by Scott Ridley
Kendrick meanwhile tried to work his personal charm but could not unlock the prohibition that held him in port. Among the meager American community, Samuel Shaw and Thomas Randall had departed on their own ventures, and Kendrick’s appeals to the Portuguese governor, His Excellency Lazaro da Silva Ferreira, went nowhere. He couldn’t get through to Macao’s Senate either. Most of the senators seemed to be merchants who were jealously protecting their friends and opportunities for their own investments.
Although Portuguese in name, the governor and nobles in the Senate had never been around the Cape of Good Hope. They were from Goa, India, and were of mixed descent. Most of the Macanese were part Portuguese, Chinese, Malay, and Indian, and spoke a local dialect barely recognizable to anyone from Lisbon. Among these men, Kendrick was a marked outsider.
ALL FOREIGN TRADERS AT CANTON were required to return to their houses at Macao in April. This swelled the city’s population to about four thousand, including slaves from Africa and Timor who served and guarded the wealthy Portuguese and foreign merchants. A limited number of Chinese lived in the crowded lanes near the inner harbor. Others were restricted from residing in Macao. The English and the East India Company dominated the social scene among the Europeans, and for Kendrick, relations were cordial but duplicitous. Samuel Shaw observed: “With respect to our own [American] commerce in this quarter, which is yet in its infancy, I shall only observe, that, inconsiderable as it has hitherto been, and in this year especially, it is viewed with no small degree of jealousy by our late mother country. Gentlemen, in all parts of the world, of whatever nation they may be, can esteem, and sometimes love, one another; but Englishmen and Americans, merely as such, in any place, as at Canton, where the former have the ascendancy, can barely treat each other with civility.”
Shaw, like Kendrick, saw the events in the Pacific unfolding within the context of a larger geopolitical struggle to control trade. “The English seem to be not only aiming at a monopoly of the tea-trade for Europe,” Shaw wrote, “but appear to have in view the exclusive commerce of this division of the globe.” Shaw pointed to British efforts to create settlements to the east and west of Macao, prohibitions against subjects in India selling ships to foreigners, and the settlement at Botany Bay as evidence of London’s intent to dominate the East.
British influence over the region was clearly growing. The East India Company’s authority and accompanying audacity and reach were like an international government. Not only were British ships required to gain a license from them, but any British subject had to carry a company-approved passport, which could be revoked at a moment’s notice. The company kept its own militia and armed ships, and could seize and deport any subject they wished. They could also make life extremely difficult for those who threatened their trade.
Amid his socializing in Macao, Kendrick found that the capture of the Argonaut, the Princess Royal, and the Northwest American had disrupted plans much larger than a British settlement on the Northwest Coast. Richard Cadman Etches and John Meares were seeking more than just an outpost in America. As Shaw had observed, they wanted to dominate the America-to-Asia trade. This included their midocean marketplace in the Sandwich Islands, and a long-awaited opening of trade with the closed nation of Japan. Meares had assurances that the inhabitants of Japan “would gladly enter into a trading intercourse” and that furs would sell there at “an immense price.”
In 1785, Etches wrote to the East India Company, stating, “The Japanese Islands would be our grand object to open a friendly intercourse with which, we have every possible hope of attaining from holding out so great a temptation as the Sea Otter Skins.” Funds from these transactions would be deposited in the East India Company treasury at Canton. Etches also wrote to influential British scientist Joseph Banks on July 17, 1788, saying, “our Intention is to adopt a Permanent system of Commerce direct from this Country [England] to the N.W. Coast and from thence to the Asiatic Coast, and Islands.” A few days later he wrote again to Banks, confirming: “A foundation thus laid, and as it is no longer to be doubted but there are plenty of furs to be met with, a market for their disposal wou’d be the whole to seek for, the opposite shores afford ample field, and I am perfectly satisfied that the Japan Islands may be attempted with success.”
With the ships they had in transit back and forth to the Northwest Coast, Meares and Etches planned to send their first London company venture to Japan in 1791. Kendrick’s participation in the seizure of the Argonaut, Princess Royal, and Northwest American crippled their whole strategy for the Pacific. As much as creating a financial collapse of the London company, the destruction of their trade strategy is what sent Meares speeding home to London and Parliament. He would find a ready audience.
ABOUT THE TIME KENDRICK WAS APPROACHING Macao in January 1790, the first intelligence on the capture of the Argonaut and Princess Royal reached England. The slow-burning fuse from the taking of the ships was about to touch off the ancient blood feud between Britain and Spain.
Viceroy Revillagigedo had sent a dispatch from Mexico City to the head of the Spanish Marine and Minister of the Indies, Antonio Valdes, in Madrid, explaining what had occurred at Nootka and recommending that the British ships and men be freed. However, it was clear to Valdes in reading Colnett’s confiscated papers that the Britishwere mounting a stark challenge to Spain’s dominion in the Pacific. Colnett presented a very real British threat of making claims and establishing a colony on the Northwest Coast.
The Spanish court had taken up Revillagigedo’s dispatch in December, and Anthony Merry, the British chargé d’affaires in Madrid, had gotten wind of the court discussion. Merry provided the British cabinet with a vague report of a Spanish warship’s confiscation of a British merchant ship in early January. And on February 10, Spain’s Marquis del Campo officially notified Britain that Spain had seized a British ship that had come to take possession of Nootka. The letter described the incident and set out Spain’s prior right of claim to the region. Campo demanded that those who had planned the expedition be punished.
Aside from Merry’s communication, the British cabinet had no facts about the seizure. However, they were aware of Meares and Etches’s activity on the Northwest Coast, that the powerful East India Company received payments from the British furs traded at Macao, and that there were larger British plans for the Pacific region. The Duke of Leeds replied to the Marquis del Campo on February 26, referring to the seizure as an “act of violence” against the law of nations and “injurous to Great Britain.” Under orders from the king, he suspended all discussion of the claims made by Spain until adequate atonement was made and the vessel was released.
The Spanish court took the hostile response as a provocation of war. Their interpretation was not far off. Prime Minister William Pitt Jr. saw an opportunity to break the Family Compact between Spain and France and undermine Spain’s colonial hold on the Americas.
The dispute was fundamentally over Spain’s claims in the New World. Foreign Minister José Floridablanca laid out his empire’s rights based on treaties with Britain in 1670 and 1713, the Papal Bull of 1493, and the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which granted Spain dominion over lands from the Azores to the Philippines. British subjects were not to enter or trade in ports held by Spain. A Royal Order of 1692, and another issued by King Carlos III in 1776, probably aimed at James Cook’s expedition, authorized Spanish officials to “take prisoner and prosecute by law whatsoever foreign vessel” arrived in ports on the Pacific.
The British rejected and ridiculed the Papal Bull, as well as the idea that the Spanish could claim possession of a territory by erecting a cross and then moving on. Prime Minister Pitt asserted that Spain could only claim lands it possessed through actual occupation. This was an odd position to take, since British explorers had traditionally made claims without occupying a site.
The Spanish viewed Pitt’s position as a desperate move aimed at denying Spanish claims everywhere. Floridablanca had correctly understood the g
lobal reach of the conflict. The Spanish court sent orders for the ships of the Armada to begin preparing for sea. They also ordered reinforcements to be sent to Trinidad, Honduras, and Puerto Rico. In London, intelligence on Spanish mobilization at the seaport of Cadiz prompted orders from the Admiralty to prepare the fleet at Spitshead. British indignation grew.
In late April, John Meares arrived in London amid the charged atmosphere at court. He carried with him the secret letters he had received from the Argonaut’s supercargo, Robert Duffin. He also had depositions taken from the prisoners who had arrived on the Columbia. He revealed that three ships, not one, were seized and the crews imprisoned and mistreated, and that despite British rights to the region, Martinez had claimed the Northwest Coast for Spain.
