by Stark, Peter
It was on August 13, when the Lark, bearing Astor’s impassioned letter to Hunt, was a few hundred miles off the coast of Maui headed hard toward Astoria that a tremendous gale blew up. As huge seas overtook the Lark, Astor’s trusted Captain Northrup had to rely on inexperienced sailors due to the needs of the U.S. Navy to fight the British on the East Coast and Great Lakes and other factors that had made recruiting difficult for the captain. As the captain fought to keep her steady, she swung sideways to the massive waves, and then was suddenly knocked down by a huge sea, throwing the ship into a “great Confusion and disorder,” as Captain Northrup recorded.
When another swell hit, it knocked her almost entirely over, so that her keel rose out of the water, yardarms, masts, and rigging dragging underwater like fishing nets, pulling the ship over. The Lark threatened to overturn completely. The crew clung for their lives. Captain Northrup had to decide whether to try to ride it out and hope she’d right herself, making it possible to save Astor’s dreams for a West Coast empire and Jefferson’s hopes for a Pacific democracy.
But the danger of losing the ship entirely appeared too great. He issued the order: Dismast her!
With the ship laid on her side, her sails and rigging dragging in the sea, slammed by wind and waves, the crew, seizing whatever they could grab hold of on the now-vertical deck, worked furiously to cut the shrouds that affixed the masts to the hull. They sliced away this rigging on the windward side of the ship—that side which remained just barely above water. The severed masts swung away into the sea. But they had not cut the rigging on the submerged leeward side of the hull. The ship now dragged alongside her a great tangle of rigging and spars and yardarms. Worse, the inexperienced crew had inadvertently sliced the lines holding the dories and other auxiliary craft. These small boats—their only escape—skittered away on the gale.
She was now mastless, heaving on her side in the storm’s powerful waves, her hatches smashed in, her holds taking on water. The overturned Lark nonetheless carried enough weight in her holds that she finally turned herself upright. Still a partly submerged hulk, shoved along by the crashing seas and shrieking gale, she wallowed through the storm as the nest of rigging and yardarms smashed and clunked beside her, and the sailors, washed over and over again by the waves breaking across her deck, hung on for their lives.
For four days, from August 13 to August 17, the Lark blew along like this. One sailor drowned belowdecks in the cabin at the outset. Another died of exposure and exhaustion on the second day. Seas swept him overboard. Three days later the high seas swept off two more exhausted sailors, drowning them, then flung the bodies back on deck, where they washed about until the survivors tied them down as an emergency food supply. Slowly they pulled themselves together. They built a platform out of broken spars above the submerged deck so they could sleep above the waves. They jury-rigged a sail. A Hawaiian swimmer aboard managed to dive below and bring up salt pork and porter. The black cook died. Thrown overboard, he was instantly devoured by the sharks that swarmed around the ship.
Two weeks of drifting brought them within sight of the coast of Maui. Hawaiian canoes paddled out. Too exhausted and starved to land the wreck of the Lark themselves, Captain Northrup and crew abandoned her and climbed into the canoes. From the beach they watched their hulk crash aground in the surf, spilling out tons of Mr. Astor’s trade goods in barrels, casks, chests, and bales. King Kamekameha claimed the goods under his salvage rights to any abandoned ship that washed ashore on his islands.
Somewhere in all this wreckage lay the letter from John Jacob Astor to Wilson Price Hunt, Astor’s chosen leader of his West Coast empire, telling him to stand tall against the British. Hunt wouldn’t have been able to receive the letter until months later in any case. He had just left Astoria a few days earlier aboard the Albatross, bound for the ship’s destination, the South Pacific’s beautiful Marquesas Islands.
EPILOGUE
John Jacob Astor’s country house at Hell Gate, overlooking the East River
at what is today 88th Street. It was here that Washington Irving and Astor
collaborated on Irving’s account of the Astor’s West Coast endeavor.
ASTOR’S LIFE CONTINUED TO REVOLVE AROUND ITS CALM domestic center in Lower Manhattan. The wreckage of his empire, however, lay scattered over much of the Pacific Ocean.
