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

by Stark, Peter

  They were approaching the bar but still two miles from shore when those in the longboat suddenly found themselves pulled into the ripping maelstrom of current and surf and wind and shallows for which the Columbia Bar was already infamous. Ross, at the oars, described “the terrific chain of breakers . . . rolling one after another in rapid succession” while a “fearful suction” pulled the longboat toward the bar. Before they had time to respond fully, the current had dragged the longboat into the bar’s breakers, the crashing tons of water spinning them this way and that.

  “[A]t this instant, Mr. Mumford, who was at the helm called out, ‘Let us turn back, and pull for your lives; pull hard, or you are all dead men.’ ”

  For twelve minutes, Ross wrote, the longboat hung in the balance, the men pulling with all their strength, but neither winning nor losing the battle against the current sucking them farther into the bar’s breaking surf. Finally, “the boat obeyed the oars,” he wrote. They managed to row themselves out of the imminent danger and to the relative safety of the heaving but open sea.

  The next morning, March 25, 1811, Mumford and crew again attempted to find the channel, now probing southward along the bar. Although the wind was calm, and the sea not choppy, the big smooth-backed swells rolling in off the Pacific still crashed over the bar in heavy breakers, almost trapping them again. They returned to the Tonquin without locating the channel. Captain Thorn, reported Ross, appeared dissatisfied with his officers—as well as himself. He surely felt the weight of the enterprise resting heavily on his shoulders. For four days the Seagoing Party had been stuck outside the mouth of the Columbia. How could they launch Mr. Astor’s great Pacific trade empire if Captain Thorn and his ship couldn’t even cross the Columbia Bar?

  Captain Thorn now summoned one of Astor’s men, Job Aiken, a Scotsman and ship’s rigger, who was a strong sailor. He ordered Aiken to take the pinnace, the ship’s launch used to ferry passengers and supplies back and forth to shore, and sound the bar slightly farther north, with a crew made up of sailmaker John Coles, armorer Stephen Weeks, and two Hawaiians. Aiken and his crew were to measure the depth of the water by dropping a sounding line with a lead weight attached. If they found water deeper than three and a half fathoms—three and a half times the distance of a man’s outstretched arms, or about twenty feet—they were to raise a flag to signal the Tonquin to follow this channel across the bar.

  It was already late in the day, 3:00 P.M., when Aitken and his crew rowed away from the Tonquin. A slight sea breeze had sprung up over the swells, a favorable and gentle wind to ride across the bar toward shore. Soon the hands aboard the Tonquin spotted the flag hoisted in Aitken’s boat—they had found the channel across the bar. Captain Thorn ordered the Tonquin’s anchor raised. The ship now slowly sailed toward the bar, moving at three knots on the gentle breeze, toward the calmer gap in the heavy breakers that indicated where the deeper water of the channel lay. The task demanded Captain Thorn’s utmost concentration—looking seaward to gauge the wind, looking up to determine the set of the sails, looking ahead to keep a steady course toward the gap in the breakers.

  At the same time, Aiken’s pinnace, after sounding for the channel, rowed her way back out toward the ship coming in. As the pinnace neared the ship, Aiken veered a bit off to the ship’s starboard to let the ship pass, expecting the Tonquin to pause or throw a rope so Aiken and party could rejoin the ship. But no one aboard ship made a move to help, reported Ross. As the pinnace began to fall to the rear, McKay finally spoke up.

  “Who is going to throw a rope to the boat?”

  No one replied. No sailor left his post to help.

  Aiken’s boat had now dropped behind the Tonquin, which was still gliding in toward the bar, aiming at the channel through the breakers, threading this needle of calm in the chaos of surf and current. The men in the pinnace began to row to catch up to the ship sailing landward but the powerful current of the outgoing tide worked against them.

  “The boat, the boat!” shouted the partners at the rail on the Tonquin. They turned to Captain Thorn “entreating” him to pick up the pinnace and its crew.

  “I can give them no assistance,” he replied coolly, according to Ross.

  “Back a sail, throw a rope overboard,” shouted the partners. Second Mate Mumford said it would not take a minute.

  “No,” replied Captain Thorn. “I will not endanger the ship.”

