Читать книгу The Conquest of Our Western Empire - Agnes Christina Laut - Страница 5
ОглавлениеPART II: Vancouver’s Race Round the Seven Seas to the Pacific Northwest. 1789-1794.
Once more stand beneath the great Astor monolith towering above the entrance to the Columbia River.
You realize now that it symbolizes far more than Gray’s discovery of the outlet of the Great River of the West. It symbolizes the frantic race of four nations for almost three hundred years to take first possession of a Pacific Empire the area of half Europe. In order of arrival, these nations were Spain, England, Russia, and the United States; and when these nations were all but ready to force war over what cynics called “a dispute about two spoons” and “some sea-cat skins,” if you keep on reading the panels of the monolith, you will still further realize it was not the diplomats’ crafty subterfuge that averted war. Nor was it the many-headed leather-lunged Demos, shouting itself hoarse in London over Maquinna’s poor little Nootka lands between 1789 and 1792, and later in Washington during a political campaign making the welkin ring over “54-40 or fight” in Oregon. It was the grace and courtesy of two matchless gentlemen, George Vancouver and Don Bodega Quadra, that averted war, by establishing facts as a basis for claims, not leather lungs.
What particularly embarrassed England in the furor, which Meares kicked up in England over the seizure of his ships and forts at Nootka on Vancouver Island, was that she did not really want war with Spain. The great crash with France was coming. Spain might be an ally with England. Pitt did not want war with Spain, though the populace stirred up by Meares’ published Voyages was now roaring itself hoarse for war over the seizure of English ships and an English fort—if Meares’ clapboard shanties could be called a fort—on the unknown Pacific Northwest Coast of America. To hold possession—yes—England would not yield one jot of her claim that Cook had landed and taken possession, where the Spanish navigators had only sighted and named the same points. Spain realized Martinez had been rash and exceeded his authority. Don Quadra and Vancouver were selected by their governments to proceed to the northwest coast and either come to an understanding, or leave things as they were, until more specific instructions emanated from the diplomats as the checkerboard of European diplomacy shuffled back and forward. The diplomatic papers on this era are voluminous. Shorn of verbiage, that is what the voyage of Vancouver was to do. He was also, if possible, to try and find that vague outlet to the Great River of the West and so extend Cook’s claim of territory farther south into the No-Man’s Land of what is now Oregon.
Spain did not care one whit for bleak northern coasts, where her seamen had rotted to death of scurvy by the score, and each of her leaders for a century had died of the hardships of the voyage north; but if there were any neck of bottle leading into her closed preserve of the South Sea, she was going to be on the ground first and cork the neck of that bottle—cork it so it would be closed to all nations but herself. The Americans—let it be frankly acknowledged—cared less than England for neck of bottle unless it were “bottle of rum” as you will find in the story. They were out avowedly for gain; but in pursuit of that gain they were also out to ascertain definitely, practically and for all time what facts lay beneath all these myths; for myths are a reflex of facts. Why did old Juan de Fuca away back in the very early sixteen-hundreds tell a seaman’s yarn to Michael Lok of a strait between 48° and 49° leading inland eastward to what we now call Hudson Bay? Had the old fellow, doddery with age when he recalled vague memories, seen such a strait, or was he only repeating an Indian camp-fire tale of that Louisiana redskin who had wandered from the head waters of the Mississippi for five years to the blue currents of the Great River of the West known as Oregon?
And the still more curious thing as you study the panels is this. Remember it. It gives the lie to cynicism for all time. Look from the aerial monument and think it out for yourself.
In every single case, the reality surpassed the illusion, the realization the dream, the results exceeded the aim, far as the stars outreach the wavering grasp of fumbling infant hands. Why—I do not know except that the lodestar leads where Destiny directs; and if we fail to follow it, we flicker out like the firefly in the dark, insects of Life, not instruments for those guardian angels of the stars who direct the fates of nations.
But they took great odds to follow that Lodestar of the Western Sea—did those old adventurers of Russia, and buccaneers of England, and sea plunderers of Spain, and American corsairs of the Seven Seas.