A few weeks after the Lark had wrecked off Maui, and Hunt had sailed off aboard the Albatross, McTavish, of the rival North West Company, returned downriver to Astoria from his posts on the far upper tributaries of the Columbia. He brought a large flotilla of ten canoes carrying a force of seventy-five men of the company as well as a letter to McDougall and the Astorians. It had been written by McDougall’s own uncle, Angus Shaw, a principal partner with the North West Company. The letter warned that the British Royal Navy ship Phoebe was en route around Cape Horn along with the company’s own Isaac Todd, “to take and destroy every thing American on the north-west coast.”
Or, as the “Top Secret” orders from the British Admiralty to the Phoebe’s Captain James Hillyar put it, “totally annihilate” any American settlements it found.
As the great flotilla of canoes landed at Astoria, McTavish of the North West Company now made an offer to Astor’s de facto leader, McDougall. In effect: Sell out Astoria now while you still have a chance. Otherwise, we will simply take it.
McDougall accepted, though the Americans at Astoria were outraged. They believed they could easily enough defend the fort against a heavy British frigate that couldn’t come close to the settlement because it would hit bottom in the river shallows. Or, if the frigate did threaten, they could simply remove all the Astor company furs and other valuables a short distance into the interior, where the British Royal Navy couldn’t touch them.
Nonetheless, on October 23, 1813, Duncan McDougall sold out John Jacob Astor’s West Coast enterprise and first American colony on the Pacific and all its goods—including some thousands of furs—for about thirty cents on the dollar.
“It was thus,” lamented Franchère, “that after having passed the seas, and suffered all sort of fatigues and privations, I lost in a moment all my hopes of fortune.”
He was not the only one.
Five weeks later, on November 30, a sail appeared in the distance off Cape Disappointment, crossed the bar, and anchored in Baker’s Bay just inside the river’s mouth. It was the British sloop-of-war Racoon. Wrote Franchère: “The officers [of the Racoon] . . . seemed to me in general very much dissatisfied with their fool’s errand, as they called it: they had expected to find a number of American vessels loaded with rich furs, and had calculated in advance their share of the booty of Astoria.”
Or as the folksier Irving put it: “They felt as if they had been duped and made tools of by a set of shrewd men of traffic, who had employed them to crack the nut, while they carried off the kernel.”
With a British warship anchored at the Columbia’s mouth, and the furs sold off to the North West Company, the end of Mr. Astor’s dream of a West Coast empire appeared near. A date was set for a formal transfer to the British. Shortly before the ceremony, however, McDougall’s new father-in-law, Comcomly, paddled across the Columbia estuary to Astoria with canoes bearing warriors dressed and painted for battle. In a long formal speech, Comcomly addressed his son-in-law. He told McDougall that the Americans had arrived first. They had been good trading partners. He didn’t want King George’s men to make those in Astor’s American company, including his new son-in-law, their slaves.
Comcomly now made his son-in-law an offer. The forest grew almost to water’s edge all along the river. He and his Chinook warriors would hide in the woods near the wharf. As the British stepped from their longboats to claim Astoria, he and his warriors would ambush them. The Americans thus would avoid becoming slaves to the British. It would be an easy matter to rush from the woods and kill them all.
“Mr. McDougall thanked them for their friendly offer,” wrote Ross Cox.
/> The son-in-law explained that the exchange of the fort would be on friendly terms. No American would be made a British slave. Comcomly and his warriors had difficulty believing it.
On the evening of December 12, 1813, Captain William Black of the Racoon was rowed to Astoria from his ship anchored at the river’s mouth. He was hosted to a proper dinner. He then rose from the table to break a bottle of Madeira on the fort’s flag post, hoist the Union Jack, and proclaim Astoria and all surrounding country the territory of the British Crown.
Captain Black and his Racoon sailed away. They left the British flag flying and a complement of North West Company men at the fort. About two months later, on February 28, 1814, yet another unidentified ship appeared off the mouth of the Columbia. Chinook canoes paddled out to meet it. They returned bearing a letter from Wilson Price Hunt. He had traveled to the Marquesas, then to Hawaii, purchased the ship Pedlar with Mr. Astor’s funds, and returned to Astoria to remove Mr. Astor’s furs to Count Baranoff’s fortress in Alaska, out of British naval reach.
