by Barry Lopez
This compilation of disasters was commissioned by Lloyd’s of London, an English firm famous for insuring ships. Ignored in the book’s extensive listings were small ships and boats, ships in which Lloyd’s had no financial stake, or in which Europeans were not foremost among the victims. Still, if one is looking for some real sense of the perils of a life at sea, this severe introduction would be a place to start. The indifference of Cook’s sailors, both to the threat of death or to the possibility of fame, reflects the indifference they believed the sea showed to the value of their lives.
When a registered ship went down with all hands aboard, someone in the London offices of Lloyd’s recorded their names in a journal with a white quill pen. The pen was crafted from the primary feather of a mute swan, several of which were raised specifically for this purpose at Abbotsbury Swannery on the Dorset coast.
It has been the custom at Lloyd’s for as long as anyone can remember.
Whenever I sat those hours in the museum with the model of HMS Resolution, I hardly ever considered the peril. I thought of the implacable nature of the ship and wondered where the figurative equivalent is in our time, the vessel that would convey us successfully through the myriad threats we face from the natural world and from the human world we’ve not so perfectly designed.
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STARING DOWN AT the surf from precipitous seaside cliffs at Cape Foulweather, or watching shearwaters amassing just seaward of the flat beaches farther to the north, I’ve wondered at the way some of the world’s coasts have been set apart, while others have remained anonymous. A historical imagination, disinterested and attuned to international trade rather than to local geography, might recall reading of the Turquoise Coast of old Anatolia, the Gold, Slave, Ivory, and Grain Coasts of West Africa in the colonial era, the Dalmatian Coast of the eastern Adriatic, North Africa’s Barbary Coast, Namibia’s Skeleton Coast (named for its many whale and seal skeletons, the remains from carcasses washed up from those South Atlantic commercial fisheries), or Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast (named for the Miskito people). The names resonate, but these are still imposed labels, dreamed up, for the most part, by merchants. Once in Hobart, Tasmania, I saw a rendering of the entire Tasmanian coast, an elongated fifteen-foot drawing executed in great detail. It was a continuous coastal elevation, drawn by an indigenous woman during a circumnavigation of the island. It was her portrait of the place. She’d affixed no names to the drawing, but had profoundly evoked the unique physical character of Tasmania’s seaward face.
The many different sections of Oregon’s coast are not set apart by any such list of names of which I’m aware, though local histories might have recorded some that local use keeps alive. To someone like me, who grew up far from here, the coastal events I’ve been most surprised to learn about, and for which coasts might once have been named, include the history of U.S. merchant marine ships torpedoed offshore here by Japanese submarines early in World War II, and stories of the ships—hundreds of them—that foundered and sank at the mouth of the Columbia River, trying to cross the Columbia bar. Also, the story of a Spanish galleon, possibly the Santo Cristo de Burgos, outbound for Acapulco from Manila in 1693. It sank near the modern-day coastal town of Manzanita, and its cargo of beeswax and porcelain continues to turn up on the beach to this day. In June 1979, what was at that time the third-largest stranding of sperm whales in the world occurred near the town of Florence, Oregon, sixty miles south of Cape Foulweather, near the entrance to the Siuslaw River. Forty-one of them died on the beach despite the efforts of some people to save them.
The coastal stories from this region that I most often recall, though, concern a group of Japanese fishermen, sometimes referred to by historians as “the shogun’s reluctant ambassadors.”
During the time of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1867), Japan’s international borders were tightly closed to the outside world. Only a limited amount of regulated trade with foreigners was conducted, solely at Nagasaki and solely with the Dutch. Under the shoguns, Japanese people were forbidden to travel beyond their own coastal waters or to build an oceangoing vessel. Small coastal vessels were occasionally dismasted by storms, and fishermen and tradesmen might then find themselves drifting rudderless or without sails in “the black river,” the Kuroshio, or Japan, Current. Carried eastward across the Pacific, most of these compromised ships eventually either sank or, carried farther east by the North Pacific Current, were washed up on the shores of North America, usually on Vancouver Island or the coast of Washington. The crews of the majority of these hulks were most often found dead, but occasionally a ship carrying food—rice, for example—whose crew had been able to catch fish and trap rainwater along the way arrived with survivors. Even with the support of sympathetic foreign nations, however, it was extremely rare that survivors were ever permitted to return to Japan.
They became, instead, the shogun’s “reluctant ambassadors” to America and to the European nations that offered them refuge.
In January 1834, one of these drifting ships, the Hōjunmaru, washed up on the Olympic Peninsula, in Washington. Only three of its crew of fourteen had survived their fourteen-month journey. A nine-year-old boy named Ranald MacDonald, living at the time two hundred miles away at Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia River, became fixated on the fate of these three men. The obsession did not leave him until he was twenty-four, when by a clever ruse, he broke into what Melville refers to in Moby-Dick as the “double-bolted land” of Japan, in 1848.