  As the pinnace disappeared off the ship’s stern in the swells, the Tonquin sailed in toward the bar and the chaos of breakers, “the sight of which,” reported Ross, “was appalling.” She steered accurately into the channel through which the Columbia’s current exited the continent. Then the water suddenly grew shallower. She struck bottom on a second sandbar. The breakers tossed her up and slammed her down onto the hard sand bottom. Breakers ten feet high crashed over her stern. Everyone aboard who was able leapt up to grab the rigging before being tossed or washed overboard. She slammed seven or eight times with a keel-jarring shock. Then she broke free into deeper water on the inside of the bar. The wind now had died. The sails flapped. As darkness fell, the Tonquin, now without wind or headway of her own in order to steer her, but still surrounded by breakers, was being washed toward the foot of the high rocky headland that lay just inside the bar, called Cape Disappointment.

  MOUTH OF COLUMBIA RIVER AND COLUMBIA BAR

  “We are all lost,” someone shouted, wrote Ross. “The ship is among the rocks.”

  Captain Thorn ordered two anchors dropped to hold the ship in place. They were, in effect, caught inside the line of scrimmage between two opposing continental forces. Pushed by the Pacific surf in the darkness, pulled by the flow of the outgoing tide and current coming out of the Columbia, the ship slowly began to drag her two anchors over the bottom toward the rocky base of Cape Disappointment, which would surely smash her to pieces even if the sandbar had not.

  The pinnace, meanwhile, was caught outside the bar. The breakers had worsened. Now that the ocean’s tide had turned, it flowed outward, drawing water out of the Columbia’s mouth. This outward flow pushed against the incoming waves—in effect shoving the rolling, breaking inbound waves upward into steep, high peaks. Aitken ordered the boat to drift with the outgoing tidal current, farther out to sea, trying to keep her steady in the turbulence. But one of the steep, toppling waves slammed into the pinnace amidships and knocked her over, spilling the crew.

  The surf instantly washed away Aiken and sailmaker John Coles. Stephen Weeks, the armorer, grabbed hold of an oar and used it for flotation while managing to stay near the overturned pinnace. The two Hawaiians immediately stripped off their clothes in the surging breakers and set to work righting the pinnace. After they managed to flip it right side up, the boat remained full of water. Swimming beside it, they emptied the pinnace by jerking the boat rapidly back and forth, end to end, so the water inside her slopped out over the gunwales. It was an extraordinary display of boat handling in rough seas.

  One of the many ironies of the Astoria story is that the expert swimmers brought from Hawaii—and they were indeed expert swimmers, ocean canoeists and longboard surfers—had never before touched a cold ocean. The water temperature at Waikiki Beach in Hawaii is about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature of a swimming pool. The water temperature at the mouth of the Columbia in March, when the Tonquin arrived, averages about 45 degrees, the temperature of an ice bath. At this temperature, someone who is immersed and lightly clothed loses body heat at an astonishing rate. In the first one to two minutes, as the water’s cold hits sensors buried deep in the skin, the victim will hyperventilate and the heart rate will jump—the gasping, yelping “shock” of hitting cold water—before elevated heart rate and breathing level off. For the expert Hawaiian swimmers, this moment must have come as a painful surprise.

  After about ten minutes, the body’s core temperature begins a steady decline of roughly one-tenth of a degree per minute, although humans with thicker skin fold and more subcutaneous fat
will show a slower cooling rate. After about fifty minutes of immersion, when the body’s core temperature reaches about 93 degrees, the average victim has lost a good part of his or her ability to manipulate extremities—fingers, arms, and legs. (The hands of “cold-water immersion” survivors have been found totally “locked” on to frozen ropes to which they clung during their ordeal; the ropes had to be cut to free them.) After roughly two hours in the water, when the body’s core temperature falls to 86 degrees, the subject typically loses consciousness. At this point the victim usually drowns. After four hours in water this cold the victim is almost surely dead.

