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

by Stark, Peter

  Above the waist, the voyageurs wore a loose-fitting and colorful plaid shirt, perhaps a blue or red, and over it, depending on the weather, a long, hooded, capelike coat called a capote. In cold winds they cinched this closed with a waist sash—the gaudier the better, often red. From the striking sash dangled a beaded pouch that contained their fire-making materials and tobacco for their “inevitable pipe.” Topping off this rainbow-hued, multicultural ensemble, the well-dressed voyageur sported either a colorful headscarf or a red wool hat, on which the French-Canadian voyageurs loved to display badges of their status.

  “Je suis un homme du nord!”

  The true “Man of the North” wore a brightly colored feather in his cap to distinguish himself from the rabble, fixing it in place before landing at a fur post. As it happened, Hunt and Mackenzie possessed an abundant supply of large, colorful feathers, including flouncy ostrich plumes, among the trade goods they’d purchased at Montreal. Desperate for recruits at Mackinac, they struck on the clever idea of offering an ostentatious feather to every voyageur who signed on. Soon the short, arcing beach at Mackinac Island fluttered with the feathers of newly recruited French-Canadian voyageurs who had joined John Jacob Astor’s great Pacific Coast enterprise.

  But ostrich feathers, to Hunt’s dismay, worked no magic with the hard-drinking, no-frills American woodsmen. He and Mackenzie still needed more recruits for the West Coast empire. Leaving Mackinac Island in mid-August, the Overland Party paddled southwest toward their next destination, St. Louis. En route, they had to cross a geographic barrier that is almost unrecognized today but that determined the route of much pre-industrial travel (and even cultural patterns) in North America. This subtle rise of land known to geographers as the Mid-Continental Divide separates the watershed of the Great Lakes, running east to the Atlantic via the St. Lawrence, from the watershed of the Ohio-Mississippi-Missouri river system, which drains the center of the continent south into the Gulf of Mexico. In the fifteen thousand or more years since arriving in North America from Asia, Native Americans had discovered the most efficient places to portage canoes across this divide, laying out their waterway equivalent of the Interstate Highway System, and along which, centuries later, they guided the first Jesuit missionaries and voyageurs.

  Following one of these ancient Indian travel corridors, the Overland Party now paddled down Lake Michigan to Green Bay, up the Fox River, and portaged over a short stretch of marshy ground that marks the Mid-Continental Divide in central Wisconsin. Then they relaunched their birch-bark vessels on the smooth, steady current of the Wisconsin River’s tea-colored waters. A day or two later, the current swept them out onto the languorous, blue Mississippi River, half a mile wide, dotted with wooded islands and shouldered by tall, forested bluffs. Now they rode the current down the great central drainage system of North America. About three weeks after leaving Mackinac Island, they pulled into the French village and fur post at St. Louis, where the Missouri, flowing from the Rockies and western plains, joins the Mississippi.

  Wilson Price Hunt struck a recruiting wall at St. Louis, too. For six weeks Hunt lingered in the village where he’d lived a few years before, a collection of old French homes surrounded by verandas and new, brick-built American shops, in addition to log cabins and crude shacks. As the hazy heat of late summer advanced to the clear cool of mid-autumn, Hunt, surrounded by old friends in a familiar place, may not have felt the urgency to leave. Men to hire were in short supply due in part to other fur companies hiring, companies headed up the Missouri, which was busier since the Lewis and Clark expedition had explored its length just six years before. The huge new U.S. territory, the Louisiana Purchase, was now opening for fur commerce. Meriwether Lewis had died the previous year and William Clark was serving as U.S. Indian Agent in St. Louis. He and Hunt probably consulted on the most plausible route to the Pacific.

  There was also a certain anxiety in the air about the journey west. Another fur outfit, under the leadership of Andrew Henry, had set off up the Missouri a year and a half earlier to establish a remote post at Three Forks, the river’s headwater streams near the Rocky Mountains. Reports had come downriver of attacks by Blackfeet. In the streets of St. Louis the worry grew: Had something terrible happened to them?

  Hunt and Mackenzie knew they had to get a start, at the least, before winter set in. On October 21, the Overland Party turned their boats up the Missouri. By mid-November they’d made about four hundred miles. This was still nearly a thousand miles short of Astor’s hope for a winter camp at the Mandan villages where Lewis and Clark had wintered. The temperature plummeted. Arctic winds blew unimpeded down the barren plains. Fine needles of frazil ice congealed on the gently swirling Missouri, clumped together, and drifted downstream in slushy rafts. The Overland Party pitched its winter camp on November 16, 1810, at the mouth of the Nodaway River, in what today is northeastern Missouri. Two days later the clumpy rafts of frazil ice locked together in the arctic cold and the Missouri River froze shut for the winter.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SEVEN THOUSAND MILES TO THE SOUTH OF THE ICEBOUND Missouri, summer was arriving in the Falklands. This made the islands no less barren and the prospect of being stranded on them no less forbidding.

  The alarm instantly spread among the passengers amusing themselves ashore—the Tonquin was sailing out of the bay! Two or three of the headboard-carving clerks scrambled over the top of the sand spit, firing guns, to signal to the Scottish partners hunting birds on the far side of it, McDougall and Stuart, to return immediately. Other clerks made for the rowboat beached in the bay. A half hour had passed by the time they all gathered at the ship’s boat. By then, the Tonquin, making good speed on a good wind under Captain Thorn’s command, had already sailed three miles out to sea.

  All nine of the partners and clerks stranded on the island piled into the boat—twenty feet in length, built for half that number—and took to the oars. Backs bent in unison with each grunting stroke, they rowed hard after the Tonquin, expecting that the ship would “heave to” into the wind at any moment and wait for them to catch up. It did not. The Tonquin proceeded to sail onward, displaying full billowing canvas to the tops of the masts, into the open South Atlantic.

  They strained harder at the oars, fighting a tidal current. The ship was fast outpacing them. As they left the sheltered bay and pulled into the open ocean, the full force of wind and waves and spray swept over the little rowboat, drenching them in cold seawater. The Tonquin now had sailed ahead by more than two leagues—or six miles. Ever larger swells broke over the rowboat’s gunwales, dumping in seawater that sloshed around their feet. Taking turns with a bailing bucket, the passengers furiously scooped water from the bilge and tossed it overboard. The Falklands lie only six hundred miles from Antarctica. The water remains frigid even at the height of the Antarctic summer. If the rowboat swamped, the clerks and Scottish traders, even those who knew how to swim, would have no chance of survival.

  They momentarily paused at the oars. A brief, urgent discussion broke out: Should they chase onward into the tumultuous open sea after the Tonquin, or turn back to the immediate safety of the shore, where eventual death by exposure, starvation, or simply years of bare-handed isolation might await them?

  As they debated, the man who was bailing lost his grip on the bucket. It danced away on the heaving swells. Those at the oars heaved hard to swivel the rowboat to catch the errant bucket. One of the oars snapped. Now they were bobbing on the open swells, without a bailing bucket, and missing one oar, with the Tonquin still sailing away from them.

  They hesitated once more. Should they return to the barren island or chase after the Tonquin? A decision was made: They would reach the ship—or die trying.

  “The weather now grew more violent,” reported Ross, “the wind increased. . . .”

  It was then, Ross wrote, as they despaired of reaching her, that they noticed the Tonquin begin to swing on the wind. Soon she had shifted course entirely. She bore down toward the
oared vessel. After considerable maneuvering in the rough seas, the two vessels finally managed to pull alongside each other. The abandoned passengers climbed aboard from the tossing boat to the safety of the big ship.

  Franchère, who was in the boat, wrote that there was never any doubt of Captain Thorn’s clear intention to abandon them “upon those barren rocks of the Falkland isles, where we must inevitably have perished.”

  The timely intervention of young Robert Stuart had saved them. Robert was the nephew of Scottish partner David Stuart, the kinder and older trader who had mediated the power struggle the first night at sea out of New York Harbor. David Stuart, the uncle, was among the passengers in the struggling oared boat. When it had become clear on board the Tonquin that Captain Thorn had no intention of turning her around to save the boat and its passengers, the younger Stuart strode up to the captain on the quarterdeck. Whipping out two loaded pistols, he commanded Captain Thorn to alter course immediately.

  Do it, young Stuart demanded, or “you are a dead man this instant.”

  ON FEBRUARY 11, 1811, two months after leaving the Falklands and rounding Cape Horn, the Tonquin’s crew spotted from fifty miles away the snowcapped cone of Mauna Loa volcano rising two and a half miles above the blue Pacific swells. The volcano marked the largest isle of the group that Captain Cook had named the Sandwich Islands when he had “discovered” them for Britain three decades earlier. The seafaring natives who lived there for centuries called them Owyhee and we know them today as Hawaii. All hands and passengers scrambled on deck as the Tonquin, spanking along on the lusciously warm trade winds, sailed toward the Big Island at a brisk eight or nine knots.

  “The coast of the island,” wrote Franchère, “viewed from the sea, offers the most picturesque coup d’oeil and the loveliest prospect; from the beach to the mountains the land rises amphitheatrically, all along which is a border of lower country covered with cocoa-trees and bananas, through the thick foliage whereof you perceive the huts of the islanders. . . .”

  The intoxicating view captured all eyes as the ship neared the emerald isle. A teenage Canadian boy accompanying the voyageurs, Guillaume Perrault, was watching the island’s approach from a perch high aloft in the foremast when he suddenly lost his grip and plummeted out of the rigging toward the deck far below. Just before hitting the wooden planking, his falling body struck upon the taught triangle of guyline shrouds that supported the mast. He bounced “like a ball” off the webbing, as Franchère put it, and flew out into the sea a good twenty feet beyond the ship’s rail. The boy didn’t know how to swim. In the best of circumstances, it would take a square-rigged ship like the Tonquin a considerable distance to slow or reverse course to rescue him.

  “We perceived his fall,” wrote Franchère, “and threw over to him chairs, barrels, benches, hen-coops, in a word everything we could lay hands on. . . .”

  The floating furniture was intended to mark the boy’s location in the big swells. It would presumably also give him something to which to cling—if he could somehow make his way to one of the items.

  It was an irony that the accident occurred amid fair winds and subtropical islands, rather than the much-feared and often violent waters off Cape Horn. The Tonquin had rounded the Horn uneventfully several weeks earlier in decent weather, making the transition from Atlantic to Pacific on Christmas Day of 1810. The truly bad weather had prevailed during this latest leg of the voyage not around Cape Horn, but between Captain Thorn and his passengers. Captain Thorn’s attempt to abandon them on the Falklands, wrote Ross, dwarfed into insignificance all the “former feuds and squabbles.”

  He described the thick tension that wrapped the deck of the Tonquin en route to Hawaii.

  “Sullen and silent, both parties passed and repassed each other in their promenades on deck without uttering a word,” wrote Ross, “but their looks bespoke the hatred that burnt within. The partners on the quarter-deck made it now a point to speak nothing but the Scotch dialect; while the Canadians on the forecastle spoke French—neither of which did the captain understand; and as both groups frequently passed hours together, cracking their jokes and chanting their outlandish songs, the commander seemed much annoyed on these occasions, pacing the deck in great agitation.”

  Captain Thorn, for his part, believed that both he and Mr. Astor would have been far better off if he’d succeeded in abandoning the passengers on the Falklands. He attributed his decision to turn back not to Robert Stuart’s hair-trigger pistols pointed at him but to a sudden shift in the wind.

  “Had the wind not hauled ahead soon after leaving the harbor’s mouth,” he wrote to Mr. Astor, “I should positively have left them; and, indeed, I cannot but think it an unfortunate circumstance for you that it so happened . . . as they seem to have no idea of the value of property, nor any apparent regard for your interest, although interwoven with their own.”

  When the Tonquin had rounded Cape Horn she had sailed 9,165 miles from New York Harbor, according to her officers’ calculations. Another roughly 7,200 miles brought them to the Hawaiian Islands, for a total distance of more than 15,000 miles and five months simply to reach Hawaii, trapped with one’s enemies in a cargo-jammed space one hundred feet long, surrounded by nothing but one another and the infinite wilderness of the sea.

  Nothing in our daily world remotely compares to this extreme confinement, except perhaps space travel or a winter in Antarctica. Imagine an airline flight of five months with one brief stop, no movies, porridge for breakfast, salt pork for dinner, and a bottle and a half of fresh water per day. The cultural clashes between factions—American sailors, Scottish fur traders, French-Canadian voyageurs, and naval heroes—exacerbated the pressures of extreme confinement, a phenomenon noted by modern psychological studies of crews that winter in Antarctica stations.

  “Crews with clique structures,” according to a summary of these studies, “report significantly more depression, anxiety, anger, fatigue and confusion than crews with core-periphery structures.”

  The Tonquin’s example offers abundant lessons in leadership, especially in the hazards of overlapping spheres of authority. During the long Pacific leg of the passage, two of the Scottish partners, McKay and McDougall, passed their time by designing the fort and living quarters they would build as the central node of Astor’s empire on the West Coast. Arguments and power struggles soon erupted between the two of them over the exact details of fort layout. Like Captain Thorn, each believed he best represented John Jacob Astor’s interests. Astor had, in fact, vested each of these individuals with his own authority in a specific sphere—Captain Thorn in matters having to do with the Tonquin, McKay in his expertise dealing with Indians at wilderness posts, McDougall as second in command in Hunt’s absence at the West Coast emporium. But these clear spheres frequently overlapped. Among the partners aboard the Tonquin, McDougall proved the most forceful and managed to come out on top. Short, proud, and quick to take control, he settled the architectural argument with McKay by pulling out his letter from Mr. Astor and pointing to the language putting him in charge of the emporium when Hunt was not around.

  “[A]nd within fifteen minutes,” Captain Thorn reported to Astor, “they would be caressing each other like children.”

  While at first glance of the map, Hawaii appears to lie far out in the Pacific, due to prevailing winds it offered a convenient resupply stop for sailing ships en route between Cape Horn and the Northwest Coast. Astor had instructed Captain Thorn and the Scottish partners to hire Hawaiians before proceeding to the West Coast. The islanders possessed skills that would be indispensable in founding a colony, such as growing lush gardens and raising pigs. They were also exceptional swimmers and boatmen. Many North Atlantic sailors and Canadian voyageurs never learned to swim, having grown up around waters so cold that the skill was difficult to learn and often regarded as largely pointless should they fall overboard in the open ocean, where chances of rescue were slim.

  So it was with young Perrault. As the Tonqui
n flew on a stiff breeze along the Hawaiian coast and he dropped from the foremast into the sea, the thrashing boy disappeared in the ship’s wake while passengers and crew threw benches and barrels overboard. Captain Thorn called out the “heave to” order. The helmsman instantly spun the wheel to steer the Tonquin into the wind, backing the sails to slow the ship. Officers and crew jumped at one of the small boats lashed in davits on deck, jerked out their clasp knives, sliced the lines that secured it, and lowered the boat over the side.

  Fifteen minutes had elapsed by the time they reached Perrault, reported Franchère. His waterlogged body rose and sunk with the swells. His head lolled beneath the surface. But his greasy and tar-stained coveralls had managed to keep his legs and torso afloat. They hauled his lifeless body into the boat and rowed him back to the Tonquin, where they went to work trying to revive him by rolling him in blankets and rubbing him with salt. Soon he came to consciousness.

  “[I]n a few hours he was able to run upon the deck,” wrote Franchère.

  Not all crew and passengers doused overboard from the Tonquin would be so lucky as young Guillaume.

  The Hawaiians warmly welcomed the Tonquin’s passengers and crew—too warmly, thought Captain Thorn. The ship anchored on the west side of the Big Island of Hawaii at Kealakekua Bay. Dozens of native canoes paddled out from the bay’s two large villages bearing mounds of breadfruit, bananas, watermelons, coconuts, yams, cabbages, and poultry—a spectacular culinary vacation from porridge and salt pork. The tattooed paddlers gladly traded their fresh vegetables and meat for glass beads, rings of iron, sewing needles, cotton cloth, and other glass and metal manufactures.