“It may be imagined what was the surprise of Mr. Hunt when he saw Astoria under the British flag,” wrote Franchère.
But where had he been? In the two years since his exhausted Overland Party had stumbled into Astoria, Hunt, its appointed leader, had only been in residence at the emporium on the Pacific a total of about five months. McDougall had filled the vacuum. Hunt had, in effect, relinquished power by his absence. It now became clear that, starting just before Christmas, and without announcing it, McDougall had switched over to the North West Company. This news further outraged the Americans at the settlement. McDougall offered to sell Astor’s furs from the North West Company back to Hunt and Astor’s company. Days of bitter arguments and haggling followed at the fort, as Hunt fought with McDougall and other representatives from the NWC over the price of Mr. Astor’s sold-out inventory.
Finally, on March 20, three weeks after the Pedlar’s arrival, they reached agreement adjusting the terms of the sale. On April 2, the Pedlar and Hunt crossed the Columbia Bar and headed out to sea, carrying off the clerks who wanted to leave Astoria, but not the furs, which remained with the North West Company. On leaving aboard the Pedlar after two years along the Columbia, the clerk and young New Yorker, Alfred Seton, missing his family and friends, gave the Northwest Coast an obituary of sorts, a good deal of it surely inspired by McDougall: “I leave the Country & most of those I have met here, without regret, so much meanness, Selfishness, & Hypocricy among an equal number, are seldom met with.”
Astoria was breaking up. Two days after the Pedlar weighed anchor with Hunt, Seton, and others, another large expedition on April 4 set off in canoes up the Columbia River to return to the East across the inland waterway route of the North West Company. This party included Astorian voyageurs and clerks who wished to return to their homes in Montreal and elsewhere in Canada, among them Franchère, as well as North West Company traders headed to their upriver posts. The British now ran the establishment at the mouth of the Columbia, renamed Fort George. The big canoe party had paddled up as far as the Walla Walla River when they spotted three canoes struggling to catch up with them.
“Arrêtez donc, arrêtez donc”—Stop! Stop!—they heard a child cry out in French, reported Franchère.
The flotilla pulled to the shore. The three canoes approached. The traders saw that one of the canoes carried Marie Dorion and her two boys.
She gave them the bad news: All the other Astorians in the Snake River country were dead.
It had happened the past winter. Her husband, Pierre, and Jacob Reznor and Le Clerc had been out trapping. She had remained at their cabin with her boys, preparing furs and food. One January day Le Clerc appeared at the cabin, badly wounded. Shortly before collapsing, he said that they’d been attacked by Indians while attending the traps. Pierre Dorion and Reznor had been killed.
Marie Dorion quickly gathered up her children and the wounded Le Clerc, and mounted them on two horses. She traveled four or five days to the cabin of John Reed. En route to Reed’s cabin the little group hid from a band of Indians for a cold night, not wanting to risk a fire. Le Clerc died during the frigid night. Alone with her children, Marie Dorion arrived at the cabin Reed shared with other trappers. Deserted, it was covered with bloodstains.
She fled. For two days she traveled hard with her children toward the west, seeking the safety of the Columbia. She came to a mountain range—the same where her baby had died two years earlier, the Blue Mountains. The snows lay too deep in January to traverse them. She found a hidden ravine, safe from attack. She killed the two horses. Over a fire, she smoked the horse meat to preserve it for the weeks ahead, and using the horsehides built shelter for herself and her children. Hidden in this makeshift shelter in a ravine with her two boys, Marie Dorion had spent the winter.
In March, as the snows melted, Marie and her children crossed the mountain range on foot and came down its far slopes to the Columbia, knowing that a springtime flotilla of traders would come upstream from Astoria. She had been given hospitality by the Indians at the Walla Walla mouth. When the flotilla appeared, two weeks later, the Walla Walla had paddled her out from shore to meet it.
