by Jan Morris
The Hudson’s Bay Company first administered this marvellous country, and the Company’s fur traders and factors were its earliest European explorers. The original Vancouver was a company stockade near the Columbia’s mouth, from which the formidable and eccentric John McLoughlin ruled almost single-handed what was then called the Oregon Territory. But once the American overlanders arrived, following the Oregon Trail through the Rockies and Cascades, the British hold on the territory was doomed. Sheer weight of numbers forced them out. The first wagon-teams of pioneers were kindly received by Dr McLoughlin;1 but almost as soon as they formed a majority in the country, they began to clamour for American sovereignty. The Oregon Question, the Anglo-American dispute over ownership of the Pacific north-west, was a perennial of American politics for thirty years, and during the most feverish period of American expansion could be guaranteed to set any political audience aflame: for the possession of Oregon, it seemed, like the acquisition of California, was essential ‘to the fulfilment of our national destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions’.
Even when, in 1846, the question was peacefully settled by the Treaty of Washington, and the Canadian frontier to the Pacific was demarcated along the line of the 49th parallel, differences remained. The whole of what are now Oregon, Washington and Idaho went to the Americans; the whole of Vancouver Island, which overlapped the parallel, went to the British: but nobody was sure who owned the archipelago that lay in the Strait of San Juan de Fuca, north of Puget Sound, and thirteen years after the settlement of the Oregon Question proper, this petty anomaly almost brought the British Empire and the United States to war.
By then the country on both sides of the frontier was well populated, and each community had developed pronounced characteristics of its own. To the south had grown up a raw American frontier society, one of the toughest communities on the Pacific, exuding a lively disrespect for Queens, Empires and Limies, and a frank belief that one day the whole of the North American continent really would be overspread by those yearly multiplying millions. To the north was the very British colony of British Columbia, recently acquired by the Crown from Hudson’s Bay Company. Victoria on Vancouver Island was its capital, with a brand-new legislative building built in a faintly Chinese style on the foreshore, and there was a Royal Navy base at Esquimault, all bugle-calls and admirals’ barges, and a formidable Scottish Governor named Sir James Douglas: and though the colony had its own fair share of adventurers, speculators, wandering negroes and opportunist Chinese, still each year more respectable British settlers arrived, to honour their transplanted loyalties with British institutions and native phlegm.
Between the two communities lay the islands of the Strait. They were not in themselves of much value. Mysteriously wooded, sandy-beached, separated by narrow winding channels, they looked lovely from a distance, but did not invite settlement. Sometimes people landed on one island or another, to chop wood, or fish, but nobody lived there permanently, and when the British and the Americans signed the treaty of 1846, the islands were not mentioned. It was simply agreed that the boundary between Vancouver Island and the American mainland should run ‘through the middle of the channel’ through the Straits. The trouble was that there were two navigable channels. If the signatories meant the Rosario Channel, nearly all the islands would be British: if they meant the Haro Channel, they would nearly all be American. Since at that time the Strait was very inadequately charted, and nobody much cared about the islands anyway, the issue did not arise for years: but in 1852 the legislature of Oregon Territory, U.S.A., in an expansionist moment, established a county government for the islands of the Haro Archipelago—Island County it was called, and it specifically included San Juan Island, one of the biggest of them all.
The British reacted promptly. They had always assumed the islands to be theirs, and to make the assumption clear in December 1853 the Hudson’s Bay Company steamer Beaver, the best-known vessel on the whole north-west coast, paddled over to San Juan from Victoria and disembarked 1,300 sheep and a shepherd, Charles Griffin, who built himself a shack at the southern tip of the island, called it the Company Farm, and settled down as the only human inhabitant. The Americans protested. The Company retorted. Sir James Douglas bristled. Officials investigated. A few American settlers defiantly trickled over from Oregon Territory. The name of San Juan Island, hitherto unknown to Foreign Office and State Department alike, made its first fitful appearance in the diplomatic documents.
For the next five years the dispute was held in testy suspense, but in 1859 it unpredictably exploded. By then there were nineteen Americans living on San Juan, and sixteen Britons, including the resilient Mr Griffin. It was scarcely a tranquil island now. The wild Indians of northern British Columbia were in a warlike mood, and now that there was somebody to raid on San Juan, they included the island in the itineraries of their war canoes. The claimant Powers themselves, represented by their respective Governors in these remote dependencies, were only too ready to squabble, and public opinion on both sides of the 49th parallel was inflammatory.
The crisis burst in June. An American farmer called Lyman Cutler had settled near the southern end of the island, and had fenced a small potato plot near the Hudson’s Bay farm on Cattle Point. He was not on good terms with the Company. Their cattle and pigs wandered freely around the place, and whenever they damaged his fences he complained. Too bad, he was told, the whole place belonged to the Company anyway, and he must look after his own fences. On the contrary, Cutler retorted, it was American territory, he had every right to be there, and he had been officially assured of American protection and support. The next time he saw a Company pig rooting around his potato patch, he stormed out of his cabin and shot it dead. Its protracted obsequies have been known ever since as the Pig War.
The American military commander in the north-west was General William S. Harney, one of the most extraordinary and difficult men in the U.S. Army. He was a famous Indian fighter, and seems to have been perpetually in a rage. Perhaps he was psychotic. Certainly with his jutting beard and his glaring eyes, his predilections for cruelty and revenge, his constant grievances and sudden impulsive accusations, he was a dangerous man to command the American forces on that touchy frontier. As a young colonel he had invaded Mexico without orders, suffering an ignominious defeat and being court-martialled for his impetuosity. As a general he had placed a number of Irish-American deserters under a wagon with nooses around their necks, obliging them to watch the course of an action against the Mexicans until, the battle won, he gave the order for the wagon to move off, and the prisoners were strangled. Since he had been in the north-west he had quarrelled with nearly everyone—with his own officers, with his civilian colleagues, with Hudson’s Bay Company, with his superiors. Some said he had ambitions for the Presidency: others that he was off his head.
The death of Cutler’s pig was just his style. He sailed to San Juan almost at once, and decided to occupy it by force, the American settlers obligingly easing his way by formally requesting protection against Indian raids. On July 27 a company of U.S. infantrymen landed at Griffin Bay, at the other end of the island from the Company farm. They were commanded by a protégé of Harney’s, Captain George Pickett, who immediately issued a proclamation announcing that ‘This being United States Territory, no laws, other than those of the United States, nor courts, except such as are held by virtue of said laws, will be recognized or allowed on this island’. Almost at once a British Justice of the Peace arrived on the island too: Major John de Courcy, who was pointedly empowered to arrest ‘all persons who by force or by a display of force’ seized lands not their property.
By the end of July the British had landed a force of Royal Marines on San Juan, and all because of a pig the island seemed ready for war. The two little armies, one at each end of the island, flew their flags boldly and greased their guns for action, while at weekends boatloads of sightseers from Victoria
cruised expectantly off-shore. Far away in London and Washington nobody had yet heard of Mr Cutler’s pig, but on the spot the atmosphere was perilous. In Victoria hotheads demanded the instant expulsion of the Americans: in Fort Vancouver Harney was urged to summon all available American naval forces. In August the Americans landed more men and guns on the island, and Admiral Lambert Baynes, Royal Navy, arrived to take over the British naval command at Esquimault in the great three-decker Ganges, eighty-four guns. The British Colonist, in Victoria, suggested a pre-emptive war at once, while the odds were in British favour; the American Governor of Washington Territory visited San Juan to be greeted with a salute of cannon from the American camp. General Harney announced that the Indian raids along the coast were instigated by Hudson’s Bay Company to scare American settlers off, and observed piously that in occupying San Juan he had merely ‘assumed a defensive posture against the encroachments of the British … upon the rights, the lives and property of our citizens’.
He really seemed to want a war. Perhaps it was only his native belligerence. Perhaps he thought a quick victory over the traditional enemy would bring him political kudos. Some British theorists supposed him to be obeying secret orders from Washington, intending to neutralize the British fleet at Esquimault as the first step in an attack on British Columbia. Others speculated that he thought a foreign war might avert the impending disaster of the War between the States at home, or alternatively (he came from Tennessee) that it might give the South a better chance to secede. But the British would not play. Governor Douglas held his hand, Admiral Baynes would not shoot, and the soldiers bore themselves with a sensible restraint. In any case both the British and American Governments were preoccupied with more desperate events elsewhere—the British with disquieting shifts of power in Europe, the Americans with the prospect of civil war.
It was ten years before the Pig War was settled. Throughout the 1860s San Juan island, some ten miles long, was occupied by the rival toy armies, one at the north end, one at the south. The Americans consolidated their position above Griffin Bay, a windswept healthy place with a magnificent view over the bay to the Olympic Mountains beyond. They built five or six clapboard huts up there, and surrounded the camp with a neat stockade, and erected an immense white flagstaff for Old Glory. The British, though, on the shore of Garrison Bay in the north, built themselves a station more in the imperial manner. On the beach they erected a blockhouse of wood, with rifle-slits commanding the bay, and behind it they cleared a large parade ground, to keep the Royal Marines up to scratch. For the rest, the encampment had a comfortable, almost a domestic look. Two rows of Douglas firs were planted, in honour of the Governor. Little flower gardens were lovingly tended. The steep wooded hill behind was hacked into limestone terraces for tennis courts and croquet lawns. There was a white clapboard barrack for the men, and the officers did themselves very well with seven-roomed houses among the trees. The commander’s house had a ballroom and a billiard room, and in old pictures of the establishment everybody looks very contented in this improbable outpost of imperial arms—the soldiers spanking and muscular in immaculate uniforms, the officers lounging about on verandahs in sporting gear, with gun-dogs at their feet.
The rival forces grew friendlier as the years passed. Nobody bothered them much, and the officers often visited each other, competed at race meetings, or enjoyed picnics together on the beach. It was not until 1871 that the Governments of Great Britain and the United States finally submitted the San Juan question for arbitration by the newly-proclaimed Emperor of Germany, Wilhelm I. His Supreme Highness did not in fact give the matter his closest personal attention, but referred it to three learned sages, Doctors Grim, Kiepert and Goldschmidt, who studied the Washington Treaty in its hydrological, geographic, legal and historic aspects, and advised the Emperor accordingly. On October 21, the Kaiser gave his decision: ‘The claim of the Government of the United States, viz., that the line of boundary between the dominions of Her Britannic Majesty and the United States should be run through the Canal de Haro, is most in accordance with the true interpretation of the Treaty….’
Within a fortnight the British garrison had embarked, and even before they left the Americans had cut down the flagpole at Garrison Bay, and chopped it up for souvenirs.1
5
This was still mid-Victorian imperialism. The British Empire could afford to lose, especially to the Americans, for it was not yet a national infatuation. Convinced of its own merit and generally sure of its rights, the Empire in the 1860s was not habitually aggressive. Its wars were, by its own lights, chiefly fought in self-defences and its acquisitions were often forced upon it. Not only in the Pacific, but everywhere in the world the British were still without envy, for they knew themselves beyond challenge.
But a very different mood was presently to animate the Raj—which, while it fortunately never again came so close to war against the Americans, soon became so obsessed with its own glories, and so freely threw its weight about the rest of the world, that within a couple of decades it had scarcely a friend to call its own, only enemies, rivals or subjects.
1 As he made clear in his best-seller Greater Britain, one of the source-books of late Victorian imperialism, and still excellent reading.
1 Dignified in 1970 with a notice hardly less in the American manner:
I am a Park with Feelings
Please do not litter me with Trash and Peelings.
1 Not altogether successfully, some may think, for their orthography is less than self-explanatory. B is pronounced MB in this gnomic system, Q is pronounced NGG, C is pronounced TH. Nadi, the international airport of Fiji, is pronounced ‘Nandi’, and Fijian studies are not made easier by the discovery that, for example, Cakobau and Thakombau are one and the same king, or that Beqa and Mbengga are the same island all the time.
2 My favourite museum caption is to be seen in the Fiji Museum at Suva. ‘Wooden vessel‚’ it says of an indefinable sort of artifact, ‘which was said to be used for sending portions, of Rev. Baker’s flesh to nearby chiefs.’
1 It is now the font of a Methodist church on the same site. Though mostly deserted, Mbau is still a peculiar place to visit. It remains the home of the senior Fijian chieftaincy, and approaching it from the mainland by boat, the silence broken only by the swish of the paddles, the squawks of recondite water-fowl, and perhaps the chop of an axe from the hidden recesses of the island, is an experience partly Venetian but mostly Stygian. Cakobau, who died in 1833, is buried with his wife beneath a stone slab on the island summit.
1 The club was kept at Windsor Castle until 1932, when King George V returned it to be used as the mace of the Fiji Legislative Council, which it still is. In the meantime the British introduced Fiji to the benefits of imperial membership with such effect that by 1945 the Indian population of the islands, imported by the British to provide labour for their sugar estates, outnumbered the indigenes.
1 Who presently, as it turned out, became an American himself, was dubbed the Father of Oregon, and is still honoured by the preservation of his house in Oregon City as a National Monument. Many visitors to it, its curator told me in 1971, still remember how kindly ‘Big John’ McLoughlin welcomed their forebears on the Oregon Trail, but McLoughlin was soon disillusioned by life in the United States, and died beset by lawsuit and chicanery.
1 Tourists on San Juan, now a popular resort island, are still guided to the twin encampments of the Pig War, though the blockhouse on Garrison Bay is the only surviving building. Many soldiers, both British and American, settled on the island after their service, and several San Juan families still trace their ancestries to the murder of Mr Cutler’s pig.
PART THREE
The Imperial Obsession 1870–1897
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A Fixed Purpose
IN 1870 an English visionary of the merchant class elevated the imperial idea to the level of faith or art. The sage John Ruskin, art historian, painter, social reformer, the physically impotent
master of a gloriously potent prose, had just been appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. There clung to his person, as to his reputation, the charisma of a prophet. He was a born conservative in the stateliest sense. He revered the past for its own sake, thought Gothic architecture the highest expression of human genius, had a taste for the grand, the spacious, the noble, the dedicated, and admired men of imperious decision: Bishop Colenso (‘loyal and patiently adamantine’), Herbert Edwardes of the Punjab (‘invincible soldiership and loving equity’), Governor Eyre (‘honourable performance of duty is more truly just than rigid enforcement of right’).
All his views he expressed with a magical conviction, and this was fortunate, for not infrequently he changed them. He was one of the most compelling and popular speakers in Britain, at working men’s clubs as at Eton or Oxford, his matter ranging splendidly free—he apologized once when his lecture, announced as being about Crystallography, turned out to be on Cistercian architecture. His style was incomparably majestic, and audiences of every kind hung upon his phrases. He spoke, we are told, ‘in a mediaeval way’, his pronunciation archaic, his Rs peculiarly rolled, and his words remained in the memory like music. Ruskin talked much nonsense in his time, but when he struck one of his grand themes the effect was unforgettable.
One such theme was Imperial Duty, and this was the subject of his inaugural lecture at Oxford. So many undergraduates had packed the University Museum to hear it that the lecture was adjourned while they all moved along the road to the larger Sheldonian Theatre. Even there they overflowed the seats, sitting on the floor and hanging about the doors: and from the high dais of Wren’s little masterpiece, beneath the painted putti on the ceiling, rolling back their painted tentage to reveal the pale blue sky behind, Ruskin delivered his call for the ideology of Empire:
