s Log and Gray’s; but nothing can detract from its magnificent, cool-headed, dogged courage. It was the first great sea adventure after the Colonies became a nation; and the nation was yet barely out of its swaddling clothes; but youth’s hopes fly high and far. So do the hopes of nations in the first flush of their dawn; but no highest hopes ever exceeded the realization of the unknown sea captain, Robert Gray, who had not a single monument to commemorate his achievement, till the great monolith arose above Astoria in 1926.
It was the first adventure in American sea annals but it was quickly followed up by adventurers as great—as the panels on the Astor monument now narrate to the world.
Note. It need hardly be told that all the scant facts bearing on Gray’s discovery of the Columbia are drawn from the Massachusetts Historical Collection; H. H. Bancroft; Haswell’s Log; Greenhow; Meares; Vancouver; Jewitt, and from addresses and writing of Judge Howay, Prof. Morison of Harvard and Judge Carey, to whom deep indebtedness is expressed. The various spellings of the Indian names—Maquinna, Makina, Makena, Macines,—Wicananish, Wicanish, Wickanish, Tatoosh, Tootoosh—have been made to conform as much as possible (and that is saying little) to modern pronunciation and modern map spelling. Only one name as far as I know has not yet been identified and that is Upquesta, who comes in Jewitt’s Log.
