Morning of Fire

by Scott Ridley

  As Gray prepared the ship and took on what seemed like an endless load of cargo, newspapers were filled with reports of preparations for war. Despite the fact that messengers had passed and repassed between the Spanish and British courts, a war seemed inevitable. In early September, one Massachusetts newspaper reported news from an arriving packet boat: “War was declared by England against Spain the fourteenth day of July last.”

  What would American ships do? Fearing that the Columbia would be caught in the contention, Barrell instructed Gray to form “no connection with foreigners, or Americans, on the northwest coast, unless absolutely necessary; nor then, with the greatest caution.”

  There was no grand farewell party on board, and no speeches this time. Impatient to have the Columbia sail, Barrell wrote in his instructions: “If the wind is fair on the morrow, we desire and expect you will embrace it and proceed on the voyage.” Following a few days of adverse winds, the Columbia departed Boston harbor on October 2, 1790, seven weeks after her arrival. The last news before sailing may have been that the Spanish fleet was setting out to capture merchant ships, and troops and arms were pouring into the West Indies. Many speculated that West Florida and New Orleans would suffer the first attacks, bringing the prospect of war to the American coast.

  Boston Harborby Fitz Hugh Lane. On the Columbia’s return to Boston Harbor, Robert Gray found a new vitality brewing. Word of Gray‘ s return and Kendrick‘s continuing expedition inspired other Boston merchants to set off for the Pacific.

  POLITICAL TENSIONS WERE PEAKING in London. The naval mobilization and armament had already cost more than three million pounds, not the one million originally allotted, or the two million reported in Boston. Britain had never mobilized forces on a global scale like this before. According to one account, a total of forty-three ships and fifty-five thousand men had been readied. Everyone was anxious. Despite the magnitude of preparations and participation in maneuvers, the Dutch became reluctant to engage on behalf of Britain. And facing criticism on the one hand for inaction, and on the other for threatening an expensive and misguided war, Prime Minister Wiliam Pitt Jr. wasforced to soften the language of demands aimed at humbling Spain. He needed to resolve the confrontation one way or the other. His revised terms, delivered October 14, carried an ultimatum that Spain accede to an agreement within ten days, or face attack.

  Floridablanca convened a junta consisting of ministers and councilors of state to debate the ultimatum before the king. They recommended against an agreement in fear that it would allow the British to settle everywhere in Spanish territory and only postpone an inevitable war. Floridablanca was dismayed. Spain was in no position to fight a global war. King Carlos IV had not secured support from Russia or Austria. Nor had he heard from France, which was mired in her own revolutionary chaos and, like the Netherlands, would not engage. Pitt had enticed France to the sidelines by promising British neutrality in France’s growing internal strife. More than just a subtle shift in position, this was a historic event. Floridablanca recognized that in their maneuvering, British emissaries had successfully destroyed the Family Compact that had been formed by the Spanish and French Bourbon kings and had countered British ambition for thirty years.

  The ten-day deadline passed as the Spanish councilors debated. In London, King George III went sleepless for two days, convinced there would be a dreadful war at great cost and suffering for his people. Floridablanca, too, was anguished at the prospect of long-term damage from British warships and raiders severing the sea-borne lines of Spain’s colonial wealth. To him, the paltry events at a remote harbor in the wilderness did not seem to justify a global conflict. He regarded delay and obfuscation at the risk of a sacrifice of honor as better than war. In an unexpected turnaround, Floridablanca’s Supreme Council of State overrode the recommendation of the junta.

  ON OCTOBER 28, BRITAIN’S AMBASSADOR, Alleyne Fitzhebert, and Count Floridablanca signed what became known as the “Nootka Convention” at the ornate palace of the Escurial north of Madrid.

  The agreement committed Spain to pay damages for Meares’s seized ships. Spain also pledged to restore “buildings and tracts of land … of which the subjects of His Britannic Majesty were dispossessed about the month of April in 1789.” However, these tracts of land, claimed by John Meares, were not defined. The document was written in French, the language of diplomats, and other concessions too were open to interpretation.

