Morning of Fire

by Scott Ridley

  QUADRA DID LITTLE ABOUT THE COMPLAINTS he received concerning the simmering warfare. He tried to quell hostility between natives,traders, and the wary British with kindness and generosity. In Vancouver’s case, it was a very successful seduction.

  On the first evening after the arrival of the Discovery and Chatham, Quadra held a banquet upstairs in the rustic commandant’s house. He treated Vancouver and his officers to wine and a five-course meal served on silver plates. As representatives of royal courts, Vancouver and Quadra had the task of executing the return of lands under the Nootka Convention of October 1790. Vancouver and his officers had expected that the handover of the building and extensive tracts owned by Meares would be a formality. The thorny difficulty, however, was determining what lands and buildings were to be restored, and exactly what area of the coast the British would have access to.

  Quadra had undertaken fact-finding on the seizure of Colnett’s ships from traders who had stopped at the cove. Robert Gray and Joseph Ingraham and others were invited to provide statements about events they had witnessed. By the time Vancouver sat down to dinner that evening, Quadra had a position supported by witnesses and documentation that would give the British commander nightmares.

  Under the terms of the agreement, Vancouver expected to receive all of Nootka Sound and Clayoquot Sound, as well as other properties that Meares had claimed farther down the coast. Vancouver also asserted that under the terms of the agreement, Britain would have access to the entire coast north of San Francisco. Technically the line for British access was to fall north of Spain’s northernmost settlement. Quadra determined that this northernmost point would be Nootka, not San Francisco.

  In terms of Meares’s land, Quadra directed Vancouver to the plot said to have been purchased from Maquinna. Meares’s “house” no longer existed there when Martinez arrived at Nootka, Quadra explained, but he was prepared to offer the spot where the house reportedly stood.

  Vancouver was astounded to realize that this plot of less than an acre was Quadra’s offer. He later wrote that the location was in the northern corner of the small cove, “forming a nearly equilateral triangle not extending an hundred yards on a side, bounded in front by the sea, and on two sides by high craggy rocks.” He was incredulous that this could possibly be considered “as the object of restitution expressed by the terms” of the agreement between their two nations.

  Robert Duffin, who was on a merchant ship at Nootka and had sent the Argonaut‘s letters to Meares at Macao, confirmed to Vancouver that when he returned to Friendly Cove in July 1789, Maquinna had not preserved Meares’s building. On the spot where the crude house had stood “were the tents and houses of some of the people belonging to the Columbia, commanded by Mr. John Kendrick, under the flag and protection of the United States of America.” That winter, Kendrick had burned up what was left of Meares’s house as firewood.

  Even more outrageous to Vancouver was that Quadra was willing to give command of the port and use of his buildings to Vancouver but was retaining the legal title for Spain. Quadra conducted a tour of the settlement to show Vancouver how things had been readied for him. Vancouver was beside himself. He couldn’t accept the offer without Quadra yielding on the principle of ownership. He foresaw increasing problems if Britain did not have exclusive control of the entire sound. Considering the American ships on the coast and the growing hostility of the natives, he wrote, “this place would not long remain unoccupied by some one of the trading nations … [and] involving my Country in fresh disputes &ca., might be laid to my charge.”

  VANCOUVER INSISTED THAT there was a misunderstanding about what Meares had purchased from Maquinna. To dispel this idea, Quadra took Vancouver to visit Maquinna at his winter village, some twenty miles up the Tahsis Inlet. Maquinna told Vancouver that he had sold no land to John Meares, and called Meares an “aita-aita"—a liar. The only land he and other chiefs had sold was to Kendrick: the land around Nootka Sound, and that at Clayoquot.

  At every turn, Vancouver seemed to find Kendrick frustrating British ambition: firearms traded at Hawaii and his men living with the Kauai chiefs, the Lady Washington’s alleged track in the Strait of Juan de Fuca that he had to follow, the arms at Clayoquot used against British traders, and after being sent halfway around the world, the harbors he was to receive were already under title in Kendrick’s hands. According to Quadra and Maquinna, Britain had only a symbolic claim to the small patch of ground where Kendrick had burned the remains of Meares’s house and flown the American flag.

  The young British commander was uncertain how to proceed. On the way back from the visit to Tahsis, he proposed to Quadra that this immense island they were on be named “Quadra and Vancouver” Island to commemorate their negotiations. It was a subtle way to attach the British claim to the region. Quadra agreed to the offer, but he had come to believe that Nootka was a highly valuable port for the defense of California. Like Martinez he recognized that preventing British settlement would be easier than trying to eradicate outposts after they were established. He thought the way to drive foreign traders from the coast would be to infuse the region with Spanish fur traders who would offer prized abalone shells, copper, and cloth of Mexican manufacture. Quadra also began considering establishment of another Spanish settlement to the north in the Queen Charlotte Islands.

  The amiable relationship Quadra had fostered with Vancouver was tested in a series of letters that passed between the Discovery and the commandant’s house. There was no progress. Vancouver could not accept that the spot where Meares’s building stood was what had been intended for restoration. “At the least,” he noted, “the whole port of Nootka, of which his Majesty’s subjects had been forcibly dispossessed, and at which themselves, their vessels and cargos had been captured, must have been the proposed object of restitution.” He found it maddening that the best detail he had in his orders was Floridablanca’s vaguely worded letter.

  William Brown had brought Vancouver a dispatch from London that apparently directed Vancouver to turn over the Nootka settlementto the Butterworth expedition once it was in British hands. That did not appear possible now. Quadra had a much better understanding of the situation and plied his skills to politely crush the British claim. Vancouver feared he might be censured for his failure, and in a candid moment he confessed in his journal that his lack of success was due in part to “a want of sufficient diplomatic skill, which a life wholly devoted to my profession [aboard ship] had denied me the opportunity of acquiring.”

  REFUSING TO YIELD COMPLETELY, Vancouver sent First Lieutenant Zachary Mudge on a long journey back to London and the Lords of the Admiralty. Mudge carried Vancouver’s journal, surveys of the coast that had been completed (including all the work of Spanish surveyors that would be appropriated on British maps), and a letter requesting clarification of his instructions. Mudge sailed for Macao on a Portuguese trader on September 30. Vancouver also canceled plans to send the Daedalus to Botany Bay to pick up prisoners who were to populate a British settlement at Nootka.

  There would be a long wait for any response. War had broken out in Europe. Just before Vancouver reached the American coast, France had declared war on Austria, on April 20, 1792. Prussia joined with Austria. France invaded Belgium and the Low Countries and planned to march on to Holland, similar to the strategy Gouverneur Morris had promoted two years earlier.

  Like the American revolutionaries, the French Republicans wanted all harbors opened as free ports of trade. They proclaimed that all people who wanted to overthrow monarchy should rise up and join them. Carrying out this wild resolve, on the night of August 10, as Vancouver was emerging from his exploration through the “inland sea,” French revolutionaries stormed the Tuileries, the royal palace on the Seine. King Louis and Marie Antoinette fled the palace and placedthemselves under the protection of the Legislative Assembly. But the assembly suspended the monarchy, shocking all of Europe.

  These seemingly remote events would come to undermine the positions
of both Quadra and Vancouver, crumbling the edges of empire. For the fledgling United States it would have impacts from Florida and the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific Coast. The Old World’s grip was loosening. For native chiefs like Maquinna and Kamehameha, and for John Kendrick, the conflagration enveloping Europe would open new possibilities on the far side of the globe.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Survival and Seduction

  Macao, Sandwich Islands

  SEPTEMBER 1792–APRIL 1793

  DURING THE LATE SUMMER, Kendrick finished constructing the tender for the Lady Washington, probably a thirty-six-foot sloop, called the Avenger. He provisioned and manned both ships. His crew included several of his original “Boston men,” more recent Boston recruits, and British, Chinese, and Hawaiian sailors. Twenty-seven-year-old John Stoddard was made master of the tender. Stoddard had served as the Washington‘s clerk for the past two years. His father was a Boston house builder and one of the revolutionaries of the 1770s. Kendrick probably knew Stoddard’s father from the group of revolutionaries at St. Andrews Masonic Lodge, which both men had joined in 1778. The second mate of the tender was twenty-three-year-old David Wood III, whose grandfather had been colonel of the Massachusetts Rangers during the French and Indian Wars. Wood was in the East seeking adventure. From what he had heard, Kendrick was certain to provide it.

  In September, while Vancouver was worrying about his failure with Quadra, Kendrick sailed from Macao into the South China Sea. Although his illness and building the tender had kept him in port for ten months, his plan was still to winter on the coast at Clayoquot and trade through the spring and summer. From there he would go to the Sandwich Islands in the autumn of 1793 to meet Williams, Rowbottom, and Coleman and pick up the sandalwood and pearls they had gathered. This time, he thought, with two ships and his furs purchased in advance, there was a good chance of collecting the windfall he needed.

  Three days out, scattered showers fell and long rolling swells appeared, indicating a storm far offshore. It was the end of the typhoon season, and many fishing boats were out on the offshore shoals. No oracles had predicted a storm, but the breeze kicked up from the northeast and the skies steadily darkened during the next half day. Then the rain turned torrential. Kendrick might have hoped this was only a lingering tropical storm, but the signs were not good. Some of the fishing junks undoubtedly hauled for Tong-Hou Cove, a well-known island rendezvous in bad weather. If it were a typhoon, however, running for shore could make matters worse. The best course was to try to run across the path of the storm, using the leading winds to get south of it. That was the decision Kendrick apparently made now.

  The ensuing hours are not difficult to envision. As the two heavily laden ships tried to run before the storm, waves began to mount. Gusts blew the tops off the heavy swells they tried to cross. Headway stalled. White water scudded over the surface in salty hard-driving rain. The storm built rapidly, too rapidly to outrun, probably the worst weather Kendrick had seen since the passage around Cape Horn. There were many things that could go wrong: weakened hull planking could split, a yard left aloft could collapse onto the deck, thrashing around like a log and hammering everything in its path, chain plates could let go, springing the foremast or mainmast.

  Waves most likely built to thirty feet or more, and wallowing in the valleys of these huge seas, visibility closed down. Despite their best efforts, amid the rain and with darkness falling on the turbulent sea, they lost sight of the tender. The Washington’s deck became awash asthey plunged into steep troughs and water surged over the deck and down her whole length. Kendrick would have called all hands below, lashing the rudder and leaving only a storm jib.

  In storms such as these, sustained winds can reach 150 miles per hour, and the peak may last an hour or more, an eternity when hunkered in the dark below deck. As the waves washed over them, water leaked around the hatch covers and deck seams. For long moments the seas submerged the hull, and the thunderous howl fell muffled before rising again. The storm sail was probably soon ripped to shreds and they were left under bare poles amid the crashing waves. Worried for their own lives as well as the men on the tender, Kendrick may have thought of how they had searched in vain for the Lady Washington four years ago off the Horn.

  Beaten with enormous force, the Washington‘s rudder most likely snapped with a booming crack as they felt the ship lurch sideways. In a terrible moment, the ship turned under them, and everything inside that was not tied down crashed across the cabin and hold as the seas rushed down the companionway. The men trapped inside despaired as the waves punished them and they lay half underwater, frantically trying to work the pumps. But despite the beating, somehow the Washington’s hull of two-inch New England oak held fast. Miraculously, she remained afloat.

  Hours after the ordeal began, in heaving seas and still-gusting winds, Kendrick and his exhausted men climbed out amid a dense tangle of lines and flotsam. The hull lay over on her side, half submerged. In the swamped cabin below, they searched for axes to cut away the masts. Showing incredible courage and endurance, they severed the stays, chopped off the masts, and then somehow managed to right the vessel.

  They could not see the tender in the bleak daylight, but prayed for her survival. Pumping water from the ship continuously, they juryrigged a new mast and sail and started back to Macao, finding masses of scattered wreckage from the fishing junks. Sharks were filling thewaters, and survivors called out to the crippled ship. They stopped repeatedly, trying to maneuver close to the wrecks, and picked up about thirty men, but much to their torment, despite the heart-rending wails and cries, many more had to be left behind.

  Seven days after the typhoon, the odd, stump-masted ship finally struggled into port at Macao. Met by the tooting of horns and the mandarin’s boats, Kendrick and his crew became local heroes. If this storm was typical of typhoons that reached shore, the harbor would have been fouled with half-sunken wreckage, roofs torn from houses, mudslides scarring the hills, and the smell of rot and human waste thickening the air.

  Days passed as Kendrick waited for his tender and Stoddard and Wood to appear. Arriving ships had no word of them. They had vanished without a trace, and gone with them were nine or ten men. The appreciation of those he saved couldn’t balance the loss. Accepting what fate had handed them, Kendrick borrowed cash, promised shares on his next load of furs to raise money, and finally laid the Washington up on the beach at Dirty Butter Bay to begin repairs.

  TWO MONTHS LATER, when the Columbia arrived, a black man came aboard and told the story of Kendrick and the typhoon. Robert Gray, returning from the streets of Macao, confirmed that he had heard the same tale. Kendrick sent a letter informing the Columbia of the deaths of Stoddard and Wood, but he did not seek out Gray. With all the bitterness that had settled between them, the two captains did not meet or communicate.

  Despite high hopes, the Columbia was facing dire economic conditions. The embargo on furs had ended, and now a surplus of furs flooded the market. Hoskins wrote to Joseph Barrell on December 22, 1792, from upriver at Whampoa that “skins are very low and there is no selling them for Cash, indeed we could not get the Ship secured unless we would agree to take goods in pay … Skins at retail will notfetch more than thirty dollars and at wholesale from six to twenty five dollars.” He expected the whole cargo would not amount to more than forty thousand dollars, and warned that the ship was leaky and needed to be hauled out and repaired, which would “make our expences at this place great.”

  The promises of a “golden harvest” that Gray and Haswell had made to Joseph Barrell and the other owners did not materialize. Though records of the voyage indicate sales totaling fifty thousand dollars, and one of the owners commented that the Columbia “made a saving voyage and some profit,” Barrell’s misgivings about Gray now proved justified. While still at Nootka, Hoskins had written a letter alerting Barrell that Gray had sought to cheat the owners by sending the property he was trading on his own to New York. Haswell too, H
oskins said, sought to make ten thousand dollars on his own account and “then go to England that the owners might go to hell and his wages and per centage with them.” Hoskins concluded that Gray was a man “who has not even the least principle of honor or honesty but appears to be divested of every virtue, and who is in grain, if not openly a Knave and a Fool.”

  It was a bitter turning for those who had sided with Gray against Kendrick. “I could wish there was some person in Canton who had your orders to take the ship and cargo out of the present hands,” Hoskins lamented. This could have reflected Kendrick’s offer to take the Columbia back as Barrell’s agent. It would have been a telling vindication for Kendrick, but none of the letters reached Boston in time to make a difference.

  If there was any written communication between Hoskins and Kendrick at Macao, no record remains. Hoskins criticized Gray’s command of the ship as “blundering along,” and charged that he endangered the vessel repeatedly, running aground, shattering the keel, splitting planks, and shearing off the rudder stem. Comparing him with Kendrick, Hoskins concluded: “although he [Gray] cruiz’d the coast more; and appeared to be more persevering to obtain skins, yet his principles were no better, his abilities less, and his knowledge ofthe coast, from his former voyage, circumscribed within very narrow limits.” On February 8, the Columbia made the two-day trip down the Pearl River and departed for Boston. Neither the ship nor Robert Gray ever returned to the East. Years later, Charles Bulfinch would note that the owners were disappointed that Kendrick did not turn over his furs to the Columbia, but nevertheless, Bulfinch said they decided to let Kendrick continue the sole conduct of their business in the Pacific.