Morning of Fire

by Scott Ridley

  Smoke rose from a small sandy cove at the village of Ninstints, two-thirds of the way along the shore on the island. The Washington fired a cannon as a signal to trade. Soon after, numerous canoes took to the water. Kendrick ordered the Washington to anchor well offshore. Unlike the Mowachaht, the Haida were regarded as aggressive and treacherous. Many still came out to the ships singing and left with a song after trading, but jealousy and sour negotiations were common.

  Both men and women were in the canoes. The men had partially painted faces but did not paint their bodies as they did at Nootka. Instead they were smeared with a thin film of grease and the dirt it collected, insulating their skin from the cold and insects. They climbed on board the Washington without the least reserve. The men wore various raccoon and otter mantles over their shoulders. They also had cast-off sailors’ garments with shells, buttons, thimbles, or Chinese coins sewn onto them. Around their necks, each man wore an iron dagger, polished bright and sharp, with a handle wrapped in leather. Some were pointed at each end to strike a double blow.

  The women wore long-sleeved leather frocks with a skirt down to their knees. Their hair hung loose or lay tied in braids a fingerwidth thick and covered in paint. Most of the women’s faces, from their cheekbones to their chin, were painted black. On another ship, a group of sailors enticed a young “perfect beauty” to wash off her face paint. They found her skin as pale as their own, and her amused friends mocked her as she hurriedly repainted herself. What fascinated the Washington‘s crew was that some of the women displayed an extremely odd fashion—a labret, or oval, piece of wood inserted into the lower lip, extending it like “a small shelf” by as much as four inches. When pushed up it would cover her upper lip and nose. When it fell, the labret entirely covered the chin and exposed the lower teeth. The practice seemed a mark of distinction worn by both lower-class women and chiefs’ wives.

  With his sons gone and few of the younger crew on board now, Kendrick may have been more lax in managing the men. As the Washington‘s crew had learned from trading here in the early summer, these women were less reserved than the Mowachaht. In the midst of barter, they were said to be “always ready and willing to gratify the amorous inclinations of any who wish it.”

  Trading at Ninstints was conducted through one chief, Coyah, an apparent tyrant who controlled SGang Gwaay, the adjacent island of Kunghit, and the region just north of the channel. He was described by one ship’s officer as “a little diminutive savage-looking fellow as ever trod.” A leader of the Raven clan, Coyah may have modeled himself on the mythical Raven, who was a magician and transformer, the greediest and most lecherous antihero among the mythical Haida characters. Two years earlier, with Colnett’s support, Coyah had taken a raiding party north, looting furs from villages as far north as Skidegate and trading them to the British. He was cruel and imperious, and Kendrick apparently took an immediate dislike to him.

  After a few days anchored off the village, someone stole the captain’s linen that had been washed and left hanging to dry. Petty thievery had been going on since their arrival, and Kendrick decided to send for Coyah and Schulkinanse, an older chief who may have been his father-in-law. When they climbed on board, Kendrick confronted Coyah about the thefts and, learning nothing, took both men hostage. The crew sat them on the deck and clamped their legs into the notches of a cannon carriage. Kendrick told them and others in a canoe alongside that if they did not return the stolen goods, he would kill them. The canoe carried Kendrick’s threat to shore, and people of the village soon appeared with some of what had been taken. Recognizing that trading would be at an end when they released the two chiefs, Kendrick forced them to bring out all the furs they had left, and gave the same rate in goods he had previously paid.

  The native version of the story, told later by a woman of the village, offered harsher details, saying that Kendrick “took Coyah, tied a rope round his neck, whipt him, painted his face, cut off his hair, took away from him a great many skins, and then turned him ashore.” Humiliated, Coyah lost his chieftainship when he came ashore and was made an “Ahliko,” or one of the lower class.

  While beating Coyah seemed out of character for Kendrick, who was usually singled out for his humanity toward native people, he may have wanted to see the tyrant deposed in favor of another chief, or maybe the wilderness or desperation for funds was bringing out the bloody work he was capable of.

  As in the killing of Callicum, violence in trading was becoming all too common. James Hanna, the first British fur trader at Nootka, reportedly killed fifty Muchalaht on the northeast side of Nootka Sound in 1786. As a prank he had also lit gunpowder underneath a chair Maquinna was sitting on, which launched him into the air and scarred his backside. Meares had fired on natives to get their furs, as did Colnett. By the time the Columbia‘s first mate, Joseph Ingraham, and the clerk, Richard Howe, witnessed the Northwest American crew shooting and robbing natives and houses in Nootka in October 1788, violence was already a common trade tactic.

  Of all the native people he would encounter, the one with Coyah was Kendrick’s only recorded case of brutality. Left in humiliation, the diminutive Raven clan chief developed a festering hatred of traders that would result in a string of deadly retaliations, and far-reaching personal consequences for Kendrick.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A Place of Skulls

  San Blas, Mexico

  AUGUST–OCTOBER 1789

  AS THE WASHINGTON TRADED near the Queen Charlotte Islands, nearly three thousand miles to the south James Colnett had fallen into deep despair and resigned himself to fate.