  Britain crowed over winning the war without firing a shot, but the conflict was far from settled. The agreement allowed British fishing, navigation, commerce, and settlement beyond the northernmost Spanish settlements. Both parties were to be allowed to navigate in the South Seas, or land at unoccupied places to trade with the natives. To Pitt, the coast above San Francisco, the ancient “New Albion” of Francis Drake, was now thrown open. To Floridablanca it meant only the area north of Nootka. The difference in translation would not be noticed until after the heat of war had dissipated and the effort to implement the agreement was carried back to the coast.

  IN PARIS, GOUVERNEUR MORRIS had learned that part of the Nootka negotiations was a secret agreement between Spain and England to join in war against the revolutionaries in France. As unlikely as it seemed, Britain and Spain had become strange bedfellows out of a mutual interest in defending monarchy and the divine right of kings. To undermine this effort, Morris tried to revive his plan for France to ally with Austria, Poland, and Malta for an attack on Holland. He still hoped that war, or the threat of war, would help shift the balance of power away from Britain. If he could gain leverage by holding out American neutrality in the war, he could bargain for Britain to abandon forts in the Great Lakes, and for Spain to open the Mississippi River.

  Although Morris carried instructions from George Washington to gain the American territorial concessions, he was on his own in provoking war. Without the willingness of the United States to join Spain,however, even the French leaders sympathetic to King Carlos found it impossible to advocate committing their ships and troops.

  As revolutionary chaos stepped up in the streets of Paris, Morris thought the Nootka agreement marked the demise of the Spanish Empire. But he continued lobbying for a European war, which in a short time would arrive amid chaos far more horrific and enduring than anything he had envisioned.

  THE CONFLICT SPARKED that July morning when Martinez and Kendrick trained their cannons on the Argonaut signaled a dramatic turning point. The Family Compact between France and Spain that had been in place since 1761 was broken. Spain’s dominion in the Pacific was cracked and the Spanish Empire would never claim rights from the Papal Bull of 1493 again. The balance of power between France, Spain, and Britain was shifting, and Europe would be shaken to her roots. The Old World was passing away, replaced by the rise of revolutionary politics that threatened the age-old concepts of monarchy. The reverberations would soon reach around the globe, back to the raw coast of the American Northwest and the islands of the Pacific. A new stage of war for the backside of the world was about to open.

  TO SECURE BRITISH RIGHTS in the Pacific and carry out the terms of the Nootka agreement, the Admiralty appointed a haughty young navy captain, George Vancouver. He was only thirty-two, but under a powdered white wig, Vancouver’s long, fleshy face and broad double chin made him look a decade or more older. A career officer with no wife or children, he had spent his life since the age of thirteen serving his king and empire. As a young midshipman, he had sailed on James Cook’s second and third voyages. He had been to Nootka and the Sandwich Islands and, during the American Revolution, served on the seventy-four-gun warship Fame in the West Indies at a time when John Kendrick was cruising there for prizes. Like most naval officers, he had just begun to stand down from the Nootka mobilization. Although this would be his first command, the Admiralty saw him as a meticulous taskmaster, and ideally suited for the trials of this mission. His expedition was aggressive and ambitious but needed to be as subtle and secretive as possible to avoid reign
iting the crisis with Spain. Espionage and acquisition of territory were to wear the guise of a diplomatic and scientific mission.

  The voyage was the outgrowth of a secret plan that the Admiralty and prime minister’s office had developed at the start of the Nootka crisis. The original plan consisted of an armed expedition that would establish a settlement on the Northwest Coast made up of British marines and prisoners from Botany Bay, Australia. That expedition, which included the forty-four-gun Gorgon, was postponed when John Meares appeared in London saying he had already established a settlement and acquired extensive lands.