Meares was ushered into the office of Secretary of State William Wyndham Grenville, who asked him to create a “memorial” describing the events and damages. Grenville was taken by Meares’s claim that he had purchased tracts of land from the native people and erected buildings before Martinez arrived. This indicated to Grenville that Britain had evidence of its possession through occupation and could validate its claim to Nootka.
Grenville read the memorial to Prime Minister William Pitt and the cabinet on April 30. Pitt took the issue to King George. On May 5, Pitt went before Parliament with an address from the king concerning the seizure of the Argonaut and Princess Royal and British grievances. The address inflamed the ancient enmity with Spain, and laid bare the larger issues at stake. House member Charles James Fox criticized the Catholic basis for Spain’s claims. “In the present enlightened age the obsolete claim to territory by grant of a Pope was done away … We now have the opportunity, and ought to embrace it, of putting an end to the assertion of those rights forever.” Talk harkened back to the War of Jenkins’ Ear, declared against Spain fifty years before. Parliament voted one million pounds for gathering the fleet, and a surge toward war was on.
The warships Pegasus, Nautilous, Termagant, Flirt, and Drake were ordered to sail the same night the address was delivered. Thirty-six other ships were instructed to be prepared for sea.
Prime minister Pitt met with the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda to revive plans for British invasions of Chile and Mexico, as well as attacks on key ports and insurrections among colonial populations in South America. Anti-Spanish propaganda filled Britain’s newspapers. John Etches wrote a distorted tract that implicated the Americans in a plot against British merchants. He charged Spain with an “insidious and mercenary conspiracy in the assistance of our revolted American colonies and the dismemberment of our empire.” He also made accusations against John Kendrick, stating that the insulting capture of Colnett and the Argonaut was celebrated by “the anniversary of American Independence [which] was commemorated with every demonstration of joy.” John Meares supported Etches and pointed to Kendrick as the architect behind Martinez’s plan to seize the ships.
Impressment squads began scouring England’s pubs, brothels, and lodgings, seizing men for service on warships as the preparations for global war moved quickly forward. Gouverneur Morris, a prominent member of Congress who had chaired the committee that drafted the Constitution and set up the new nation’s currency of dollars and cents,was in London at the time. He witnessed what was occurring with both alarm and a sense of opportunity.
Morris was a brilliant and bullish politician who believed the pending war offered a chance for Spain, France, and America to join forces again to defeat Britain. He believed a victory would restructure the balance of power in Europe, gain American access down the Mississippi, and open trade in the West Indies. Morris wrote to America’s staunchest ally in Paris, the Marquis de Lafayette: “This country is arming and I am convinced with a Determination to compel not only Spain but every other Power to subscribe to such terms as she may chuse to dictate. You will strive in vain to deprecate the Blow, therefore you must prepare to meet it. Or rather so to strike as may prevent it.” He proposed to Lafayette a French attack on Holland, and playing each side against the other, he began efforts to foment the war in London as well.
Through treaties and agreements, other European nations were being drawn into the Nootka dispute. Foreign Minister Floridablanca sent a circular letter to the courts of Europe outlining the circumstances of the seizure of the British ships. Citing Britain’s hostility, he sought support from Austria, Sweden, Denmark, and Russia. Most importantly, Spain needed France, its ally under the Family Compact of 1761.
King Louis XVI of France committed fourteen ships of the line. This decision infuriated revolutionaries in the National Assembly, who challenged the king’s right to commit the people of France to a war. Amid that debate, France stumbled further into social chaos, with peasants burning chateaus and manor houses, and the Assembly dissolving monasteries and convents.
Behind the scenes, the Spanish reportedly sent France gold for its support. Meanwhile, the British were rumored to have made similar payments to keep France neutral.
Britain appealed to its partners in the Triple Alliance—Holland and Prussia—for support. Notices of alert were sent to military outposts in Canada, the West Indies, India, and Macao. By the middle of June, despite the hesitation of allies, a global war was looming. Floridablanca proposed a strategic plan that included assembling troops in Cuba, encouraging rebellion in Ireland, and invading England, an attack that had been approved in an earlier plan. He also advised strengthening defenses in the Canaries, Minorca, and the Philippines.