From Coxcomb Hill, can’t you picture them cruising up and down the Pacific Coast, now tacking out to sea to avoid a smash between shore rocks and inrush of rumbling angry tide; now dodging in boats that tossed to the surf like corks between the suck of quicksands and the knife-edge rocks; now scrambling ashore for stove wood and fresh water, and scampering at nightfall, when the winking camp-fires of Indians blinked amid the deep greenery, where treacherous savages of Rogue River, or Clatsops and Chinooks of the Columbia, or the wreckers of Tatoosh near Murderers’ Island off Flattery Cape would have lured the whites to disaster amid the labyrinthine waterways?
Here came the Spanish dons on the great adventure, gay as boys on holiday, dressed in all the picturesque grace of cocked hats, silver braid and plume above velvet cape with gold buttons and pearl-hilted sword and leather-scrolled sheath for brace of great pistols. Aguilar on a little frigate in 1603 had noted the muddy willow-grown outlet of a river. Was it the Columbia? Too far south. May have been the Umpqua or the Rogue; but it gave vogue to the Indian tradition of a great River of the West, which coast tribes called Oregon.
And then came Juan Perez in 1774—just four years before Cook the Englishman—on a wobbly little corvette with friars to convert the heathen and cannon to put the fear of God in their hearts. Indians he saw aplenty in their great dugouts singing as they circled round him both up near Queen Charlotte Islands and off Nootka Sound, when he may have lost “those two spoons” which Spain set up as proof of discovery prior to Cook; but Perez for very good reasons did not land, though accompanied by that Martinez as pilot who took as prizes Meares’ ships in the presence of Robert Gray fifteen years later. The fog was dense, the sea boisterous, and the eighty-eight men on his ship poor match against two or three hundred Indians circling round. Perez was demoted to position of pilot for his failure to land and take possession of all the coast from Mexico to Russian Alaska; but Spain had no desire to annex these fogbound icy coasts. Besides, his seamen had as yet no remedies for scurvy and though his sailors were athirst for fresh water, they had to content themselves with wines.
And then in 1775 on the same wobbly corvette came Bruno Heceta with a little schooner to skim the coast like a gull under a young lieutenant, Juan Bodega Quadra. Perez went as pilot under Heceta, who proved a bolder commander; and both ships had in all one hundred and six men; but it was noticed that where Heceta followed the timid guidance of Perez, Don Quadra, at this time in his late twenties, with the boldness of youth either purposely or by chance again and again slipped from the surveillance of Heceta and cut his own course through the silver seas. Juan de Fuca Straits, Heceta undoubtedly found, though they did not lead to Hudson Bay, and Quadra paid dearly enough for giving the slip to the protection from his commander’s big guns. He had fewer than sixteen men, who must have been packed aboard close as sardines. His schooner was not so long as Tatoosh Island dugouts—it was barely thirty-six feet and about twelve feet athwart. Six men rowed ashore off Flattery Cape for kitchen stove wood and fresh water. Three hundred Tatoosh warriors hidden ashore received them—received them with showers of barbed arrows that would go in, stick in and would not pull out. Two Spanish seamen sprang in the sea and were drowned in the backwash. The other four were torn to pieces by bloody hands and doubtless eaten; for the Tatoosh tribes were cannibals. Quadra’s brave fellows were riotous to march ashore and avenge the massacre; but Quadra knew five men, one boy and four sick sailors could not defeat the screaming mob behind that screen of rock and brush, who were now pushing out in canoes with piercing yells to surround and wreck the schooner. He fired at the nearest dugout and saw six Indian lives pay for his six dead Spaniards. Later his men tried to punish the murderers by hurling a harpoon at a war canoe. It pierced a naked back but did not hold. Remember that, too, for it comes up later in Maquinna’s complaint up at Nootka that the whites had been first to attack. Heceta later loaned six men to take the place of the massacred crew; but Heceta had had enough. With Perez, he turned south, though it was only July. The scene of attack became known as Dolores Islands, or Destruction, or Martyr Point. Remember that, too; for you will meet it again. It was on his way south that Heceta observed the mouth of “a great river” behind “San Roc,” Cape Disappointment. The excuse he gave for not going in was that his crew were so ill of scurvy, if he had dropped anchor at the mouth of the Columbia, there was not a man left with strength to heave it up; and as Perez died two days before reaching Monterey, the excuse must be accepted as valid. But scurvy or no scurvy, Quadra spread his sails and hied north to Sitka waters. Quadra himself was in bed with scurvy when the little schooner turned south.
Perhaps not so picturesque but equally daring were the English sea rovers like Meares, and Barclay with his seventeen-year-old bride; and the thirty or more Boston and Salem and New York and New Bedford privateers, who came assuming all risks with no national power behind them. Lowrie and Guise, the Englishmen of the East India Company a few years before Gray’s first voyage, had left the drunken surgeon McKay at Nootka to learn the language and act as interpreter and “drummer of trade.” Drunk or sober, McKay could hardly be called a coward; and his adventures, if known, might fill a book. He married a native woman and sank like lead in water to Indian level, from which Barclay rescued him and carried him to China, where in the backwash of harbor front, he is a derelict lost to history. Barclay had a magnificent ship for those days, the Imperial Eagle, 400 tons with 20 great guns, though she sailed under Austrian colors from the Thames to avoid trouble with the East India Company, the same difficulty avoided by Meares. He reached Nootka about the time Gray was preparing to leave Boston on the first voyage. With the daring of youth—he was only twenty-six—Barclay went up those Juan de Fuca Straits and when his rowboat went ashore where Don Quadra met disaster in the voyage of ten years before, his mate Mr. Miller and five English seamen received the same treacherous reception from the Tatoosh warriors and perished to a man. Dyed with the blood of white traders from the first were these straits of old Juan de Fuca, and unprovoked the attack in every case; for the Tatoosh warriors were the prize murderers of this coast. Don Martinez, the ruthless, may have had good enough reason for shooting Maquinna’s brother like a dog and throwing the corpse out to sink in the blood-stained waters. Also, he may have had a good motive for his demonstration of power by seizing Meares’ privateers and erecting a fort at Nootka or Hog Island, bristling with cannon to overawe Maquinna and Wicanish and Tatoosh.
THE LOWER REACHES OF THE COLUMBIA RIVER FROM LONGVIEW TO ASTORIA
And now came on the shifting kaleidoscopic screen of the Columbia, the two matchless gentlemen of all sea annals, to decide whether Spain and England were to fight over “two silver spoons” and some “sea-cat skins,” as the sea otter was popularly called.
Pirate, freebooter, sailor under different flags to avoid clash over claims of the East India Company to levy licenses and port charges—all these Meares was; but the fact remained he had been an English navy man. His miserable shanty of clapboards, called by courtesy a fort, at Nootka flew the English flag. His captains and seamen, seized by Martinez and treated as the Americans testified “with all imaginable kindness,” had been Englishmen. Granted their ship papers were irregular enough to arouse suspicion in the Spanish don’s mind that Meares and his crews might be only pirates under different flags and that Don Martinez realized he had gone too far, inasmuch as Spain wanted no war with England in Europe. Meares claimed $600,000 worth of English property had been seized by Spain. The one thing the Mistress of the Seas would never acknowledge from the days of Drake and Good Queen Bess was that any sea was a closed sea to her. The thing she would never tolerate was the seizure of her seamen on any waters in all the world. Also, if she could upset Spain’s proofs of first discovery from Mexico to Russian Alaska, it gave her a vast coast the wealth of which no man guessed, and sea commerce was, as it is to-day—her life-blood.
THE CELEBRATION IN HONOR OF THE COMING OF AGE OF THE DAUGHTER OF CHIEF MAQUINNA
THE Northwest America, THE FIRST VESSEL BUILT ON THE PACIFIC, LAUNCHED IN NOOTKA SOUND
England wanted war with Spain as little as Spain wanted war with England in the impending crash of empires in Europe; but Meares’ complaints now changed what had been the backwater of an unknown coast to the Eldorado of the world’s treasure hunters.
Vancouver was not only to get back all Spain had seized, but he was to make a complete survey of the Pacific Coast from the Spanish territory in the south to Russian Alaskan territory in the north. Now contemplate what has happened in a little over a hundred years! On this coast are five cities, Tacoma, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Victoria, with a population of over a million; add to them the people of lesser cities such as Longview, Astoria, Aberdeen, Everett, Bellingham, New Westminster—one could enumerate a dozen. A million and a half people are living where only a century and a quarter ago ten thousand raiding savages ruled these waters. You can count at one time in the harbor of any one of these cities as many ships as then came to the Northwest Coast in ten years.
Yet when John Vancouver wrote the introduction to his deceased brother’s voyages in 1798, he gravely questioned “what beneficial consequences if any” were “likely to follow to the interests of humanity, or the increase of useful knowledge from all our boasted attempts to explore the distant recesses of the globe.” Why, the record of these voyages “positively contradicted each other.” To John Vancouver, the value of “the cat skins” did not weigh in the balance against his brother’s life cut short in his forty-first year by the ardor of his work as an explorer. George Vancouver had been with Cook as middy. He had served in the tropic seas of Jamaica when called to go to Nootka. The Navy gave him the best ships on its list—the Discovery, 340 tons, 20 cannons, 100 men, the Chatham, 135 tons, 10 guns, 45 men, copper fastened, plank sheaths, copper prowed. Broughton was to command the Chatham; and later a supply ship was to follow.
Little need be told of the voyage except the ships set out from England in April of 1791 and rounded Good Hope instead of the Horn, and paused as usual for fresh supplies at Hawaii, where in the course of a formal Navy dinner a Hawaiian chief drank a bottle of brandy without diluting it and at once threw such a fit it took “four strong men to hold him.” One might infer that Vancouver, who was a terribly strict disciplinarian, would see no more undiluted liquor was served to visiting chiefs on his ships. A number of young noblemen had gone for the adventure of it as middies with Vancouver; and when these kicked over the traces in the wild freedom of the new life, they were given the same treatment as common sailors—the triangle, or lashed to the wheel and whipped. It didn’t make Vancouver popular, but it gave his voyage the cleanest record next to Gray’s of a lawless age in a lawless world. There were no outrages perpetrated on savages in Vancouver’s voyaging for four years. He came through clean, to die before his voyages had been published.
Mother Carey’s chickens, stormy petrels, whales and “porps” floundering in a seething sea, fog and rain and sleet, a lone albatross, always omen of bad weather—welcome him to Pacific shores in April of 1792 as these harbingers of tempestuous seas had welcomed all his predecessors.
His first landfall north of Spanish possessions seems to have been about Mendocino, when heavy gales drove him out from what is now Oregon coasts for almost two weeks. In vain Indian canoes of Cape Orford raced the seething tides to invite him in to trade. With big ships, he could take no risks for trade, when he had been sent out to explore farther north.
Vancouver did not like American private traders. His era was too close to the Revolutionary War. Also his aim was to anticipate these Boston cruisers in getting England’s title to possessions nailed down first. Let us forget that. His explorations coming after an American’s discoveries confirmed those discoveries. On April 27, after passing Cape Lookout in a fog and missing Tillamook owing to the haze, he sighted that Cape Disappointment of Meares’ voyage and recorded that he did not consider the possibility of Heceta’s river “worthy of attention.” Here are his words when a day later he met Gray up off Juan de Fuca Straits and heard Gray’s belief that a great river did exist behind Disappointment.
“The river Mr. Gray mentioned should, from the latitude he assigned to it, have existence in the bay South of Cape Disappointment. This we passed on the forenoon of the 27th; and as I then observed, if any inlet should be found, it will be a very intricate one, and inaccessible to vessels of our burden, owing to the reefs and broken water, which appeared in its neighborhood. Mr. Gray stated that he had been several days attempting to enter it, which he at length was unable to effect in consequence of a very strong outset.... I was thoroughly convinced, as were also most persons on board, that we could not possibly have passed any safe navigable opening, harbor or place of security for shipping on the coast, from Cape Mendocino to Classet ... nor had we any reason to alter our opinions.”
I give Vancouver’s words because they are an example of how far prejudice can deflect a good man’s judgment; but not all Vancouver’s crews agreed with him. One of the underlings on the Chatham, whom Vancouver held under such strict discipline, records—“the Discovery made signal we were standing into danger and we hauled out, this situation is off Cape Disappointment from whence a very extensive shoal stretches out and there was every appearance of an opening actually seen, but it was passed without appreciating the importance of the place.” Evidently the smaller Chatham could go closer in than the big Discovery; but with Europe suspended above the abyss of war over Nootka, Vancouver would take no chances among those rocks where the tide clutched in ghostly fingers up the Haystack and Tillamook, or thundered in the rumble of earthquake back from the clash with the waters of the vast Columbia.
The rest of Vancouver’s course up to Nootka can be followed almost to the mile by the latitude given and the names, which remain to this day. He passed Tatoosh’s Islands, of course, and recognized them as the Martyr or Dolores of the Spaniards and Barclay; and he describes the features of the group—the ledges, the violent angry sea, one oblong lying northwest by southeasterly very verdant with a cove almost cutting the islet in two and an Indian village approached by an almost impassable causeway; then the enchanting landscape which any tourist to Puget Sound can see to-day—flowers ariot in April and May, berries, such berries, of every variety as have made all the coast from Everett to Bellingham famous for small fruits; the funereal pines on both the islands and the main coast; the opalescent, translucent Olympics which Meares had named. It was here two days later that he descried a strange sail on the offing of these painted seas and signaling sent Lieutenant Puget and Mr. Menzies to meet Robert Gray, whose report he would not credit—that there was a River of the West behind Disappointment, which Gray was going directly to reconnoiter. One point is noted of these Tatoosh warriors which explains why that sinister tribe holding from Fraser River to the Columbia were such raiders and body-snatchers—they wanted to sell a child for some copper or a musket. The Indian dugouts were full of household furniture piled helter skelter—boxes and baskets, kettles and shell spoons and skulls—for this being spring the Tatoosh folk were coming back from winter man-hunt inland to whale-hunt and man-hunt by sea. When Vancouver’s men went ashore in two small boats, they noted the human skulls on high poles decorating the village houses.
Mount Rainier, Port Townsend, Oak Point, Puget Sound, Whidby, Port Orchard, Vashon, Burrard Inlet, Mount Baker named after a lieutenant, half the modern names from Flattery to the modern cities of Vancouver and Seattle and Tacoma—mark Vancouver’s surveying here. Should the names given by Vancouver be changed back to old Indian designations? That is a hot point over which the local historians are still at daggers drawn. When Vancouver’s men landed in this danger zone, a line was drawn with a stick on the sands between Indian and whites and each party ordered to keep on their own side; so even if Vancouver’s excessive caution robbed him of the discovery of the two great unknown rivers here—the Columbia and the Fraser—it also averted such tragedies as had named the Martyr Islands and later ended in such awful catastrophe as engulfed both the Jewitt ship and Astor’s Tonquin. He remarked on the amazing sea life—the seals roaring from the rocks, the salmon, the great eagles apoise, cranes in flocks, gulls thick as snowflakes and petrels in clouds. He also noted how like the plains Indians, these warriors strengthened their bows by serpent skins wound round and round the wood when wet, then shrunken hard and tight as iron when dry; but these fellows had no sign language like the plains tribes. The Chinook jargon had not yet developed. When the Tatoosh warriors strung their bows “to hear them twang,” Vancouver swung his swivels and sent one shot humming harmless overhead to let them hear “it sing.” Naturally, Tatoosh did not like this sort of watchful commander nor his music. Port Grey farther in, was not named after Robert Gray, the American. It was in honor of a George Grey of the Royal Navy. Vancouver, Lieutenant Puget and Lieutenant Johnson out in three small boats kept plying what are now the waters of Puget Sound for almost nine days, and although damp powder was spread ashore on rocks and sands to dry, enough powder was kept dry on hand to convince Tatoosh father and son that these whites in three-cornered shovel hats, in tight-fitting blue coats and sky-colored knee breeches, were not altogether ornamental. Everett, Blaine, Birch Bay, Bellingham—all were seen and noted. Then up north threading the narrow passageway, where he ought to have discovered Fraser River and didn’t because the fog lies thick as a curtain on the swampy reaches of that great delta, he descried a Spanish brig and a Spanish schooner of Spain’s Royal Navy, whose officers told him Don Quadra was waiting at Nootka with three frigates. They told him of the Fraser; but again the obstinate Englishman could not credit that his careful survey had missed a second river, though he did acknowledge “mortification”. Myths, of course! Was not this mystic coast full of myths and seamen’s yarns and Indian fables? Facts only for Vancouver. Vancouver was now in his thirty-sixth year. If he had been older or younger, he might have been less sure in his snap judgments.
He did observe that while the Indians from Flattery north seemed to have independent chiefs like Wicanish of Clayoquot and Tatoosh of what is now New Westminster, and spoke varying dialects, they all seemed more or less in league with and under advice of Maquinna at Nootka. All were terrible thieves; and he didn’t like their nasty habits of having human heads in basket boxes.
Turning southwest from the north end of the Inland Passageway between Vancouver Island and the mainland, he came abreast the famous Nootka, August 28, 1792, and anchored in a drizzling, blankety fog. The Spanish boats rowed out to tow them in through the mist to Friendly Cove. Thirteen guns thundered a welcome and thirteen thundered response and the misty mountains roared in rip-rock, fog-muffled echo that must have struck a strange chord in the villainous heart of old Maquinna. A grand dinner was held on the 29th—a five-course dinner at which Maquinna sat in, stately as a bronze statue, using the foreigners’ knives and forks with a cool dexterity that amazed his hosts.
Maquinna gave one of his mask dances; but both commanders had the sense to keep these masked dancers ashore. Maquinna had at this time at least two good-looking wives and one fine daughter. The dinner wound up with fireworks and rockets; and it was followed by other stately dinners at which Maquinna was always guest, in one case arriving in his birthday suit, when he was cuffed off by the laughing middies and came back clothed in the sea-otter cloak and the little teapot basket hat made famous in picture. It can hardly be credited the rascal did not know better; for he had been acquainted with white men’s customs for fourteen years. He probably did it in crafty defiance to see what the courteous white commanders would do. He found out. No tricks with these two men.
The Spanish fort was on Hog Island, Maquinna’s village on a high embankment on Nootka Island overlooking the fort; but those brass snouted Spanish and English guns! They poked twelve menacing noses from ports and some sixteen from the taffrails. They pointed their shining menace from the two-story Spanish palisaded fort; and then came in some Yankee ships and I grieve to add the usual Jamaica kegs of drugged rum. At least two American vessels came before Gray returned from the Columbia, where, to Vancouver’s great chagrin, the Boston captain announced the discovery and naming of the Columbia. Gray’s sailors were not the rum offenders. Quadra, Vancouver and Broughton visited Maquinna’s winter quarters up Tashees River fifteen miles. If it did not alarm, it certainly put the two commanders on guard to observe Maquinna’s warriors had plenty of muskets and iron-headed spears. A Spanish boy was found murdered one night after a brawl, with throat slit and thighs dismembered. Why, hardly needed explanations—thirty trading vessels a year were on the coast; so were as many hogsheads of rum. Whatever Maquinna’s faults, he protected his women; and whatever the Spanish sailors’ virtues, they did not include respect for Indian women; so the fault may have been on both sides. Maquinna said it was. When Gray came to Nootka in September, he lent Vancouver his own rough chart of the Columbia.
It is unnecessary to follow the complicated parleys between Vancouver and Quadra over Nootka. They fill volumes of special pleading. Vancouver did not speak Spanish. Don Quadra did not speak English. One Dobson acted as interpreter. Vancouver understood he was to receive back all the lands and seized property, which would have wiped out Spain’s title for all time. Quadra understood he was only to restore the exact property seized from Meares; and Haswell of Gray’s ship says frankly that, though each graceful leader agreed to refer the dispute to the home governments, it was the tact, the hilarious good-nature and the matchless courtesy of both gentlemen that averted an armed clash. As the world knows, $210,000 settled Meares’ claim of $600,000. Nootka was given up by both nations as neutral ground for all traders, with the result that with the exception of the Jewitt ship and Astor’s Tonquin it became deserted as a graveyard. It remains so to this day.
The farewell dinner with Vancouver late in September was more cordial than the Spanish welcome. Healths were drunk and twenty-one guns fired and two poor Sandwich Island girls brought in by the Jenny of Bristol were dressed in English garb by Vancouver’s orders and carried back to their native land. Disciplinarian, Vancouver may have been, but gentleman in the truest sense he always proved. There was a terrible tale current on the coast at this time. I give it only because our modern sentimentalism shuts its eyes to facts on both sides of all disputes. It was that Maquinna had a habit of sacrificing two captives at each monthly feast to the new moon. This explained the skulls on poles and the heads in wicker baskets in each chief’s house. The sailors averred the captives chosen were regaled with all delicacies as the Aztecs in Mexico regaled their human sacrifices. Then the chief would invite the tribe to his great house, blindfold himself and amid demon screams of applause start in pursuit of the captives. The two caught were sacrificed and the flesh eaten. It is not a pretty tale, but it does away with a lot of misspent regret over the passing of the Indian era.
The little American sloop Adventure was sold to Quadra for seventy-five sea otters.
Then in October, Vancouver set out to explore that river discovered by Gray. It is hard to be generous to Vancouver in his account of the Columbia. He was fair to neither his own high standards nor to Gray’s generosity in lending rough charts; and first charts are always rough and inaccurate.
The great mistake of all Pacific navigators prior to Gray was that they lay off those rock reefs watching the smash of tide and riverflow in what looked like a maelstrom that would engulf anything human. As Bunyan would put it in homely phrase, there seemed to be a lion or dragon across the path to their Paradise. If they had come closer, they would have found the lion was chained. There was a safe passageway between the bar and the cape. Gray had found it because, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, he went ahead.
The big ship under Vancouver lay in the offing; but Broughton got inside and with a small launch rowed alongshore and noted Tongue Point, a long spit of glacial silt and soft mud, which you can see as from aeroplane as you stand below the Astor pillar of Coxcomb Hill. Broughton saw the opal peak of St. Helen’s and the Chinook Indian village deserted for the winter on the north shore just opposite modern Astoria. Then he passed across to the south shore among the swampy sands of Point Adams, which Gray had named after the American statesman. The Indian village on the south shore was also abandoned by the Clatsops, now in winter quarters away from coastal rains and floods. He estimated the distance between the two capes as four to five miles—not so far astray considering these sands on the south shore shift each year. Young’s River was duly christened for Sir George Young of the Royal Navy. You will find almost all the Royal Navy names of that year spattered by Vancouver over the coast of the Columbia; but rather than repudiate these names does not their continuance really emphasize for all time that Gray’s little vessel accomplished what all the power of the Royal Navy couldn’t? Does it not add to Gray’s prestige? Seven miles—said Broughton—terminated the discoveries of Mr. Gray. Later, these figures are revised by Vancouver, and Gray is credited not with the thirty miles which he claimed, up almost as far as modern Longview, but between fifteen and eighteen miles—figures varying according as you measure from the bar or inside the cape; but Vancouver’s jealousy got another disconcerting jolt inside Cape Disappointment. He was not second inside the river; for the Jenny of Bristol—the kidnaper of the two Hawaiian girls—lay rocking at anchor in the great bay now named after her captain—Baker. The fact that Baker was an Englishman took the curse off the third time Vancouver was just a few days behind a quicker commander.
On October 16, Broughton set up the Columbia in a rowboat; and you can follow his course to-day along the river to Longview and Portland. He coasted the countless islands, the high rocky south shore, the deeper water—deep enough for seagoing vessels—on the south side. Puget Island, that beautiful stretch of irrigated farms like gardens, takes the name of his brother lieutenant. Here was a new type of Indian, not speaking the language of Chinook and Clatsop and Tatoosh—a better type, as all inland hunters were higher types than the coastal fishing tribes, the latter spending all their lives in alternations of gorging idleness and wild whale hunts and wilder man hunts, then another gorge of human flesh and whale blubber. Only the whale oil saved the tribes from extinction through their own greedy vices. It purged their bodies as their horrible religion of fast and human sacrifice failed to purge their souls. As many as one hundred and fifty natives sometimes escorted Broughton in twenty-five canoes. He came to what he calls Belle Vue Point; and a beautiful view it was—just ten or eighteen miles beyond the outlet of the Willamette, where the American city of Vancouver stands to-day. Here, too, for the first time he saw Mt. Hood. At the Cowlitz, or modern Longview, he spotted that high rock where the Indians deposited the bodies of their dead and he gave it the appropriate name of Coffin Rock. Castle Rock he described as the turret of an old Gothic fort. Mount Hood, named after Admiral Hood, was seen as a great pink snow dome in the sky to the south.
Beyond the Willamette, the river seemed to coil north and by signs of water falling through their hands, the Indians gave Broughton to understand that boats could ascend no farther. This is the first record we have of the famous Dalles and Celilo Falls; but, oh, regrets that a soul as big as Vancouver’s could record as his final judgment—“It does not appear that Mr. Gray either saw or was ever within five leagues of its [the Columbia’s] entrance.” His journal was not issued till after his death. It was edited by his brother under Royal Navy tutelage. Vancouver had, of course, taken formal possession of all these regions for England. Diplomats took strange liberties with voyager’s annals in those old days as you will find if you examine the original handwritten copies in the public Records, London, and the published books. I have given an example of this in Vancouver’s Voyages and another can be found in the Radisson Voyage of a century before, where intoxicated commanders are called plain drunk by Radisson but “greatly preoccupied” in the official report. Let us give Vancouver the benefit of the generous doubt; for the dead cannot defend themselves; and in national disputes, a diplomat’s conscience is an elastic thing.
Vancouver’s farther voyaging for two more years up the Pacific Northwest to Alaskan settlements, was the most accurate survey of all the navigators; and it stands as such to this day.
Just one more point—off Dean’s Canal, Vancouver had gone in surveying the first week of June. If he had been just six weeks later, he would have met one of the greatest overland discoverers of the world—Alexander Mackenzie, who had inscribed on the rocks in red paint—“Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three.” Irony of ironies that the greatest explorer coveting the glory of first discoverer should have been in three cases, the Columbia, the Fraser, the Inland Passageway round Vancouver Island, too late and then at the entrance to Dean’s Canal—just a few weeks too early; but that does not detract from the fact that he was one of the greatest navigators the world knows.
His body lies under a humble headstone in Petersham, Surrey, England, with the simple inscription—“Captain George Vancouver, Died in the year 1798, aged 40”; but his name is inscribed for all time on the Pacific Northwest Coast.
Note. The data for Vancouver’s Voyage are drawn, of course, from Vancouver’s ship log primarily; but to this must be added the fine identification of many points worked out in the histories of Judge Howay and Judge Carey, and by the later investigations in London sources by Professor Meany and the Portland Historical Society and Washington Historical Society. The same wild differences in the spelling of Indian names exist, but these can now be almost perfectly harmonized by the accurate latitudes and longitudes given in Vancouver; and in each case, the modern spelling is given, though it is not clear whether we are dealing with Tatoosh father or Tatoosh son; and that question is left open.
