Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  The river passage to the Pacific never strayed far from Mackenzie’s mind, but three years were to pass before he could undertake a new expedition to find it. On October 10, 1792, he again embarked from Fort Chipewyan and proceeded up the Peace River to the foothills of the northern Rocky Mountains, where stood the farthest-flung western trading post of the North West Company. He outfitted there and chose a trusted (and ill-fated) friend, Alexander McKay, as his second-in-command. With a twenty-five-foot birch-bark canoe loaded with 3,000 pounds of supplies, Mackenzie and his ten-member party pushed off a place called Fork Fort on May 9, 1793, and made a heroic portage around the Peace River canyon. In his search for a waterway that would carry him west to the ocean, Mackenzie often acted on information given to him by Indians and often on his own instinct, the latter taking him on a difficult and mistaken detour down the Fraser River. In mid-July the party crossed a 6,000-foot defile in the subsequently named Mackenzie Range, and descended the Fraser (which the explorer mistakenly thought was the Columbia) to the Bella Coola River and to its discharge into a narrow canal. This waterway emptied into Queen Charlotte Sound just north of Vancouver Island and by negotiating it, Mackenzie and his party reached Pacific tidewater on July 20, 1793.

  He returned along the same route to caches of buried pemmican along the Fraser, reached Fork Fort on August 24, and a month later was back at Fort Chipewyan to resume his work as a fur trader. He made no further explorations.

  Mackenzie’s Voyages from Montreal Through the Continent of North America, published in 1801, was widely read and esteemed for its modesty and felicity of language. Thomas Jefferson was among the book’s ardent admirers, as were the president’s transcontinental agents, Messrs. Lewis and Clark, who carried the book to the Pacific on their own expedition in 1804.

  For his services to the crown, Mackenzie was knighted in 1802 by King George III. Sir Alexander retired to Scotland in 1805, married, enjoyed his children, and died at his home at Mulinearn on March 12, 1820, at the age of fifty-six.

  3

  Nootka Sound

  “… TO PENETRATE WESTWARDLY TO THE SOUTH SEA.”

  1

  John Ledyard seemed destined to make his mark in the crowded exploration decade of 1778–1788 when Cook, La Pérouse, Barkley, Gray, and Mackenzie were finding, refinding, and defining the northwestern Pacific coast. No man of his time, with the exception of his patron Thomas Jefferson, had a greater vision of what the region could mean to the United States than this half-mad seeker of a “passage to glory.”

  Ledyard was born in Groton, Connecticut, in 1751, the eldest of six children of a sea captain in the West Indies trade. After his father’s death in 1762, he lived with his grandparents and at age twenty-one, acting on an ill-defined ambition to “minister to the Indians,” undertook missionary training at Dartmouth. Not long after he began his theological studies, however, he ran afoul of certain stringent rules, and for his insolence and disobedience obliged the college by leaving it. Now disinherited by his family, he signed aboard a merchant ship out of New London bound for the Barbary Coast of North Africa, but deserted when the ship reached Falmouth, England. He was arrested in Bristol, jailed, and eventually given the choice of sailing aboard a ship departing for the Guinea coast or “taking the King’s shilling”—enlisting in the army. Ledyard chose the army, transferred to the Royal Marines, and, in July 1776, as his home country launched its Revolutionary War, he learned of Captain Cook’s preparations to launch his third voyage to the Great South Sea. With typical brashness, he sought an audience with Cook to ask for a billet, and the eminent navigator was sufficiently curious about the tall, powerfully built American at his doorstep to permit him across the threshold. Ledyard, an intelligent, excitable talker, explained his mission and told his history. Cook was impressed with his visitor’s “ardent nature,” and the Connecticut Yankee in King Cook’s court left the lodging with the rank of corporal of marines on the Resolution, the only American in the expedition.

  The Discovery and the Resolution sailed from Plymouth on July 12, 1776, and Ledyard kept a journal of the expedition’s progress to the Cape of Good Hope, the outer waters of Antarctica, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, the Sandwich Islands, and of the voyage along the North American coast, which was reached in March 1778. At Nootka Sound on the western shore of Vancouver Island Ledyard studied the island’s natives and reflected on his long absence from home. He wrote, “This was the first fair opportunity I had of examining the appearance of those unknown aborigines of North America. It was the first time too that I had been so near the western shores of that continent which gave me birth; and though more than 2000 miles distant from the nearest part of New England I felt myself painfully affected.”

  One of the American’s notable adventures occurred when Cook guided his ships northward and anchored off Unalaska, one of the largest of the Aleutian chain. Ledyard was among the shore party that found traces of other “civilized” visitors—campfires, rusted iron traps, a black waistcoat—and he volunteered to conduct a search of the island for the white men who had abandoned the belongings. With native guides he located a camp of Russian trappers who greeted him warmly and invited him to share their meal of whale meat and broiled salmon. Using sign language and drawings, he learned that the Russians came to the Alaskan coast every year from Kamchatka to trap sable, fox, ermine, beaver, and sea otter and to trade for these skins among the natives. Ledyard learned of the Siberian and Chinese markets for the furs and the enormous profits to be made from them.

  After Cook’s death in the Sandwich Islands in 1779, his officers continued the expedition, returned north, sailed along the Russian Asiatic coast, called at Macao and Canton, and returned to Plymouth in October 1780 after a voyage of four years and three months.

  In 1782 Ledyard returned to the United States and made his way to Groton a few weeks after the British surrender at Yorktown.

  With publication of his A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific in 1783, Ledyard became something of a celebrity, with newspapers referring to him as “the Great American Traveler.” He was afire with schemes born from his Pacific adventures. He wanted to captain a ship that would round the Horn and sail to Nootka Sound, proceed to Alaska, and there trade in furs to take to China to exchange for tea, silks, and spices. With the profits from this venture he proposed to mount an expedition to cross the continent east to west and establish an American fur-trading post at Nootka, thus anticipating accomplishments by Lewis and Clark, and the German-born fur entrepreneur John Jacob Astor.

  Supremely self-confident, vigorous, and possessing an infectious enthusiasm and the enviable history of having James Cook as his mentor and the Resolution as his classroom, Ledyard carried his visonary ideas to New England financiers. He earned their interest—who would not be interested, at least, in hearing the Great American Traveler recount his adventures and ideas?—but not their backing, and decided to try his luck in Europe.

  Dependent on the income from his Journal and loans from his brother for his daily expenses, the “mad, romantic, dreaming Ledyard,” as he called himself, took a room in a Paris hostelry. As a celebrated American expatriate he managed to meet such sympathetic compatriots as the American minister to France Benjamin Franklin, his successor Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the naval hero Captain John Paul Jones. All were impressed by Ledyard’s exploits, and Jefferson later wrote of him as “a man of genius, of some science, of fearless courage and enterprise.”

  At this time, John Paul Jones happened to be in Paris and became so ignited by Ledyard’s ideas that he engaged in planning to fit out a trade ship, which he would master, to take his partner to the Pacific. Perhaps even two ships, the two decided, might be necessary, one of which would be left with Ledyard at Nootka Sound while the other carried furs to Canton and returned with a cargo of Chinese luxuries.

  This scheme fell apart when Jones learned from the American charge d’affaires
in Madrid that Spain was “too jealous to permit any commercial speculation” in its Pacific lands. Ledyard also failed to interest French authorities in forming a mercantile company to engage in the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest.

  Dismayed and all but penniless but still brimming with ideas and ardor, Ledyard paid a visit to Thomas Jefferson, now American minister to France, in the summer of 1786. The two had met before—it was Jefferson who introduced Ledyard to Jones—and had corresponded regularly. The future president had noted in his diary that in past talks with Ledyard, “I suggested to him the enterprise of exploring the western part of our continent, by passing through St. Petersburg, then across Russia to Kamchatka, and procuring a passage thence in some of the Russian vessels to Nootka Sound, whence he might make his way across the continent.” Now Ledyard eagerly seized on this grandiose idea and in his perfervid talks about it, Jefferson noted, “only asked to be assured of the permission of the Russian Government.… I undertook to have the permission [from Empress Catherine II] solicited. He [Ledyard] eagerly embraced the proposition.”

  The Great American Traveler departed London for Saint Petersburg in December 1786 with a letter of introduction from Jefferson (describing the bearer as a man of “much singularity of character”) and ten guineas in his pocket. He traveled to Hamburg and to Stockholm, and after walking halfway across the frozen Gulf of Bothnia before finding open water blocking him, he returned to Stockholm. After a brief recuperation, he set out north through Swedish Finland and Lapland on the 1,200-mile journey to the Russian capital. Sheltered, and sustained by a diet of salt herring, milk, and bread given him by strangers in hamlets and farms along his route, Ledyard arrived in Saint Petersburg in March 1787.

  Upon learning of this astonishing perambulation, Jefferson wrote a friend, “I had a letter from Ledyard lately. He had but two shirts, and yet more shirts than shillings. Still he was determined to obtain the palm of being the first circumnambulator of the earth.”

  In his several weeks in Saint Petersburg, Ledyard managed to obtain a paper permitting him to proceed across Siberia to the Russian maritime provinces. Somehow—perhaps because he was an oddity, an American carrying a letter from Jefferson, and the author of a book about Cook’s last voyage—he was able to travel the first 3,000 miles across the steppes, to Novosibirsk, in a kibitka, a three-horse carriage-sleigh, accompanied part of the way by a Scottish physician employed by Empress Catherine. From the Ural Mountain town of Barnaul, he joined a party of government couriers to Irkutsk on Lake Baikal, “driving with wild Tartar horses over a wild and ragged country,” and after a few days’ rest traveled with another governmental party down the Lena River to the fur-trading outpost of Yakutsk. They reached the forbidding place in September 1787, with dropping temperatures and winter winds preventing his continuing east to the Sea of Okhotsk and his goal, the peninsula of Kamchatka, the jumping-off spot for a crossing of the North Pacific to Nootka Sound.

  Ledyard wrote in his journal at Yakutsk, “This is the third time I have been overtaken and arrested by winter; and both the others, by giving time for my evil genius to rally hosts about me, have defeated the enterprise. Fortune, thou hast humbled me at last.”

  But then he had an experience awaiting him more humbling than the Siberian winter. In the spring of 1788, as he prepared to continue eastward, Ledyard was arrested on orders from Empress Catherine and accused, inexplicably, of being “a French spy.” The accusation was in fact a ruse. The French ambassador to Russia investigated the matter at the request of Ledyard’s friend from his Paris days, the Marquis de Lafayette, and reported that the empress’s actions probably “disguised her unwillingness to have the new possessions of Russia on the western coast of America seen by an enlightened citizen of the United States.”

  Ledyard, of course, did not know this as he was hurried under armed escort to the Polish frontier. “The royal dame has taken me out of my way,” he wrote as he made his way back to London, there to report his harrowing tale to the author of his journey.

  Jefferson noted in his autobiography, “Thus failed the first attempt to explore the western part of our northern continent.”

  * * *

  Ledyard was driven by the conviction that he was destined to make an indelible mark in history and was thus able to bear his misadventures gracefully and with honest, self-deprecating humor. His utter confidence that he would succeed in some great enterprise had an infectious quality. He was eager, daring, inexhaustible—he had proven it—and he was believed.

  In London, even while he was regaining his health and strength, Ledyard cast about for some new endeavor. He visited the eminent botanist and promoter of explorations Sir Joseph Banks, who proposed that the Great Traveler’s future lay not in America but in Africa. Banks told of an exploration of the sources of the Niger River being sponsored by the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, and Ledyard fairly leaped on the idea.

  “When can you be ready?” Sir Joseph asked.

  “Tomorrow morning,” his guest said.

  Banks advanced him the funds to travel to Cairo, where the expedition was to be launched. There, in Turkish-controlled Egypt, Ledyard wrote apologetically to Thomas Jefferson, who had expressed disappointment that the Traveler seemed to have abandoned his ideas of exploring the American West. Jefferson later wrote James Madison that Ledyard “promises me, if he escapes his [present] journey, he will go to Kentucky, and endeavor to penetrate westwardly to the South Sea [the Pacific].”

  Compared to Ledyard’s incomparable crossing of Russia and Siberia, such a transcontinental journey might well have been accomplished with relative ease. Certainly no single man of his time had better credentials to attempt it.

  But in Cairo in January 1789 Ledyard’s impatience grew to fury at repeated postponements of the caravan that was to take him into the African interior, and he died suddenly on the tenth of the month.

  Jefferson, who apparently investigated the details behind the loss of his “man of genius,” explained that “Mr. Ledyard took offense at the delay and threw himself into a violent rage with his conductors, which deranged something in his system that he thought to cure by an emetic, but he took the dose so strong as at the first or second effect of its operation to burst a blood vessel—in three days he was suffocated and died.”

  The Traveler, Jefferson later remarked, “was a person of ingenuity” who “unfortunately had too much imagination,” an extraordinary thing for a man of such ingenuity and imagination to say. Ledyard was Jefferson’s agent of action, the man who saw the Pacific littoral with his own eyes, envisioned it as America’s mare nostrum of the future, and shared his vision with the future president.

  The ingenious and imaginative idea of an exploration of the western American continent with which Thomas Jefferson had inspired John Ledyard, and which he so mightily tried to accomplish, would have to wait another fifteen years.

  2

  Spanish claims of sovereignty over the coastal lands of western North America originated with a papal bull in 1494, fifty years before Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo’s expedition actually set out from La Natividad. Subsequently, Spain sent other expeditions from Mexican ports, and galleons from the Philippines, their holds laden with silks, damasks, spices, porcelains, wax, and other exotic goods of the Far East. These vessels followed the Great Circle from Manila northeast toward Japan, then due east along the 41st parallel to the vicinity of Cape Mendocino and down the California coast.

  With such voyages and its first actual land-based foothold, the presidio of San Diego, which was established in 1769, Spain made its presence known from Baja California to Cape Mendocino and sent occasional expeditions as far north as Vancouver Island and even into the Bay of Alaska. But in the fifteen years between Cook’s voyage in 1778 and the beginning of their war with Napoleonic France, the British were preeminent in breaking the shaky grasp the Spanish held in the sea-lanes along and above the Oregon coast.

  Furs, the
sea otter in particular, and the riches they represented in the China trade drove the English as they had Russians and Frenchmen before them, and the Americans soon to come. The fur trade gave a new and perfect meaning to the old Spanish phrase for the mythical lands of the Pacific Northwest—the “Coast of Cathay”—and at the center of it was an obscure dimple on the ragged western shore of Vancouver Island named for the principal Indian clan inhabitating its shores.

  Nootka Sound, discovered by the Spaniards, charted by Barkley and Cook, was a small detour on the sea trails to Old Oregon, but it had a significant role in the story. The place was known to Northwest explorers and fur traders for two centuries; the Indians inhabiting Nootka Island and the fringes of the Sound surrounding it posed “problems” for British and American traders that often erupted into violence, and it became the arena where contending nations fought over the sea otter, the China trade, and rights to settlement on the Pacific coast of America.

  All these matters—exploration, exploitation, Indian problems, international conflict—were exemplified by the 1788 adventure of a British seaman-entrepreneur named John Meares.

  * * *

  The historical verdict on Meares is mixed: To some of his contemporaries he was a tireless, driven, intrepid figure like Ledyard, anxious to make a contribution to his nation as well as to history. To others, and to virtually all modern historians, he was an egoistic, relatively talentless rogue, full of high-sounding rhetoric but fundamentally little more than a self-promoting fortune-seeker who happened to trigger, as such frenetic blunderers often do, an international incident.

  Born in 1756, Meares served as a lieutenant in the British navy and after the Peace of Paris of 1783, which settled the American Revolutionary War, entered the merchant service. He took command of a ship bound for India and in Calcutta organized a commercial house to trade on the Pacific Rim of North America. In this enterprise he was much influenced by the publication of Cook’s Voyages to the Pacific Ocean in 1784, and by the reports of Cook’s successor in command of the Discovery on the great value placed on sea otter skins in the Orient.