Amid the war preparations, Meares told Pitt that the Lady Washington had passed through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and sailed into an inland sea, which raised the specter of the Northwest Passage and implied that the Americans might have found the elusive route in their search. Meares attempted to substantiate his claims by publishing a narrative of his voyages in 1788 and 1789, including the map showing the route of the Washington in the fall of 1789, sailing the entire inland shore of what would later become known as Vancouver Island.
Incendiary allegations and an ancient animosity between Spain and England motivated events at this stage and led to further escalation. As both British and Spanish warships set out to cruise the Bay of Biscay off northern Spain in the summer of 1790, only a chance confrontation was needed for the bloodshed and chaos to begin.
AT MACAO, A FIVE-MONTH VOYAGE from London, the summer monsoons were finally clearing off and the muddy hills drying out when word arrived that Spain and England were preparing for war. Fearing attack and seizure by Spanish warships out of the Philippines, the East India Company ships and other British vessels went on alert. The alarm cast a pall over the port. Kendrick was arrested by soldiers in the street and ordered to leave the city or face imprisonment. He retreated to the Washington at Dirty Butter Bay, unaware of the full dimension of how the taking of British ships at Nootka had shaken Europe, or how his expedition was being described at home.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Columbia’s Homecoming
Boston
AUGUST 1790
NEWS OF THE IMPENDING WAR and the suspected involvement of the American expedition came to Robert Gray at the island of Saint Helena on his homeward passage from Macao to Boston in June 1790. In the same month, news of the king’s address to Parliament, the embarkation of warships, and a description of the sweeping impressments appeared in New York and Philadelphia newspapers. On July 3, people in Boston read with alarm that “the Parliament has granted to his Britannick Majesty, two Millions, sterling, and 16,000 men, to carry on the preparations for a Spanish war … Spain has formed a Treaty of alliance with Austria and a strong counter-league is making against it, in which Great Britain, Prussia, and Holland are concerned.” British transports were reportedly sending troops and four companies of artillery to Quebec, which stirred great concern over how far the war would spread. To raid Spanish outposts along the Mississippi and south to New Orleans and Florida, British agents were once again trying to enlist the support of disaffected Americans
on the “middle lands” frontier.
Thomas Jefferson embodied the drive to expand what the Founding Fathers saw as an “empire of liberty” and feared British seizure of lands west of the Mississippi. In 1813, he would write to John Jacob Astor of his outpost on the Columbia River: “I view it as the germ of a great, free, and independent empire on that side of our continent, and that liberty and self-government spreading from that as well as this side, will ensure their complete establishment over the whole.” (Painting by Rembrandt Peale)
From London, Gouverneur Morris wrote to President Washington: “I believe that a war is inevitable; and I act on that ground.” In regard to Kendrick, he urged “that it would not be amiss for the American captain, who was witness of the whole transaction, to publish a faithful narrative.” Thomas Jefferson, recently returned from Paris to serve as Washington’s first secretary of state, also believed that war was likely. On June 20, he wrote that the British would be satisfied “with nothing less than war, dismemberment of the Spanish empire, and annihilation of their fleet.”
If fighting flared up on the North American continent, it would embroil Canada, the Floridas, and the border lands along the Mississippi. The new nation would be in great jeopardy. British officers hoped to draw in Vermont separatists and backwoods pioneers in Kentucky territory to create independent buffer states loyal to England and mount attacks on Spanish townsfrom Saint Louis south to New Orleans. The Spanish, likewise, were continuing efforts to create runaway border colonies occupied by independent American pioneers loyal to Spain. Once again, former American general James Wilkinson was involved with Spain, this time in partnership with a smooth-talking Irishman, James O’Fallon. Their scheme for a Spanish colony came apart when O’Fallon decided the Nootka crisis offered a better opportunity to gain British aid to attack Spain and take all of Louisiana. Indian nations were also being enticed by each side to become shock troops. Representatives of the Cherokee nation reportedly showed up in London to offer twenty thousand warriors to Britain.
