Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  5

  The Voyage of the Tonquin

  “… A GUNPOWDER FELLOW.”

  1

  On the sunny afternoon of August 4, 1810, onlookers on both sides of the Narrows separating the upper and lower bays of New York witnessed what celebrated New York author Washington Irving called “a nautical apparition.” Down the mouth of the Hudson River and through the Narrows, heading for Rockaway Point on Long Island, slid a splendid flotilla of birch-bark canoes and bateaux filled with merrily whooping, halooing crews of French-Canadian voyageurs chanting boat-songs in an old patois of French and Indian tongues only they understood. Oblivious to the muggy weather and their sweaty work at the paddles, the variegated band wore beaded deerskins and blanket capotes, striped cotton shirts, moccasins and leggings; some had fur-trimmed, feather-bedecked caps on their heads, others wore feathers in their braided hair and paint on their faces. Dutch farmers along the Hudson naturally mistook them for a crew of savages. To the voyageur the gawkers on the riverbanks were, among kinder epithets, mangeurs de lard (pork-eaters).

  H. H. Bancroft, in one of his flights of romantic fantasy, described the voyageur’s life as “wild, unfettered, buoyant, joyous, revelling, rollicking … full of beauty, with ever fresh and recurring fascination.” He pictured them “as they sit at night eating, smoking, and chatting round the ruddy camp-fire, with weary limbs and soiled clothes, after a day of many portages, or perhaps after a wreck in a rapid, or a beating storm, their dark, luxuriant hair falling in tangled masses round their bronzed faces, and their uncouth figures casting weird shadows on the background foliage.” On a frosty, hyperborean morning, he wrote, “See them as they rise from their hard though welcome bed, at the first faint streak of dawn … to the guide’s harsh, leathern-voiced call of ‘Lève! Lève!’ [wake up!] joking good-humor gradually arising out of the wheezes, sneezes, grunts, and grumbles of their somnolence. See them now, merry and musical as larks, throwing themselves with their luggage into the boats, and shoving off from a bank out upon the placid, polished water, striking up their morning song to the soft, low, rhythmic dip of their paddles, which rise and fall in unison as if moved by one hand.”

  These men, the backbone trappers of the Great Lakes, had come to New York from Lachine, their settlement near Montreal. They had transported their watercraft by wagon from the Saint Lawrence to Lake Champlain, crossed the lake, hoisted the boats on wagons again to travel to Lansingburgh, there pushing off on the Hudson toward the New York bays for what promised to be a grand adventure: They had enlisted as engagés for five years’ service with John Jacob Astor’s new Pacific Fur Company and were to sail from New York on the 290-ton frigate Tonquin to build a trading post at the mouth of the Columbia River, gateway to the fur riches of the Oregon Country.

  * * *

  Mr. Astor had no notions of “adventure” in launching his expedition to the Pacific. The scheme was purely a business matter; indeed, he was pure business, a financial genius all his adult life. He was a butcher’s son, born in Waldorf, Germany, near Heidelberg, in 1763, who emigrated with his family to England when he was seventeen, and to America in 1784. He had an entrepreneurial gift, selling musical instruments for a time, then, discovering the profits to be made in furs, tramping the New York countryside to buy pelts from farmers and independent trappers and from the Iroquois and other tribes. He started an import-export business and in a few years had agents trading furs in China for nankings, silks, tea, fans, cloves, and nutmegs.

  After twenty years in America, Astor had his own ships in the China trade and had become the foremost fur trader in New York and one of its richest merchants. He organized the American Fur Company in 1808 and made it dominant in the Great Lakes trade, then, as Bancroft put it, “pregnant with purposes of wealth and power, Astor’s mind now labored with a great conception,” setting up the Pacific Fur Company for a massive assault on the fur trade of the American West. He aspired to build a chain of forts westward from Saint Louis to the Pacific with a headquarters entrepôt, to be named Astoria, near the Columbia River estuary. And he devised an overland expedition, to depart soon after the Tonquin set sail, which would follow Lewis and Clark’s route westward and which would survey sites for forts and trading posts and blaze a trail for a migration of Americans to the Pacific coast.

  Astor foresaw Astoria as the soaring American presence in the Pacific Northwest, the monopolistic center of the fur trade west of the Rocky Mountains, a place where beaver, sea otter, and other skins would be shipped to Canton, where they would fetch the highest prices.

  Astoria and its satellite posts would form a commercial emporium that would strike a mighty blow against England’s puissant Hudson’s Bay Company and especially against Astor’s greatest rival, the North West Company, which for a quarter century had dominated the Saint Lawrence valley trade.

  Astor hobnobbed with the elite at the North West Company headquarters in Montreal and at the exclusive Beaver Club in the city. There he heard the stories of the rivalry between the Nor’westers and the Company and the impossibility of either to engage in the China trade because of the monopoly there held by the British East India Company. The nabob of New York had no such restraints, and the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory and the overland pathmaking of Lewis and Clark convinced him he could construct an American fur cartel on the north Pacific Rim while the British companies were busy warring against each other.

  To this end, Astor recruited seasoned agents and business partners from the discontented ranks of the North West Company to help put his plan into motion. He launched his Pacific Fur establishment on March 10, 1810, with nine partners, five of them Scotch veterans of the Nor’westers: Alexander McKay, who had been a clerk accompanying Mackenzie on his explorations to the Pacific Coast in 1793; Donald Mackenzie, who had spent ten of his twenty-seven years in the service of the Nor’westers; David Stuart, born in Perthshire in 1753, a fisherman and fur trader; Robert Stuart, David Stuart’s nephew, who migrated to Canada in 1807; and Duncan McDougall a former Nor’wester described by Washington Irving as “an active, irritable, fuming, vainglorious little man, and elevated in his own opinion, by being the proxy for Mr. Astor.”

  The nabob signed an agreement with these men, put up $400,000 of his own money, named himself as chief stockholder and president of Pacific Fur, and agreed to bear all losses in the company’s first five years of business.

  McDougall and McKay were selected to lead the seaward expedition to the Pacific on the Tonquin, a frigate built in 1808 expressly as a trader, which had already made two successful voyages to the Pacific and which Astor purchased for $40,000 two weeks before it sailed. Donald Mackenzie and Wilson Price Hunt of Asbury, New Jersey, would lead the land-bound party. At age twenty-seven, Hunt was an established merchant in Saint Louis when he first met with Astor and learned of the Pacific plan. He became such an enthusiastic backer of it that he was selected as leader of the “Overland Astorians” with orders to take charge of the Columbia River post.

  As laborers—woodsmen, carpenters, hunters, wheelwrights, packers, and the like—Astor hired many Americans “of respectable connections and of good moral character as possible” but he knew he needed the hommes du nord for his boats and traps. His agents were instructed to begin hiring these northmen immediately and found them in the taverns and warehouses at Lachine in the months before the Tonquin was due to hoist anchor and sail for the Falklands.

  In June 1810 Alexander McKay led the first of three parties of fourteen voyageurs and several clerks to join McDougall in New York. Between June and the end of August these men had gathered and stowed their canoes and bateaux aboard the frigate and were ready to sail on a far greater body of water than they had known before.

  2

  As sole financier of the Oregon undertaking and a meticulous planner, Astor tried to cover all details and contingencies of the Tonquin voyage. A few days before the frigate spread its canvas, he addressed a letter to his four partners aboard the frig
ate, enjoining them to “cultivate harmony and unanimity” among themselves and the Tonquin crew and to take special care in creating good relations with “the wild people of the Oregon coast.” He said, “If you find them kind, as I hope you will, be so to them. If otherwise, act with caution and forbearance, and convince them that you come as friends.”

  To ensure these good relations, he had financed certain precautions on the Tonquin. The frigate, manned by a crew of twenty sailors, carried not only the Astor partners, a number of voyageurs, twelve clerks, a party of workmen to build the fort on the Columbia, $50,000 in trade goods, plus tools, provisions, and even a small, dismantled coastal vessel, it also carried nearly a ton of gunpowder in its hold, was armed with ten cannon, and was “pierced” (had gunports available) for ten more.

  Astor’s powder-and-ball insurance, influenced by the massacre of the Boston crew at Nootka Sound in 1803 and rising tensions between the United States and Britain, extended to his selection of the Tonquin’s captain. Five years after Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, at a time when Napoleon was at his zenith but Wellington was fighting and winning battles against French generals in Portugal and Spain and William Henry Harrison was defeating Tecumseh at Tippecanoe in Indiana, the financier told friends he wanted “a gunpowder fellow” to command his ship “in fine style.” He found the fellow, if not the style, in a thirty-one-year-old salt named Jonathan Thorn of Schenectady, New York. Astor was impressed by Thorn’s history: He had been appointed a midshipman in the navy in 1800, served on men-of-war in the Mediterranean and on frigates against Tripolitan pirates in the Barbary Wars. So valorous was his service in these engagements, in particular the memorable expedition under Stephen Decatur to destroy the captured Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor on February 16, 1804, that the New Yorker had been commended by Commodore Decatur in dispatches and promoted to lieutenant. Thorn had also commanded the New York Navy Yard and its gunboats in 1806 and 1807, during which service he may have been introduced to Astor. In any event, the navy granted him a two-year leave, beginning in May 1810, to command the Tonquin.

  Thorn had, no doubt, earned Decatur’s wartime commendations, but between wars, in all the navy of the United States no worse choice could have been made to command a merchant ship than this surly, stern-visaged, acid-tongued autocrat. Even the attribute Astor must have found attractive, Thorn’s sycophantic loyalty toward his employer, would prove catastrophic. In truth, Thorn had no interest in Astor’s expansive, expensive fur cartel scheme. Washington Irving, Astor’s hired amanuensis, wrote, “He [Thorn] evidently had but a narrow idea of the scope and nature of the enterprise, limiting his views merely to his part of it; everything beyond the concerns of his ship was out of his sphere; and anything that interfered with the routine of his nautical duties put him in a passion.”

  Astor saw none of the man’s potential for folly when he wrote Captain Thorn a letter on the eve of the Tonquin’s departure urging his “strictest attention” to the health of himself and crew and the “promotion of good humor and harmony aboard the ship.” The nabob’s closing paragraph to Thorn would yield a bitter irony: “I must recommend you to be particularly careful on the coast, and not to rely too much on the friendly disposition of the natives. All accidents which have as yet happened there arose from too much confidence in the Indians.”

  Irving noted that these final admonitions were particularly pregnant and asked his readers “to bear these instructions in mind as events will prove their wisdom and importance, and the disasters which ensued in consequence of the neglect of them.”

  * * *

  On September 8, 1810, the Tonquin and its thirty-three passengers ran down to Staten Island for a brief anchorage off Sandy Hook Lighthouse before proceeding south into the Atlantic. The presence of an escort ship, the USS Constitution, had been arranged by Astor. Royal Navy vessels out of Halifax, Nova Scotia, were cruising nearby and he feared that his ship, with its Canadian subjects aboard, might be boarded by press gangs. The presence of Old Ironsides also illustrated the government’s interest in the Astor enterprise in the midst of growing tensions between the two powers. Two years past, Astor had written to President Jefferson of his scheme, seeking governmental sanction for it because of its “great public utility.” To this appeal the president took a middle course: He made it known that while he encouraged private merchant vessels to trade in the Pacific Northwest, he opposed any official “partnership” in these expeditions. Newly elected President James Madison followed his predecessor’s wishes but did extend to Astor the government’s “full approbation and best wishes” for the Oregon experiment.

  After striking the trade winds, on October 5 the Tonquin sighted the Cape Verde Islands off the West African coast and, while stores and water were low, Captain Thorn decided against an anchorage and shore party. He remained worried about British warships lurking nearby, and indeed one unidentified brigantine, mounting twenty guns, approached the Tonquin in what Thorn believed to be a hostile manner and followed for three days in a cat-and-mouse game until the merchantman caught a racing wind and lost its pursuer.

  The sea chase was a diversion from serious problems aboard the Astor frigate. Captain Thorn’s proclivity for petty tyranny seems to have surfaced the instant he climbed the boarding ladder into his floating fiefdom. From that moment he was oblivious to his civilian passengers, including Astor’s partners, except as victims of his wrath. He made it known that he regarded these landsmen as “live lumber, continually in the way,” and had no sympathy for their cramped quarters or their tendency to suffer mal de mer. “Lubberly” was his favorite word for them, including the voyageurs, the rivermen, who suffered as much as the partners, clerks, and workmen “the doleful rigors and retchings of sea-sickness.” Throughout the voyage, Irving wrote, Thorn found it intolerable to discover the French-Canadians “lurking below in their berths in squalid state, or emerging now and then like spectres from the hatchways, in capotes and blankets, with dirty nightcaps, grizzly beard, lantern visage and unhappy eye, shivering about the deck, and ever and anon crawing to the sides of the vessel, and offering up their tributes to the windward.”

  Gabriel Franchére, a clerk aboard the Tonquin who somehow managed to keep a journal, said that Thorn, when he first addressed his passengers, “laid the foundation of rankling hatred between the partners and himself which ended only with the voyage.” The captain’s Bligh-like pronouncements included the news that he intended enforcing a ship-of-war discipline and therefore all cabin lanterns would be extinguished punctually at eight o’clock each night and any man proving “refractory” would be manacled. Moreover, Thorn added, he would shoot any man challenging his authority.

  These decrees were clearly aimed at Astor’s partners and clerks, who were accustomed to burning midnight oil as they pored over their charts, plans, and correspondence, but Thorn, described by Bancroft as “as thoroughly disagreeable a Yankee as ever crossed the path of Scotchmen,” underestimated Scotch mettle. The “irritable, fuming,” Duncan McDougall was having none of Thorn’s insolence and after a later confrontation with the captain he seized a pistol and swore he would kill Thorn if he ever subjected him to further indignity.

  After a month at sea and now approaching the equator, the skipper’s annoyance with his passengers deteriorated further. He was suspicious of the Canadian passengers from the start, wondering about their national loyalties, and he now made a habit of scowling at them as they bent over the rail wracked with sea sickness, blaspheming over the squalid, stinking state of their berths, calling them the worst “lubberly scoundrels that ever broke a sea-biscuit.” And now, with no reprovisioning stores and fresh water for over a month, he grew especially irritated at the civilians’ “keenness of appetite” and “daintiness” at the mess table.

  At first, the ship’s stores and galley served up what would be sumptuous meals for a sailing ship: fresh pork loins, hams, tongue, smoked beef haunches, sweetened puddings made of flour, rice, tapioca, and raisins. But t
he passengers complained incessantly at this fare and the furious Thorn called them “effeminate” and wrote to Astor that he would never take to sea again with such a group “without having a Fly-market on the forecastle, Covent-garden on the poop, and a cool spring from Canada in the maintop.”

  In the stifling heat of the slow passage below the equator, he rationed water to a quart a day—soon reduced to a pint and a half plus a half-pint of Souchong tea—and reduced the food allowance per man to fourteen ounces of hardtack, a pound and a quarter of salt pork or beef, a small portion of rice, beans, and cornmeal pudding with molasses. Even this still-considerable ration was not enough for them, he said, and he claimed that the Canadians had to be restrained from raiding the stores.

  He was also irritated by the camaraderie among the Astor partners, clerks, and voyageurs, at their grouping together to tell tales of their lives—David Stuart was particularly loquacious in recalling his halcyon days as a fisherman off the coast of Labrador—as they cackled and sucked their pipes and sang old boat-songs. Thorn regarded such badinage as idleness, shocking to naval etiquette in general and his quarter-deck authority in particular, and beneath the dignity of Astor agents. He also regarded it highly suspicious that the clerks were incessantly scribbling in their journals, “showing literary pretensions.”