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

by Stark, Peter

  A contingent of passengers and crew from the Tonquin returned the visit, rowing from the ship to the village under the palms. Nineteen young women and one man danced for them in welcome, swaying rhythmically in unison as they sang. Their performance enchanted the passengers and sailors after the months of confinement in the dark, claustrophobic quarters of the Tonquin under the unyielding hand of Captain Thorn. The young women, as Franchère described them, each wore a “becoming” garland of flowers. The dumbfounded young visitors from the Bible-toting lands of New England and Scotland and Montreal had never seen anything like it.

  “For other traits, they are very lascivious,” he reported, “and far from observing a modest reserve, especially toward strangers.”

  An old man led the visitors down the beach to a shelf of coral rock. He pointed out the very spot where Captain Cook had fallen, on February 14, 1779—which Franchère realized was exactly thirty-two years before, to the day. The old man filled in the details of Cook’s famous demise. Initially the Hawaiians had welcomed Cook; and Cook in turn had treated them with respect. After several misunderstandings, however, the Hawaiians had stolen a rowboat. Captain Cook and his marines rowed ashore and marched under the palms to the Hawaiian king’s house to take him hostage until the islanders returned the ship’s boat.

  Hawaiian chiefs and warriors clustered around their sacred leader to protect him. Captain Cook, “not accustomed to have his intentions frustrated,” recorded one crew member who was an eyewitness, “ . . . had but little command over himself in his anger.” A crowd of two or three thousand Hawaiians pressed in. The enraged Cook beat them back with the butt of his shotgun. His Lieutenant Phillips warned Cook that he was in mortal danger and should leave immediately. Cook fired once, wounding a Hawaiian, then again, killing one. Followed by the crowd of angry Hawaiians, he retreated to the nearby beach with his marines while other marines in his oared boats just offshore opened fire.

  Cook strode into the surf and, facing the ocean, raised his hands to order the marines in boats to cease firing at the Hawaiians and pick him up. James Cook, like so many of the sailors of the era, had never learned to swim well, either; if he knew how, he may have waded out from shore into deeper water and events could have transpired very differently. As Cook stood in the shallows facing seaward, one of the Hawaiian chiefs, “more daring than the rest,” stepped forward with dagger in hand and stabbed Cook between the shoulders. Instantly, another warrior clubbed him over the head. Cook collapsed into the shallow surf. They pounced on him, holding him underwater for several minutes. Then they dragged him up and beat his head against the nearby coral rocks to ensure that he was dead.

  Thrown into chaos by the sudden fall of their vaunted leader, and some of them also falling under knife stabs and club blows, Cook’s men scrambled for the boats and retreated to the ships anchored in the bay, unable to retrieve their commander’s body. They then opened fire with cannon loaded with jagged iron shrapnel aimed at the hundreds of Hawaiians gathered on the beach.

  Three decades later, the Tonquin’s partners and clerks strolled about the beach, enthralled by the old Hawaiian’s story and their own presence on the very spot where one of the greatest British heroes of the age had forever fallen. Captain Thorn would have been well served to learn from Captain Cook’s temperamental treatment of the native peoples, but the captain had apparently remained aboard ship. Accompanied by their knowledgeable local guide, the Tonquin contingent ashore was, in effect, one of Hawaii’s first tourist groups. Like most tourists, they now wanted souvenirs. Pulling out pocketknives, they pried chunks of wood from the coconut trees that still bore the bullet and shrapnel scars of Captain Cook’s last stand and chipped off pieces of the coral rock where Hawaiian warriors bashed his head.

  Finally, the enchanting day ashore drew to a close and they headed for the rowboat. The Scottish partners and young clerks had an incentive to return to the Tonquin—the possibility of great wealth as founders and shareholders of Mr. Astor’s West Coast empire. The Tonquin’s sailors, however, faced only the prospect of Captain Thorn’s harsh discipline at sea for many months to come. Several deserted right there on the paradisal beach at Kealakekua Bay.

  When, with the shore party back on board, Captain Thorn heard that several of his sailors were missing, he flew into a rage.

  “Storming and stamping on deck,” Ross wrote, “the captain called up all hands; he swore, he threatened, and abused the whole ship’s company. . . .”

