Morning of Fire

by Scott Ridley

  Although it was an isolated incident on the far side of the world, the killing of Kendrick and his three men (whether accidental or not) reflected the larger conflict taking place. It was different tinder, but the same flames, the same morning of fire that was engulfing Europe and threatening the Americas in the war for trade and territory.

  WITH KENDRICK’S DEATH, Brown’s outlook immediately improved. His main competition on the Northwest Coast and in the islands was gone. Maquinna and Wickaninish no longer had a steady source of powder, muskets, and lead, and the American deeds to an immense tract on Vancouver Island were shaken. Moreover, Brown now faced no outside challenge to his claim to be lord of the Leeward Islands.

  He immediately demanded that four hundred hogs be slaughtered and salted for market, and took other native items as he wished. His imperious attitude provoked resentment among the Oahu chiefs. Whether or not any of them sought revenge for the killing of Kendrick, or invoked his spirit with the winding sheet that had been stolen, they considered Brown a tyrant and wanted his ships. Their retribution was swift.

  Nineteen days after Kendrick’s death, on January 1, 1795, a group of Kalanikupule’s warriors approached the Jackall and Prince Lee Boo in a large double canoe. Most of the men on the two ships were ashore, some slaughtering and salting pork and others sent in boats to the salt ponds at Kaihikapu, where Brown was told he could take as much salt as he wanted. On attempting to return, the loaded boats stranded on a reef and had to wait for the rising tide. According to the story later passed among the ships, the double canoe full of native men “rang’d up alongside the Prince Laboo, & struck her small boat, that lay along side, & somewhat damaged her upon which Capt. Gordon run to ye gangway to blame them for it.” A native working as a cook on board pushed Gordon into the water where the men in the canoe quickly killed him. They then went alongside the Jackall where Brown was walking the quarterdeck. Climbing on board with a long iron pahoua, one of the natives lunged at Brown who “seized a Swivel worm & drove the fellow of.” The remaining warriors came on board and Brown tried to beat them off “but at last he was overpowered,” stabbed in the neck, and pitched onto the main deck where he died.

  Most of Brown’s crew on shore were also killed. Those who survived eventually escaped to Kealakekua with the ships and left a tale of what had occurred and a warning for John Young that Kalanikupule planned to attack Kamehameha.

  Events then took shape that many believed were foreordained. That spring, the Hawaiian king prepared his troops and several of Kendrick’s men. In April, he invaded and conquered Maui, Lanai, and Molokai and moved on to Oahu, killing Kaiana and three hundred of his followers when they turned against him. Then he hunted down and killed Kalanikupule and took over all the Leeward Islands but Kauai. In time, that island too would fall under his power, fulfilling Kamehameha’s prophesied destiny as king of all the islands.

  CARRYING WORD OF KENDRICK’S DEATH, the Washington arrived at Macao in February 1795, and John Howell proceeded to rifle everything Kendrick left behind. He placed the cargo of furs with another shipmaster to sell and paid himself $1,817 in fees and inflated commissions from the proceeds. This was three times more than Robert Gray earned for the Columbia’s first voyage. Howell then sold the Lady Washington to himself for thirteen hundred dollars, a bargain price in light of Kendrick’s offer of fourteen thousand dollars two years earlier. In essence, Howell took the ship and more than five hundred dollars in cash. He said nothing of the sale of the valuable ambergris Kendrick had collected, or sandalwood that had been gathered, and only mentioned the Washington‘s pearls in passing a few years later.

  On May 11, 1795, Howell sent a letter to Joseph Barrell and his partners in what would become a long course of evasion:

  Sirs:

  I wrote to you from the island of O. Whahoo the 19th of December last, and left the letter with Captain Brown to forward via England. Eleven days after, he and Captain Gordon were both murdered there by the Chief of the Island… the letter was forwarded from hence by the last Fleet which sailed nearly two months ago.

  My last letter informed you of the death of Captain Kendrick, on the 12th of December at O. Whahoo …

  Since arriving three months earlier Howell had not had time to conduct an accounting, but claimed that “the debts he [Kendrick] accumulated were immense.” As it turned out, the revenue from sale of the cargo would pay the current debt, and sale of the ship at a price similar to what Kendrick offered to Barrell would have paid the longterm debts to Martinez ($8,000) and Douglas ($2,322).

  Oddly, Howell felt compelled to attack both Robert Gray and John Kendrick, telling Barrell, “I hardly ever saw a man in your N.W. employ, who was not either a fool or Rogue, and your commanders united in both these characters.” He also launched into an anti-American diatribe saying, “It is absolutely necessary some steps should be taken to retrieve the character of the Americans here. Such villanies have been practiced as have sickened the Chinese from having any dealing with them on a liberal scale they would otherwise adopt.” He noted that Joseph Ingraham and the Hope’s owners had defaulted on a bond to the hoppo Consequa for $43,821. Howell said he had joined with Chinese merchants and was preparing a trip to the Northwest Coast. He said he would send Kendrick’s papers and accounts of the Washington when he returned.

  Most important he noted, “The deeds of the Land purchased on the N.W. Coast, are in my possession. I shall leave them here to be forwarded by the first vessel of the season to Boston. If you know these lands as well as I do, you would not be very anxious about the fate of them.”

  Although Kendrick had written to Barrell in March 1792 that the deeds had been registered with the American consul at Macao (a task that would most likely have been entrusted to Howell as clerk), the deeds had not been registered. It was a curious game Howell was playing. He would send the Washington to Hawaii and the Northwest Coast in 1796 under a British captain and crew, apparently to collect the furs Kendrick had purchased in advance, and then he would continue to evade Barrell.

  THE FIRST WORD of John Kendrick’s death arrived at Boston on the Jefferson, which entered port on Monday, July 27, 1795, 168 days from China. The city was in an uproar over revelations of the details of John Jay’s treaty with Britain. In exchange for neutrality and peace, Jay had sacrificed principles of open ports and free trade that had been advocated by Jefferson and other founding fathers since 1776. Equally onerous, Jay had also failed to win a ban on impressment of American sailors. Riots broke out in Boston and in New York. Up and down the coast, seaports were feverish with denunciations. At a time when Britain was wracked by internal crises and losing the war with France, Jay was seen as foolishly acquiescing to England’s desired dominance on the seas. Jay had acted on the instructions of Alexander Hamilton, and the treaty had won American trade in British ports, but only for vessels of less than seventy tons (smaller than the Lady Washington). Secretary of State Edmund Randolph, who had been appointed after Thomas Jefferson, was dismayed by the treaty and gave up his post after being caught criticizing Washington’s administration.

  Those who defended the agreement, including Washington and John Adams, believed that it was the best the United States could do given the circumstances. At least for a brief time they saw it allowing a period of growth in which America could fatten on the follies of the old kingdoms. It was the price to keep America from being drawn into the spreading European conflict.

  JOHN KENDRICK’S DEATH was a faint footnote to all the uproar that was occurring. A brief article appeared in Boston’s Columbian Centinel on August 5: “Capt. Kendrick, formerly of this State, we learn, was some time since killed at Owyhee, in the Pacific Ocean, by a salute, by accident. Mr. Howell, has conducted the vessel he was in to China.” The article was reprinted in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other cities.

  SOUTH OF BOSTON, in the sleepy village of Wareham, the first haying was done. Across the broad marsh northeast of the Kendrick house, the tips of the mar
sh grass were just starting to yellow. Joseph Kendrick had turned sixteen a few weeks earlier, Alfred was seventeen, and Benjamin, at nineteen, was most likely at sea. Little Hanna, now fourteen, was her mother’s companion. She would have faced the disastrous news with her. Who delivered it is unknown. If it had been difficult for Kendrick’s crew to believe, here it was even more so under the double blow that Solomon too was dead, perished with ten others on the Resolution. The loss of a husband or son alone, even for a woman who had grown up among seafarers and accepted fate and her religion’s sense of predestination, would have been hardly bearable. Now both of them were gone, and the longed-for recovery of her husband’s reputation, or even a modest homecoming, would be denied.

  Juan Kendrick resigned from the Spanish navy and returned home when he learned of his father’s death. Unanswered questions about his father and William Brown, the fate of the deeds to the vast tract of coast, and Solomon’s death must have haunted the family. In August 1798, Juan signed on as supercargo for the Eliza, which was headed for the Northwest. The captain was James Rowan, the Washington‘s former first mate, and one of the officers was Samuel Burling, the brother of one of Solomon’s murdered crewmates. Shortly after arriving on the coast, they hunted down the chiefs responsible for the massacre of Solomon and the Resolution’s crew. Juan Kendrick also sought Francisco Marin at Hawaii, and undoubtedly looked for John Howell at Macao. He found no easy answers about his father. The former English clergyman had disappeared with the Washington‘s papers and Kendrick’s deeds.

  At Macao, Howell had managed in a very short time to earn a reputation for questionable business dealings. After the Washington returned from her 1796 voyage to the Northwest and the cargo was sold, Howell made a hasty departure from China for the Philippines in 1797. In a July monsoon, he grounded the Lady Washington on Luzon’s Cagayan River bar and abandoned her. In an ending similar to Kendrick’s barely noted demise, the hulk was later driven up the river on a flood tide, where she was stripped of anything of use and her New England oak ribs and planks slowly rotted into the mud.

  In May 1798, in response to a letter from Barrell, Howell tried to hold off his inquiries with a “sketch” of an accounting. He was living in Manilla and said that he had left his papers in China. He was “in daily expectation” of them “and among them your deeds of the lands on the N.W. Coast.” A year earlier he had assured Barrell that the deeds were registered at Macao and that triplicates had been made and he would forward the originals. He promised once again to transmit the deeds and documents. They were never received or found at Macao.

  EVERYTHING SEEMED SO UNFINISHED. With his ships’ logs and deeds missing, and his debts left unpaid, Kendrick’s accomplishments on the Pacific coast and in the Sandwich Islands seemed to vanish. Unlike James Cook, or Vancouver, or a number of American captains, there was no journal that told of his seven-year odyssey. His story was scattered in letters and in logs and journals of other ships, and his reputation remained under a cloud stirred up by Robert Gray. But legends do not die as easily as those who make them, and much more lay in Kendrick’s and the Lady Washington’s wake. The world needed to catch up. And as in life, Kendrick persevered.

  His journey would become a seminal event following the American Revolution. The pioneering captain Amasa Delano, who circumnavigated the globe three times, would later say, “Capt. Kendrick was the first American that burst forth into the world and traversed those distant regions which were before but little known to the inhabitants of this part of the globe …” Kendrick taught others how to navigate those seas and led the American leap into the Pacific. William Sturgis, a prominent shipmaster who took part in the maritime surge into the Pacific in the early nineteenth century, called Kendrick’s expedition “one of the boldest and most remarkable commercial enterprises ever undertaken from this Country.” As significant as his pioneering at sea, the events Kendrick and his men helped to ignite in the Nootka Crisis caused a shift in the balance of world powers. In the view of American historian Fredrick Jackson Turner, this crisis was as important as any major battle in determining the fate of the American West and the future of the Pacific region and Asia. As the first international challenge for President Washington, the crisis also established the key American policy of neutrality in European conflicts.

  All of this had great significance for the young nation. As war with Britain heated up again in the years after Kendrick’s death, and the fate of the Oregon Country and the American West was contested, presidents Madison, Monroe, and Adams would turn to Kendrick’s expedition, and the legacy of an American presence he left behind would take on increased meaning. He did not gain the glory or wealth he sought when they set out on that early October morning from Boston, but surviving as long as he did, he achieved something more. Kendrick’s American odyssey in the Pacific shaped world events and set the stage for the next era—and through the gateway he opened others were coming.

  EPILOGUE

  Legacy for a New Nation

  IN JANUARY 1803, President Thomas Jefferson won an appropriation from Congress for a secret overland expedition. British trading posts were being established westward across Canada as Alexander Mackenzie had recommended a decade earlier. American trade had to be established deep in the frontier to counter British outposts and claims. Jefferson’s secret “Corps of Discovery” was to be led by his private secretary, Meriwether Lewis, and Captain William Clark, the younger brother of George Rogers Clark, whom Jefferson had asked to take an expedition up the Missouri in 1783. They were to explore and describe the western lands, establish trade relations with the tribes, and find a passage that would offer the most direct route to the Pacific.

  In a story that has become a touchstone of American history, Lewis and Clark set out from Saint Louis on May 14, 1804, on an arduous trek of thirty-five hundred miles up the Missouri River to its headwaters and over the Rocky Mountains. In a breathtaking moment on the morning of November 7, 1805, from a high bank of the Columbia River as the fog cleared, they caught sight of what they believed to be the blue Pacific Ocean.

  Seventeen years after Kendrick and his expedition had wintered over at Nootka in 1788, the Corps of Discovery constructed their crude Fort Clatsop near the mouth of the Columbia River to wait out the snows and perhaps encounter one of the trading ships that came to the coast. The signs of American traders were broadly evident in the cast-off sailor’s clothing, blankets, guns, and speech of the Clatsop and Chinook people.

  From an old chief, Clark compiled a list of the captains and vessels “who visit this part of the coast for the purpose of trade.” Most of them were Boston ships, and the schooner “Washilton” was noted to be a favorite. How much Lewis and Clark knew of Kendrick’s expedition is uncertain, but its legacy was all around them, including the name of the river on which they camped. On the journey homeward, enthralled with what they had found and seeking a strategy that could secure this vast region, Lewis laid out a plan similar to what Joseph Barrell had envisioned and Kendrick had sacrificed so much trying to achieve.

  On his arrival at Saint Louis in September 1806, Lewis immediately sent a letter to President Jefferson concluding that the United States should develop an outpost on the Columbia River that would draw furs from across the continent to ship to Canton. The nation would “shortly derive the benefits of a most lucrative trade from this source, and … in the course of ten or twelve years a tour across the Continent by the rout mentioned will be undertaken by individuals with as little concern as a voyage across the Atlantic is at present.”

  Jefferson was enthusiastic. In the dozen years since Kendrick had sent his deeds to the State Department, much had changed. Amid the hotly shifting politics of Europe, Spain had lost the vast Louisiana Territory to France. And in need of funds for war, and to keep the region from the British, Napoleon had recently sold the territory to the United

  States. The immense tract, reaching from the Mississippi River to the hills of eastern Idaho, doubled the siz
e of the nation overnight. Some in Congress believed that under old Spanish claims, the western border of the United States now extended as far as the Pacific. It would take another generation for overland migration to begin in the region, but an American maritime surge westward was already under way.

  ALONG THE NORTHWEST COAST after Kendrick’s death, “Boston men” came to dominate the fur trade, often gathering at Safe Harbor Retreat at Mawina. In 1800, there were eight American traders and one British ship on the coast. In 1801, twenty American and three British ships. Then, between 1802 and 1812, a total of 105 annual voyages to the coast were made by Americans. During the same period, the British made only five annual trading voyages.

  At the same time, American whalers were streaming into the South Pacific. In 1791, five vessels from Nantucket and one from New Bedford came around Cape Horn to hunt whales in the “South Sea.” As the number of ships increased over time, they would push their way northward, making Honolulu their primary port for supplies, repairs, and freewheeling shore leave. By 1823, as many as forty ships, most of them American, would also sit at anchor on a single day in the harbor where Kendrick died. Boston ships would also come to dominate the islands’ lucrative sandalwood trade, which was managed by Francisco Marin for Kamehameha.

  America’s ambitious push westward would again incense Britain. In 1810, nearly twenty years after John Kendrick purchased his vast tract of land, the Winship family of Boston attempted to establish an outpost at the mouth of the Columbia River and failed due to native hostility. The following year, John Jacob Astor established the first American outpost on the banks of the Columbia at Astoria. In the War of 1812, British ships were sent to destroy any American property on the Pacific and forced Astor’s outpost to be turned over to the Hudson’s Bay Company.