  Yankee sailors and Hawaiian swimmers both possessed their own advantages in these extreme circumstances. While not expert swimmers, and often not swimmers at all, the Yankee sailors knew the shock of cold water, and from all their cold-ocean seafaring, also knew of that state of drowsiness and lassitude that foretells the slip into hypothermia. What the Hawaiians had going for them, besides their extraordinary swimming ability and centuries-old tradition of small boats on the open sea, was their stockier body types and subcutaneous fat. Modern research shows that Asiatic peoples tend to have a thicker layer of under-the-skin fat, especially in the upper body, than do Caucasians. This would serve them as an insulating layer, but when the warning symptoms of hypothermia commenced, unlike the Yankee sailor, they probably wouldn’t recognize them or know the warning signs of hypothermia and how to fight it.*

  Despite the water’s incredible chill as they swam beside the small boat, the Hawaiians managed to slosh water from the pinnace until it was buoyant enough to hold one of them. As darkness descended on the Pacific, one of the Hawaiians climbed over the gunwales into the swamped boat and resumed bailing by rapidly scooping water with his hands and splashing it over the side. The currents of the outgoing tide now carried them out to sea, away from the immediate danger of the breakers on the bar. Soon the pinnace was afloat, bobbing on the waves. The other Hawaiian climbed in, too.

  They noticed Weeks nearby, clinging to his oar. They maneuvered the pinnace near to him. Weeks was now so tired and cold he could barely hold himself to his oar. The two Hawaiians tried to pull him into the pinnace, but their hands, with fingers stiffened by the extreme cold water, didn’t possess the strength to grip him. Finally, the two Hawaiians leaned over the gunwales, seized Weeks’s clothing in their teeth, and by wrenching upward with their heads, pulled him aboard the pinnace.

  Now the true ordeal began. The three were wet, very cold, nearly naked, and at sea in a small boat along a dangerous coast smashed by heavy breakers, in the dark of the night. One of the Hawaiians, exhausted and deeply chilled, eventually lay down in the bottom of the boat, having seemingly given up hope. The other also seemed to fall into a stupor, refusing to move. Weeks, despite the difficulty of holding himself upright in his condition, struggled to the oars and began to row, trying to keep the boat far enough offshore to avoid the breakers. He understood that he had to row not only to stay out of the surf, but to keep working his muscles to generate body heat and avoid being overcome by a hypothermic stupor.

  Around midnight, the Hawaiian lying in the bottom of the boat died. The other Hawaiian lay on top of him and stayed there, unmoving and silent.

  Weeks kept on rowing, for all purposes alone.

  Just across the bar, the Tonquin also struggled as night fell over the Pacific. Her two anchors dragged over the bottom as the tide flowed out and the wind died, leaving her without sail power, slowly but irrevocably pulling her toward the rocks and surf of the headland of Cape Disappointment. The crew worked desperately to keep the ship from running aground and breaking up in the violent surf. But as the night deepened, reported Ross, the tide began to turn. First was a slack tide—that period between an outgoing tide and an incoming one. Then the tide began to flow inward, the tidal currents now pushing into the Columbia’s broad mouth instead of exiting it. Around midnight, with a rising wind that helped power the ship, these tidal currents carried the Tonquin into the safety of the cove just inside Cape Disappointment, known as Baker’s Bay. With their ship safely anchored, the exhausted sailors took to their berths for a rest.

  The following morning, March 26, a party rowed across the placid bay to the shore. It consisted of Captain Thorn, McKay, Ross, and several others. They planned to climb to the summit of Cape Disappointment, which looked like a smaller version of Gibraltar, topped by a few wind-gnarled evergreen trees, and scout the coast for survivors or signs of the two missing boats.

  “We had not proceeded fifty yards,” reported Ross, “when we saw Steven Weeks, the armourer, standing under the shelter of a rock, shivering and half-dead with cold.”

  They couldn’t get him to talk, or perhaps he wasn’t able, to tell what happened to his boat mates in the pinnace. The party brought him back to the Tonquin, warmed him, and gave him food and clothes. (Franchère, also a witness to the rescue, reported Weeks was stark naked when found.) When Weeks finally began to talk, he could barely be understood, he “appeared so overpowered with grief and vexation.”

  “You did it purposely,” he finally exclaimed in anger to the assembled group.

  Weeks calmed down a bit after those aboard the Tonquin recounted how the ship had slammed over and over on the bar and had struggled, too, through the night, in danger of being smashed on the rocks of the cape.

  Weeks then told his story. After the Hawaiian had died in the bottom of the pinnace about midnight, and the other Hawaiian lay down atop him, Weeks continued to row. When the incoming tide began to flow toward shore, the pinnace was pulled toward the breakers, and he rowed all the harder to stay at sea to avoid them. When dawn broke, he was only a quarter mile from the breakers, and perhaps a half mile offshore from Cape Disappointment itself.

