Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  The passengers were forever clamoring to find an anchorage so they could go ashore, Thorn wrote. They “insisted on my stopping at the Cape de Verds. Next they said the ship should stop on the coast of Patagonia, for they must see the large and uncommon inhabitants of that place. Then they must go to the island where Robinson Crusoe had so long lived. And lastly they were determined to see the handsome inhabitants of Easter Island.”

  Naturally, Thorn wrote to Astor, he turned down such requests peremptorily as “contrary to instructions.” Washington Irving gave Thorn the benefit of the doubt in his dealings with the “lubberly” civilians on the Tonquin, admitting that the crusty seaman had some sound reasons to have “seamanlike impatience” toward the landsmen and that at least he had an “honest, trusty concern for the interests of his employer.” Irving wrote that Thorn “pictured to himself the anxious protector of the enterprise, who had disbursed so munificently in its outfit, calculating on the zeal, fidelity and singleness of purpose of his associates and agents; while they, on the other hand, having a good ship at their disposal and a deep pocket at home to bear them out, seemed ready to loiter on every coast, and amuse themselves in every port.”

  Down the Torrid Zone, through the Tropic of Capricorn, and into cold and rainy weather as they lost the trades in advancing south, the Tonquin saw a few distant sails and only one up close, a Portuguese brig out of Recife on the Pernambuco coast of Brazil. In early December a lookout in the shrouds sighted the barren, reef-scattered outline of the Falklands, 300 miles east of the Strait of Magellan, and Thorn ordered his helmsman to follow a corridor through the maze of small islets and rocks to a small bay, there to take soundings, anchor, and fill water casks. The Canadians were overjoyed to set foot on dry land, and explored the bleak moorlands, visited the ancient graves of mariners who died there, swam, chased penguins and killed them by the dozens (their flesh, black and leathery, carried a strong fishy odor even when thoroughly cooked), and stole their eggs.

  Thorn meantime had determined the anchorage unsafe and fresh water scarce, and stood out to sea after signaling the shore for the civilians to return to ship. To his fury, they straggled back in the jollyboats and it was nine at night before all were aboard. The next morning, after assurances from the Canadians that they would return on a moment’s notice, they were again taken ashore with the water party. With the wind up favorably, Thorn was anxious to find a new anchorage and had signals made to the shore. After a half-hour with no boat seen pulling away from the beach, the captain reconnoitered with his glass and, as Irving wrote, “to his infinite vexation, saw the loiterers in the full enjoyment of their ‘wild-goose chase.’” He ordered the Tonquin to set sail and when the Canadians saw the ship under way they jumped into the boats and pulled hard at the oars before coming alongside and aboard.

  On December 7, the last act of this absurd melodrama occurred when Thorn took the ship to another Falklands bay that promised a better source of water and wood for galley fires and a safer sanctuary for repairs. The Tonquin remained at the place, called “Fort Egmont” on the charts, for four days, during which time the Canadians were given a boat to themselves, pitched a tent on the beach, and resumed their rambling explorations, chasing and butchering sea lions, geese, penguins, foxes, and any animal life that waddled, ran, flew, or swam.

  As before, the captain warned his detested civilian supercargo not to wander far and to remain within hailing distance, for he would not detain the ship this time waiting for them to react to his signal to reboard; the Astor men, true to their custom, ignored him.

  On the morning of the eleventh, the Tonquin signaled the shore that it was time to embark, but the civilians were scattered, some inspecting tombstone legends, others hunting and exploring, and two of the partners, David Stuart and Duncan McDougall, pursuing penguins on the south end of the island. Those closest to the anchorage heard the report of the gunshot signal and scurried about to locate the missing members of the shore party while the skipper angrily paced the deck of his ship. The landsmen had thrice defied him and he could bear it no longer: He ordered the sails spread and the ship put to sea.

  The eight Canadians on the beach saw their ship stand out of the bay, and by the time they were all aboard their twenty-foot longboat the Tonquin was three miles offshore in surging seas. For three hours the boat tried to close the gap, thrown high on the waves as its occupants bent to the oars and bailed the water shipped by every roller. Aboard the frigate the other Canadians and crewmen implored Thorn to heave to and await the longboat, but he refused. Finally, Robert Stuart, nephew of David, “a young man of spirit and resolution,” Irving said, went below and grabbed a brace of pistols “and in a paroxysm of wrath swore he would blow out the captain’s brains unless he put about or shortened sail.”

  Stuart’s proposed mutiny died out with the wind, which suddenly abated and allowed the longboat to come alongside and its sopping, exhausted passengers to board. In his account of the incident, Irving put the best face on it by allowing, “We can hardly believe that the captain really intended to carry his threat into full effect, and rather think he meant to let the laggards off for a long pull and a hearty fright.” But in a letter to Astor Thorn made it clear that if not for the wind hauling, “I should positively have left them.” In his blind constancy to his employer he apparently thought he would have done Astor a favor by abandoning the partners and clerks. “I cannot but think it an unfortunate circumstance for you that it so happened, for the first loss in this instance would, in my opinion, have proved the best, as they seem to have no idea of the value of property, not any apparant regard for your interest, although interwoven with their own.”

  The “property” Thorn referred to was certain articles of spare clothing in the ship’s slopchest, which the partners asked be distributed among them. Naturally, Thorn refused to consider the request and posted the ship’s mastiff to guard the chest. This pettifoggery Thorn dutifully described in his letters to Astor, as he did the feuds among the partners themselves—with unalloyed delight. Alexander McKay and Duncan McDougall, Thorn said, were particularly argumentative over their “rank” in the Astor scheme. They drew plans for the fort on the Columbia, he said, and disputed over placement of doors and windows until McDougall would produce a letter in which Astor named him his main representative and proxy, whereupon the word-contest ended and the two men “would be caressing each other like children.”

  On December 15, the mountains of Tierra del Fuego hove into view and on the eighteenth the ship, fifteen leagues from Cape Horn, encountered a lucky calm in the wind and a good current that carried it to the cape’s stupendous rocks and seas. Thorn, excellent seaman that he was, managed to breech the Horn in a wild gale and reach the Diego Ramirez Islands—9,165 miles from New York—for a final water-and-repair stop. Six of the ship’s cannons had broken loose from their carriages in the Horn gale and careened about the deck, splintering railings and tangling lines before being wrestled down and secured, and the ship was leaking and had damaged canvas and rigging, but there was time to patch and mend before the run north to the Sandwich Islands.

  3

  The Tonquin spotted the snowcapped peak of the Mauna Loa volcano on the island of Owhyee (Hawaii) on February 11, 1811, and sailed into Kamehameha Bay two days later. At anchor, the ship was surrounded by canoes filled with islanders clamoring to come aboard and exchange their yams, taro, plantains, coconuts, cabbages, and breadfruit for beads, needles and cloth, and other such treasures the vessel carried.

  Great changes had occurred in the islands in the thirty-two years since Captain Cook had been murdered there upon his return from exploring the northwest coast of America. The archipelago had been unified in 1810 by King Kamehameha, a crafty bargainer who knew the value to his people of Western technology and welcomed foreign ships to his shores. The islands had already become a trade crossroads, linking Canton with Boston, Bristol, Marseilles, and other foreign ports.

  The Tonquin remained in
the islands two weeks, cultivating good relations with the natives and purchasing livestock and provisions with trade items and silver coins. In planning his North Pacific sovereignty, Astor had not neglected the importance of the islands as a place for his ships to reprovision en route to Astoria and in their comings and goings to China. Washington Irving said Astor “even had a vague idea of, some time or other, getting possession of one of their islands as a rendezvous for his ships, and a link in the chain of his commercial establishments.”

  As he took the Tonquin to Maui and back to the big island of Hawaii, Thorn grew increasingly unhinged over what he considered the scandalous conduct of the civilians. They all stayed ashore, dazzled by the snow-white beaches, warm waters for swimming, the splendid hospitality afforded them, and the singing and dancing of the native women, whose dress exposed them in a manner he described as “very revolting to a civilized eye,” but which did not seem to injure Scotch sensibilities. Far from it, Irving said; the Canadians “were delighted with the charms and graces of the dancing damsels.”

  While at Hawaii, the Astor men and a number of crew members hiked to Kealakekua Bay on the Kona Coast for a pilgrimage to the spot where Cook had fallen under native knives in 1779. An old islander served as their guide and pointed out the spot on the beach where the greatest of English navigators died and where the rocks and coconut palms still bore the marks of musket balls fired by the marines—including John Ledyard—who formed Cook’s escort, and from boats offshore. The Canadians took pieces of palm bark and rock as precious relics back to the ship.

  Thorn was unimpressed by this holy mission; indeed he threw a fit at the unauthorized shore leave by his crewmen. Alexander Ross, a twenty-eight-year-old Astor man on the Tonquin, wrote in his journal of Thorn “storming and stomping the deck,” and how “the captain called up all hands; he swore, he threatened, and abused the whole ship’s company.” The crewmen, whom the captain labeled “deserters,” were rounded up and brutally flogged, Ross said. He wrote that Thorn was exceedingly angry at the Scotchmen for fomenting the desertions, for speaking in Gaelic and “making gestures toward him he construed as mutinous.”

  Before departing the islands, the Tonquin paid a visit to the village at Waikiki on Oahu, the royal residence of King Kamehameha, whose two-story “palace” of stone and wood was guarded by two dozen men dressed in long blue coats, each armed with a musket. The corpulent king, dressed in a tight regimental uniform complete with ceremonial sword, came out to the frigate in his royal barge accompanied by a large retinue that included three of his wives. Thorn permitted a three-gun greeting for the king, and while the Canadian partners appeared on deck in tartans and kilts to present greetings from Mr. Astor and engage in diplomatic talk, Thorn, ever the practical man, sought to buy hogs from the sovereign of the Sandwich Islands.

  Kamehameha, Irving said, “was a magnanimous monarch but a shrewd pork merchant.… Several interviews were requisite, and much bargaining, before he could be brought to part with a bristle of bacon, and then he insisted on being paid in hard Spanish dollars; giving as a reason that he wanted money to purchase a frigate from his brother George, as he affectionately terms the king of England.”

  At length Thorn managed to buy a hundred hogs, a number of goats, two sheep, and a coop of chickens, adding these to an abundance of island vegetables.

  The Astor partners were greatly impressed by the Hawaiians’ singular skills at canoeing, swimming, and diving and said they had not seen their equal even among the voyageurs of Canada. They talked to the king about recruiting thirty or forty of these fine “watermen,” but Thorn objected to the number. Eventually, with royal authorization, twenty-four natives were signed for three years’ service with the Pacific Fur Company, during which time they were guaranteed food and clothing and, at the end of their service, $100 “in merchandise.”

  On the last day of February the Tonquin sailed from the warm and placid bay off Waikiki toward the sterner waters of the North Pacific. In Hawaii, Thorn had left a large packet of seething letters to his employer to be forwarded to New York on the next ship bound for the New England coast. Now, heading toward the Columbia, he wrote Astor again to describe the disgusting conduct of the agents’ fraternizing with the natives, dressing in Highland plaids, loosening tongues and probably the morals of the Hawaiian women with gifts of rum and wine, making a great show of visiting the site of Cook’s murder, and similar “ridiculously contemptible” acts. “To enumerate the thousands of instances of ignorance, filth, &c., or to particularize all the frantic gambols that are daily practiced, would require volumes,” he said.

  6

  The Phial of Wrath

  “I HAVE BUT TO DRAW THE CORK.”

  1

  In the three-week voyage from the Sandwich Islands to the Oregon coast, Jonathan Thorn’s enmity toward the Astor agents on the Tonquin deepened. He may have, as Washington Irving speculated, “picked up some information at Owyhee, possibly of war between the United States and England” and begun suspecting that the Canadians were plotting to take over the ship and alter its destination. He detected clues of conspiracy: The civilians held long conversations in Gaelic “of a mysterious and unwarranted nature,” he wrote to Astor; they had their own store of firearms and distributed them among their party; they seemed furtive and silent when he made a sudden appearance among them. He saw their every utterance and act as evidence of mutinous conduct and believed that it was only his stalwart defiance of them, made clear by word and deed, that overawed them and kept them from enacting their despicable plans.

  One example Thorn cited to Astor of his fortitude in dealing with this gang of disloyal Gaels was the occasion when the Tonquin struck a violent storm in the North Pacific, one that washed much of the penned livestock overboard. During the squall the Canadians, without seeking his permission, attempted to procure rain gear from a storage locker. Thorn proudly reported that he drove them off with a pistol.

  The real test of the Tonquin, its captain, and crew began on March 22, 1811, when the ship approached the Oregon coast and the surging mouth of the Columbia River. The estuary was four miles wide with a low sandy spit of land on the south called Point Adams, a peninsula and promontory on the north side crowned with a forest of pines and connected to the mainland by a narrow land neck. Within the cape opened a wide inlet, Baker’s Bay, the entrance to which was guarded by numerous sandbars and a chain of crashing breakers. Captain Robert Gray had described the river’s mouth in 1792 as perhaps the most perilous passage along the northwest coast and Thorn saw the evidence of the assertion before him. On the tossing quarterdeck of the Astor frigate he examined the hellish gate through his glass and determined that he could not attempt to penetrate it without a sounding and a close-up survey by whaleboat.

  Selected to lead this perilous if not suicidal mission was Thorn’s first mate, a man named John Fox. The captain ordered that he take John Martin, an old sea hand who had visited the Oregon coast before, and three of the voyageurs with him in the boat to sound the channel and discover a safe passage to the beach while the Tonquin stood three miles offshore. Fox made a mild protest over the Canadians, asking for more experienced deepwater sailors to accompany him, but Thorn refused this patently prudent request, saying that he needed his crew to help guide the Tonquin to anchorage. He told Fox that the Canadians were supposed to be expert small-boat men and ought to serve admirably under the guidance of two veterans like Fox and Martin.

  Nothing is known of John Fox’s history except that he was an experienced sailor who had a premonition that he would never return to the Tonquin. He sought sympathy from the Astorians, telling them pitifully, “I am sent off without seamen to man my boat, in boisterous weather, and on the most dangerous part of the northwest coast. My uncle was lost a few years ago on this same bar and now I am going to lay my bones with his.” But when he protested that the mission was ill-conceived, Thorn answered, “Mr. Fox, if you are afraid of water, you should have remained in Boston.
”

  The whaleboat was lowered at one o’clock that afternoon, and the five men rowed into the foaming breakers and disappeared in the foggy mist. The Tonquin searched for them all day and the next, lowering boats, which stayed on the seaward side of the bar, but no sign of them was ever found.

  At the end of the second day of waiting and with the wind abating, Thorn took his ship closer to shore and anchored at a fourteen-fathom sounding north of the long peninsula forming the north side of the river entrance that was aptly named Cape Disappointment. Here a boat was lowered carrying several sailors and the Astor partners Alexander McKay and David Stuart, who hoped to find some trace of Fox and his men. But the crashing surf drove them back to the ship. Another boat, carrying an experienced crew and two of the Hawaiian outrigger experts signed aboard at Oahu, clawed its way to within a league of the shore before being tossed high on a ferocious breaker that nearly capsized it. It too limped back to the ship.

  By now the Tonquin itself was in serious danger, riding perilously at anchor in shallow water in a roaring wind and smashing surf that threatened to splinter the ship to oak kindling on the rocks despite the extra anchors thrown overboard. Thorn had a final plan: He turned to three of his most experienced hands to guide the frigate through the passage. An old tar named Aiken, who had signed on to command the disassembled schooner on board the Tonquin, commanded the escort boat, with a sailmaker named John Coles; an armorer, Stephen Weekes; and two Hawaiians as crew. The plan called for Aiken to steer the boat and take soundings while the Tonquin followed under shortened sails. When Aiken had found the channel he was to signal with a pistol shot and return to the ship.

  For a time the plan seemed to be working, but eventually Aiken’s boat broached broadside to the twenty-foot waves crashing inland and was carried away. On the Tonquin, crewmen climbed the quaking mizzentop and saw the boat desperately trying to reach the ship, then saw it vanish in the surf. The frigate meantime had entered shallow water, scraped its hull against the rocks, and ploughed across sandbars, until at nightfall, with the help of a tidal surge, it was pushed into Baker’s Bay and, at a depth of seven fathoms and with the wind lulling, cast anchor.