  Now, with an agreement in hand and not wanting to alarm the Spanish with large war frigates, Vancouver’s expedition was to consist of two armed ships, the ninety-nine-foot sloop Discovery of 340 tons, and the eighty-foot armed tender Chatham of 135 tons. A supply ship, Daedalus, would depart later. Vancouver was to implement the Nootka agreement and receive from the Spanish the lands claimed by Meares. He was to visit and gather information on Spanish defenses to the south in California and those of the Russians to the north. He was to also seek out the “inland sea” and the Northwest Passage.

  Based on the reports from Meares and others, Vancouver was to explore and acquire information on “the nature and extent of any water communication which may tend, in any considerable degree, to facilitate an intercourse for the purpose of commerce, between the northwest coast and the country upon the opposite side of the continent, which are inhabited or occupied by his Majesty’s subjects.” Concern about Kendrick’s possible achievements were front and center. Vancouver was “required and directed to pay particular attention to theexamination of the supposed straits of Juan de Fuca, said to be situated between 48 degrees and 49 degrees North Latitude, and to lead to an opening through which the sloop Washington is reported to have passed, in 1789.”

  The young British captain was also instructed to make claims along the Northwest Coast and examine the harbors and lands of the Sandwich Islands. The doorway that Spanish concessions had opened had to be entered quickly to prevent Spaniards and Americans from exploring and claiming critical lands. Vancouver’s armed royal presence and his mission were to be the foundation for expanded merchant ventures and Britain’s dominance in the North Pacific.

  As Vancouver’s ships prepared, the merchant Butterworth expedition was also getting ready. The Butterworth expedition contained three ships owned by a company of merchants led by Sir William Curtis. Curtis was a member of Parliament, a former mayor of London, and a strong supporter of Pitt’s war policies toward Spain. Replacing John Meares and the Etches family, or perhaps taking them in as partners, his company was granted a monopoly for trade on the Northwest Coast. In order to implement the rights Vancouver was to secure, Curtis assigned William Brown, a Greenland whaling captain, to take the three ships and settle outposts at strategic locations: Staten Land near Cape Horn, Nootka or the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Queen Charlotte Islands, and Hawaii. Aboard the thirty-gun Butterworth, Brown believed that part of his purpose was to drive the Americans out. His efforts at Hawaii would bring him to the center of inter-island warfare, and a fateful date with John Kendrick and the Washington.

  Vancouver set out on April 1, 1791, from Falmouth, England, headed on a long course eastward around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. A few months later, with government support and licenses from the East India Company and South Seas Company, William Brown set off with the Butterworth ships headed west around Cape Horn.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  An American Presence

  China, Japan, Queen Charlotte Islands,

  Northwest Coast

  JANUARY–JULY 1791

  NEWS OF THE NOOTKA AGREEMENT wouldn’t reach Macao until late in the spring or early summer. In the busy harbor the atmosphere was tense throughout the winter in anticipation of war. Two British warships and an armed frigate sat at anchor, sent from London to escort the East India merchant vessels homeward. The port was filled with Royal Navy officers and sailors expecting a Spanish attack from Manila. And rumors spread that Prussia and Holland were ready to join Britain and that a royal company called Mar del Sur had been formed to raid the coast of California and South America.

  Known to be at the center of the controversy that touched off the plunge toward war, Kendrick was living aboard the Washington in the smuggler’s haven at Dirty Butter Bay. Along the shore, spring rains were beginning to turn the hillsides green and swarms of insects were starting to hatch. A less determined man might have given up and gone home in defeat after suffering severe illness, robbery, a bureaucraticimpoundment of his vessel, and arrest and threat of imprisonment. Yet Kendrick maintained his blind faith. For better or worse, he seemed to dismiss nagging daily problems, and like others in his generation of revolutionaries, perseverance and a focus on dreams larger than life carried him through.

  As testimony to the trust he engendered as a captain, most of his seasoned Boston men stayed with him: the blacksmith, Jonathan Barber, his gunner James Crawford, young John Cordis, who had just turned twenty, John Maud Jr., the cooper Robert Green, carpenter Thomas Foster, and sailmaker William Bowles. For all of them, this was still the voyage of a lifetime. Together they endured, and undoubtedly made the best of the sin and solace Macao offered. And at last their luck turned.

