Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  Meares learned of other voyages between England, Nootka, and the trading emporiums at Macao and Canton that resulted in immense profits for their sponsors. He acted on the information with his customary zeal. He gathered the funds to outfit two trade ships, named them after his destination and quarry—Nootka, a 200-ton vessel, and Sea Otter, at 100 tons—and put to sea in February 1786 with a consignment of opium to be delivered to Malacca on the Malay Peninsula before setting a course for the north Pacific.

  Meares, commanding the Nootka, arrived in the Aleutian Islands in August and island-hopped around the misty shores from Attu to Unalaska, where he found a good anchorage and discovered a Russian trappers’ camp. He and his crew were treated cordially by these bearded, fur-bedecked, Cossack-like hunters, and Meares, thirsty for information on the sea otter potential of the region, seems to have found ways to question the Russians at length. Like Ledyard, he was an excellent interrogator and observer.

  The Russians, he wrote, came to Alaska from Kamchatka in “galleots” (small oar-and-sail galleys), each carrying from sixty to eighty men. “They heave their vessels up the same convenient station here,” he said, and “hunt sea-otters and other animals whom nature has cloathed in furs. The natives of the different districts are also employed in the same occupation, and are obliged to give the fruits of their toil, as a tribute to the Empress of Russia, to whom the trade exclusively belongs.” He discovered that the natives received “small quantities of snuff, of which they are immoderately fond” for their furs, “and obtaining that favorite article, they are content with their wretched condition, from whence, as far as respects any exertions of their own, they will never emerge.”

  Anxious to find his own fur-trade below the Russian outposts in the Aleutians, Meares took the Nootka into the Bay of Alaska that summer and anchored in Prince William Sound to await the Sea Otter’s arrival. The sister ship never came; indeed she was never seen again, presumably lost at sea.

  Meares gave some thought to making a run for the Sandwich Islands to spend the winter but decided that his men, restless, some ill with scurvy, and all dreaming of loading the Nootka with furs and making their fortunes in Canton, might desert the ship. He preferred the rigors of a winter at latitude 60 degrees north to the possible ruination of his mission.

  By January 1787 twenty-three of the Nootka crew had contracted scurvy (Captain Cook carried kegs of sauerkraut on his ships and thus defeated this ancient sailors’ scourge) and eight men, including the ship surgeon and pilot, died. In April, with warm weather returning, local natives brought fish and game to Meares’ camp and in that month another trade ship, the Queen Charlotte, entered the sound and, although Meares had to pay for provisions, the ship was welcomed “as a guardian angel.”

  With the help of crewmen and the ship’s carpenter from the Charlotte, the Nootka sailors spent a month refitting their ship, caulking seams, and mending shredded sails and rigging. Meares paid for services with his trade goods and in June set sail for Honolulu. There, after more refitting and the recuperation of his crew, he continued on to Macao with the meager collection of furs he had bartered for among the natives at Prince William Sound.

  By now he had a new scheme in mind. Despite his disastrous experiences in Alaskan waters, the loss of crewmen from scurvy, and the disappearance of the Sea Otter, Meares was aflame with the notion of establishing a British fur-trading post at Nootka Sound and building a small fleet of trade vessels to ply coastal waters from Vancouver Island down along the Oregon coast bartering for furs. He seems to have had little concern about the excellent chance that his enterprise would meet opposition from the Spaniards, who claimed the territory by right of discovery, and he knew his home country would not sanction his activities. To avoid such conflicts, he flew the Portuguese flag from his mainmast, thereby using, also without permission, the port of Macao as a front for his activities.

  In Macao, through some never-explained financial prestidigitation, Meares managed to get rid of the decrepit Nootka and purchase a 230-ton brig, the Felice. At Canton he employed several Chinese “artisans” (actually carpenters) to build his factory and trade schooner. He also took aboard the Felice a young Vancouver Island native named Comekela, who had been taken to China the year before as a crewmen on another trade vessel. Comekela was the brother of Maquinna, chief of the Nootka people, and a compelling, if not sinister, figure in events to come.

  * * *

  In April 1788, nearly four months out of Canton, the Felice anchored in Friendly Cove, abreast of the village of Nootka, on the southern tip of Nootka Island, at the entrance to Nootka Sound. The hetman Maquinna came out to greet the ship with a great war-canoe assemblage. “They moved with great parade round the ship,” Meares wrote. “There were twelve of these canoes, each of which contained about eighteen men, the greater part of whom were cloathed in dresses of the most beautiful skins of sea otter, which covered them from their neck to their ancles.” He said Maquinna and his entourage wore white bird down in their hair, “and there faces bedaubed with red and black ochre, in the form of a shark’s jaw, and a kind of spiral line, which rendered their appearance extremely savage.”

  The Nootkans fascinated Meares. They lived in sturdy wooden houses, hunted whales with bone-headed harpoons, fished for salmon and herring—their staple diet—and highly prized olachen oil, which was extracted from candlefish and used in cooking. They were adept with harpoons and knives in sea otter hunts, a dangerous business at close quarters when some of the animals measured six feet from nose to tip of tail and were ferocious when cornered.

  Maquinna, he said, wore a royal otter-fur dress and a high, conical cap feathered at the point, and “appeared to be about thirty years, of a middle size, but extremely well made, and possessing a countenance that was formed to interest all who saw him.”

  That chameleonic countenance, before which traders in years to come would cringe in fear, seemed to smile on Meares. The chief was no doubt more pleased that his brother Comekela had been delivered home than by the gifts the Englishman presented to him—“copper, iron, and other gratifying articles.” On the Felice, Meares wrote, Maquinna shrugged out of his otter garments “and threw them, in the most graceful manner, at our feet, and remained in the unattired garb of nature on the deck.”

  Meares negotiated with Maquinna for a parcel of land to build his factory and schooner and said the chief “not only most readily consented to grant us a spot of ground … but promised us also his assistance in forwarding our works.” The two-story log structure was completed on the Nootka shore at the end of April. Meares would later say he “purchased” the land for a brace of pistols, a claim denied by Maquinna.

  While the fort and ship were under construction, Meares took the Felice southward to the entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and continued to Cape Flattery, the Columbia River estuary (which Spanish charts designated as San Roque but which Meares did not rediscover, that distinction going to Robert Gray three years later). They sailed down as far as Tillamook Head on the north Oregon coast, taking a jollyboat crew ashore periodically to trade among the natives. On the return voyage along the southwestern edge of Vancouver Island, the Felice’s crew enjoyed such a brisk sea otter trade that Meares dispatched his first officer, Robert Duffin, and several sailors in a longboat to penetrate the Strait of Juan de Fuca to investigate the trade potential east of Cape Flattery. Instead of finding compliant Indians eager to exchange furs for bits of iron and copper and cheap beads, Duffin’s boat was attacked by native canoes. Four of his sailors received arrow wounds, and, said Meares, “the rest of the people were bruised in a terrible manner by the stones and clubs of the enemy; even the boat itself was pierced in a thousand places by arrows.”

  Now the natives were the “enemy,” and when Meares returned to Nootka to supervise the building of his log fort, he “explained his power” by ordering the throwing up of a breastwork in front of the structure with a small ship’s cannon mounted atop it.

  In
September, after the completion of the palisaded fort as well as the schooner North West America—“the first bottom [keel] ever built and launched in this part of the globe”—Meares sailed the Felice to Canton with a hefty cargo of furs, leaving the Nootka operation to be supervised by his partner, a Captain Douglas, master of the merchantman Iphigenia.

  To Meares, his scheme was working perfectly. His experiment with the Chinese “artisans” had resulted in the building of the fort and schooner, he had located many profitable trading locations, he had lorded it over Maquinna of the Nootkas, and had purchased for a brace of pistols a factory site that would be the epicenter of a great fur-trading monopoly.