“We had no doubt,” wrote Franchère, “that this massacre was an act of vengeance, on the part of the natives, in retaliation for the death of one of their people, whom Mr. John Clark had hanged for theft the spring before.”
In all the Snake River country, Marie Dorion was the only survivor.* She and her two fatherless boys bore one more heavy cost of John Jacob Astor’s attempt at West Coast empire.
JOHN JACOB ASTOR OPPOSED GAMBLING. He refused to play cards for money. He abhorred speculation in stocks, which during his youth had become an emerging practice among the coffeehouse-frequenting merchants of Manhattan, leading to the birth of the New York Stock Exchange. But John Jacob Astor in many ways was the consummate gambler, his wagers for huge sums and vast stretches of territory extending over thousands of miles and several decades.
He didn’t give up his West Coast empire for lost—not for years, and really not even then. At first, he didn’t know what had happened. It took months for news of various disasters to reach him in New York, interspersed with reports of Astoria’s achievements. But even after he learned of the repeated setbacks and disasters, he pushed forward, long after his own men had essentially given up.
“Good god,” he had written to the State Department in the spring of 1813, “what an objict is to be secured by Smale means. . . .”
You needed big, bold strokes to accomplish big, bold ends. That summarized his message to the government bureaucrats who moved cautiously on his repeated requests throughout 1813 to send an armed U.S. naval ship and a small complement of marines to the mouth of the Columbia to defend the American settlement there—his settlement—against the British Royal Navy. He had bolstered the nation’s underfunded war effort, no doubt out of a mixture of patriotism and profit, willing to lend the U.S. Treasury $2.5 million in its attempt to raise $16 million from America’s wealthiest individuals.
But the Madison administration vacillated on whether to help Astor defend his West Coast colony.
“And for want of one ship and crew,” writes historian James P. Ronda, “an empire appeared lost.”
8 lost on the Columbia Bar
5 lost on the Overland Party
27 perished with the Tonquin
3 died or were killed at Astoria
8 lost in the wreck of the Lark
9 massacred by Indians in the Snake River country
1 died in the final departure
* * *
61 Total
Astorians who perished as tallied by clerk Alexander Ross; figures do not include untold Native American losses. Historian Hiram Chittenden puts the total at 65 Astorians.
One of the last to die was young Archibald Pelton. A few weeks after the other Astorians had left by ship and canoe in early April 1814, he one day was tending the charcoal pit alone i
n the forest, now in the employment of the North West Company. Two Tillamook Indians mistook him for a white man who had wronged them and vowed revenge, ambushing him and splitting open his skull with his own tomahawk.
Astor had sent a total of about 140 men to the mouth of the Columbia, between the Tonquin, the Beaver, the Lark, and Hunt’s Overland Party. Of these, at least sixty-one, or over 41 percent, died in a gruesome spectrum of violent deaths. It’s fair to ask: Was this a bold display of perseverance on John Jacob Astor’s part, to send expedition after expedition to a dangerous and remote coast? Or was it simple callousness to human life?
“[Mr. Astor] assumed the financial risks,” wrote one commentator; “the traders mortgaged their lives.”
“My plan was right,” Astor allegedly said, according to another, “but my men were weak. Time will vindicate my reasoning.”
One could argue that other Americans who built great business empires since John Jacob Astor’s day likewise showed the same deep focus on the vision and were willing to sacrifice almost everything else to see it succeed, often ignoring human costs. Astor does not come across this distance of two centuries as capricious or cruel. Rather, he’s gentlemanly. But he’s also unsentimental—except for his own family—and relentlessly focused.
Astor explicitly parceled out blame, and blame fell directly on his chosen leaders. Irving was undoubtedly speaking for Astor himself in the conclusion to his 1836 account commissioned by Astor, some twenty-five years after the incidents, when he singled out Captain Thorn. The captain had ignored Astor’s orders and “earnest injunctions” about how to approach the native peoples of the Northwest Coast. His poor judgment resulted in “dismal catastrophe” that “prepared the way for subsequent despondency.”