  A new Portuguese governor, Don Vasco Luis Caneiro de Sousa de Faro, was appointed by King Pedro III and took office by late 1790. Whatever hold former governor da Silva Ferreira had on Kendrick because of John Meares or the Portuguese merchant Cavalho was lifted. Finally, Kendrick could gain his clearance “chop” stamp to depart. He also had a new source of funds.

  While Kendrick had missed the entire season of 1790, William Douglas and Davis Coolidge had returned from the Northwest Coast in the Grace, loaded with a rich cargo of furs. They had stopped at the Sandwich Islands on the way and picked up Kendrick’s shipment of sandalwood. They also brought the two younger men, James Mackay and Samuel Thomas, who had been left there. From them, Kendrick learned of the massacre of the Fair American crew, and that Isaac Ridler remained behind amid intensifying warfare.

  Douglas and Coolidge went upriver to Canton and, after selling their furs, joined Kendrick at Dirty Butter Bay. They found the Washington remade into a heavily armed, two-masted brigantine—the classic image of a pirate ship—with a square-rigged foremast carrying three courses of sail, and a gaff-rigged main mast with a boom extending over the stern and two courses of sail above. Her lines and sails hadbeen replaced, and the bow was embellished with an intricately carved, eight-foot figurehead of a woman with a jade ornament in her hair and a gown almost touching the sea. As a brigantine, the Washington was a sailor’s dream, sturdy yet flexible, with ample sail to take on the heavy seas of the North Pacific and cruise the shallow inlets of the coast. The cost of refitting the ship and maintaining his men, coupled with bribing officials and losses from the robbery, had left Kendrick drained of funds.

  The windfall he had been awaiting from the thirty tons of sandalwood unfortunately shrank, because the wood turned out to be a species low in aromatic oils. Nevertheless, Douglas loaned Kendrick $2,320 for provisioning and trade goods. To address other debts, Kendrick apparently transacted a “sham sale” of the Washington—selling her to a merchant and then buying her back at the same price, and disclosing only the first sale. This allowed him to evade seizure of the ship and the mandarins’ rule that no vessel owing money to Macanese merchants could leave port. A young Massachusetts carpenter, Amasa Delano, who would later become a legendary voyager in the Pacific, accompanied Douglas downriver from Canton and helped with final preparations of the Washington. He praised Kendrick for his spirit and courage, saying he was the first American in the Pacific who showed others the way. “As a seaman and a navigator,” Delano noted, “he had but few equals.”

  Kendrick had received no further communication from Barrell. He assumed the Columbia was returning, but given Gray’s insubordination, there was no certainty. For now,
he had only a single vessel and meager resources for the expedition, but was willing to use them in bold strokes and to live off trading and bartering as he continued to build alliances and an American presence in the Pacific. His plan was a groundbreaking one, typical of the daring spirit Delano recognized. Kendrick would return to the Northwest Coast and Hawaii, but he would start with a venture to the forbidden island nation of Japan. In helping to capture Meares’s ships, Kendrick had already unknowingly stifled the London company’s plan to send the Argonaut to pioneer a market in Japan. Now he would seek to steal their thunder by trying to open the closed nation himself.

  Douglas agreed to bring the Grace into the venture, but he apparently leaked word of the plan to the British. On several nights Douglas found himself in town talking with Captain John Blankett, commander of the seventy-four-gun HMS Leopard, one of the warships sent to escort British merchant ships homeward and protect them from Spanish attacks. Douglas may have been unaware that Blankett was one of the prime advocates of British trade with Japan. In a series of memos to the Lord of the Admiralty, Blankett had advocated strategies that might “cut off [Japan’s] communications with other countries” and gain superiority in Japanese trade.

  Clearly concerned that Britain’s future efforts toward Japan might be jeopardized, Blankett sent a summary of his conversations with Douglas to the Admiralty: