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Astoria; Or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains

by Washington Irving · English · Gutenberg #1371 · 966,008 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Astoria; Or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains

Author: Washington Irving


        
Release date: February 19, 2006 [eBook #1371]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

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ASTORIA;

OR, ANECDOTES OF AN ENTERPRISE BEYOND THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS


By Washington Irving




AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION


IN THE COURSE of occasional visits to Canada many years since, I became
intimately acquainted with some of the principal partners of the
great Northwest Fur Company, who at that time lived in genial style
at Montreal, and kept almost open house for the stranger. At their
hospitable boards I occasionally met with partners, and clerks, and
hardy fur traders from the interior posts; men who had passed years
remote from civilized society, among distant and savage tribes, and
who had wonders to recount of their wide and wild peregrinations, their
hunting exploits, and their perilous adventures and hair-breadth escapes
among the Indians. I was at an age when imagination lends its coloring
to everything, and the stories of these Sinbads of the wilderness made
the life of a trapper and fur trader perfect romance to me. I even
meditated at one time a visit to the remote posts of the company in
the boats which annually ascended the lakes and rivers, being thereto
invited by one of the partners; and I have ever since regretted that I
was prevented by circumstances from carrying my intention into effect.
From those early impressions, the grand enterprise of the great fur
companies, and the hazardous errantry of their associates in the wild
parts of our vast continent, have always been themes of charmed
interest to me; and I have felt anxious to get at the details of their
adventurous expeditions among the savage tribes that peopled the depths
of the wilderness.

About two years ago, not long after my return from a tour upon the
prairies of the far West, I had a conversation with my friend, Mr.
John Jacob Astor, relative to that portion of our country, and to the
adventurous traders to Santa Fe and the Columbia. This led him to advert
to a great enterprise set on foot and conducted by him, between twenty
and thirty years since, having for its object to carry the fur trade
across the Rocky Mountains, and to sweep the shores of the Pacific.

Finding that I took an interest in the subject, he expressed a regret
that the true nature and extent of his enterprise and its national
character and importance had never been understood, and a wish that I
would undertake to give an account of it. The suggestion struck upon the
chord of early associations already vibrating in my mind. It occurred
to me that a work of this kind might comprise a variety of those curious
details, so interesting to me, illustrative of the fur trade; of its
remote and adventurous enterprises, and of the various people, and
tribes, and castes, and characters, civilized and savage, affected by
its operations. The journals, and letters, also, of the adventurers by
sea and land employed by Mr. Astor in his comprehensive project, might
throw light upon portions of our country quite out of the track of
ordinary travel, and as yet but little known. I therefore felt disposed
to undertake the task, provided documents of sufficient extent and
minuteness could be furnished to me. All the papers relative to the
enterprise were accordingly submitted to my inspection. Among them were
journals and letters narrating expeditions by sea, and journeys to and
fro across the Rocky Mountains by routes before untravelled, together
with documents illustrative of savage and colonial life on the borders
of the Pacific. With such material in hand, I undertook the work.
The trouble of rummaging among business papers, and of collecting and
collating facts from amidst tedious and commonplace details, was spared
me by my nephew, Pierre M. Irving, who acted as my pioneer, and to whom
I am greatly indebted for smoothing my path and lightening my labors.

As the journals, on which I chiefly depended, had been kept by men of
business, intent upon the main object of the enterprise, and but little
versed in science, or curious about matters not immediately bearing upon
their interest, and as they were written often in moments of fatigue
or hurry, amid the inconveniences of wild encampments, they were
often meagre in their details, furnishing hints to provoke rather
than narratives to satisfy inquiry. I have, therefore, availed myself
occasionally of collateral lights supplied by the published journals of
other travellers who have visited the scenes described: such as Messrs.
Lewis and Clarke, Bradbury, Breckenridge, Long, Franchere, and Ross Cox,
and make a general acknowledgment of aid received from these quarters.

The work I here present to the public is necessarily of a rambling
and somewhat disjointed nature, comprising various expeditions and
adventures by land and sea. The facts, however, will prove to be linked
and banded together by one grand scheme, devised and conducted by
a master spirit; one set of characters, also, continues throughout,
appearing occasionally, though sometimes at long intervals, and the
whole enterprise winds up by a regular catastrophe; so that the work,
without any labored attempt at artificial construction, actually
possesses much of that unity so much sought after in works of fiction,
and considered so important to the interest of every history.

WASHINGTON IRVING




CHAPTER I.

     Objects of American Enterprise.--Gold Hunting and Fur
     Trading.--Their Effect on Colonization.--Early French Canadian
     Settlers.--Ottawa and Huron Hunters.--An Indian Trading Camp.
     Coureurs Des Bois, or Rangers of the Woods.--Their Roaming
     Life.--Their Revels and Excesses.--Licensed Traders.
     Missionaries.--Trading Posts.--Primitive French Canadian
     Merchant.--His Establishment and Dependents.--British Canadian
     Fur Merchant.--Origin of the Northwest Company.--Its
     Constitution.--Its Internal Trade.--A Candidate for the
     Company.--Privations in the Wilderness.--Northwest Clerks.
     Northwest Partners.--Northwest Nabobs.--Feudal Notions in the
     Forests.--The Lords of the Lakes.--Fort William.--Its
     Parliamentary Hall and Banqueting Room.--Wassailing in the
     Wilderness.

TWO leading objects of commercial gain have given birth to wide and
daring enterprise in the early history of the Americas; the precious
metals of the South, and the rich peltries of the North. While the fiery
and magnificent Spaniard, inflamed with the mania for gold, has extended
his discoveries and conquests over those brilliant countries scorched by
the ardent sun of the tropics, the adroit and buoyant Frenchman, and the
cool and calculating Briton, have pursued the less splendid, but no
less lucrative, traffic in furs amidst the hyperborean regions of the
Canadas, until they have advanced even within the Arctic Circle.

These two pursuits have thus in a manner been the pioneers and
precursors of civilization. Without pausing on the borders, they have
penetrated at once, in defiance of difficulties and dangers, to the
heart of savage countries: laying open the hidden secrets of the
wilderness; leading the way to remote regions of beauty and fertility
that might have remained unexplored for ages, and beckoning after them
the slow and pausing steps of agriculture and civilization.

It was the fur trade, in fact, which gave early sustenance and vitality
to the great Canadian provinces. Being destitute of the precious metals,
at that time the leading objects of American enterprise, they were long
neglected by the parent country. The French adventurers, however, who
had settled on the banks of the St. Lawrence, soon found that in the
rich peltries of the interior, they had sources of wealth that
might almost rival the mines of Mexico and Peru. The Indians, as yet
unacquainted with the artificial value given to some descriptions of
furs, in civilized life, brought quantities of the most precious kinds
and bartered them away for European trinkets and cheap commodities.
Immense profits were thus made by the early traders, and the traffic was
pursued with avidity.

As the valuable furs soon became scarce in the neighborhood of the
settlements, the Indians of the vicinity were stimulated to take a wider
range in their hunting expeditions; they were generally accompanied on
these expeditions by some of the traders or their dependents, who
shared in the toils and perils of the chase, and at the same time made
themselves acquainted with the best hunting and trapping grounds, and
with the remote tribes, whom they encouraged to bring their peltries
to the settlements. In this way the trade augmented, and was drawn from
remote quarters to Montreal. Every now and then a large body of Ottawas,
Hurons, and other tribes who hunted the countries bordering on the great
lakes, would come down in a squadron of light canoes, laden with beaver
skins, and other spoils of their year’s hunting. The canoes would be
unladen, taken on shore, and their contents disposed in order. A camp of
birch bark would be pitched outside of the town, and a kind of primitive
fair opened with that grave ceremonial so dear to the Indians. An
audience would be demanded of the governor-general, who would hold
the conference with becoming state, seated in an elbow-chair, with the
Indians ranged in semicircles before him, seated on the ground,
and silently smoking their pipes. Speeches would be made, presents
exchanged, and the audience would break up in universal good humor.

Now would ensue a brisk traffic with the merchants, and all Montreal
would be alive with naked Indians running from shop to shop, bargaining
for arms, kettles, knives, axes, blankets, bright-colored cloths, and
other articles of use or fancy; upon all which, says an old French
writer, the merchants were sure to clear at least two hundred per cent.
There was no money used in this traffic, and, after a time, all payment
in spirituous liquors was prohibited, in consequence of the frantic and
frightful excesses and bloody brawls which they were apt to occasion.

Their wants and caprices being supplied, they would take leave of the
governor, strike their tents, launch their canoes, and ply their way up
the Ottawa to the lakes.

A new and anomalous class of men gradually grew out of this trade. These
were called coureurs des bois, rangers of the woods; originally men
who had accompanied the Indians in their hunting expeditions, and made
themselves acquainted with remote tracts and tribes; and who now became,
as it were, peddlers of the wilderness. These men would set out from
Montreal with canoes well stocked with goods, with arms and ammunition,
and would make their way up the mazy and wandering rivers that interlace
the vast forests of the Canadas, coasting the most remote lakes, and
creating new wants and habitudes among the natives. Sometimes they
sojourned for months among them, assimilating to their tastes and habits
with the happy facility of Frenchmen, adopting in some degree the Indian
dress, and not unfrequently taking to themselves Indian wives.

Twelve, fifteen, eighteen months would often elapse without any tidings
of them, when they would come sweeping their way down the Ottawa in full
glee, their canoes laden down with packs of beaver skins. Now came their
turn for revelry and extravagance. “You would be amazed,” says an old
writer already quoted, “if you saw how lewd these peddlers are when they
return; how they feast and game, and how prodigal they are, not only in
their clothes, but upon their sweethearts. Such of them as are married
have the wisdom to retire to their own houses; but the bachelors act
just as an East Indiaman and pirates are wont to do; for they lavish,
eat, drink, and play all away as long as the goods hold out; and when
these are gone, they even sell their embroidery, their lace, and their
clothes. This done, they are forced upon a new voyage for subsistence.”

Many of these coureurs des bois became so accustomed to the Indian mode
of living, and the perfect freedom of the wilderness, that they lost
relish for civilization, and identified themselves with the savages
among whom they dwelt, or could only be distinguished from them by
superior licentiousness. Their conduct and example gradually corrupted
the natives, and impeded the works of the Catholic missionaries, who
were at this time prosecuting their pious labors in the wilds of Canada.

To check these abuses, and to protect the fur trade from various
irregularities practiced by these loose adventurers, an order was issued
by the French government prohibiting all persons, on pain of death, from
trading into the interior of the country without a license.

These licenses were granted in writing by the governor-general, and
at first were given only to persons of respectability; to gentlemen of
broken fortunes; to old officers of the army who had families to provide
for; or to their widows. Each license permitted the fitting out of
two large canoes with merchandise for the lakes, and no more than
twenty-five licenses were to be issued in one year. By degrees, however,
private licenses were also granted, and the number rapidly increased.
Those who did not choose to fit out the expeditions themselves, were
permitted to sell them to the merchants; these employed the coureurs des
bois, or rangers of the woods, to undertake the long voyages on shares,
and thus the abuses of the old system were revived and continued.

The pious missionaries employed by the Roman Catholic Church to convert
the Indians, did everything in their power to counteract the profligacy
caused and propagated by these men in the heart of the wilderness. The
Catholic chapel might often be seen planted beside the trading house,
and its spire surmounted by a cross, towering from the midst of an
Indian village, on the banks of a river or a lake. The missions had
often a beneficial effect on the simple sons of the forest, but had
little power over the renegades from civilization.

At length it was found necessary to establish fortified posts at the
confluence of the rivers and the lakes for the protection of the trade,
and the restraint of these profligates of the wilderness. The most
important of these was at Michilimackinac, situated at the strait of the
same name, which connects Lakes Huron and Michigan. It became the great
interior mart and place of deposit, and some of the regular merchants
who prosecuted the trade in person, under their licenses, formed
establishments here. This, too, was a rendezvous for the rangers of the
woods, as well those who came up with goods from Montreal as those who
returned with peltries from the interior. Here new expeditions
were fitted out and took their departure for Lake Michigan and the
Mississippi; Lake Superior and the Northwest; and here the peltries
brought in return were embarked for Montreal.

The French merchant at his trading post, in these primitive days of
Canada, was a kind of commercial patriarch. With the lax habits and easy
familiarity of his race, he had a little world of self-indulgence and
misrule around him. He had his clerks, canoe men, and retainers of
all kinds, who lived with him on terms of perfect sociability, always
calling him by his Christian name; he had his harem of Indian beauties,
and his troop of halfbreed children; nor was there ever wanting a
louting train of Indians, hanging about the establishment, eating and
drinking at his expense in the intervals of their hunting expeditions.

The Canadian traders, for a long time, had troublesome competitors in
the British merchants of New York, who inveigled the Indian hunters
and the coureurs des bois to their posts, and traded with them on more
favorable terms. A still more formidable opposition was organized in
the Hudson’s Bay Company, chartered by Charles II., in 1670, with the
exclusive privilege of establishing trading houses on the shores of that
bay and its tributary rivers; a privilege which they have maintained to
the present day. Between this British company and the French merchants
of Canada, feuds and contests arose about alleged infringements of
territorial limits, and acts of violence and bloodshed occurred between
their agents.

In 1762, the French lost possession of Canada, and the trade fell
principally into the hands of British subjects. For a time, however, it
shrunk within narrow limits. The old coureurs des bois were broken up
and dispersed, or, where they could be met with, were slow to accustom
themselves to the habits and manners of their British employers. They
missed the freedom, indulgence, and familiarity of the old French
trading houses, and did not relish the sober exactness, reserve, and
method of the new-comers. The British traders, too, were ignorant of the
country, and distrustful of the natives. They had reason to be so. The
treacherous and bloody affairs of Detroit and Michilimackinac showed
them the lurking hostility cherished by the savages, who had too long
been taught by the French to regard them as enemies.

It was not until the year 1766, that the trade regained its old
channels; but it was then pursued with much avidity and emulation
by individual merchants, and soon transcended its former bounds.
Expeditions were fitted out by various persons from Montreal and
Michilimackinac, and rivalships and jealousies of course ensued. The
trade was injured by their artifices to outbid and undermine each other;
the Indians were debauched by the sale of spirituous liquors, which had
been prohibited under the French rule. Scenes of drunkeness, brutality,
and brawl were the consequence, in the Indian villages and around the
trading houses; while bloody feuds took place between rival trading
parties when they happened to encounter each other in the lawless depths
of the wilderness.

To put an end to these sordid and ruinous contentions, several of the
principal merchants of Montreal entered into a partnership in the winter
of 1783, which was augmented by amalgamation with a rival company in
1787. Thus was created the famous “Northwest Company,” which for a time
held a lordly sway over the wintry lakes and boundless forests of
the Canadas, almost equal to that of the East India Company over the
voluptuous climes and magnificent realms of the Orient.

The company consisted of twenty-three shareholders, or partners,
but held in its employ about two thousand persons as clerks, guides,
interpreters, and “voyageurs,” or boatmen. These were distributed at
various trading posts, established far and wide on the interior lakes
and rivers, at immense distances from each other, and in the heart of
trackless countries and savage tribes.

Several of the partners resided in Montreal and Quebec, to manage
the main concerns of the company. These were called agents, and were
personages of great weight and importance; the other partners took
their stations at the interior posts, where they remained throughout
the winter, to superintend the intercourse with the various tribes of
Indians. They were thence called wintering partners.

The goods destined for this wide and wandering traffic were put up at
the warehouses of the company in Montreal, and conveyed in batteaux, or
boats and canoes, up the river Attawa, or Ottowa, which falls into the
St. Lawrence near Montreal, and by other rivers and portages, to Lake
Nipising, Lake Huron, Lake Superior, and thence, by several chains of
great and small lakes, to Lake Winnipeg, Lake Athabasca, and the Great
Slave Lake. This singular and beautiful system of internal seas, which
renders an immense region of wilderness so accessible to the frail bark
of the Indian or the trader, was studded by the remote posts of the
company, where they carried on their traffic with the surrounding
tribes.