  The Argonaut arrived at San Blas on August 15, two weeks before the Princess Royal. Colnett was suffering from scurvy, and many of his imprisoned crew were in deplorable condition. Each night during the month-long voyage down the California coast, Colnett was locked in Duffin’s cabin. He said he was hungry and parched much of the time and watched helplessly while the Spanish and one of his own men broke open “every case of the cargo that was in the [captain’s] Cabin out of which what they thought proper was taken.” He said he was taunted and “almost suffocated” in the heat as they sailed south. As bad as his condition seemed, he had freedom most days and was treated far better than the ten English crewmen locked in irons in the bread room. Their condition deteriorated to a point where Colnett described them as “half Starved and [bathed in] constant perspiration, their Bones Crawling through their flesh, Stark naked, and no one could discern the Colour of their Skin, for the conveniency they had to ease the calls of nature was never emptied, till by the roll of the Ship it upset on them and their bedding, and even not allowed to Shift themselves. Lice, Maggots, and every other vermin that this filth Collected, made them prefer being stark naked rather than keep Clothes on them to harbour additional Plagues. Their Victuals that they gave them were frequently thrown into them like Dogs, and the Door lock’d on them again …”

  Since Colnett’s episodes of delusion, Robert Duffin had taken on the role of captain. Duffin and the other officers, confined in their own cabins, rarely visited Colnett, who accused Duffin of siding with the Spanish and doing everything to distress him. He also charged that Duffin had many occasions to retake the ship when the Spanish were drunk at night, but failed to do so.

  At San Blas, they were held a night and a day at anchor in the bay before being taken off the Argonaut and up the river at dusk. The Spanish ushered Colnett onto a barge with the aging port commandant, José Comacho, while Colnett’s men crowded into a second boat. Colnett lamented the miserable figures the dirty and naked crew cut before the people who lined the shore to see them. Mosquitoes swarmed over them as they proceeded a mile upriver. Stick and grass huts appeared along the darkened shore. They seemed wretched to Colnett—far below the quality of the grass houses of the Sandwich Islanders. As they approached the village, many more people appeared along the shore and the road where they landed. Colnett estimated there were about eight hundred inhabitants of the town. “It being
a Market day … I do not believe there was a single person that could walk but our arrival had brought to the water side.”

  They were marched into the town and held at first in a house off the square. Nearby was the slaughterhouse, “which was it not for the Turkey Bustards [buzzards] which destroy all the Offals that the pigs do not, this place would become more pestilential than it is.” Colnett described it as a “golgotha or Place of Skulls” and said their sleep was disturbed by bells that announced the deaths of villagers, a common occurrence during what was now the “unhealthy season.”

  Commandant José Comacho read with alarm a letter from Estevan Martinez on the seizure of the British ships, and forwarded the large package of the Princesa’s reports and inventory lists of the captured ships to Viceroy Flores. At Mexico City, the ailing viceroy received Martinez’s request to have the British ships declared prizes at about the same time he received orders from Madrid. Floridablanca and minister of the Marine and Indies Antonio Valdes had at last responded to Martinez’s original plan. They agreed on the urgent need to defend Spanish dominion in the North Pacific, which they knew the British wanted to test.

  Count Juan Vincente de Revillagigedo, the son of a previous viceroy, was coming to replace Viceroy Flores. A new commander, Juan Bodega y Quadra, would be installed at San Blas with five other naval officers. And new ships were to be constructed for actions to keep out foreign vessels, which might extend to removing the Russians from Alaska.

  The news of Revillagigedo’s appointment arrived as he journeyed overland from Veracruz to Mexico City. The new viceroy would soon issue orders to build up the outpost at Nootka and begin extensive exploration of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The decision fulfilled at least part of Martinez’s recommendations, but the shift did not bode well for the temperamental captain. His wife, Gertrudis, had petitioned the royal court to have her long-absent husband returned to Spain. He would lose not only his mission, but also the protection of Flores as the result of allegations that would soon be leveled at him concerning the captured ships. Despite what Martinez might suffer personally, the Spanish ministers’ decision was well timed and appeared to anticipate the heightened tensions about to erupt.

  At San Blas, many of the prisoners contracted fever. First mate James Hansen committed suicide by slitting his throat with a razor in the privy, and eighteen of the thirty-one men eventually died or deserted. As time elapsed, Colnett noted, “We now had no remedy left but to resign ourselves to fate and depend on the Court of Great Britain for our release which we were well-assured would happen as soon as the news by the way of China thro’ the Americans that were at Nootka when we were Captured.”

  AS COLNETT DESPAIRED, Robert Gray was en route to China. On November 17, the prisoners and the news of the capture of the Argonaut and Princess Royal arrived at Macao. Stories about the Spanish seizure spread through the city. An enraged John Meares read the letters from Douglas and Duffin, took depositions from the prisoners, and set off on the next ship for England. He would take this to the prime minister, he would take it to Parliament, and regardless of what he had to do, he was determined to break Spain’s three-hundred-year-old claim of dominion over the Pacific.

  Far from Colnett’s hell, and oblivious to the ominous events in the making, Kendrick was about to depart the Queen Charlotte Islands, his men eager to exchange the cold rains of the coast for their long-held fantasies of the solace of the Sandwich Islands.

  PART III

  Odyssey

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Volatile Paradise

  Sandwich Islands

  OCTOBER—DECEMBER 1789

  THREE OR FOURS DAYS out from the Queen Charlotte Islands, the Washington eased into trade winds from the northeast that would carry her on the twenty-seven-hundred-mile passage to the Sandwich Islands. As Kendrick and his crew made their way toward the mid-Pacific, large flocks of birds resembling plovers appeared, and lone albatrosses soared under the high thin clouds. For men who had voyaged nearly a year and then spent another year in the deep northern wilderness, the good weather sparked anticipation of a long-awaited paradise. The stories of Sandwich Island women they had heard in Boston were colored with glowing detail by the men of the Iphigenia and by Kaiana, the young Hawaiian chief who accompanied Douglas. New members of their crew who had wintered in the islands aboard the Northwest American now boosted their expectations further. A single nail bought copious quantities of roast pork and fruit, and beautiful women would come aboard each evening for sex. These women were said to possess arts Western women knew nothing of and wouldinitiate former farm boys and lowly jack-tars into life on the far side of the world. Even the reluctant officers of arriving ships were said to find themselves unable to resist.

  Aside from the anticipated paradise, Kendrick was concerned about the more serious uncertainties that awaited them. He knew that a war was under way in the islands and they had to take care in their alliances with local chiefs. He also knew that these islands were an extremely valuable prize for any nation because they were ideally situated to command voyaging and trade routes in the North Pacific. Like an outpost at Nootka, or the elusive Northwest Passage, the harbors and shores they were headed for could easily become a source of contention between European courts.

  Estevan Martinez had already urged that Spain take possession of these islands. He reported that the island group, “which abounds in everything that is necessary, is placed in the center of the Pacific Ocean at an almost equal distance from San Blas, Nootka, Prince William, Siberia, Japan, the Philippines, and Canton. The voyage each way requires but a month, and it is an advantageous stopping place where ships sailing between this coast and Canton can take on a store of provisions.”

  As part of his intelligence-gathering, the Nootka commandant kept Matuturay, a young Hawaiian chief who had been aboard the Northwest American. With Matuturay, Martinez created a short Spanish-Hawaiian dictionary and told the viceroy that the young chief “is very inclined toward us, and realizes the difference between our treatment and that of the English. We could probably accomplish the reduction of all the islanders, and our sovereign would have new subjects” if a Spanish outpost were established.

  At present, the British were far ahead of Spain. Although London had not adopted a formal policy toward possession of lands in the North Pacific, merchant adventurers were leading the way to create one. In 1786, James Cook’s former officers Nathaniel Portlock and George Dixon visited the islands in the large fur traders King George and Queen Charlotte. They began the practice of reprovisioning onvoyages between America and China. The King Georges Sound Company, which they were part of, saw this as an important link for much more than resupply.

  When Richard Cadman Etches applied to the East India Company for trading privileges for the King Georges merchants in April 1785, he envisioned the Sandwich Islands becoming “the grand emporium of Commerce between the two Continents and the innumerable Islands of that immense Ocean.” In the monopoly British merchants sought in the Pacific, the islands would be an essential midocean marketplace. John Meares went so far as to claim that providence intended the islands to belong to Great Britain, an attitude that was widely shared in England.

  Kendrick undoubtedly wondered what it might mean for American trade in the Pacific and Asia if other nations controlled these islands. Britain’s policy of closing her ports to American ships did not bode well. And if the belligerence of Martinez was any indication, Spanish possession would also pose problems. The American expedition’s instructions were to purchase lands that appeared beneficial and offered a base for trade. This left Kendrick to discover what foothold, if any, he might find there.

  BACK HOME, THE NEW NATION was just beginning to stir from the devastation of the Revolution and the ensuing economic depression.

  As the Washington headed south for Hawaii, Joseph Barrell was entertaining President George Washington. In late September, Washington had left New York City for a tour through the New England states. Th
e journey for many was a triumphant march, symbolic of the new federal government now in place. For others, it was vital for peacemaking.

  Despite ratification of the Constitution and the first federal election, there was deep-seated rancor among the states and hostility in the countryside. There was a fear of new tyranny and that an elite class—an American royalty—was forming to run the country. In the wake of Shays’ Rebellion, Washington wanted to bolster the support of merchants and the goodwill of yeoman farmers for the federal government. In a time with no mass media other than regional newspapers, he had to venture out, using his charismatic image to capture local loyalty and build unanimity by riding through the villages and farms where Shays’ armed rebellion had risen up and opposition to the Constitution had been widespread.