  “I paused for a moment, ‘What is to be done?’ I said to myself; ‘death itself is preferable to this protracted struggle.’ ”

  Weeks turned the prow of the boat to the shore and decided he’d reach land, or die trying.

  As he rowed into the breakers, they swept up the boat from the stern and pushed it forward toward shore, as if surfing. As the sun was just rising, he found himself and the boat “thrown up high and dry on the beach.”

  With “benumbed limbs,” Weeks dragged himself from the boat. He also managed to drag out the Hawaiian who was still barely alive and haul him to the edge of the forest, where “covering him with leaves I left him to die.”

  As he gathered leaves, Weeks happened to spot a beaten path at the forest’s edge. He followed it around the base of Cape Disappointment to the bay on its inside, where he ran into the Tonquin and the party led ashore by Captain Thorn.

  The Hawaiian whom Weeks buried in the leaves still lived. Discovered the next day, feet bleeding, legs swollen, nearly dead, he was warmed by a giant bonfire on the beach and carried back to the Tonquin. The Hawaiian in the bottom of the boat, however, had perished. The other twenty-three Hawaiians aboard the Tonquin came ashore the following day and held an elaborate burial ceremony on the sandy beach, placing sea biscuit and pork under his arms and tobacco under his genitals for the journey to the next world. The Hawaiians prayed and chanted in unison over him, which gave the Tonquin diarists to understand that these Pacific islanders possessed a greater spiritual sophistication than they had guessed.

  Neither of the two other members of the pinnace, the mariner Job Aitken and sailmaker Coles, was ever seen again. Nor was any sign of the genial Mr. Fox and his boat ever found, nor his crew of voyageurs, which included the popular brothers Lapensée and Joseph Nadeau, all of respectable Canadian families, and the old sailor John Martin. In the three attempts sent by Captain Thorn, eight of the approximately sixty of Mr. Astor’s men aboard the Tonquin had died simply trying to land the expedition at the Columbia’s mouth.

  It was not a good beginning for John Jacob Astor’s Pacific empire.

  PART TWO

  THE JOURNEY

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MR. ASTOR, MEA
NWHILE, WROTE TO WILSON PRICE Hunt of the Overland Party about possible rivals.

  John Jacob Astor usually dealt with rival enterprises in one of three ways. First he tried to buy them out. If that didn’t work, he tried to form a partnership with them. If he failed to join them, he tried, through relentless competition, to crush them.

  He had scrupulously planned for two years how to deal with possible rivals for his West Coast empire. He had tried several times, over months of negotiations, to forge a West Coast partnership with the firm most likely to challenge him—the North West Company, that consortium of Scottish fur traders based in Montreal with outposts stretching from Lake Superior all the way to the Rockies.

  Astor knew the Scottish partners well from previous trips to Montreal, where, over the years, he’d purchased many thousands of dollars’ worth of their furs. They in turn had wined and dined him at their Beaver Club and at dinner parties in their homes. On one occasion in 1808, Astor’s daughter Magdalen accompanied him to one of these parties, and the after-dinner dancing had lasted until midnight, with a French cotillion, then all the rage in New York, performed in her honor. Beyond their sociability, Astor knew them as expert, efficient, and far-flung fur traders. One of their men, Alexander Mackenzie—no relation to Donald Mackenzie of the Overland Party—had reached the Pacific Coast twelve years before Lewis and Clark by traveling through Canada and crossing the Rockies, all far to the north of the Missouri route. They in turn knew Astor as an innovative businessman and a take-no-prisoners competitor with money to burn.

  The negotiations went down to a final round. It was a complicated deal that Astor offered the North West Company, made more complicated by certain trade embargoes the United States had recently imposed on Canada. In essence, Astor would buy into the existing North West Company fur operations in the upper Midwest, and they’d buy into his start-up fur operations on the Pacific Coast. The proposal was, by any standards, a gargantuan deal. It embraced much of the tradable wealth of the western half of the continent and converted it into global trading capital. Whether measured by market share, percentage of gross domestic product, or geographical scope, Astor’s commercial scheme, unregulated by government bodies, existed on a scale that would probably dwarf even the largest mergers of our era. He was striving for a near-global monopoly on fur.