The company, as we have shown, was at first a spontaneous association of
merchants; but, after it had been regularly organized, admission into
it became extremely difficult. A candidate had to enter, as it were,
“before the mast,” to undergo a long probation, and to rise slowly by
his merits and services. He began, at an early age, as a clerk, and
served an apprenticeship of seven years, for which he received one
hundred pounds sterling, was maintained at the expense of the company,
and furnished with suitable clothing and equipments. His probation was
generally passed at the interior trading posts; removed for years from
civilized society, leading a life almost as wild and precarious as the
savages around him; exposed to the severities of a northern winter,
often suffering from a scarcity of food, and sometimes destitute for a
long time of both bread and salt. When his apprenticeship had expired,
he received a salary according to his deserts, varying from eighty to
one hundred and sixty pounds sterling, and was now eligible to the great
object of his ambition, a partnership in the company; though years might
yet elapse before he attained to that enviable station.

Most of the clerks were young men of good families, from the Highlands
of Scotland, characterized by the perseverance, thrift, and fidelity
of their country, and fitted by their native hardihood to encounter the
rigorous climate of the North, and to endure the trials and privations
of their lot; though it must not be concealed that the constitutions
of many of them became impaired by the hardships of the wilderness, and
their stomachs injured by occasional famishing, and especially by the
want of bread and salt. Now and then, at an interval of years, they were
permitted to come down on a visit to the establishment at Montreal, to
recruit their health, and to have a taste of civilized life; and these
were brilliant spots in their existence.

As to the principal partners, or agents, who resided in Montreal and
Quebec, they formed a kind of commercial aristocracy, living in
lordly and hospitable style. Their posts, and the pleasures, dangers,
adventures, and mishaps which they had shared together in their wild
wood life, had linked them heartily to each other, so that they formed
a convivial fraternity. Few travellers that have visited Canada some
thirty years since, in the days of the M’Tavishes, the M’Gillivrays, the
M’Kenzies, the Frobishers, and the other magnates of the Northwest,
when the company was in all its glory, but must remember the round of
feasting and revelry kept up among these hyperborean nabobs.

Sometimes one or two partners, recently from the interior posts, would
make their appearance in New York, in the course of a tour of pleasure
and curiosity. On these occasions there was a degree of magnificence of
the purse about them, and a peculiar propensity to expenditure at
the goldsmith’s and jeweler’s for rings, chains, brooches, necklaces,
jeweled watches, and other rich trinkets, partly for their own
wear, partly for presents to their female acquaintances; a gorgeous
prodigality, such as was often to be noticed in former times in Southern
planters and West India creoles, when flush with the profits of their
plantations.

To behold the Northwest Company in all its state and grandeur, however,
it was necessary to witness an annual gathering at the great interior
place of conference established at Fort William, near what is called
the Grand Portage, on Lake Superior. Here two or three of the leading
partners from Montreal proceeded once a year to meet the partners from
the various trading posts of the wilderness, to discuss the affairs
of the company during the preceding year, and to arrange plans for the
future.

On these occasions might be seen the change since the unceremonious
times of the old French traders; now the aristocratic character of the
Briton shone forth magnificently, or rather the feudal spirit of the
Highlander. Every partner who had charge of an interior post, and a
score of retainers at his Command, felt like the chieftain of a Highland
clan, and was almost as important in the eyes of his dependents as of
himself. To him a visit to the grand conference at Fort William was
a most important event, and he repaired there as to a meeting of
parliament.

The partners from Montreal, however, were the lords of the ascendant;
coming from the midst of luxurious and ostentatious life, they quite
eclipsed their compeers from the woods, whose forms and faces had
been battered and hardened by hard living and hard service, and whose
garments and equipments were all the worse for wear. Indeed, the
partners from below considered the whole dignity of the company as
represented in their persons, and conducted themselves in suitable
style. They ascended the rivers in great state, like sovereigns making
a progress: or rather like Highland chieftains navigating their subject
lakes. They were wrapped in rich furs, their huge canoes freighted
with every convenience and luxury, and manned by Canadian voyageurs,
as obedient as Highland clansmen. They carried up with them cooks and
bakers, together with delicacies of every kind, and abundance of choice
wines for the banquets which attended this great convocation. Happy were
they, too, if they could meet with some distinguished stranger; above
all, some titled member of the British nobility, to accompany them on
this stately occasion, and grace their high solemnities.

Fort William, the scene of this important annual meeting, was a
considerable village on the banks of Lake Superior. Here, in an immense
wooden building, was the great council hall, as also the banqueting
chamber, decorated with Indian arms and accoutrements, and the trophies
of the fur trade. The house swarmed at this time with traders and
voyageurs, some from Montreal, bound to the interior posts; some from
the interior posts, bound to Montreal. The councils were held in great
state, for every member felt as if sitting in parliament, and every
retainer and dependent looked up to the assemblage with awe, as to the
House of Lords. There was a vast deal of solemn deliberation, and hard
Scottish reasoning, with an occasional swell of pompous declamation.

These grave and weighty councils were alternated by huge feasts and
revels, like some of the old feasts described in Highland castles. The
tables in the great banqueting room groaned under the weight of game
of all kinds; of venison from the woods, and fish from the lakes, with
hunters’ delicacies, such as buffalos’ tongues, and beavers’ tails,
and various luxuries from Montreal, all served up by experienced cooks
brought for the purpose. There was no stint of generous wine, for it was
a hard-drinking period, a time of loyal toasts, and bacchanalian songs,
and brimming bumpers.

While the chiefs thus revelled in hall, and made the rafters resound
with bursts of loyalty and old Scottish songs, chanted in voices cracked
and sharpened by the northern blast, their merriment was echoed
and prolonged by a mongrel legion of retainers, Canadian voyageurs,
half-breeds, Indian hunters, and vagabond hangers-on who feasted
sumptuously without on the crumbs that fell from their table, and made
the welkin ring with old French ditties, mingled with Indian yelps and
yellings.

Such was the Northwest Company in its powerful and prosperous days, when
it held a kind of feudal sway over a vast domain of lake and forest. We
are dwelling too long, perhaps, upon these individual pictures, endeared
to us by the associations of early life, when, as yet a stripling youth,
we have sat at the hospitable boards of the “mighty Northwesters,”
 the lords of the ascendant at Montreal, and gazed with wondering
and inexperienced eye at the baronial wassailing, and listened with
astonished ear to their tales of hardship and adventures. It is one
object of our task, however, to present scenes of the rough life of the
wilderness, and we are tempted to fix these few memorials of a transient
state of things fast passing into oblivion; for the feudal state of Fort
William is at an end, its council chamber is silent and deserted; its
banquet hall no longer echoes to the burst of loyalty, or the “auld
world” ditty; the lords of the lakes and forests have passed away; and
the hospitable magnates of Montreal where are they?



CHAPTER II.

     Rise of the Mackinaw Company.--Attempt of the American
     Government to Counteract Foreign Influence Over the Indian
     Tribes.--John Jacob Astor.--His Birth-Place.--His Arrival in
     the United States.--What First Turned His Attention to the
     Fur Trade.--His Character, Enterprises, and Success.--His
     Communications With the American Government.--Origin of the
     American Fur Company

THE success of the Northwest Company stimulated further enterprise in
this opening and apparently boundless field of profit. The traffic of
that company lay principally in the high northern latitudes, while
there were immense regions to the south and west, known to abound with
valuable peltries; but which, as yet, had been but little explored by
the fur trader. A new association of British merchants was therefore
formed, to prosecute the trade in this direction. The chief factory was
established at the old emporium of Michilimackinac, from which place the
association took its name, and was commonly called the Mackinaw Company.

While the Northwesters continued to push their enterprises into the
hyperborean regions from their stronghold at Fort William, and to hold
almost sovereign sway over the tribes of the upper lakes and rivers,
the Mackinaw Company sent forth their light perogues and barks, by Green
Bay, Fox River, and the Wisconsin, to that areas artery of the West, the
Mississippi; and down that stream to all its tributary rivers. In this
way they hoped soon to monopolize the trade with all the tribes on
the southern and western waters, and of those vast tracts comprised in
ancient Louisiana.

The government of the United States began to view with a wary eye the
growing influence thus acquired by combinations of foreigners, over
the aboriginal tribes inhabiting its territories, and endeavored to
counteract it. For this purpose, as early as 1796, the government sent
out agents to establish rival trading houses on the frontier, so as to
supply the wants of the Indians, to link their interests and feelings
with those of the people of the United States, and to divert this
important branch of trade into national channels.

The expedition, however, was unsuccessful, as most commercial expedients
are prone to be, where the dull patronage of government is counted
upon to outvie the keen activity of private enterprise. What government
failed to effect, however, with all its patronage and all its agents,
was at length brought about by the enterprise and perseverance of a
single merchant, one of its adopted citizens; and this brings us to
speak of the individual whose enterprise is the especial subject of
the following pages; a man whose name and character are worthy of being
enrolled in the history of commerce, as illustrating its noblest aims
and soundest maxims. A few brief anecdotes of his early life, and of the
circumstances which first determined him to the branch of commerce of
which we are treating, cannot be but interesting.

John Jacob Astor, the individual in question, was born in the honest
little German village of Waldorf, near Heidelberg, on the banks of the
Rhine. He was brought up in the simplicity of rural life, but, while
yet a mere stripling, left his home, and launched himself amid the
busy scenes of London, having had, from his very boyhood, a singular
presentiment that he would ultimately arrive at great fortune.

At the close of the American Revolution he was still in London, and
scarce on the threshold of active life. An elder brother had been for
some few years resident in the United States, and Mr. Astor determined
to follow him, and to seek his fortunes in the rising country. Investing
a small sum which he had amassed since leaving his native village, in
merchandise suited to the American market, he embarked, in the month
of November, 1783, in a ship bound to Baltimore, and arrived in Hampton
Roads in the month of January. The winter was extremely severe, and the
ship, with many others, was detained by the ice in and about Chesapeake
Bay for nearly three months.

During this period, the passengers of the various ships used
occasionally to go on shore, and mingle sociably together. In this
way Mr. Astor became acquainted with a countryman of his, a furrier by
trade. Having had a previous impression that this might be a lucrative
trade in the New World, he made many inquiries of his new acquaintance
on the subject, who cheerfully gave him all the information in his power
as to the quality and value of different furs, and the mode of carrying
on the traffic. He subsequently accompanied him to New York, and, by his
advice, Mr. Astor was induced to invest the proceeds of his merchandise
in furs. With these he sailed from New York to London in 1784, disposed
of them advantageously, made himself further acquainted with the course
of the trade, and returned the same year to New York, with a view to
settle in the United States.

He now devoted himself to the branch of commerce with which he had thus
casually been made acquainted. He began his career, of course, on the
narrowest scale; but he brought to the task a persevering industry,
rigid economy, and strict integrity. To these were added an aspiring
spirit that always looked upwards; a genius bold, fertile, and
expansive; a sagacity quick to grasp and convert every circumstance to
its advantage, and a singular and never wavering confidence of signal
success.

As yet, trade in peltries was not organized in the United States, and
could not be said to form a regular line of business. Furs and skins
were casually collected by the country traders in their dealings with
the Indians or the white hunters, but the main supply was derived
from Canada. As Mr. Astor’s means increased, he made annual visits to
Montreal, where he purchased furs from the houses at that place engaged
in the trade. These he shipped from Canada to London, no direct trade
being allowed from that colony to any but the mother country.

In 1794 or ‘95, a treaty with Great Britain removed the restrictions
imposed upon the trade with the colonies, and opened a direct commercial
intercourse between Canada and the United States. Mr. Astor was in
London at the time, and immediately made a contract with the agents of
the Northwest Company for furs. He was now enabled to import them from
Montreal into the United States for the home supply, and to be shipped
thence to different parts of Europe, as well as to China, which has ever
been the best market for the richest and finest kinds of peltry.

The treaty in question provided, likewise, that the military posts
occupied by the British within the territorial limits of the United
States, should be surrendered. Accordingly, Oswego, Niagara, Detroit,
Michilimackinac, and other posts on the American side of the lakes, were
given up. An opening was thus made for the American merchant to trade on
the confines of Canada, and within the territories of the United States.
After an interval of some years, about 1807, Mr. Astor embarked in this
trade on his own account. His capital and resources had by this time
greatly augmented, and he had risen from small beginnings to take his
place among the first merchants and financiers of the country. His
genius had ever been in advance of his circumstances, prompting him
to new and wide fields of enterprise beyond the scope of ordinary
merchants. With all his enterprise and resources however, he soon found
the power and influence of the Michilimackinac (or Mackinaw) Company too
great for him, having engrossed most of the trade within the American
borders.

A plan had to be devised to enable him to enter into successful
competition. He was aware of the wish of the American government,
already stated, that the fur trade within its boundaries should be in
the hands of American citizens, and of the ineffectual measures it had
taken to accomplish that object. He now offered, if aided and protected
by government, to turn the whole of that trade into American channels.
He was invited to unfold his plans to government, and they were warmly
approved, though the executive could give no direct aid.

Thus countenanced, however, he obtained, in 1809, a charter from the
legislature of the State of New York, incorporating a company under the
name of “The American Fur Company,” with a capital of one million
of dollars, with the privilege of increasing it to two millions. The
capital was furnished by himself he, in fact, constituted the company;
for, though he had a board of directors, they were merely nominal; the
whole business was conducted on his plans and with his resources, but
he preferred to do so under the imposing and formidable aspect of a
corporation, rather than in his individual name, and his policy was
sagacious and effective.

As the Mackinaw Company still continued its rivalry, and as the fur
trade would not advantageously admit of competition, he made a new
arrangement in 1811, by which, in conjunction with certain partners of
the Northwest Company, and other persons engaged in the fur trade, he
bought out the Mackinaw Company, and merged that and the American Fur
Company into a new association, to be called the “Southwest Company.”
 This he likewise did with the privity and approbation of the American
government.

By this arrangement Mr. Astor became proprietor of one half of the
Indian establishments and goods which the Mackinaw Company had within
the territory of the Indian country in the United States, and it was
understood that the whole was to be surrendered into his hands at the
expiration of five years, on condition that the American Company would
not trade within the British dominions.

Unluckily, the war which broke out in 1812 between Great Britain and
the United States suspended the association; and, after the war, it was
entirely dissolved; Congress having passed a law prohibiting the British
fur traders from prosecuting their enterprises within the territories of
the United States.




CHAPTER III.

     Fur Trade in the Pacific--American Coasting Voyages--Russian
     Enterprises.--Discovery of the Columbia River.--Carver’s
     Project to Found a Settlement There.--Mackenzie’s
     Expedition.--Lewis and Clarke’s Journey Across the Rocky
     Mountains--Mr. Astor’s Grand Commercial Scheme.--His
     Correspondence on the Subject With Mr. Jefferson.--His
     Negotiations With the Northwest Company.--His Steps to Carry
     His Scheme Into Effect.

WHILE the various companies we have noticed were pushing their
enterprises far and wide in the wilds of Canada, and along the course of
the great western waters, other adventurers, intent on the same objects,
were traversing the watery wastes of the Pacific and skirting the
northwest coast of America. The last voyage of that renowned but
unfortunate discoverer, Captain Cook, had made known the vast quantities
of the sea-otter to be found along that coast, and the immense prices to
be obtained for its fur in China. It was as if a new gold coast had
been discovered. Individuals from various countries dashed into this
lucrative traffic, so that in the year 1792, there were twenty-one
vessels under different flags, plying along the coast and trading with
the natives. The greater part of them were American, and owned by Boston
merchants. They generally remained on the coast and about the adjacent
seas, for two years, carrying on as wandering and adventurous a commerce
on the water as did the traders and trappers on land. Their trade
extended along the whole coast from California to the high northern
latitudes. They would run in near shore, anchor, and wait for the
natives to come off in their canoes with peltries. The trade exhausted
at one place, they would up anchor and off to another. In this way they
would consume the summer, and when autumn came on, would run down to the
Sandwich Islands and winter in some friendly and plentiful harbor. In
the following year they would resume their summer trade, commencing at
California and proceeding north: and, having in the course of the two
seasons collected a sufficient cargo of peltries, would make the best
of their way to China. Here they would sell their furs, take in teas,
nankeens, and other merchandise, and return to Boston, after an absence
of two or three years.

The people, however, who entered most extensively and effectively in the
fur trade of the Pacific, were the Russians. Instead of making casual
voyages, in transient ships, they established regular trading houses in
the high latitudes, along the northwest coast of America, and upon the
chain of the Aleutian Islands between Kamtschatka and the promontory of
Alaska.

To promote and protect these enterprises, a company was incorporated by
the Russian government with exclusive privileges, and a capital of two
hundred and sixty thousand pounds sterling; and the sovereignty of that
part of the American continent, along the coast of which the posts had
been established, was claimed by the Russian crown, on the plea that the
land had been discovered and occupied by its subjects.

As China was the grand mart for the furs collected in these quarters,
the Russians had the advantage over their competitors in the trade. The
latter had to take their peltries to Canton, which, however, was a mere
receiving mart, from whence they had to be distributed over the interior
of the empire and sent to the northern parts, where there was the chief
consumption. The Russians, on the contrary, carried their furs, by a
shorter voyage, directly to the northern parts of the Chinese empire;
thus being able to afford them in the market without the additional cost
of internal transportation.

We come now to the immediate field of operation of the great enterprise
we have undertaken to illustrate.

Among the American ships which traded along the northwest coast in 1792,
was the Columbia, Captain Gray, of Boston. In the course of her voyage
she discovered the mouth of a large river in lat. 46 19’ north. Entering
it with some difficulty, on account of sand-bars and breakers, she came
to anchor in a spacious bay. A boat was well manned, and sent on shore
to a village on the beach, but all the inhabitants fled excepting the
aged and infirm. The kind manner in which these were treated, and the
presents given them, gradually lured back the others, and a friendly
intercourse took place. They had never seen a ship or a white man. When
they had first descried the Columbia, they had supposed it a floating
island; then some monster of the deep; but when they saw the boat
putting for shore with human beings on board, they considered them
cannibals sent by the Great Spirit to ravage the country and devour the
inhabitants. Captain Gray did not ascend the river farther than the bay
in question, which continues to bear his name. After putting to sea, he
fell in with the celebrated discoverer, Vancouver, and informed him
of his discovery, furnished him with a chart which he had made of the
river. Vancouver visited the river, and his lieutenant, Broughton,
explored it by the aid of Captain Gray’s chart; ascending it upwards of
one hundred miles, until within view of a snowy mountain, to which he
gave the name of Mt. Hood, which it still retains.

The existence of this river, however, was known long before the visits
of Gray and Vancouver, but the information concerning it was vague and
indefinite, being gathered from the reports of Indians. It was spoken
of by travellers as the Oregon, and as the Great River of the West. A
Spanish ship is said to have been wrecked at the mouth, several of the
crew of which lived for some time among the natives. The Columbia,
however, is believed to be the first ship that made a regular discovery
and anchored within its waters, and it has since generally borne the
name of that vessel. As early as 1763, shortly after the acquisition of
the Canadas by Great Britain, Captain Jonathan Carver, who had been in
the British provincial army, projected a journey across the continent
between the forty-third and forty-sixth degrees of northern latitude
to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. His objects were to ascertain the
breadth of the continent at its broadest part, and to determine on some
place on the shores of the Pacific, where government might establish
a post to facilitate the discovery of a northwest passage, or a
communication between Hudson’s Bay and the Pacific Ocean. This place he
presumed would be somewhere about the Straits of Annian, at which point
he supposed the Oregon disembogued itself. It was his opinion, also,
that a settlement on this extremity of America would disclose new
sources of trade, promote many useful discoveries, and open a more
direct communication with China and the English settlements in the East
Indies, than that by the Cape of Good Hope or the Straits of Magellan. *
This enterprising and intrepid traveller was twice baffled in individual
efforts to accomplish this great journey. In 1774, he was joined in
the scheme by Richard Whitworth, a member of Parliament, and a man of
wealth. Their enterprise was projected on a broad and bold plan. They
were to take with them fifty or sixty men, artificers and mariners.
With these they were to make their way up one of the branches of the
Missouri, explore the mountains for the source of the Oregon, or River
of the West, and sail down that river to its supposed exit, near the
Straits of Annian. Here they were to erect a fort, and build the vessels
necessary to carry their discoveries by sea into effect. Their plan had
the sanction of the British government, and grants and other requisites
were nearly completed, when the breaking out of the American Revolution
once more defeated the undertaking. **

The expedition of Sir Alexander Mackenzie in 1793, across the continent
to the Pacific Ocean, which he reached in lat. 52 20’ 48”, again
suggested the possibility of linking together the trade of both sides of
the continent. In lat. 52 30’ he had descended a river for some distance
which flowed towards the south, and wag called by the natives Tacoutche
Tesse, and which he erroneously supposed to be the Columbia. It was
afterwards ascertained that it emptied itself in lat. 49 degrees,
whereas the mouth of the Columbia is about three degrees further south.

When Mackenzie some years subsequently published an account of his
expeditions, he suggested the policy of opening an intercourse between
the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and forming regular establishments
through the interior and at both extremes, as well as along the coasts
and islands. By this means, he observed, the entire command of the fur
trade of North America might be obtained from lat. 48 north to the pole,
excepting that portion held by the Russians, for as to the American
adventurers who had hitherto enjoyed the traffic along the northwest
coast, they would instantly disappear, he added, before a well regulated
trade.

A scheme of this kind, however, was too vast and hazardous for
individual enterprise; it could only be undertaken by a company under
the sanction and protection of a government; and as there might be a
clashing of claims between the Hudson’s Bay and Northwest Company, the
one holding by right of charter, the other by right of possession,
he proposed that the two comparties should coalesce in this great
undertaking. The long-cherished jealousies of these two companies,
however, were too deep and strong to allow them to listen to such
counsel.

In the meantime the attention of the American government was attracted
to the subject, and the memorable expedition under Messrs. Lewis and
Clarke fitted out. These gentlemen, in 1804, accomplished the enterprise
which had been projected by Carver and Whitworth in 1774. They
ascended the Missouri, passed through the stupendous gates of the Rocky
Mountains, hitherto unknown to white men; discovered and explored the
upper waters of the Columbia, and followed that river down to its
mouth, where their countryman, Gray, had anchored about twelve years
previously. Here they passed the winter, and returned across the
mountains in the following spring. The reports published by them of
their expedition demonstrated the practicability of establishing a line
of communication across the continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific
Ocean.

It was then that the idea presented itself to the mind of Mr. Astor, of
grasping with his individual hand this great enterprise, which for years
had been dubiously yet desirously contemplated by powerful associations
and maternal governments. For some time he revolved the idea in his
mind, gradually extending and maturing his plans as his means of
executing them augmented. The main feature of his scheme was to
establish a line of trading posts along the Missouri and the Columbia,
to the mouth of the latter, where was to be founded the chief trading
house or mart. Inferior posts would be established in the interior, and
on all the tributary streams of the Columbia, to trade with the Indians;
these posts would draw their supplies from the main establishment, and
bring to it the peltries they collected. Coasting craft would be
built and fitted out, also at the mouth of the Columbia, to trade, at
favorable seasons, all along the northwest coast, and return, with the
proceeds of their voyages, to this place of deposit. Thus all the Indian
trade, both of the interior and the coast, would converge to this point,
and thence derive its sustenance.

A ship was to be sent annually from New York to this main establishment
with reinforcements and supplies, and with merchandise suited to the
trade. It would take on board the furs collected during the preceding
year, carry them to Canton, invest the proceeds in the rich merchandise
of China, and return thus freighted to New York. As, in extending the
American trade along the coast to the northward, it might be brought
into the vicinity of the Russian Fur Company, and produce a hostile
rivalry, it was part of the plan of Mr. Astor to conciliate the
good-will of that company by the most amicable and beneficial
arrangements. The Russian establishment was chiefly dependent for its
supplies upon transient trading vessels from the United States. These
vessels, however, were often of more harm than advantage. Being owned
by private adventurers, or casual voyagers, who cared only for present
profit, and had no interest in the permanent prosperity of the trade,
they were reckless in their dealings with the natives, and made no
scruple of supplying them with fire-arms. In this way several fierce
tribes in the vicinity of the Russian posts, or within the range of
their trading excursions, were furnished with deadly means of warfare,
and rendered troublesome and dangerous neighbors.

The Russian government had made representations to that of the United
States of these malpractices on the part of its citizens, and urged to
have this traffic in arms prohibited; but, as it did not infringe
any municipal law, our government could not interfere. Yet, still it
regarded, with solicitude, a traffic which, if persisted in, might give
offence to Russia, at that time almost the only friendly power to us. In
this dilemma the government had applied to Mr. Astor, as one conversant
in this branch of trade, for information that might point out a way
to remedy the evil. This circumstance had suggested to him the idea of
supplying the Russian establishment regularly by means of the annual
ship that should visit the settlement at the mouth of the Columbia (or
Oregon); by this means the casual trading vessels would be excluded
from those parts of the coast where their malpractices were so injurious
to the Russians.

Such is a brief outline of the enterprise projected by Mr. Astor, but
which continually expanded in his mind. Indeed it is due to him to say
that he was not actuated by mere motives of individual profit. He was
already wealthy beyond the ordinary desires of man, but he now aspired
to that honorable fame which is awarded to men of similar scope of mind,
who by their great commercial enterprises have enriched nations, peopled
wildernesses, and extended the bounds of empire. He considered his
projected establishment at the mouth of the Columbia as the emporium
to an immense commerce; as a colony that would form the germ of a wide
civilization; that would, in fact, carry the American population across
the Rocky Mountains and spread it along the shores of the Pacific, as
it already animated the shores of the Atlantic. As Mr. Astor, by the
magnitude of his commercial and financial relations, and the vigor
and scope of his self-taught mind, had elevated himself into the
consideration of government and the communion and correspondence with
leading statesmen, he, at an early period, communicated his schemes
to President Jefferson, soliciting the countenance of government. How
highly they were esteemed by that eminent man, we may judge by the
following passage, written by him some time afterwards.

“I remember well having invited your proposition on this subject,*** and
encouraged it with the assurance of every facility and protection which
the government could properly afford. I considered, as a great public
acquisition, the commencement of a settlement on that point of the
western coast of America, and looked forward with gratification to the
time when its descendants should have spread themselves through the
whole length of that coast, covering it with free and independent
Americans, unconnected with us but by the ties of blood and interest,
and enjoying like us the rights of self-government.”

The cabinet joined with Mr. Jefferson in warm approbation of the plan,
and held out assurance of every protection that could, consistently with
general policy, be afforded. Mr. Astor now prepared to carry his scheme
into prompt execution. He had some competition, however, to apprehend
and guard against. The Northwest Company, acting feebly and partially
upon the suggestions of its former agent, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, had
pushed one or two advanced trading posts across the Rocky Mountains,
into a tract of country visited by that enterprising traveller, and
since named New Caledonia. This tract lay about two degrees north of the
Columbia, and intervened between the territories of the United States
and those of Russia. Its length was about five hundred and fifty miles,
and its breadth, from the mountains to the Pacific, from three hundred
to three hundred and fifty geographic miles.

Should the Northwest Company persist in extending their trade in that
quarter, their competition might be of serious detriment to the plans
of Mr. Astor. It is true they would contend with him to a vast
disadvantage, from the checks and restrictions to which they were
subjected. They were straitened on one side by the rivalry of the
Hudson’s Bay Company; then they had no good post on the Pacific where
they could receive supplies by sea for their establishments beyond the
mountains; nor, if they had one, could they ship their furs thence to
China, that great mart for peltries; the Chinese trade being comprised
in the monopoly of the East India Company. Their posts beyond the
mountains had to be supplied in yearly expeditions, like caravans,
from Montreal, and the furs conveyed back in the same way, by long,
precarious, and expensive routes, across the continent. Mr. Astor, on
the contrary, would be able to supply his proposed establishment at
the mouth of the Columbia by sea, and to ship the furs collected there
directly to China, so as to undersell the Northwest Company in the great
Chinese market.

Still, the competition of two rival companies west of the Rocky
Mountains could not but prove detrimental to both, and fraught with
those evils, both to the trade and to the Indians, that had attended
similar rivalries in the Canadas. To prevent any contest of the kind,
therefore, he made known his plan to the agents of the Northwest
Company, and proposed to interest them, to the extent of one third, in
the trade thus to be opened. Some correspondence and negotiation ensued.
The company were aware of the advantages which would be possessed by
Mr. Astor should he be able to carry his scheme into effect; but they
anticipated a monopoly of the trade beyond the mountains by their
establishments in New Caledonia, and were loth to share it with an
individual who had already proved a formidable competitor in the
Atlantic trade. They hoped, too, by a timely move, to secure the mouth
of the Columbia before Mr. Astor would be able to put his plans into
operation; and, that key to the internal trade once in their possession,
the whole country would be at their command. After some negotiation and
delay, therefore, they declined the proposition that had been made to
them, but subsequently despatched a party for the mouth of the Columbia,
to establish a post there before any expedition sent out by Mr. Astor
might arrive.

In the meantime Mr. Astor, finding his overtures rejected, proceeded
fearlessly to execute his enterprise in face of the whole power of the
Northwest Company. His main establishment once planted at the mouth of
the Columbia, he looked with confidence to ultimate success. Being able
to reinforce and supply it amply by sea, he would push his interior
posts in every direction up the rivers and along the coast; supplying
the natives at a lower rate, and thus gradually obliging the Northwest
Company to give up the competition, relinquish New Caledonia, and retire
to the other side of the mountains. He would then have possession of
the trade, not merely of the Columbia and its tributaries, but of the
regions farther north, quite to the Russian possessions. Such was a part
of his brilliant and comprehensive plan.

He now proceeded, with all diligence, to procure proper agents and
coadjutors, habituated to the Indian trade and to the life of the
wilderness. Among the clerks of the Northwest Company were several of
great capacity and experience, who had served out their probationary
terms, but who, either through lack of interest and influence, or a
want of vacancies, had not been promoted. They were consequently much
dissatisfied, and ready for any employment in which their talents and
acquirements might be turned to better account.

Mr. Astor made his overtures to several of these persons, and three
of them entered into his views. One of these, Mr. Alexander M’Kay, had
accompanied Sir Alexander Mackenzie in both of his expeditions to the
northwest coast of America in 1789 and 1793. The other two were Duncan
M’Dougal and Donald M’Kenzie. To these were subsequently added Mr.
Wilson Price Hunt, of New Jersey. As this gentleman was a native born
citizen of the United States, a person of great probity and worth, he
was selected by Mr. Astor to be his chief agent, and to represent him in
the contemplated establishment.

On the 23d of June, 1810, articles of agreement were entered into
between Mr. Astor and those four gentlemen, acting for themselves and
for the several persons who had already agreed to become, or should
thereafter become, associated under the firm of “The Pacific Fur
Company.”

According to these articles, Mr. Astor was to be at the head of the
company, and to manage its affairs in New York. He was to furnish
vessels, goods, provisions, arms, ammunition, and all other requisites
for the enterprise at first cost and charges, provided that they did
not, at any time, involve an advance of more than four hundred thousand
dollars.

The stock of the company was to be divided into a hundred equal shares,
with the profits accruing thereon. Fifty shares were to be at the
disposition of Mr. Astor, and the other fifty to be divided among the
partners and their associates.

Mr. Astor was to have the privilege of introducing other persons into
the connection as partners, two of whom, at least, should be conversant
with the Indian trade, and none of them entitled to more than three
shares.

A general meeting of the company was to be held annually at Columbia
River, for the investigation and regulation of its affairs; at which
absent members might be represented, and might vote by proxy under
certain specified conditions.

The association, if successful, was to continue for twenty years; but
the parties had full power to abandon and dissolve it within the first
five years, should it be found unprofitable. For this term Mr. Astor
covenanted to bear all the loss that might be incurred; after which it
was to be borne by all the partners, in proportion to their respective
shares.

The parties of the second part were to execute faithfully such duties as
might be assigned to them by a majority of the company on the northwest
coast, and to repair to such place or places as the majority might
direct.

An agent, appointed for the term of five years, was to reside at the
principal establishment on the northwest coast, and Wilson Price Hunt
was the one chosen for the first term. Should the interests of the
concern at any time require his absence, a person was to be appointed,
in general meeting, to take his place.

Such were the leading conditions of this association; we shall now
proceed to relate the various hardy and eventful expeditions, by sea and
land, to which it gave rise.

     * Carver’s Travels, Introd. b. iii. Philad. 1796.

     **Carver’s Travels, p. 360.

     *** On this point Mr. Jefferson’s memory was in error. The
     proposition alluded to was the one, already mentioned, for
     the establishment of an American Fur Company in the Atlantic
     States. The great enterprise beyond the mountains, that was
     to sweep the shores of the Pacific, originated in the mind
     of Mr. Astor, and was proposed by him to the government.




CHAPTER IV.

     Two Expeditions Set on Foot.--The Tonquin and Her Crew.--
     Captain Thorn, His Character.--The Partners and Clerks--
     Canadian Voyageurs, Their Habits, Employments, Dress,
     Character, Songs--Expedition of a Canadian Boat and Its Crew
     by Land and Water.--Arrival at New York.--Preparations for a
     Sea Voyage.--Northwest Braggarts.--Underhand Precautions--
     Letter of Instructions.

IN prosecuting his great scheme of commerce and colonization, two
expeditions were devised by Mr. Astor, one by sea, the other by
land. The former was to carry out the people, stores, ammunition, and
merchandise, requisite for establishing a fortified trading post at
the mouth of Columbia River. The latter, conducted by Mr. Hunt, was to
proceed up the Missouri, and across the Rocky Mountains, to the same
point; exploring a line of communication across the continent and
noting the places where interior trading posts might be established. The
expedition by sea is the one which comes first under consideration.

A fine ship was provided called the Tonquin, of two hundred and ninety
tons burden, mounting ten guns, with a crew of twenty men. She carried
an assortment of merchandise for trading with the natives of the
seaboard and of the interior, together with the frame of a schooner,
to be employed in the coasting trade. Seeds also were provided for the
cultivation of the soil, and nothing was neglected for the necessary
supply of the establishment. The command of the ship was intrusted to
Jonathan Thorn, of New York, a lieutenant in the United States navy,
on leave of absence. He was a man of courage and firmness, who had
distinguished himself in our Tripolitan war, and, from being accustomed
to naval discipline, was considered by Mr. Astor as well fitted to take
charge of an expedition of the kind. Four of the partners were to embark
in the ship, namely, Messrs. M’Kay, M’Dougal, David Stuart, and his
nephew, Robert Stuart. Mr. M’Dougal was empowered by Mr. Astor to act as
his proxy in the absence of Mr. Hunt, to vote for him and in his name,
on any question that might come before any meeting of the persons
interested in the voyage.

Besides the partners, there were twelve clerks to go out in the ship,
several of them natives of Canada, who had some experience in the Indian
trade. They were bound to the service of the company for five years, at
the rate of one hundred dollars a year, payable at the expiration of
the term, and an annual equipment of clothing to the amount of forty
dollars. In case of ill conduct they were liable to forfeit their wages
and be dismissed; but, should they acquit themselves well, the confident
expectation was held out to them of promotion, and partnership. Their
interests were thus, to some extent, identified with those of the
company.

Several artisans were likewise to sail in the ship, for the supply of
the colony; but the most peculiar and characteristic part of this motley
embarkation consisted of thirteen Canadian “voyageurs,” who had enlisted
for five years. As this class of functionaries will continually recur
in the course of the following narrations, and as they form one of those
distinct and strongly marked castes or orders of people, springing up
in this vast continent out of geographical circumstances, or the varied
pursuits, habitudes, and origins of its population, we shall sketch a
few of their characteristics for the information of the reader.

The “voyageurs” form a kind of confraternity in the Canadas, like the
arrieros, or carriers of Spain, and, like them, are employed in long
internal expeditions of travel and traffic: with this difference, that
the arrieros travel by land, the voyageurs by water; the former with
mules and horses, the latter with batteaux and canoes. The voyageurs may
be said to have sprung up out of the fur trade, having originally been
employed by the early French merchants in their trading expeditions
through the labyrinth of rivers and lakes of the boundless interior.
They were coeval with the coureurs des bois, or rangers of the woods,
already noticed, and, like them, in the intervals of their long,
arduous, and laborious expeditions, were prone to pass their time in
idleness and revelry about the trading posts or settlements; squandering
their hard earnings in heedless conviviality, and rivaling their
neighbors, the Indians, in indolent indulgence and an imprudent
disregard of the morrow.

When Canada passed under British domination, and the old French trading
houses were broken up, the voyageurs, like the coureurs des bois, were
for a time disheartened and disconsolate, and with difficulty could
reconcile themselves to the service of the new-comers, so different in
habits, manners, and language from their former employers. By degrees,
however, they became accustomed to the change, and at length came to
consider the British fur traders, and especially the members of the
Northwest Company, as the legitimate lords of creation.

The dress of these people is generally half civilized, half savage.
They wear a capot or surcoat, made of a blanket, a striped cotton shirt,
cloth trousers, or leathern leggins, moccasins of deer-skin, and a
belt of variegated worsted, from which are suspended the knife,
tobacco-pouch, and other implements. Their language is of the same
piebald character, being a French patois, embroidered with Indian and
English words and phrases.

The lives of the voyageurs are passed in wild and extensive rovings, in
the service of individuals, but more especially of the fur traders.
They are generally of French descent, and inherit much of the gayety and
lightness of heart of their ancestors, being full of anecdote and song,
and ever ready for the dance. They inherit, too, a fund of civility and
complaisance; and, instead of that hardness and grossness which men in
laborious life are apt to indulge towards each other, they are mutually
obliging and accommodating; interchanging kind offices, yielding each
other assistance and comfort in every emergency, and using the familiar
appellations of “cousin” and “brother” when there is in fact no
relationship. Their natural good-will is probably heightened by a
community of adventure and hardship in their precarious and wandering
life.

No men are more submissive to their leaders and employers, more capable
of enduring hardship, or more good-humored under privations. Never are
they so happy as when on long and rough expeditions, toiling up rivers
or coasting lakes; encamping at night on the borders, gossiping round
their fires, and bivouacking in the open air. They are dextrous boatmen,
vigorous and adroit with the oar and paddle, and will row from
morning until night without a murmur. The steersman often sings an old
traditionary French song, with some regular burden in which they all
join, keeping time with their oars; if at any time they flag in spirits
or relax in exertion, it is but necessary to strike up a song of the
kind to put them all in fresh spirits and activity. The Canadian waters
are vocal with these little French chansons, that have been echoed from
mouth to mouth and transmitted from father to son, from the earliest
days of the colony; and it has a pleasing effect, in a still golden
summer evening, to see a batteau gliding across the bosom of a lake and
dipping its oars to the cadence of these quaint old ditties, or sweeping
along in full chorus on a bright sunny morning, down the transparent
current of one of the Canada rivers.

But we are talking of things that are fast fading away! The march of
mechanical invention is driving everything poetical before it. The
steamboats, which are fast dispelling the wildness and romance of our
lakes and rivers, and aiding to subdue the world into commonplace, are
proving as fatal to the race of the Canadian voyageurs as they have been
to that of the boatmen of the Mississippi. Their glory is departed. They
are no longer the lords of our internal seas, and the great navigators
of the wilderness. Some of them may still occasionally be seen coasting
the lower lakes with their frail barks, and pitching their camps
and lighting their fires upon the shores; but their range is fast
contracting to those remote waters and shallow and obstructed rivers
unvisited by the steamboat. In the course of years they will gradually
disappear; their songs will die away like the echoes they once awakened,
and the Canadian voyageurs will become a forgotten race, or remembered,
like their associates, the Indians, among the poetical images of past
times, and as themes for local and romantic associations.

An instance of the buoyant temperament and the professional pride of
these people was furnished in the gay and braggart style in which they
arrived at New York to join the enterprise. They were determined to
regale and astonish the people of the “States” with the sight of a
Canadian boat and a Canadian crew. They accordingly fitted up a large
but light bark canoe, such as is used in the fur trade; transported
it in a wagon from the banks of the St. Lawrence to the shores of Lake
Champlain; traversed the lake in it, from end to end; hoisted it again
in a wagon and wheeled it off to Lansingburgh, and there launched it
upon the waters of the Hudson. Down this river they plied their course
merrily on a fine summer’s day, making its banks resound for the first
time with their old French boat songs; passing by the villages with
whoop and halloo, so as to make the honest Dutch farmers mistake them
for a crew of savages. In this way they swept, in full song and with
regular flourish of the paddle, round New York, in a still summer
evening, to the wonder and admiration of its inhabitants, who had never
before witnessed on their waters, a nautical apparition of the kind.

Such was the variegated band of adventurers about to embark in the
Tonquin on this ardous and doubtful enterprise. While yet in port and
on dry land, in the bustle of preparation and the excitement of novelty,
all was sunshine and promise. The Canadians, especially, who, with their
constitutional vivacity, have a considerable dash of the gascon, were
buoyant and boastful, and great brag arts as to the future; while all
those who had been in the service of the Northwest Company, and engaged
in the Indian trade, plumed themselves upon their hardihood and their
capacity to endure privations. If Mr. Astor ventured to hint at the
difficulties they might have to encounter, they treated them with scorn.
They were “northwesters;” men seasoned to hardships, who cared for
neither wind nor weather. They could live hard, lie hard, sleep hard,
eat dogs!--in a word they were ready to do and suffer anything for the
good of the enterprise. With all this profession of zeal and devotion,
Mr. Astor was not overconfident of the stability and firm faith of these
mercurial beings. He had received information, also, that an armed brig
from Halifax, probably at the instigation of the Northwest Company, was
hovering on the coast, watching for the Tonquin, with the purpose of
impressing the Canadians on board of her, as British subjects, and thus
interrupting the voyage. It was a time of doubt and anxiety, when
the relations between the United States and Great Britain were daily
assuming a more precarious aspect and verging towards that war which
shortly ensued. As a precautionary measure, therefore, he required
that the voyageurs, as they were about to enter into the service of
an American association, and to reside within the limits of the United
States, should take the oaths of naturalization as American citizens.
To this they readily agreed, and shortly afterward assured him that they
had actually done so. It was not until after they had sailed that he
discovered that they had entirely deceived him in the matter.

The confidence of Mr. Astor was abused in another quarter. Two of the
partners, both of them Scotchmen, and recently in the service of the
Northwest Company, had misgivings as to an enterprise which might clash
with the interests and establishments protected by the British flag.
They privately waited upon the British minister, Mr. Jackson, then
in New York, laid open to him the whole scheme of Mr. Astor, though
intrusted to them in confidence, and dependent, in a great measure, upon
secrecy at the outset for its success, and inquired whether they, as
British subjects, could lawfully engage in it. The reply satisfied their
scruples, while the information they imparted excited the surprise
and admiration of Mr. Jackson, that a private individual should have
conceived and set on foot at his own risk and expense so great an
enterprise.

This step on the part of those gentlemen was not known to Mr. Astor
until some time afterwards, or it might have modified the trust and
confidence reposed in them.

To guard against any interruption to the voyage by the armed brig, said
to be off the harbor, Mr. Astor applied to Commodore Rodgers, at that
time commanding at New York, to give the Tonquin safe convoy off
the coast. The commodore having received from a high official source
assurance of the deep interest which the government took in the
enterprise, sent directions to Captain Hull, at that time cruising
off the harbor, in the frigate Constitution, to afford the Tonquin the
required protection when she should put to sea.

Before the day of embarkation, Mr. Astor addressed a letter of
instruction to the four partners who were to sail in the ship. In this
he enjoined them, in the most earnest manner, to cultivate harmony and
unanimity, and recommended that all differences of opinions on points
connected with the objects and interests of the voyage should be
discussed by the whole, and decided by a majority of votes. He,
moreover, gave them especial caution as to their conduct on arriving at
their destined port; exhorting them to be careful to make a favorable
impression upon the wild people among whom their lot and the fortunes
of the enterprise would be cast. “If you find them kind,” said he, “as
I hope you will, be so to them. If otherwise, act with caution and
forebearance, and convince them that you come as friends.”

With the same anxious forethought he wrote a letter of instructions to
Captain Thorn, in which he urged the strictest attention to the health
of himself and his crew, and to the promotion of good-humor and harmony
on board his ship. “To prevent any misunderstanding,” added he, “will
require your particular good management.” His letter closed with an
injunction of wariness in his intercourse with the natives, a subject on
which Mr. Astor was justly sensible he could not be too earnest. “I must
recommend you,” said he, “to be particularly careful on the coast, and
not to rely too much on the friendly disposition of the natives.
All accidents which have as yet happened there arose from too much
confidence in the Indians.”

The reader will bear these instructions in mind, as events will
prove their wisdom and importance, and the disasters which ensued in
consequence of the neglect of them.




CHAPTER V.

     Sailing of the Tonquin.--A Rigid Commander and a Reckless
     Crew.--Landsmen on Shipboard.--Fresh-Water Sailors at Sea.--
     Lubber Nests.--Ship Fare.--A Labrador Veteran--Literary
     Clerks.-Curious Travellers.--Robinson Crusoe’s Island.--
     Quarter-Deck Quarrels.--Falkland Islands.--A Wild-Goose
     Chase.--Port Egmont.-Epitaph Hunting.--Old Mortality--
     Penguin Shooting.--Sportsmen Left in the Lurch.--A Hard
     Pull.--Further Altercations.--Arrival at Owyhee.

ON the eighth of September, 1810, the Tonquin put to sea, where she was
soon joined by the frigate Constitution. The wind was fresh and fair
from the southwest, and the ship was soon out of sight of land and free
from the apprehended danger of interruption. The frigate, therefore,
gave her “God speed,” and left her to her course.

The harmony so earnestly enjoined by Mr. Astor on this heterogeneous
crew, and which had been so confidently promised in the buoyant moments
of preparation, was doomed to meet with a check at the very outset.

Captain Thorn was an honest, straighforward, but somewhat dry and
dictatorial commander, who, having been nurtured in the system and
discipline of a ship of war, and in a sacred opinion of the supremacy of
the quarter-deck, was disposed to be absolute lord and master on board
of his ship. He appears, moreover, to have had no great opinion, from
the first, of the persons embarked with him--He had stood by with surly
contempt while they vaunted so bravely to Mr. Astor of all they could
do and all they could undergo; how they could face all weathers, put up
with all kinds of fare, and even eat dogs with a relish, when no better
food was to be had. He had set them down as a set of landlubbers and
braggadocios, and was disposed to treat them accordingly. Mr. Astor was,
in his eyes, his only real employer, being the father of the enterprise,
who furnished all funds and bore all losses. The others were mere agents
and subordinates, who lived at his expense. He evidently had but a
narrow idea of the scope and nature of the enterprise, limiting his
views merely to his part of it; everything beyond the concerns of
his ship was out of his sphere; and anything that interfered with the
routine of his nautical duties put him in a passion.

The partners, on the other hand, had been brought up in the service
of the Northwest Company, and in a profound idea of the importance,
dignity, and authority of a partner. They already began to consider
themselves on a par with the M’Tavishes, the M’Gillivrays, the
Frobishers, and the other magnates of the Northwest, whom they had been
accustomed to look up to as the great ones of the earth; and they were
a little disposed, perhaps, to wear their suddenly-acquired honors with
some air of pretension. Mr. Astor, too, had put them on their mettle
with respect to the captain, describing him as a gunpowder fellow who
would command his ship in fine style, and, if there was any fighting to
do, would “blow all out of the water.”

Thus prepared to regard each other with no very cordial eye, it is not
to be wondered at that the parties soon came into collision. On the very
first night Captain Thorn began his man-of-war discipline by ordering
the lights in the cabin to be extinguished at eight o’clock.

The pride of the partners was immediately in arms. This was an invasion
of their rights and dignities not to be borne. They were on board
of their own ship, and entitled to consult their ease and enjoyment.
M’Dougal was the champion of their cause. He was an active, irritable,
fuming, vainglorious little man, and elevated in his own opinion, by
being the proxy of Mr. Astor. A violent altercation ensued, in the
course of which Thorn threatened to put the partners in irons should
they prove refractory; upon which M’Dougal seized a pistol and swore to
be the death of the captain should he ever offer such an indignity. It
was some time before the irritated parties could be pacified by the more
temperate bystanders.

Such was the captain’s outset with the partners. Nor did the clerks
stand much higher in his good graces; indeed, he seems to have regarded
all the landsmen on board his ship as a kind of live lumber, continually
in the way. The poor voyageurs, too, continually irritated his spleen by
their “lubberly” and unseemly habits, so abhorrent to one accustomed
to the cleanliness of a man-of-war. These poor fresh-water sailors, so
vainglorious on shore, and almost amphibious when on lakes and rivers,
lost all heart and stomach the moment they were at sea. For days they
suffered the doleful rigors and retchings of sea-sickness, lurking below
in their berths in squalid state, or emerging now and then like spectres
from the hatchways, in capotes and blankets, with dirty nightcaps,
grizzly beard, lantern visage and unhappy eye, shivering about the deck,
and ever and anon crawling to the sides of the vessel, and offering up
their tributes to the windward, to infinite annoyance of the captain.

His letters to Mr. Astor, wherein he pours forth the bitterness of his
soul, and his seamanlike impatience of what he considers the “lubberly”
 character and conduct of those around him, are before us, and are
amusingly characteristic. The honest captain is full of vexation on his
own account, and solicitude on account of Mr. Astor, whose property he
considers at the mercy of a most heterogeneous and wasteful crew.

As to the clerks, he pronounced them mere pretenders, not one of whom
had ever been among the Indians, nor farther to the northwest than
Montreal, nor of higher rank than barkeeper of a tavern or marker of a
billiard-table, excepting one, who had been a school-master, and whom he
emphatically sets down for “as foolish a pedant as ever lived.”

Then as to the artisans and laborers who had been brought from Canada
and shipped at such expense, the three most respectable, according
to the captain’s account, were culprits, who had fled from Canada on
account of their misdeeds; the rest had figured in Montreal as draymen,
barbers, waiters, and carriole drivers, and were the most helpless,
worthless beings “that ever broke sea-biscuit.”

It may easily be imagined what a series of misunderstandings and
cross-purposes would be likely to take place between such a crew
and such a commander. The captain, in his zeal for the health and
cleanliness of his ship, would make sweeping visitations to the “lubber
nests” of the unlucky “voyageurs” and their companions in misery, ferret
them out of their berths, make them air and wash themselves and their
accoutrements, and oblige them to stir about briskly and take exercise.

Nor did his disgust and vexation cease when all hands had recovered from
sea-sickness, and become accustomed to the ship, for now broke out an
alarming keenness of appetite that threatened havoc to the provisions.
What especially irritated the captain was the daintiness of some of his
cabin passengers. They were loud in their complaints of the ship’s fare,
though their table was served with fresh pork, hams, tongues, smoked
beef, and puddings. “When thwarted in their cravings for delicacies,”
 Said he, “they would exclaim it was d-d hard they could not live as
they pleased upon their own property, being on board of their own ship,
freighted with their own merchandise. And these,” added he, “are the
fine fellows who made such boast that they could ‘eat dogs.’”

In his indignation at what he termed their effeminacy, he would swear
that he would never take them to sea again “without having Fly-market on
the forecastle, Covent-garden on the poop, and a cool spring from Canada
in the maintop.”

As they proceeded on their voyage and got into the smooth seas and
pleasant weather of the tropics, other annoyances occurred to vex the
spirit of the captain. He had been crossed by the irritable mood of one
of the partners; he was now excessively annoyed by the good-humor of
another. This was the elder Stuart, who was an easy soul, and of a
social disposition. He had seen life in Canada, and on the coast of
Labrador; had been a fur trader in the former, and a fisherman on
the latter; and, in the course of his experience, had made various
expeditions with voyageurs. He was accustomed, therefore, to the
familiarity which prevails between that class and their superiors, and
the gossipings which take place among them when seated round a fire
at their encampments. Stuart was never so happy as when he could seat
himself on the deck with a number of these men round him, in camping
style, smoke together, passing the pipe from mouth to mouth, after the
manner of the Indians, sing old Canadian boat-songs, and tell stories
about their hardships and adventures, in the course of which he rivaled
Sinbad in his long tales of the sea, about his fishing exploits on the
coast of Labrador.

This gossiping familiarity shocked the captain’s notions of rank and
subordination, and nothing was so abhorrent to him as the community
of pipe between master and man, and their mingling in chorus in the
outlandish boat-songs.

Then there was another whimsical source of annoyance to him. Some of the
young clerks, who were making their first voyage, and to whom everything
was new and strange, were, very rationally, in the habit of taking notes
and keeping journals. This was a sore abomination to the honest captain,
who held their literary pretensions in great contempt. “The collecting
of materials for long histories of their voyages and travels,” said
he, in his letter to Mr. Astor, “appears to engross most of their
attention.” We can conceive what must have been the crusty impatience of
the worthy navigator, when, on any trifling occurrence in the course of
the voyage, quite commonplace in his eyes, he saw these young landsmen
running to record it in their journals; and what indignant glances he
must have cast to right and left, as he worried about the deck, giving
out his orders for the management of the ship, surrounded by singing,
smoking, gossiping, scribbling groups, all, as he thought, intent upon
the amusement of the passing hour, instead of the great purposes and
interests of the voyage.

It is possible the captain was in some degree right in his notions.
Though some of the passengers had much to gain by the voyage, none of
them had anything positively to lose. They were mostly young men, in the
heyday of life; and having got into fine latitudes, upon smooth seas,
with a well-stored ship under them, and a fair wind in the shoulder
of the sail, they seemed to have got into a holiday world, and were
disposed to enjoy it. That craving desire, natural to untravelled men of
fresh and lively minds, to see strange lands, and to visit scenes famous
in history or fable, was expressed by some of the partners and clerks,
with respect to some of the storied coasts and islands that lay within
their route. The captain, however, who regarded every coast and island
with a matter-of-fact eye, and had no more associations connected
with them than those laid down in his sea-chart, considered all this
curiosity as exceedingly idle and childish. “In the first part of the
voyage,” says he in his letter, “they were determined to have it said
they had been in Africa, and therefore insisted on stopping at the
Cape de Verdes. Next they said the ship should stop on the coast of
Patagonia, for they must see the large and uncommon inhabitants of that
place. Then they must go to the island where Robinson Crusoe had so long
lived. And lastly, they were determined to see the handsome inhabitants
of Easter Island.”

To all these resolves, the captain opposed his peremptory veto, as
“contrary to instructions.” Then would break forth an unavailing
explosion of wrath on the part of certain of the partners, in the course
of which they did not even spare Mr. Astor for his act of supererogation
in furnishing orders for the control of the ship while they were on
board, instead of leaving them to be the judges where it would be best
for her to touch, and how long to remain. The choleric M’Dougal took the
lead in these railings, being, as has been observed, a little puffed up
with the idea of being Mr. Astor’s proxy.

The captain, however, became only so much the more crusty and dogged in
his adherence to his orders, and touchy and harsh in his dealings with
the passengers, and frequent altercations ensued. He may in some measure
have been influenced by his seamanlike impatience of the interference
of landsmen, and his high notions of naval etiquette and quarter-deck
authority; but he evidently had an honest, trusty concern for the
interests of his employer. He pictured to himself the anxious projector
of the enterprise, who had disbursed so munificently in its outfit,
calculating on the zeal, fidelity, and singleness of purpose of his
associates and agents; while they, on the other hand, having a good ship
at their disposal and a deep pocket at home to bear them out, seemed
ready to loiter on every coast, and amuse themselves in every port.

On the fourth of December they came in sight of the Falkland Islands.
Having been for some time on an allowance of water, it was resolved to
anchor here and obtain a supply. A boat was sent into a small bay to
take soundings. Mr. M’Dougal and Mr. M’Kay took this occasion to go on
shore, but with a request from the captain that they would not detain
the ship. Once on shore, however, they were in no haste to obey his
orders, but rambled about in search of curiosities. The anchorage
proving unsafe, and water difficult to be procured, the captain stood
out to sea, and made repeated signals for those on shore to rejoin the
ship, but it was not until nine at night that they came on board.

The wind being adverse, the boat was again sent on shore on the
following morning, and the same gentlemen again landed, but promised to
come off at a moment’s warning; they again forgot their promise in their
eager pursuit of wild geese and seawolves. After a time the wind hauled
fair, and signals were made for the boat. Half an hour elapsed but no
boat put off. The captain reconnoitered the shore with his glass, and,
to his infinite vexation, saw the loiterers in the full enjoyment of
their “wildgoose-chase.” Nettled to the quick, he immediately made sail.
When those on shore saw the ship actually under way, they embarked with
all speed, but had a hard pull of eight miles before they got on board,
and then experienced but a grim reception, notwithstanding that they
came well laden with the spoils of the chase.

Two days afterwards, on the seventh of December, they anchored at Fort
Egmont, in the same island, where they remained four days taking in
water and making repairs. This was a joyous time for the landsmen. They
pitched a tent on shore, had a boat at their command, and passed their
time merrily in rambling about the island, and coasting along the
shores, shooting sealions, seals, foxes, geese, ducks, and penguins.
None were keener in pursuit of this kind of game than M’Dougal and
David Stuart; the latter was reminded of aquatic sports on the coast of
Labrador, and his hunting exploits in the Northwest.

In the meantime the captain addressed himself steadily to the business
of his ship, scorning the holiday spirit and useless pursuits of his
emancipated messmates, and warning them, from time to time, not to
wander away nor be out of hail. They promised, as usual, that the ship
should never experience a moment’s detention on their account, but, as
usual, forgot their promise.

On the morning of the 11th, the repairs being all finished, and the
water casks replenished, the signal was given to embark, and the ship
began to weigh anchor. At this time several of the passengers were
dispersed about the island, amusing themselves in various ways. Some of
the young men had found two inscriptions, in English, over a place where
two unfortunate mariners had been buried in this desert island. As the
inscriptions were worn out by the time and weather, they were playing
the part of “Old Mortality,” and piously renewing them. The signal from
the ship summoned them from their labors; they saw the sails unfurled,
and that she was getting under way. The two sporting partners, however,
Mr. M’Dougal and David Stuart, had strolled away to the south of the
island in pursuit of penguins. It would never do to put off without
them, as there was but one boat to convey the whole.

While this delay took place on shore, the captain was storming on board.
This was the third time his orders had been treated with contempt, and
the ship wantonly detained, and it should be the last; so he spread all
sail and put to sea, swearing he would leave the laggards to shift for
themselves. It was in vain that those on board made remonstrances and
entreaties, and represented the horrors of abandoning men upon a sterile
and uninhabited island; the sturdy captain was inflexible.

In the meantime the penguin hunters had joined the engravers of
tombstones, but not before the ship was already out at sea. They all, to
the number of eight, threw themselves into their boat, which was about
twenty feet in length, and rowed with might and main. For three hours
and a half did they tug anxiously and severely at the oar, swashed
occasionally by the surging waves of the open sea, while the ship
inexorably kept on her course, and seemed determined to leave them
behind.

On board the ship was the nephew of David Stuart, a young man of spirit
and resolution. Seeing, as he thought, the captain obstinately bent
upon abandoning his uncle and the others, he seized a pistol, and in a
paroxysm of wrath swore he would blow out the captain’s brains, unless
he put about or shortened sail.

Fortunately for all parties, the wind just then came ahead, and the boat
was enabled to reach the ship; otherwise, disastrous circumstances might
have ensued. We can hardly believe that the captain really intended to
carry his threat into full effect, and rather think he meant to let the
laggards off for a long pull and a hearty fright. He declared, however,
in his letter to Mr. Astor, that he was serious in his threats, and
there is no knowing how far such an iron man may push his notions of
authority.

“Had the wind,” writes he, “(unfortunately) not hauled ahead soon after
leaving the harbor’s mouth, I should positively have left them; and,
indeed, I cannot but think it an unfortunate circumstance for you
that it so happened, for the first loss in this instance would, in my
opinion, have proved the best, as they seem to have no idea of the
value of property, nor any apparent regard for your interest, although
interwoven with their own.”

This, it must be confessed, was acting with a high hand, and carrying
a regard to the owner’s property to a dangerous length. Various petty
feuds occurred also between him and the partners in respect to the goods
on board ship, some articles of which they wished to distribute
for clothing among the men, or for other purposes which they deemed
essential. The captain, however, kept a mastiff watch upon the cargo,
and growled and snapped if they but offered to touch box or bale. “It
was contrary to orders; it would forfeit his insurance; it was out of
all rule.” It was in vain they insisted upon their right to do so, as
part owners, and as acting for the good of the enterprise; the captain
only stuck to his point the more stanchly. They consoled themselves,
therefore, by declaring, that as soon as they made land, they would
assert their rights, and do with ship and cargo as they pleased.

Beside these feuds between the captain and the partners, there were
feuds between the partners themselves, occasioned, in some measure, by
jealousy of rank. M’Dougal and M’Kay began to draw plans for the fort,
and other buildings of the intended establishment. They agreed very well
as to the outline and dimensions, which were on a sufficiently grand
scale; but when they came to arrange the details, fierce disputes arose,
and they would quarrel by the hour about the distribution of the doors
and windows. Many were the hard words and hard names bandied between
them on these occasions, according to the captain’s account. Each
accused the other of endeavoring to assume unwarrantable power, and take
the lead; upon which Mr. M’Dougal would vauntingly lay down Mr. Astor’s
letter, constituting him his representative and proxy, a document not to
be disputed.

These wordy contests, though violent, were brief; “and within fifteen
minutes,” says the captain, “they would be caressing each other like
children.”

While all this petty anarchy was agitating the little world within the
Tonquin, the good ship prosperously pursued her course, doubled Cape
Horn on the 25th of December, careered across the bosom of the Pacific,
until, on the 11th of February, the snowy peaks of Owyhee were seen
brightening above the horizon.




CHAPTER VI.

     Owyhee.--Sandwich Islanders--Their Nautical Talents.--
     Tamaahmaah.--His Navy.--His Negotiations.--Views of Mr.
     Astor With Respect to the Sandwich Islands--Karakakooa.--
     Royal Monopoly of Pork.-Description of the Islanders--
     Gayeties on Shore.--Chronicler of the Island.--Place
     Where Captain Cook was Killed.--John Young, a Nautical
     Governor.--His Story.--Waititi--A Royal Residence.--A Royal
     Visit--Grand Ceremonials.--Close Dealing--A Royal Pork
     Merchant--Grievances of a Matter-of-Fact Man.

OWYHEE, or Hawaii, as it is written by more exact orthographers, is the
largest of the cluster, ten in number, of the Sandwich Islands. It is
about ninety-seven miles in length, and seventy-eight in breadth, rising
gradually into three pyramidal summits or cones; the highest, Mouna
Roa, being eighteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, so as to
domineer over the whole archipelago, and to be a landmark over a wide
extent of ocean. It remains a lasting monument of the enterprising
and unfortunate Captain Cook, who was murdered by the natives of this
island.

The Sandwich Islanders, when first discovered, evinced a character
superior to most of the savages of the Pacific isles. They were frank
and open in their deportment, friendly and liberal in their dealings,
with an apt ingenuity apparent in all their rude inventions.

The tragical fate of the discoverer, which, for a time, brought them
under the charge of ferocity, was, in fact, the result of sudden
exasperation, caused by the seizure of their chief.

At the time of the visit of the Tonquin, the islanders had profited, in
many respects, by occasional intercourse with white men; and had shown a
quickness to observe and cultivate those arts important to their mode
of living. Originally they had no means of navigating the seas by which
they were surrounded, superior to light pirogues, which were little
competent to contend with the storms of the broad ocean. As the
islanders are not in sight of each other, there could, therefore, be but
casual intercourse between them. The traffic with white men had put
them in possession of vessels of superior description; they had made
themselves acquainted with their management, and had even made rude
advances in the art of ship-building.

These improvements had been promoted, in a great measure, by the energy
and sagacity of one man, the famous Tamaahmaah. He had originally been
a petty eri, or chief; but, being of an intrepid and aspiring nature, he
had risen in rank, and, availing himself of the superior advantages now
afforded in navigation, had brought the whole archipelago in subjection
to his arms. At the time of the arrival of the Tonquin he had about
forty schooners, of from twenty to thirty tons burden, and one old
American ship. With these he held undisputed sway over his insular
domains, and carried on intercourse with the chiefs or governors whom he
had placed in command of the several islands.

The situation of this group of islands, far in the bosom of the
vast Pacific, and their abundant fertility, render them important
stopping-places on the highway to China, or to the northwest coast
of America. Here the vessels engaged in the fur trade touched to make
repairs and procure provisions; and here they often sheltered themselves
during the winters that occurred in their long coasting expeditions.

The British navigators were, from the first, aware of the value of these
islands to the purposes of commerce; and Tamaahmaah, not long after
he had attained the sovereign sway, was persuaded by Vancouver, the
celebrated discoverer, to acknowledge, on behalf of himself, and
subjects, allegiance to the king of Great Britain. The reader cannot but
call to mind the visit which the royal family and court of the Sandwich
Islands was, in late years, induced to make to the court of St. James;
and the serio-comic ceremonials and mock parade which attended that
singular travesty of monarchal style.

It was a part of the wide and comprehensive plan of Mr. Astor to
establish a friendly intercourse between these islands and his intended
colony, which might, for a time, have occasion to draw supplies thence;
and he even had a vague idea of, some time or other, getting possession
of one of their islands as a rendezvous for his ships, and a link in the
chain of his commercial establishments.

On the evening of the 12th of February, the Tonquin anchored in the bay
of Karakakooa, in the island of Owyhee. The surrounding shores were wild
and broken, with overhanging cliffs and precipices of black volcanic
rock. Beyond these, however, the country was fertile and well
cultivated, with inclosures of yams, plantains, sweet potatoes,
sugar-canes, and other productions of warm climates and teeming soils;
and the numerous habitations of the natives were pleasantly sheltered
beneath clumps of cocoanut and bread-fruit trees, which afforded both
food and shade. This mingled variety of garden and grove swept gradually
up the sides of the mountains, until succeeded by dense forests, which
in turn gave place to naked and craggy rocks, until the summits rose
into the regions of perpetual snow.

The royal residence of Tamaahmaah was at this time at another island
named Woahoo. The island of Owyhee was under the command of one of his
eris, or chiefs, who resided at the village of Tocaigh, situated on a
different part of the coast from the bay of Karakakooa.

On the morning after her arrival, the ship was surrounded by canoes and
pirogues, filled with the islanders of both sexes, bringing off supplies
of fruits and vegetables, bananas, plantains, watermelons, yams,
cabbages and taro. The captain was desirous, however, of purchasing a
number of hogs, but there were none to be had--The trade in pork was a
royal monopoly, and no subject of the great Tamaahmaah dared to meddle
with it. Such provisions as they could furnish, however, were brought
by the natives in abundance, and a lively intercourse was kept up during
the day, in which the women mingled in the kindest manner.

The islanders are a comely race, of a copper complexion. The men are
tall and well made, with forms indicating strength and activity; the
women with regular and occasionally handsome features, and a lascivious
expression, characteristic of their temperament. Their style of dress
was nearly the same as in the days of Captain Cook. The men wore the
maro, a band one foot in width and several feet in length, swathed round
the loins, and formed of tappa, or cloth of bark; the kihei, or mantle,
about six feet square, tied in a knot over one shoulder, passed under
the opposite arm, so as to leave it bare, and falling in graceful folds
before and behind, to the knee, so as to bear some resemblance to a
Roman toga.

The female dress consisted of the pau, a garment formed of a piece
of tappa, several yards in length and one in width, wrapped round the
waist, and reaching like a petticoat, to the knees. Over this kihei, or
mantle, larger than that of the men, sometimes worn over both shoulders,
like a shawl, sometimes over one only. These mantles were seldom worn
by either sex during the heat of the day, when the exposure of their
persons was at first very revolting to a civilized eye.

Towards evening several of the partners and clerks went on shore,
where they were well received and hospitably entertained. A dance was
performed for their amusement, in which nineteen young women and one man
figured very gracefully, singing in concert, and moving to the cadence
of their song.

All this, however, was nothing to the purpose in the eyes of Captain
Thorn, who, being disappointed in his hope of obtaining a supply of
pork, or finding good water, was anxious to be off. This it was not so
easy to effect. The passengers, once on shore, were disposed, as usual,
to profit by the occasion. The partners had many inquiries to make
relative to the island, with a view to business; while the young clerks
were delighted with the charms and graces of the dancing damsels.

To add to their gratifications, an old man offered to conduct them to
the spot where Captain Cook was massacred. The proposition was eagerly
accepted, and all hands set out on a pilgrimage to the place. The
veteran islander performed his promise faithfully, and pointed out
the very spot where the unfortunate discoverer fell. The rocks and
cocoa-trees around bore record of the fact, in the marks of the balls
fired from the boats upon the savages. The pilgrims gathered round
the old man, and drew from him all the particulars he had to relate
respecting this memorable event; while the honest captain stood by and
bit his nails with impatience. To add to his vexation, they employed
themselves in knocking off pieces of the rocks, and cutting off the bark
of the trees marked by the balls, which they conveyed back to the ship
as precious relics.

Right glad, therefore, was he to get them and their treasures fairly on
board, when he made sail from this unprofitable place, and steered
for the Bay of Tocaigh, the residence of the chief or governor of the
island, where he hoped to be more successful in obtaining supplies. On
coming to anchor the captain went on shore, accompanied by Mr. M’Dougal
and Mr. M’Kay, and paid a visit to the governor. This dignitary proved
to be an old sailor, by the name of John Young; who, after being tossed
about the seas like another Sinbad, had, by one of the whimsical freaks
of fortune, been elevated to the government of a savage island. He
received his visitors with more hearty familiarity than personages in
his high station are apt to indulge, but soon gave them to understand
that provisions were scanty at Tocaigh, and that there was no good
water, no rain having fallen in the neighborhood in three years.

The captain was immediately for breaking up the conference and
departing, but the partners were not so willing to part with the
nautical governor, who seemed disposed to be extremely communicative,
and from whom they might be able to procure some useful information. A
long conversation accordingly ensued, in the course of which they
made many inquiries about the affairs of the islands, their natural
productions, and the possibility of turning them to advantage in the way
of trade; nor did they fail to inquire into the individual history of
John Young, and how he came to be governor. This he gave with great
condescension, running through the whole course of his fortunes “even
from his boyish days.”

He was a native of Liverpool, in England, and had followed the sea from
boyhood, until, by dint of good conduct, he had risen so far in his
profession as to be boatswain of an American ship called the Eleanor,
commanded by Captain Metcalf. In this vessel he had sailed in 1789,
on one of those casual expeditions to the northwest coast, in quest of
furs. In the course of the voyage, the captain left a small schooner,
named the Fair American, at Nootka, with a crew of five men, commanded
by his son, a youth of eighteen. She was to follow on in the track of
the Eleanor.

In February, 1790, Captain Metcalf touched at the island of Mowee, one
of the Sandwich group. While anchored here, a boat which was astern
of the Eleanor was stolen, and a seaman who was in it was killed. The
natives, generally, disclaimed the outrage, and brought the shattered
remains of the boat and the dead body of the seaman to the ship.
Supposing that they had thus appeased the anger of the captain, they
thronged, as usual, in great numbers about the vessel, to trade. Captain
Metcalf, however, determined on a bloody revenge. The Eleanor mounted
ten guns. All these he ordered to be loaded with musket-balls, nails,
and pieces of old iron, and then fired them, and the small arms of the
ship, among the natives. The havoc was dreadful; more than a hundred,
according to Young’s account, were slain.

After this signal act of vengeance, Captain Metcalf sailed from Mowee,
and made for the island of Owyhee, where he was well received by
Tamaahmaah. The fortunes of this warlike chief were at that time on the
rise. He had originally been of inferior rank, ruling over only one or
two districts of Owyhee, but had gradually made himself sovereign of his
native island.

The Eleanor remained some few days at anchor here, and an apparently
friendly intercourse was kept up with the inhabitants. On the 17th
March, John Young obtained permission to pass the night on shore. On the
following morning a signal-gun summoned him to return on board.

He went to the shore to embark, but found all the canoes hauled up on
the beach and rigorously tabooed, or interdicted. He would have launched
one himself, but was informed by Tamaahmaah that if he presumed to do so
he would be put to death.

Young was obliged to submit, and remained all day in great perplexity to
account for this mysterious taboo, and fearful that some hostility was
intended. In the evening he learned the cause of it, and his uneasiness
was increased. It appeared that the vindictive act of Captain Metcalf
had recoiled upon his own head. The schooner Fair American, commanded
by his son, following in his track, had fallen into the hands of the
natives to the southward of Tocaigh Bay, and young Metcalf and four of
the crew had been massacred.

On receiving intelligence of this event, Tamaahmaah had immediately
tabooed all the canoes, and interdicted all intercourse with the ship,
lest the captain should learn the fate of the schooner, and take his
revenge upon the island. For the same reason he prevented Young from
rejoining his countrymen. The Eleanor continued to fire signals from
time to time for two days, and then sailed; concluding, no doubt, that
the boatswain had deserted.

John Young was in despair when he saw the ship make sail; and found
himself abandoned among savages;-and savages, too, sanguinary in
their character, and inflamed by acts of hostility. He was agreeably
disappointed, however, in experiencing nothing but kind treatment from
Tamaahmaah and his people. It is true, he was narrowly watched whenever
a vessel came in sight, lest he should escape and relate what had
passed; but at other times he was treated with entire confidence and
great distinction. He became a prime favorite, cabinet counsellor, and
active coadjutor of Tamaahmaah, attending him in all his excursions,
whether of business or pleasure, and aiding in his warlike and ambitious
enterprises. By degrees he rose to the rank of a chief, espoused one of
the beauties of the island, and became habituated and reconciled to his
new way of life; thinking it better, perhaps, to rule among savages
than serve among white men; to be a feathered chief than a tarpaulin
boatswain. His favor with Tamahmaah, never declined; and when that
sagacious, intrepid, and aspiring chieftain had made himself sovereign
over the whole group of islands, and removed his residence to Woahoo, he
left his faithful adherent John Young in command of Owyhee.

Such is an outline of the history of Governor Young, as furnished by
himself; and we regret that we are not able to give any account of the
state maintained by this seafaring worthy, and the manner in which he
discharged his high functions; though it is evident he had more of
the hearty familiarity of the forecastle than the dignity of the
gubernatorial office.

These long conferences were bitter trials to the patience of the
captain, who had no respect either for the governor or his island, and
was anxious to push on in quest of provisions and water. As soon as
he could get his inquisitive partners once more on board, he weighed
anchor, and made sail for the island of Woahoo, the royal residence of
Tamaahmaah.

This is the most beautiful island of the Sandwich group. It is forty-six
miles in length and twenty-three in breadth. A ridge of volcanic
mountains extends through the centre, rising into lofty peaks, and
skirted by undulating hills and rich plains, where the cabins of the
natives peep out from beneath groves of cocoanut and other luxuriant
trees.

On the 21st of February the Tonquin cast anchor in the beautiful bay
before the village of Waititi, (pronounced Whyteetee.) the abode of
Tamaahmaah. This village contained about two hundred habitations,
composed of poles set in the ground, tied together at the ends, and
thatched with grass, and was situated in an open grove of cocoanuts. The
royal palace of Tamaahmaah was a large house of two stories; the lower
of stone, the upper of wood. Round this his body-guard kept watch,
composed of twenty-four men in long blue cassocks, turned up with
yellow, and each armed with a musket.

While at anchor at this place, much ceremonious visiting and long
conferences took place between the potentate of the islands and the
partners of the company. Tamaahmaah came on board of the ship in royal
style, in his double pirogue. He was between fifty and sixty years
of age, above the middle size, large and well made, though somewhat
corpulent. He was dressed in an old suit of regimentals, with a sword
by his side, and seemed somewhat embarrassed by his magnificent attire.
Three of his wives accompanied him. They were almost as tall, and quite
as corpulent as himself; but by no means to be compared with him in
grandeur of habiliments, wearing no other garb than the pan. With him,
also, came his great favorite and confidential counseller, Kraimaker;
who, from holding a post equivalent to that of prime minister, had been
familiarly named Billy Pitt by the British visitors to the islands.

The sovereign was received with befitting ceremonial. The American
flag was displayed, four guns were fired, and the partners appeared
in scarlet coats, and conducted their illustrious guests to the cabin,
where they were regaled with wine. In this interview the partners
endeavored to impress the monarch with a sense of their importance, and
of the importance of the association to which they belonged. They let
him know that they were eris, or chiefs, of a great company about to
be established on the northwest coast, and talked of the probability
of opening a trade with his islands, and of sending ships there
occasionally. All this was gratifying and interesting to him, for he
was aware of the advantages of trade, and desirous of promoting frequent
intercourse with white men. He encouraged Europeans and Americans to
settle in his islands and intermarry with his subjects. There were
between twenty and thirty white men at that time resident in the island,
but many of them were mere vagabonds, who remained there in hopes
of leading a lazy and an easy life. For such Tamaahmaah had a great
contempt; those only had his esteem and countenance who knew some trade
or mechanic art, and were sober and industrious.

On the day subsequent to the monarch’s visit, the partners landed and
waited upon him in return. Knowing the effect of show and dress upon men
in savage life, and wishing to make a favorable impression as the eris,
or chiefs, of the great American Fur Company, some of them appeared in
Highland plaids and kilts to the great admiration of the natives.

While visits of ceremony and grand diplomatic conferences were going
on between the partners and the king, the captain, in his plain,
matter-of-fact way, was pushing what he considered a far more important
negotiation; the purchase of a supply of hogs. He found that the king
had profited in more ways than one by his intercourse with white men.
Above all other arts he had learned the art of driving a bargain. He was
a magnanimous monarch, but a shrewd pork merchant; and perhaps thought
he could not do better with his future allies, the American Fur Company,
than to begin by close dealing. Several interviews were requisite, and
much bargaining, before he could be brought to part with a bristle of
his bacon, and then he insisted upon being paid in hard Spanish dollars;
giving as a reason that he wanted money to purchase a frigate from his
brother George, as he affectionately termed the king of England. *

At length the royal bargain was concluded; the necessary supply of hogs
obtained, besides several goats, two sheep, a quantity of poultry, and
vegetables in abundance. The partners now urged to recruit their forces
from the natives of this island. They declared they had never seen
watermen equal to them, even among the voyageurs of the Northwest; and,
indeed, they are remarkable for their skill in managing their light
craft, and can swim and dive like waterfowl. The partners were inclined,
therefore, to take thirty or forty with them to the Columbia, to be
employed in the service of the company. The captain, however, objected
that there was not room in his vessel for the accommodation of such a
number. Twelve, only, were therefore enlisted for the company, and as
many more for the service of the ship. The former engaged to serve for
the term of three years, during which they were to be fed and clothed;
and at the expiration of the time were to receive one hundred dollars in
merchandise.

And now, having embarked his live-stock, fruits, vegetables, and water,
the captain made ready to set sail. How much the honest man had
suffered in spirit by what he considered the freaks and vagaries of
his passengers, and how little he had understood their humors and
intentions, is amusingly shown in a letter written to Mr. Astor from
Woahoo, which contains his comments on the scenes we have described.

“It would be difficult,” he writes, “to imagine the frantic gambols
that are daily played off here; sometimes dressing in red coats, and
otherwise very fantastically, and collecting a number of ignorant
natives around them, telling them that they are the great eris of the
Northwest, and making arrangements for sending three or four vessels
yearly to them from the coast with spars, &c.; while those very natives
cannot even furnish a hog to the ship. Then dressing in Highland plaids
and kilts, and making similar arrangements, with presents of rum, wine,
or anything that is at hand. Then taking a number of clerks and men
on shore to the very spot on which Captain Cook was killed, and each
fetching off a piece of the rock or tree that was touched by the shot.
Then sitting down with some white man or some native who can be a little
understood, and collecting the history of those islands, of Tamaahmaah’s
wars, the curiosities of the islands, &c., preparatory to the
histories of their voyages; and the collection is indeed ridiculously
contemptible. To enumerate the thousand instances of ignorance, filth,
&c.,--or to particularize all the frantic gambols that are daily
practiced, would require Volumes.”

Before embarking, the great eris of the American Fur Company took leave
of their illustrious ally in due style, with many professions of lasting
friendship and promises of future intercourse; while the matter-of-fact
captain anathematized him in his heart for a grasping, trafficking
savage; as shrewd and sordid in his dealings as a white man. As one of
the vessels of the company will, in the course of events, have to appeal
to the justice and magnanimity of this island potentate, we shall see
how far the honest captain was right in his opinion.

     * It appears, from the accounts of subsequent voyagers, that
     Tamaahmaah afterwards succeeded in his wish of purchasing a
     large ship. In this he sent a cargo of sandal-wood to
     Canton, having discovered that the foreign merchants trading
     with him made large profits on this wood, shipped by them
     from the islands to the Chinese markets. The ship was manned
     by natives, but the officers were Englishmen. She
     accomplished her voyage, and returned in safety to the
     islands, with the Hawaiian flag floating gloriously in the
     breeze. The king hastened on board, expecting to find his
     sandal-wood converted into crapes and damasks, and other
     rich stuffs of China, but found, to his astonishment, by the
     legerdemain of traffic, his cargo had all disappeared, and,
     in place of it, remained a bill of charges amounting to
     three thousand dollars. It was some time before he could be
     made to comprehend certain of the most important items of
     the bill, such as pilotage, anchorage, and custom-house
     fees; but when he discovered that maritime states in other
     countries derived large revenues in this manner, to the
     great cost of the merchant, “Well,” cried he, “then I will
     have harbor fees also.” He established them accordingly.
     Pilotage a dollar a foot on the draft of each vessel.
     Anchorage from sixty to seventy dollars. In this way he
     greatly increased the royal revenue, and turned his China
     speculation to account.



CHAPTER VII.

     Departure From the Sandwich Islands.--Misunderstandings--
     Miseries of a Suspicious Man.--Arrival at the Columbia--
     Dangerous Service.--Gloomy Apprehensions--Bars and
     Breakers.--Perils of the Ship. Disasters of a Boat’s Crew.--
     Burial of a Sandwich Islander.

IT was on the 28th of February that the Tonquin set sail from the
Sandwich Islands. For two days the wind was contrary, and the vessel was
detained in their neighborhood; at length a favorable breeze sprang up,
and in a little while the rich groves, green hills, and snowy peaks of
those happy islands one after another sank from sight, or melted into
the blue distance, and the Tonquin ploughed her course towards the
sterner regions of the Pacific.

The misunderstandings between the captain and his passengers still
continued; or rather, increased in gravity. By his altercations and his
moody humors, he had cut himself off from all community of thought, or
freedom of conversation with them. He disdained to ask questions as
to their proceedings, and could only guess at the meaning of their
movements, and in so doing indulged in conjectures and suspicions, which
produced the most whimsical self-torment.

Thus, in one of his disputes with them, relative to the goods on board,
some of the packages of which they wished to open, to take out articles
of clothing for the men or presents for the natives, he was so harsh and
peremptory that they lost all patience, and hinted that they were the
strongest party, and might reduce him to a very ridiculous dilemma, by
taking from him the command.

A thought now flashed across the captain’s mind that they really had
a plan to depose him, and that, having picked up some information at
Owyhee, possibly of war between the United States and England, they
meant to alter the destination of the voyage; perhaps to seize upon ship
and cargo for their own use.

Once having conceived this suspicion, everything went to foster it. They
had distributed fire-arms among some of their men, a common precaution
among the fur traders when mingling with the natives. This, however,
looked like preparation. Then several of the partners and clerks and
some of the men, being Scotsmen, were acquainted with the Gaelic, and
held long conversations together in that language. These conversations
were considered by the captain of a “mysterious and unwarranted nature,”
 and related, no doubt, to some foul conspiracy that was brewing among
them. He frankly avows such suspicions, in his letter to Mr. Astor, but
intimates that he stood ready to resist any treasonous outbreak; and
seems to think that the evidence of preparation on his part had an
effect in overawing the conspirators.

The fact is, as we have since been informed by one of the parties, it
was a mischievous pleasure with some of the partners and clerks, who
were young men, to play upon the suspicious temper and splenetic humors
of the captain. To this we may ascribe many of their whimsical pranks
and absurd propositions, and, above all, their mysterious colloquies in
Gaelic.

In this sore and irritable mood did the captain pursue his course,
keeping a wary eye on every movement, and bristling up whenever the
detested sound of the Gaelic language grated upon his ear. Nothing
occurred, however, materially to disturb the residue of the voyage
excepting a violent storm; and on the twenty-second of March, the
Tonquin arrived at the mouth of the Oregon, or Columbia River.

The aspect of the river and the adjacent coast was wild and dangerous.
The mouth of the Columbia is upwards of four miles wide with a peninsula
and promontory on one side, and a long low spit of land on the other;
between which a sand bar and chain of breakers almost block the
entrance. The interior of the country rises into successive ranges
of mountains, which, at the time of the arrival of the Tonquin, were
covered with snow.

A fresh wind from the northwest sent a rough tumbling sea upon the
coast, which broke upon the bar in furious surges, and extended a sheet
of foam almost across the mouth of the river. Under these circumstances
the captain did not think it prudent to approach within three leagues,
until the bar should be sounded and the channel ascertained. Mr.
Fox, the chief mate, was ordered to this service in the whaleboat,
accompanied by John Martin, an old seaman, who had formerly visited the
river, and by three Canadians. Fox requested to have regular sailors to
man the boat, but the captain would not spare them from the service of
the ship, and supposed the Canadians, being expert boatmen on lakes
and rivers, were competent to the service, especially when directed and
aided by Fox and Martin. Fox seems to have lost all firmness of spirit
on the occasion, and to have regarded the service with a misgiving
heart. He came to the partners for sympathy, knowing their differences
with the captain, and the tears were in his eyes as he represented
his case. “I am sent off,” said he, “without seamen to man my boat,
in boisterous weather, and on the most dangerous part of the northwest
coast. My uncle was lost a few years ago on this same bar, and I am now
going to lay my bones alongside of his.” The partners sympathized in his
apprehensions, and remonstrated with the captain. The latter, however,
was not to be moved. He had been displeased with Mr. Fox in the earlier
part of the voyage, considering him indolent and inactive; and probably
thought his present repugnance arose from a want of true nautical
spirit. The interference of the partners in the business of the ship,
also, was not calculated to have a favorable effect on a stickler
for authority like himself, especially in his actual state of feeling
towards them.

At one o’clock, P.M., therefore, Fox and his comrades set off in
the whaleboat, which is represented as small in size, and crazy in
condition. All eyes were strained after the little bark as it pulled for
shore, rising and sinking with the huge rolling waves, until it entered,
a mere speck, among the foaming breakers, and was soon lost to view.
Evening set in, night succeeded and passed away, and morning returned,
but without the return of the boat.

As the wind had moderated, the ship stood near to the land, so as to
command a view of the river’s mouth. Nothing was to be seen but a wild
chaos of tumbling waves breaking upon the bar, and apparently forming a
foaming barrier from shore to shore. Towards night the ship again stood
out to gain sea-room, and a gloom was visible in every countenance. The
captain himself shared in the general anxiety, and probably repented
of his peremptory orders. Another weary and watchful night succeeded,
during which the wind subsided, and the weather became serene.

On the following day, the ship having drifted near the land, anchored
in fourteen fathoms water, to the northward of the long peninsula or
promontory which forms the north side of the entrance, and is called
Cape Disappointment. The pinnace was then manned, and two of the
partners, Mr. David Stuart and Mr. M’Kay, set off in the hope of
learning something of the fate of the whaleboat. The surf, however,
broke with such violence along the shore that they could find no landing
place. Several of the natives appeared on the beach and made signs to
them to row round the cape, but they thought it most prudent to return
to the ship.

The wind now springing up, the Tonquin got under way, and stood in to
seek the channel; but was again deterred by the frightful aspect of
the breakers, from venturing within a league. Here she hove to; and
Mr. Mumford, the second mate, was despatched with four hands, in the
pinnace, to sound across the channel until he should find four fathoms
depth. The pinnace entered among the breakers, but was near being lost,
and with difficulty got back to the ship. The captain insisted that
Mr. Mumford had steered too much to the southward. He now turned to Mr.
Aiken, an able mariner, destined to command the schooner intended
for the coasting trade, and ordered him, together with John Coles,
sail-maker, Stephen Weekes, armorer, and two Sandwich Islanders, to
proceed ahead and take soundings, while the ship should follow under
easy sail. In this way they proceeded until Aiken had ascertained the
channel, when signal was given from the ship for him to return on board.
He was then within pistol shot, but so furious was the current, and
tumultuous the breakers, that the boat became unmanageable, and was
hurried away, the crew crying out piteously for assistance. In a
few moments she could not be seen from the ship’s deck. Some of the
passengers climbed to the mizzen top, and beheld her still struggling to
reach the ship; but shortly after she broached broadside to the waves,
and her case seemed desperate. The attention of those on board of the
ship was now called to their own safety. They were in shallow water; the
vessel struck repeatedly, the waves broke over her, and there was danger
of her foundering. At length she got into seven fathoms water, and the
wind lulling, and the night coming on, cast anchor. With the darkness
their anxieties increased. The wind whistled, the sea roared, the gloom
was only broken by the ghastly glare of the foaming breakers, the
minds of the seamen were full of dreary apprehensions, and some of them
fancied they heard the cries of their lost comrades mingling with
the uproar of the elements. For a time, too, the rapidly ebbing tide
threatened to sweep them from their precarious anchorage. At length the
reflux of the tide, and the springing up of the wind, enabled them to
quit their dangerous situation and take shelter in a small bay within
Cape Disappointment, where they rode in safety during the residue of a
stormy night, and enjoyed a brief interval of refreshing sleep.

With the light of day returned their cares and anxieties. They looked
out from the mast-head over a wild coast, and wilder sea, but could
discover no trace of the two boats and their crews that were missing.
Several of the natives came on board with peltries, but there was no
disposition to trade. They were interrogated by signs after the lost
boats, but could not understand the inquiries.

Parties now Went on shore and scoured the neighborhood. One of these
was headed by the captain. They had not proceeded far when they beheld a
person at a distance in civilized garb. As he drew near he proved to
be Weekes, the armorer. There was a burst of joy, for it was hoped his
comrades were near at hand. His story, however, was one of disaster. He
and his companions had found it impossible to govern their boat, having
no rudder, and being beset by rapid and whirling currents and boisterous
surges. After long struggling they had let her go at the mercy of
the waves, tossing about, sometimes with her bow, sometimes with her
broadside to the surges, threatened each instant with destruction, yet
repeatedly escaping, until a huge sea broke over and swamped her. Weekes
was overwhelmed by the broiling waves, but emerging above the surface,
looked round for his companions. Aiken and Coles were not to be seen;
near him were the two Sandwich Islanders, stripping themselves of their
clothing that they might swim more freely. He did the same, and the boat
floating near to him he seized hold of it. The two islanders joined him,
and, uniting their forces, they succeeded in turning the boat upon her
keel; then bearing down her stern and rocking her, they forced out
so much water that she was able to bear the weight of a man without
sinking. One of the islanders now got in, and in a little while bailed
out the water with his hands. The other swam about and collected the
oars, and they all three got once more on board.

By this time the tide had swept them beyond the breakers, and Weekes
called on his companions to row for land. They were so chilled and
benumbed by the cold, however, that they lost all heart, and absolutely
refused. Weekes was equally chilled, but had superior sagacity and
self-command. He counteracted the tendency to drowsiness and stupor
which cold produces by keeping himself in constant exercise; and
seeing that the vessel was advancing, and that everything depended upon
himself, he set to work to scull the boat clear of the bar, and into
quiet water.

Toward midnight one of the poor islanders expired; his companion threw
himself on his corpse and could not be persuaded to leave him. The
dismal night wore away amidst these horrors: as the day dawned, Weekes
found himself near the land. He steered directly for it, and at length,
with the aid of the surf, ran his boat high upon a sandy beach.

Finding that one of the Sandwich Islanders yet gave signs of life, he
aided him to leave the boat, and set out with him towards the adjacent
woods. The poor fellow, however, was too feeble to follow him, and
Weekes was soon obliged to abandon him to his fate and provide for his
own safety. Falling upon a beaten path, he pursued it, and after a few
hours came to a part of the coast, where, to his surprise and joy, he
beheld the ship at anchor and was met by the captain and his party.

After Weekes had related his adventures, three parties were despatched
to beat up the coast in search of the unfortunate islander. They
returned at night without success, though they had used the utmost
diligence. On the following day the search was resumed, and the poor
fellow was at length discovered lying beneath a group of rocks, his
legs swollen, his feet torn and bloody from walking through bushes and
briars, and himself half-dead with cold, hunger, and fatigue. Weekes and
this islander were the only survivors of the crew of the jolly-boat, and
no trace was ever discovered of Fox and his party. Thus eight men were
lost on the first approach to the coast; a commencement that cast a
gloom over the spirits of the whole party, and was regarded by some of
the superstitious as an omen that boded no good to the enterprise.

Towards night the Sandwich Islanders went on shore, to bury the body of
their unfortunate countryman who had perished in the boat. On arriving
at the place where it had been left, they dug a grave in the sand, in
which they deposited the corpse, with a biscuit under one of the arms,
some lard under the chin, and a small quantity of tobacco, as provisions
for its journey in the land of spirits. Having covered the body with
sand and flints, they kneeled along the grave in a double row, with
their faces turned to the east, while one who officiated as a priest
sprinkled them with water from a hat. In so doing he recited a kind of
prayer or invocation, to which, at intervals, the others made responses.
Such were the simple rites performed by these poor savages at the grave
of their comrade on the shores of a strange land; and when these were
done, they rose and returned in silence to the ship, without once
casting a look behind.




CHAPTER VIII.

     Mouth of the Columbia.--The Native Tribes.--Their Fishing.--
     Their Canoes.--Bold Navigators--Equestrian Indians and
     Piscatory Indians, Difference in Their Physical
     Organization.--Search for a Trading Site.--Expedition of
     M’Dougal and David Stuart-Comcomly, the One-Eyed Chieftain.--
     Influence of Wealth in Savage Life.--Slavery Among the
     Natives.-An Aristocracy of Flatheads.-Hospitality Among the
     Chinooks--Comcomly’s Daughter.--Her Conquest.

THE Columbia, or Oregon, for the distance of thirty or forty miles
from its entrance into the sea, is, properly speaking, a mere estuary,
indented by deep bays so as to vary from three to seven miles in width;
and is rendered extremely intricate and dangerous by shoals reaching
nearly from shore to shore, on which, at times, the winds and currents
produce foaming and tumultuous breakers. The mouth of the river proper
is but about half a mile wide, formed by the contracting shores of the
estuary. The entrance from the sea, as we have already observed, is
bounded on the south side by a flat sandy spit of land, stretching in
to the ocean. This is commonly called Point Adams. The opposite, or
northern side, is Cape Disappointment; a kind of peninsula, terminating
in a steep knoll or promontory crowned with a forest of pine-trees, and
connected with the mainland by a low and narrow neck. Immediately within
this cape is a wide, open bay, terminating at Chinook Point, so called
from a neighboring tribe of Indians. This was called Baker’s Bay, and
here the Tonquin was anchored.