  But Meares had underestimated the Spanish resolve to protect their interests on the Pacific Rim, and during his absence in China his nascent fur empire fell to pieces.

  During the building of the fort, a Spanish expedition returning from investigating Russian activities on the Alaskan coast reported to the viceroy of Mexico that the Russians were contemplating a trading post in the south to take advantage of the “commerce which the English from Canton are carrying on at Nootka.” The commander of this expedition urged immediate action, and in February 1789 the viceroy dispatched two warships with a complement of soldiers “to occupy said port [Nootka] and garrison it.” Several missionaries accompanied the expedition to win the goodwill of the Indians and proselytize among them. Meantime, the soldiery were to deal “with prudent firmness” with the anticipated advent of Russian traders and any English, American, or other foreign intruders.

  The Spanish ships reached Nootka Sound in May. The Iphigenia, commanded by Meares’ partner, and the newly launched North West America were seized. The former was later released and Douglas was permitted to sail away—which he did, to Honolulu and on to Macao. But the Spaniards claimed the North West America as a “prize ship,” appropriated the 215 sea otter skins in its hold, placed a crew on board, changed its name to Gertrudis, and put it into service. Meares’ factory and outbuildings were also confiscated in the name of King Carlos III.

  At the time of these seizures, the American ships Columbia Rediviva and Lady Washington were also anchored in Nootka Sound but were not interned, and their skippers, John Kendrick and Robert Gray, were permitted to come and go at will. Kendrick was even allowed to take some of the North West America sailors on board the Columbia as crew members. The Americans, after all, were not forming a permanent settlement in Spanish lands while the British stood as a symbol of invidious trespassing in Spanish territory.

  In China, Meares learned of the events at Nootka Sound in November 1789, four months after the fact, found a berth on a trader, and returned to England in April 1790. There he presented a report to the government on his activities in America and on Spain’s “illegal” seizure of his assets.

  As it happened, Meares’ document came to his government’s attention at a propitious time: England was attempting to negotiate with Spain for certain rights in the fur trade in the North Pacific but had reached a stalemate. The Court of Spain, according to a report made to King George III, was maintaining “exclusive rights of sovereignty, navigation and commerce in the territories, coasts and seas in that part of the world,” and Spain was said to be sending armed expeditions to reinforce its claims. Parliament urged His Majesty to “act with vigor” and approved an expenditure, if necessary, of £1,000,000 to enable the king to act “as the exigency of affairs might require.”

  This meant England was prepared to go to war with Spain over the rights to trade and settle the northwest coast of North America and, among other, more important matters, the British government insisted that Spain indemnify Captain Meares for his seized property at Nootka Sound.

  Meares was eventually paid a large restitution—said to be, in American terms, “two hundred and ten thousand hard dollars in Specie”—and with this considerable fortune he appears to have retired. His final years are difficult to trace. His book, Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789 From China to the Northwest Coast of America, appeared in 1790, and although he had no further active service for England, he received a promotion to commander in the Royal Navy in 1795.

  Meares died in 1809 at age fifty-three.

  3

  On August 9, 1790, the year following Ledyard’s death and four months after Meares returned to England, Captain Robert Gray and his Columbia crew returned to Boston from their voyage around the world. They arrived in time to witness a development bothersome to all Yankee skippers and to their government: an agreement that gave England certain trading rights in the Pacific Northwest that were denied, at least on paper, to other nations.

  The Meares incident at Nootka Sound was a coincidental but pivotal event in the dispute between England and Spain over territorial rights-of-way in the north Pacific. Spain’s claim of discovery had been ill-attended, its realization of the value of the fur trade in the region belated. England had its own claims of discovery—Cook’s voyage in particular—and had in fact rights by virtue of occupancy of Nootka Sound, where British subject John Meares purchased land from Chief Maquinna, and south along the Oregon coast to Spanish California, where British vessels had conducted trade for a decade. The stalemate between the two countries had about it the alarming potential of a call to arms, a matter that concerned the newly elected first president of the United States. George Washington worried that if England went to war it might seek access across American territory to strike at Spanish possessions in Louisiana and Florida. To refuse such access might embroil America in the conflict. Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s pro-British secretary of the treasury, favored granting the right-of-way; Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson proposed to ignore such a request if it were made.

  The issue never materialized. Spain could not stand alone against England and turned to Louis XVI for assistance, but France was convulsed in revolution and unable to render aid. With no alternative but to capitulate, in October 1790 Spanish ministers signed the Nootka Sound Convention, recognizing England’s right to navigate, trade, and settle along the Pacific Northwest coast above San Francisco. Each nation was to have free access to the establishments of the other in those regions.

  The convention strengthened British interests in the region and signaled the end of two centuries of Spanish claims.

  * * *

  Of course, the natives of Nootka Sound were not consulted in the international debate over the lands they had inhabited for untold centuries, but the Nootkans were by now familiar with the white men who came to their island. It made no matter if they were Russian, English, Spanish, French, or American; they were all of the same template. Their despicable habits had grown intolerable. The traders had always sneered at the Indians’ religious rites, trampled on village customs, threatened their chiefs, and treated the coastal people as vassals. The whites were belligerent, cheated in their trading, made a show of force at the least provocation, stole, brutalized, and murdered, all without redress.

  Within a few years after their first contact with the seaborne barbarians, the Indians were regarding the trespassers as useful enemies. They were not fooled by being invited aboard the traders’ “floating cities,” or by the strained amity as they displayed their furs on the deck to trade for bits of metal, beads, mirrors, pots, and knives. They had learned quickly the white man’s wiles and had raised the ante for their otter skins; they began to barter rather than accept any gewgaw for the wares the intruders so obviously lusted after.

  Magellan had been killed by natives in the Philippines in 1521; Captain Cook underestimated the Sandwich Islanders and at Kealakekua Bay in 1779 had paid for the error with his life. Countless other intruders had tried to construct native alliances for selfish gain—territorial expansion and trade being the principal motives—without understanding or respecting the natives. It seemed to be the white man’s way.

  Some of the trespassers on the northwest coast of America did not see Cook’s or the other historical examples as instructive, but thirteen y
ears after the Nootka Sound Convention they were taught an abrupt and bloody lesson.

  4

  The man who fatally exasperated Chief Maquinna of the Nootkas was Captain John Salter, and we know little about him before he brought his trading vessel to Vancouver Island in the spring of 1803. Judging from what appears to be his chronic exasperation with the natives, he was probably a veteran of the North Pacific sea-lanes and may have known Maquinna from a previous voyage.

  Salter sailed from Dover in September 1802 with a crew of twenty-nine on the Boston, laden with trade goods. The merchantman doubled the Horn and on March 12, 1803, anchored five miles inside Nootka Sound just beyond the notch on the shore called Friendly Cove. While crew members were busy filling water casks and gathering wood for galley fires, canoes were pushed off from the beach and Maquinna and a dozen of his men made the first of several visits to the ship, bringing their furs and haggling over the trade items displayed on the Boston’s deck. Salter, following the tradition of presenting the chief with a special gift, gave Maquinna an old double-barreled fowling piece.

  Trouble erupted on the twenty-first as Salter and his crew were preparing the ship to proceed downcoast to trade among the other coastal people. Maquinna’s canoes paid a farewell visit and he and his courtiers clambered aboard. The chief brought a gift of a string of wild ducks for Salter, but he also brought the old gun with him, complaining that it didn’t work, was peshak—bad. An armorer on the Boston, a twenty-year-old blacksmith’s son named John Jewitt who had shipped aboard the trader at Hull and who kept a diary of the voyage, witnessed the exchange between the captain and the chief.