If James Cook represented the apotheosis of the Enlightenment, MacDonald might be said to represent that place in Western society reserved for the marginalized, in his case a mixed-race working-class man whose great deed in life, and whose insights as an international traveler, were ignored or dismissed during his lifetime. When Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Edo in 1853, intent on forcing Japan to open its borders to foreign trade, he was stunned to find that the emperor’s advisers were able to speak English. They had been taught to do so, four years earlier, by the seaman, raconteur, and roustabout Ranald MacDonald.
MacDonald was born at the mouth of the Columbia on February 3, 1824, to a Chinook woman named Koale’xoa, the daughter of the most prominent Chinook chief of that time, Concomly. Ranald’s white father, Archibald McDonald (as he spelled their surname), was a Scots clerk at Fort George, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) post at Astoria. MacDonald’s mother died shortly after he was born. In the years following, MacDonald’s father was stationed at various HBC forts in present-day Washington and British Columbia, including at Fort Vancouver, eighty miles up the Columbia from Fort George. Ranald spent much of his early childhood with his Chinook relatives at the mouth of the river and periodically joined his father at his postings, where he got to know itinerant fur trappers in the HBC network, many of them native Polynesians from the Pacific and French voyageurs from Canada.
Archibald, who had married again, was pleased to have his son living with him in what he regarded as a more civilized environment at Fort Vancouver, which boasted a school. McDonald made clear to Ranald his hope that he would grow up to take a managerial position with the HBC, like his father, or otherwise find himself a place in the business world, perhaps in a city like Ottawa or Montreal. When Ranald finished his elementary education at Fort Vancouver, his father sent him to an HBC boarding school at Winnipeg, Manitoba. At the age of fourteen, Ranald accepted a job as a clerk in a bank in St. Thomas, Ontario, where his work was supervised by a business friend of his father.
Throughout his early years, according to his chroniclers, Ranald felt thwarted in his ambitions because of his mixed-blood heritage. It’s clear from MacDonald’s autobiography that his sense of cultural allegiance was conflicted as he was growing up. He felt aligned to some degree with the Chinook society into which he was born, but Chinook social organization and cultural values were changing rapidly at the time of his birth. He also identified with his fat
her’s educated white mercantile culture and, to some extent, with his father’s aspirations to material wealth, domestic comfort, and executive authority. In Winnipeg, Ranald fell in love with a white girl. He was roughly confronted and informed that he had no business as a “half-breed” trying to court her. In Ontario, later, he encountered similar judgments and suspicion. Sitting at his stool in the bank every day, facing long columns of figures, Ranald felt straitjacketed by local social conventions. He grew bored and became depressed at the prospect of slowly amassing enough money to leave the bank and move on to well-paid work he was more comfortable with. He soon quit his apprenticeship and traveled east to Long Island, where he found employment aboard whaling ships, the crews of which comprised men of extremely varied backgrounds—West Africans, Pacific Islanders, Coastal Asians, Native Americans, Scandinavians, and sailors from the Caribbean.
As a boy, Ranald had heard stories from his Chinook relatives about the hyōryūsha, Japanese drifters who washed up on the shores of North America during the Seclusion Era, including the three survivors of the Hōjunmaru who came ashore near Ozette, Washington. His relatives had told him that all the hyōryūsha looked like Indian people.
Over the years—neither MacDonald’s own papers nor his biographers’ research make clear precisely how this occurred—MacDonald came to feel a complex sense of identity with the Hōjunmaru survivors and other hyōryūsha. His sense of identity with a distant indigenous people in the Western Pacific, walled off from European culture, combined with his feelings of resentment over episodes of social rejection and racism, along with his anxiety over having chosen yeoman work as a seaman, which he believed had deeply disappointed his father, led him to feel he had to distinguish himself in some way. He had to escape from the category society had assigned him to, that of a “half blood,” a mestizo, and do it by some act that would, not incidentally, impress his father.
MacDonald came to believe that Japanese people were actually related to American Indians and that they were soon to suffer the same social disintegration the Chinook had at the hands of aggressive European and American traders. They would be as powerless as the Chinook, he thought, to prevent or control it. (The British had already forced an opium-for-tea trade on a reluctant China with the first Opium War, securing the ports of Canton [Guangzhou], Amoy [Xiamen], Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai in the Treaty of Nanking [Nanjing].) By this time in his life, MacDonald had gained enough experience in Atlantic and Pacific ports to understand the enormous political and economic power driving the development of international trade, and he comprehended the effects of its momentum.
MacDonald believed someone had to warn the Japanese about what was coming. He knew that the crews of shipwrecked American whaling ships who had come ashore seeking help in Japan in recent years had been treated rudely and forcibly expelled from the country. He also knew that pressure was growing in America “to do something about Japan.”
That someone, he decided, would be him. And he believed he had to get there right away.
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I FIRST LEARNED about Ranald MacDonald when I came across some of his letters in the holdings of the Eastern Washington State Historical Society, in Spokane, while I was teaching at Eastern Washington University, in 1985. Later, at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, I read more of his personal correspondence, marking his occasionally florid and affected prose and his consistently courteous and gentle tone. I read several biographies of him along with a heavily footnoted edition of his autobiography, and eventually went to visit his grave site in an old cemetery just north of the Colville Indian Reservation in northeastern Washington, near the Canadian border. In the course of other work I was also able to visit some of the places that had been important in his life, including the old whaling town of Lahaina on Maui, in Hawai‘i; Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia; the Australian goldfields where he worked after being deported from Japan in 1849; and Hokkaido, in northern Japan, where MacDonald came ashore among the Ainu, the indigenous people of the area.
I developed an affection for MacDonald because of his earnest and dignified struggle for personal recognition and credibility, a lifelong soul-wrenching effort to find out who he was. And, too, because of his capacity for self-delusion, and the admixture in his life of venal desire—his hopes for fame and fortune. These traits, for me, only made him more deeply human.
MacDonald’s best biographer, Frederik L. Schodt, in his Native American in the Land of the Shogun: Ranald MacDonald and the Opening of Japan, writes that he’s not convinced MacDonald ever sailed as crew on an (illegal by then) Middle Passage voyage aboard a West African slaver in the 1840s, though this grim experience with nineteenth-century commerce in human beings remains part of the popular perception of MacDonald. In an impressive number of ways, however, MacDonald gained experience with the dark side of a system of international trade that began to accelerate after Cook’s voyages created more dependable maps. MacDonald was born into the North American fur trade, and he came of age around the early nineteenth-century competition that pitted British and American traders against each other in the Pacific Northwest. He sailed from New England ports aboard both cargo vessels and whalers. He was part of the gold rush in Victoria, Australia, in the 1850s, on lands usurped by frontier speculators, country that was taken from Aboriginal people with the support of Australian businessmen and politicians. It’s possible he also crewed on coastal traders in Southeast Asia, and he might also have worked aboard British East India Company tea clippers, which hauled opium from India to Guangzhou and then freighted Chinese tea to London.
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THE HISTORICAL FIGURES of Cook and MacDonald, the one famous, the other obscure, have remained linked in my mind for many years. Each in his own way is archetypal, and both found the pivot point of their personal histories in the Pacific. Both also remain to some degree enigmatic. Together, they raise the issues of race and class privilege, and questions about the history and morality of modern commerce, which resonate intensely in modern times. On their long ocean journeys, these men, each one putting to sea from a country roiled by economic change, defined a search for the ineffable. I can imagine them in conversation, speaking out of earshot of anyone who might judge them or try to explain them. One might presume that they wouldn’t be able to converse much beyond pleasantries and sea stories; but each person was a driven man, and both had been wounded by an effort to achieve something memorable. They might have come to realize this in private conversation, let’s say over tea on a conducive afternoon on some Pacific island lanai, each of them speaking freely, without fear of being criticized or contradicted. An observer would note that Cook was thinner and slightly taller than the other man; that where Cook had a small head and a large nose and was otherwise oddly proportioned, MacDonald was broad-shouldered, handsome, compact, and muscular. Cook had piercing blue eyes, MacDonald deep-set gray eyes, with hazel rings around the irises.
Cook grew up the son of a tenant farmer, with little ahead of him in the way of prospects but work of that sort. He set himself apart from his childhood companions, however, by entering the merchant service. He was soon a ship’s master aboard a collier, freighting coal along the North Sea coast of England. He then entered the Royal Navy as a master’s mate at the age of twenty-six, essentially starting all over again to prove himself at sea outside the merchant navy.
Though Cook didn’t grow up with a sense of privilege, he intended to make his own way in life, not be assigned a place because he was (only) a landless working-class man. In the British navy he distinguished himself immediately by creating a set of exceptional maps and charts for sailing Newfoundland’s coastal waters. He departed England on his First Voyage of circumnavigation (1768–1771) feeling gratitude for having been chosen for the post of captain. He was overcome with similar emotions when he opened his sealed orders in the South Pacific, after the observations a
t Point Venus had been completed, and learned the Admiralty wanted him to settle the matter of the existence of a rumored southern continent. They wanted him, further, to follow up on the work of other British mariners by laying claim to additional islands in the South Pacific. By the time of the Second Voyage (1772–1775), Cook knows from experience what is expected of him and how to achieve it. He strains his ships and drives his men hard to get the work done.
With the Second Voyage behind him, Cook is comfortable with the thought that he might have arrived at the end of his string of extraordinary accomplishments. He’d done the one thing every man of his class hoped to do—a class he was not born to, but into whose company he had moved himself with his achievements. He had become great—in his case, as an explorer. It is now another, perhaps less admirable form of ambition that takes hold of him and leads him to accept command of a Third Voyage.
He has by 1775 dispensed with the question of Antarctica. He’s given the Atlantic, the Indian, and the Pacific Oceans a southern boundary, and he’s fixed coordinates for the east coast of Australia. The vastness that still needs definition is the North Pacific, between the latitudes of Mexico and the Bering Strait. And if he is able to sail far enough up the coast of North America to do that, he might possibly find a western entrance to a Northwest Passage.