  The captain demanded that the Hawaiian islanders bring back the deserters, which they eventually did. He had one deserter confined belowdecks. Another was tied up and flogged. A third, reported Ross, was put in irons. Captain Thorn didn’t bother to round up the deserting boatswain Anderson, however, because he felt Anderson was worthless as a sailor anyway.

  With the Tonquin now undermanned, Ross momentarily felt sorry for the captain, while also pointing out in his account of the incident that Captain Thorn had brought on all his woes himself. Thorn was steeped in a rigid system of order, discipline, and deprivation designed for the sole purpose of combat at sea. Through the long reach of Astor’s empire, this ethic had collided head-on at the beach of Kealakekua Bay with the charming allures of what appeared, for an outsider at least, to be a far more permissive, harmonious, and easygoing culture. Captain Thorn’s situation was a bit like that of a besieged summer camp director trying to corral his high-spirited lads from escaping during the night to the girls’ camp across the lake.

  “[W]ith all his faults he had some good qualities,” Ross wrote, “and in his present trying situation we all forgot our wrongs, and cheerfully exerted ourselves to help him out of his difficulties.”

  But the difficulties in Hawaii didn’t end at Kealakekua Bay, nor did Captain Thorn’s frustrations. Before sailing the 2,600 miles to America’s West Coast, the Tonquin needed more personnel to staff the emporium as well as a stock of live Hawaiian pigs, both to consume en route and to raise at the new colony. Royal Hawaiian decree, however, banned the villagers from selling their own pigs to passing ships, as this was a trading right reserved for the king. Two days after the shore visit to Captain Cook’s last stand, the Tonquin sailed about twenty miles up the west coast of the Big Island and put in at Tohehigh Bay, residence of the island’s governor, for permission to buy pigs. To the surprise of all aboard, the governor of the Big Island turned out to be a Scotsman and former sailor named John Young, who twenty years earlier had served as boatswain aboard a New England ship, the Eleanora, one of the first trading vessels to call at the Northwest Coast after Cook’s voyage.

  Young had been taken captive during an altercation between the ship’s captain and the Hawaiians and left behind by the Eleanora. Kamekameha, the head of the Big Island at the time and a far-sighted leader, had taken in the boatswain, given him land, and used him as a trusted advisor on military matters and Western technology. Kamekameha eventually united the other islands and established his royal seat at the more fertile island of Oahu, with its good harbor at what is now the city of Honolulu. He promoted Young to be governor of the Big Island, where he had ruled.

  Captain Thorn, the Scottish partners McDougall and McKay, and some of the clerks, such as Ross, were rowed ashore at Tohehigh Bay on the Big Island to meet Governor Young, then about sixty years old, shrewd, and in good health, to ask about buying pigs.

  “He received us kindly,” wrote Ross, “and with every mark of attention peculiar to an Indian chief; showed us his wife, his daughter, his household, and vassals. . . . [F]rom his long residence among the natives, he has imbibed so much of their habits and peculiarities, that he is now more Indian than white man.”

  But to buy pigs, Governor Young told them, they had to sail to Oahu and call on King Kamekameha himself, who kept a monopoly on the sale of pigs to foreign ships as a means of generating profits for the royal treasury.

  The Tonquin sailed from the Big Island to Oahu and anchored in Waikiki Bay. Over several days, the Scot
tish partners exchanged formal visits with King Kamekameha to negotiate the sale of pigs. Arriving at the Tonquin in a huge double canoe paddled by sixteen chiefs and accompanied by three enormous wives in traditional garb, the Hawaiian king wore a mix of Western dress that included a blue coat with velvet collar, a beaver top hat, and a long sword given to him by his “brother,” King George III of England. The Tonquin’s passengers and crew, no doubt laboring under the popular image that savages and cannibals inhabited the islands of the Pacific, were impressed by the sophistication of the Hawaiians’ traditional culture. They noted the finely crafted outrigger canoes and seafaring skills, the hundreds of woven-walled, thatched-roofed houses of the town, the personal cleanliness and industriousness of the Hawaiian people, and their careful respect of taboos, religious customs, and rules laid down by their king.

  None of it impressed Captain Thorn. Chafing to be under way, he wrote to Mr. Astor from Waikiki, “It would be difficult to imagine the frantic gambols that are daily played off here. To enumerate the thousand instances of ignorance, filth, &c . . . would require Volumes.”

  Not to be outdone in the displays of power and refinement, the Scottish partners rose to the same level of formality as the Hawaiians. Dressing up in their kilts, they paid a visit to King Kamekameha and called themselves “The Great Eris of the Northwest,” using the Hawaiian word for king. They pledged to Kamekameha to establish permanent and very profitable trade relations with his islands once they’d founded their West Coast colony.

  Finally the negotiations with King Kamekameha concluded. Dozens of canoes were dispatched from shore, heaped with more fruit, vegetables, and a hundred squealing pigs to stock the Tonquin. The Scottish partners wanted to hire thirty or forty Hawaiians to work at the West Coast emporium, impressed with their extraordinary ability to handle canoes, swim like seals, and hold their breath underwater for up to four minutes while diving deep for a pulley the ship had lost overboard. This was all encouraged by King Kamekameha. He urged his subjects to travel to foreign lands and learn new skills to bring back and further Hawaii. But Captain Thorn said no—the Tonquin couldn’t carry that many extra men and supplies. Eventually, he and the partners reached a compromise: twelve Hawaiians to serve as sailors and twelve to work the West Coast emporium for a total of twenty-four carried as additional passengers aboard the ship.

  As the ship prepared to sail, it appeared that the Tonquin would achieve a tranquil leave-taking from Hawaii, unlike the stormy departures from New York Harbor and the Falkland Islands.

  “[F]rom the good conduct of the sailors since our arrival, we began to think matters would go smoothly for the future,” wrote Ross, “but these hopes were of short duration. . . .”

  One of the sailors, Edward Aymes, from New York, missed the longboat that was leaving the Waikiki beach for the Tonquin. He quickly hired Hawaiians to take him out to the ship, but an enraged Captain Thorn jumped into the boat when it pulled alongside the Tonquin where Aymes was ready to climb aboard, seized stalks of sugarcane in the boat destined to feed the pigs, and beat Aymes senseless with them. Then he ordered Aymes thrown overboard.

  A native canoe nearby rescued Aymes and took him to shore. He returned a few hours later and, from a canoe alongside the ship, called up to Captain Thorn, apologizing and asking to be taken aboard. Captain Thorn threatened to kill Aymes if he set foot on the Tonquin. Aymes asked for his clothes and sailors papers. Thorn didn’t reply. The sympathetic first mate, Mr. Fox, surreptitiously threw down the articles into the canoe for Aymes.

  And so sailor Aymes was left on Hawaii. As his canoe pushed off from the Tonquin, he shouted up to Captain Thorn that he knew his rights as an American citizen. If they ever met on American soil, he said, Captain Thorn would find himself in deep trouble.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHEN THE TONQUIN ARRIVED OFF THE NORTHWEST Coast and mouth of the Columbia River on March 22, 1811, it had left all tropical antics far in its wake. Here wind squalls from the northwest swept across the charcoal sea. Huge swells tossed the ship. Roaring white breakers smashed against the shoreline of this far edge of the North American continent, stretching away endlessly north and south in a misty gray-green band of impenetrable forest and rocky headlands, backed by ranges of snowy mountains. Here was the fabled destination—the epicenter of the great empire-to-be! If they hadn’t understood just how wild and remote and storm-battered the Northwest Coast was when they left the bustle of New York and the scented islands of Hawaii, they did now. From this spot, sending and receiving any communication to their familiar world would take roughly one year.

  But whatever safety and shelter was offered by this wild coast was blocked by a four-mile-long sandbar across the Columbia’s mouth. Still today one of the world’s most dangerous navigational hazards, here the power of the largest river of the western continent, discharging an average of 265,000 cubic feet of water per second, collides head-on with the power of the world’s largest ocean. The Pacific tides and swells entering the river’s mouth fight against the outgoing river’s discharge. This battle throws up ferociously steep mounds of water, up to twelve feet high, known as standing waves. They can literally stand a boat up on end. At the same time, incoming swells from the North Pacific, generated by powerful storms thousands of miles out at sea and thirty feet and more in height, tower over the shallows of the bar. Crashing down in a tumult of foam and spray further churned by the winds and tidal currents, these waves create what seems to be a giant cauldron where the earth’s hydraulic forces converge.

  Somewhere in this chaos of wind and wave and powerful tides the Seagoing Party had to find the gap in the shallow sandbar. It was only through this single channel that the main current of the Columbia River exited the continent, and they could enter.

  “The wind was blowing in heavy squalls, and the sea ran very high,” wrote Franchère, about their arrival off the Columbia’s mouth, adding that they could plainly see the breakers crashing from three miles off.

  Captain Thorn gave orders to prepare the whaleboat. Mr. Fox, he ordered, would act as captain. For his crew, Mr. Fox would take the French-Canadian brothers Lapensée, in addition to Joseph Nadeau, and John Martin. Their mission was to row into the wild confusion of wind and wave and current and “sound” the bottom—measure the water’s depth to locate the deeper channel across the shallow bar.

  Fox was taken aback. Three of the four men assigned to pull the oars of the whaleboat into one of the most treacherous spots in the world’s oceans were French Canadians who had never before been to sea—Nadeau was a barber from Montreal and the two brothers had worked as porters at Lachine Rapids, just above Montreal. John Martin, an experienced but aging Yankee seaman, didn’t have the power of youth at the oars.

  Couldn’t Captain Thorn assign a more experienced crew to man the oars? asked Fox.

  No, replied Thorn. He needed all experienced sailors aboard the Tonquin to handle her in these conditions.

  “Mr. Fox,” wrote Alexander Ross, who witnessed this scene unfolding on the deck of the Tonquin, “then represented the impossibility of performing the business in such weather, and on such a rough sea, even with the best seamen.”

  “[T]he waves [are] too high for any boat to live in,” Fox pleaded to Captain Thorn.

  The captain had already turned away. He now spun around to face Fox.

  “Mr. Fox, if you are afraid of water, you should have remained in Boston.”

  Fox didn’t reply. He simply turned to the crew and issued the fateful order: Lower the boat.

  A mere twenty ships had, by this time, crossed the Columbia bar. The Columbia River itself had been discovered by Europeans only eighteen years earlier. For European sailing ships, almost all the other coastlines of the world were on the way to somewhere. The Northwest Coast was not and remained obscure, unknown, and impossibly remote for centuries after most other coastlines of the world had been charted.

  Spaniards first had sailed northward from their colonies in Mexico as
far as today’s Oregon in the 1600s. But the cool, wet, rugged Northwest Coast inhabited by Indian tribes living in wooden longhouses and traveling in large cedar canoes didn’t compel them like the benign climates and monumental, gold-encrusted civilizations of the Aztecs and Incas far to the south. For a century and a half, the Northwest Coast, in geopolitical terms at least, remained a vast no-man’s-land while Europe’s seafaring powers, such as Spain, France, and Britain, assembled their colonial empires elsewhere on the globe.*

  In the second half of the 1700s, a flurry of interest from several European powers converged on the Northwest Coast. After pushing their empire across Siberia to the Far East, the Russians, with the Bering Expedition in 1741, sailed across the North Pacific to the Aleutian Islands and Alaskan coast, and quietly began to develop a fur trade with natives there. With Russia poking around Alaska’s Pacific Coast, Spain felt threatened and swung her attention northward from Mexico. Starting in 1769, Franciscan Father Junípero Serra planted a string of missions up the Pacific Coast as far north as today’s San Francisco Bay. Beyond this point, however, the coastline grew colder, wetter, more forested, and less attractive for settlement.

  As Father Serra built his missions for Christianity in California, and small Russian ships traded for furs up in the Aleutians, Captain Cook explored the South Pacific for Britain and for science. On his Third Voyage in 1776, however, British authorities assigned Cook a secret mission in the North Pacific that also had much to do with commerce—locate the Pacific end of the legendary Northwest Passage. The Passage had been a coveted geographical object sought since Columbus—a water route across North America that offered European merchants a shortcut to the trading wealth of the Orient.