The natives inhabiting the lower part of the river, and with whom the
company was likely to have the most frequent intercourse, were divided
at this time into four tribes, the Chinooks, Clatsops, Wahkiacums, and
Cathlamahs. They resembled each other in person, dress, language, and
manner; and were probably from the same stock, but broken into tribes,
or rather hordes, by those feuds and schisms frequent among Indians.

These people generally live by fishing. It is true they occasionally
hunt the elk and deer, and ensnare the water-fowl of their ponds and
rivers, but these are casual luxuries. Their chief subsistence is
derived from the salmon and other fish which abound in the Columbia
and its tributary streams, aided by roots and herbs, especially the
wappatoo, which is found on the islands of the river.

As the Indians of the plains who depend upon the chase are bold
and expert riders, and pride themselves upon their horses, so these
piscatory tribes of the coast excel in the management of canoes, and are
never more at home than when riding upon the waves. Their canoes vary in
form and size. Some are upwards of fifty feet long, cut out of a single
tree, either fir or white cedar, and capable of carrying thirty persons.
They have thwart pieces from side to side about three inches thick,
and their gunwales flare outwards, so as to cast off the surges of the
waves. The bow and stern are decorated with grotesque figures of men and
animals, sometimes five feet in height.

In managing their canoes they kneel two and two along the bottom,
sitting on their heels, and wielding paddles from four to five feet
long, while one sits on the stern and steers with a paddle of the same
kind. The women are equally expert with the men in managing the canoe,
and generally take the helm.

It is surprising to see with what fearless unconcern these savages
venture in their light barks upon the roughest and most tempestuous
seas. They seem to ride upon the waves like sea-fowl. Should a surge
throw the canoe upon its side and endanger its overturn, those to
windward lean over the upper gunwale, thrust their paddles deep into the
wave, apparently catch the water and force it under the canoe, and by
this action not merely regain III an equilibrium, but give their bark a
vigorous impulse forward.

The effect of different modes of life upon the human frame and human
character is strikingly instanced in the contrast between the hunting
Indians of the prairies, and the piscatory Indians of the sea-coast. The
former, continually on horseback scouring the plains, gaining their food
by hardy exercise, and subsisting chiefly on flesh, are generally tall,
sinewy, meagre, but well formed, and of bold and fierce deportment: the
latter, lounging about the river banks, or squatting and curved up in
their canoes, are generally low in stature, ill-shaped, with crooked
legs, thick ankles, and broad flat feet. They are inferior also in
muscular power and activity, and in game qualities and appearance, to
their hard-riding brethren of the prairies.

Having premised these few particulars concerning the neighboring
Indians, we will return to the immediate concerns of the Tonquin and her
crew.

Further search was made for Mr. Fox and his party, but with no better
success, and they were at length given up as lost. In the meantime, the
captain and some of the partners explored the river for some distance in
a large boat, to select a suitable place for the trading post. Their old
jealousies and differences continued; they never could coincide in their
choice, and the captain objected altogether to any site so high up the
river. They all returned, therefore, to Baker’s Bay in no very good
humor. The partners proposed to examine the opposite shore, but the
captain was impatient of any further delay. His eagerness to “get on”
 had increased upon him. He thought all these excursions a sheer loss
of time, and was resolved to land at once, build a shelter for the
reception of that part of his cargo destined for the use of the
settlement, and, having cleared his ship of it and of his irksome
shipmates, to depart upon the prosecution of his coasting voyage,
according to orders.

On the following day, therefore, without troubling himself to consult
the partners, he landed in Baker’s Bay, and proceeded to erect a shed
for the reception of the rigging, equipments, and stores of the schooner
that was to be built for the use of the settlement.

This dogged determination on the part of the sturdy captain gave high
offense to Mr. M’Dougal, who now considered himself at the head of the
concern, as Mr. Astor’s representative and proxy. He set off the same
day, (April 5th) accompanied by David Stuart, for the southern shore,
intending to be back by the seventh. Not having the captain to contend
with, they soon pitched upon a spot which appeared to them favorable
for the intended establishment. It was on a point of land called Point
George, having a very good harbor, where vessels, not exceeding two
hundred tons burden, might anchor within fifty yards of the shore.

After a day thus profitably spent, they recrossed the river, but landed
on the northern shore several miles above the anchoring ground of the
Tonquin, in the neighborhood of Chinooks, and visited the village of
that tribe. Here they were received with great hospitality by the chief,
who was named Comcomly, a shrewd old savage, with but one eye, who
will occasionally figure in this narrative. Each village forms a petty
sovereignty, governed by its own chief, who, however, possesses but
little authority, unless he be a man of wealth and substance; that is
to say, possessed of canoe, slaves, and wives. The greater the number of
these, the greater is the chief. How many wives this one-eyed potentate
maintained we are not told, but he certainly possessed great sway, not
merely over his own tribe, but over the neighborhood.

Having mentioned slaves, we would observe that slavery exists among
several of the tribes beyond the Rocky Mountains. The slaves are well
treated while in good health, but occupied in all kinds of drudgery.
Should they become useless, however, by sickness or old age, they are
totally neglected, and left to perish; nor is any respect paid to their
bodies after death.

A singular custom prevails, not merely among the Chinooks, but among
most of the tribes about this part of the coast, which is the flattening
of the forehead. The process by which this deformity is effected
commences immediately after birth. The infant is laid in a wooden
trough, by way of cradle. The end on which the head reposes is higher
than the rest. A padding is placed on the forehead of the infant, with a
piece of bark above it, and is pressed down by cords, which pass through
holes on each side of the trough. As the tightening of the padding and
the pressing of the head to the board is gradual, the process is
said not to be attended with much pain. The appearance of the infant,
however, while in this state of compression, is whimsically hideous, and
“its little black eyes,” we are told, “being forced out by the tightness
of the bandages, resemble those of a mouse choked in a trap.”

About a year’s pressure is sufficient to produce the desired effect,
at the end of which time the child emerges from its bandages a complete
flathead, and continues so through life. It must be noted that
this flattening of the head has something in it of aristocratical
significancy, like the crippling of the feet among the Chinese ladies of
quality. At any rate, it is a sign of freedom. No slave is permitted
to bestow this enviable deformity upon his child; all the slaves,
therefore, are roundheads.

With this worthy tribe of Chinooks the two partners passed a part of
the day very agreeably. M’Dougal, who was somewhat vain of his official
rank, had given it to be understood that they were two chiefs of a great
trading company, about to be established here, and the quick-sighted,
though one-eyed chief, who was somewhat practiced in traffic with white
men, immediately perceived the policy of cultivating the friendship of
two such important visitors. He regaled them, therefore, to the best of
his ability, with abundance of salmon and wappatoo. The next morning,
April 7th, they prepared to return to the vessel, according to promise.
They had eleven miles of open bay to traverse; the wind was fresh, the
waves ran high. Comcomly remonstrated with them on the hazard to which
they would be exposed. They were resolute, however, and launched their
boat, while the wary chieftain followed at some short distance in his
canoe. Scarce had they rowed a mile, when a wave broke over their boat
and upset it. They were in imminent peril of drowning, especially Mr.
M’Dougal, who could not swim. Comcomly, however, came bounding over the
waves in his light canoe, and snatched them from a watery grave.

They were taken on shore and a fire made, at which they dried their
clothes, after which Comcomly conducted them back to his village. Here
everything was done that could be devised for their entertainment during
three days that they were detained by bad weather. Comcomly made
his people perform antics before them; and his wives and daughters
endeavored, by all the soothing and endearing arts of women, to find
favor in their eyes. Some even painted their bodies with red clay, and
anointed themselves with fish oil, to give additional lustre to their
charms. Mr. M’Dougal seems to have had a heart susceptible to the
influence of the gentler sex. Whether or no it was first touched on this
occasion we do not learn; but it will be found, in the course of this
work, that one of the daughters of the hospitable Comcomly eventually
made a conquest of the great eri of the American Fur Company.

When the weather had moderated and the sea became tranquil, the one-eyed
chief of the Chinooks manned his state canoe, and conducted his
guests in safety to the ship, where they were welcomed with joy, for
apprehensions had been felt for their safety. Comcomly and his people
were then entertained on board of the Tonquin, and liberally rewarded
for their hospitality and services. They returned home highly satisfied,
promising to remain faithful friends and allies of the white men.




CHAPTER IX.

     Point George--Founding of Astoria--Indian Visitors.--Their
     Reception.--The Captain Taboos the Ship.--Departure of the
     Tonquin.--Comments on the Conduct of Captain Thorn.

FROM the report made by the two exploring partners, it was determined
that Point George should be the site of the trading house. These
gentlemen, it is true, were not perfectly satisfied with the place,
and were desirous of continuing their search; but Captain Thorn was
impatient to land his cargo and continue his voyage, and protested
against any more of what he termed “sporting excursions.”

Accordingly, on the 12th of April the launch was freighted with all
things necessary for the purpose, and sixteen persons departed in her to
commence the establishment, leaving the Tonquin to follow as soon as the
harbor could be sounded.

Crossing the wide mouth of the river, the party landed, and encamped at
the bottom of a small bay within Point George. The situation chosen for
the fortified post was on an elevation facing to the north, with the
wide estuary, its sand bars and tumultuous breakers spread out before
it, and the promontory of Cape Disappointment, fifteen miles distant,
closing the prospect to the left. The surrounding country was in all the
freshness of spring; the trees were in the young leaf, the weather was
superb, and everything looked delightful to men just emancipated from a
long confinement on shipboard. The Tonquin shortly afterwards made her
way through the intricate channel, an came to anchor in the little bay,
and was saluted from the encampment with three volleys of musketry and
three cheers. She returned the salute with three cheers and three guns.

All hands now set to work cutting down trees, clearing away thickets,
and marking out the place for the residence, storehouse, and powder
magazine, which were to be built of logs and covered with bark. Others
landed the timbers intended for the frame of the coasting vessel, and
proceeded to put them together, while others prepared a garden spot, and
sowed the seeds of various vegetables.

The next thought was to give a name to the embryo metropolis: the one
that naturally presented itself was that of the projector and supporter
of the whole enterprise. It was accordingly named ASTORIA.

The neighboring Indians now swarmed about the place. Some brought a few
land-otter and sea-otter skins to barter, but in very scanty parcels;
the greater number came prying about to gratify their curiosity, for
they are said to be impertinently inquisitive; while not a few came
with no other design than to pilfer; the laws of meum and tuum being
but slightly respected among them. Some of them beset the ship in
their canoes, among whom was the Chinook chief Comcomly, and his liege
subjects. These were well received by Mr. M’Dougal, who was delighted
with an opportunity of entering upon his functions, and acquiring
importance in the eyes of his future neighbors. The confusion thus
produced on board, and the derangement of the cargo caused by this petty
trade, stirred the spleen of the captain, who had a sovereign contempt
for the one-eyed chieftain and all his crew. He complained loudly of
having his ship lumbered by a host of “Indian ragamuffins,” who had not
a skin to dispose of, and at length put his positive interdict upon
all trafficking on board. Upon this Mr. M’Dougal was fain to land, and
establish his quarters at the encampment, where he could exercise his
rights and enjoy his dignities without control.

The feud, however, between these rival powers still continued, but was
chiefly carried on by letter. Day after day and week after week elapsed,
yet the store-house requisite for the reception of the cargo was not
completed, and the ship was detained in port; while the captain was
teased by frequent requisitions for various articles for the use of the
establishment, or the trade with the natives. An angry correspondence
took place, in which he complained bitterly of the time wasted in
“smoking and sporting parties,” as he termed the reconnoitering
expeditions, and in clearing and preparing meadow ground and turnip
patches, instead of despatching his ship. At length all these jarring
matters were adjusted, if not to the satisfaction, at least to the
acquiescence of all parties. The part of the cargo destined for the use
of Astoria was landed, and the ship left free to proceed on her voyage.

As the Tonquin was to coast to the north, to trade for peltries at the
different harbors, and to touch at Astoria on her return in the autumn,
it was unanimously determined that Mr. M’Kay should go in her as
supercargo, taking with him Mr. Lewis as ship’s clerk. On the first of
June the ship got under way, and dropped down to Baker’s Bay, where she
was detained for a few days by a head wind; but early in the morning of
the fifth stood out to sea with a fine breeze and swelling canvas, and
swept off gaily on her fatal voyage, from which she was never to return!

On reviewing the conduct of Captain Thorn, and examining his peevish and
somewhat whimsical correspondence, the impression left upon our mind is,
upon the whole, decidedly in his favor. While we smile at the simplicity
of his heart and the narrowness of his views, which made him regard
everything out of the direct path of his daily duty, and the rigid
exigencies of the service, as trivial and impertinent, which inspired
him with contempt for the swelling vanity of some of his coadjutors, and
the literary exercises and curious researches of others, we cannot but
applaud that strict and conscientious devotion to the interests of his
employer, and to what he considered the true objects of the enterprise
in which he was engaged. He certainly was to blame occasionally for the
asperity of his manners, and the arbitrary nature of his measures, yet
much that is exceptionable in this part of his conduct may be traced to
rigid notions of duty acquired in that tyrannical school, a ship of war,
and to the construction given by his companions to the orders of Mr.
Astor, so little in conformity with his own. His mind, too, appears to
have become almost diseased by the suspicions he had formed as to the
loyalty of his associates, and the nature of their ultimate designs; yet
on this point there were circumstances to, in some measure, justify him.
The relations between the United States and Great Britain were at that
time in a critical state; in fact, the two countries were on the eve of
a war. Several of the partners were British subjects, and might be ready
to desert the flag under which they acted, should a war take place.
Their application to the British minister at New York shows the dubious
feeling with which they had embarked in the present enterprise. They had
been in the employ of the Northwest Company, and might be disposed
to rally again under that association, should events threaten the
prosperity of this embryo establishment of Mr. Astor. Besides, we have
the fact, averred to us by one of the partners, that some of them, who
were young and heedless, took a mischievous and unwarrantable pleasure
in playing upon the jealous temper of the captain, and affecting
mysterious consultations and sinister movements.

These circumstances are cited in palliation of the doubts and surmises
of Captain Thorn, which might otherwise appear strange and unreasonable.
That most of the partners were perfectly upright and faithful in the
discharge of the trust reposed in them we are fully satisfied; still the
honest captain was not invariably wrong in his suspicions; and that
he formed a pretty just opinion of the integrity of that aspiring
personage, Mr. M’Dougal, will be substantially proved in the sequel.




CHAPTER X.

     Disquieting Rumors From the Interior.--Reconnoitring Party--
     Preparations for a Trading Post.--An Unexpected Arrival--A
     Spy in the Camp.--Expedition Into the Interior--Shores of
     the Columbia--Mount Coffin.--Indian Sepulchre.--The Land of
     Spirits--Columbian Valley--Vancouver’s Point.-Falls and
     Rapids.--A Great Fishing Mart.--The Village of Wishram.--
     Difference Between Fishing Indians and Hunting Indians--
     Effects of Habits of Trade on the Indian Character.--Post
     Established at the Oakinagan.

WHILE the Astorians were busily occupied in completing their factory and
fort, a report was brought to them by an Indian from the upper part of
the river, that a party of thirty white men had appeared on the banks
of the Columbia, and were actually building houses at the second rapids.
This information caused much disquiet. We have already mentioned that
the Northwest Company had established posts to the west of the Rocky
Mountains, in a district called by them New Caledonia, which extended
from lat. 52 to 55 deg north, being within the British territories. It
was now apprehended that they were advancing within the American limits,
and were endeavoring to seize upon the upper part of the river and
forestall the American Fur Company in the surrounding trade; in which
case bloody feuds might be anticipated, such as had prevailed between
the rival fur companies in former days.

A reconnoitring party was sent up the river to ascertain the truth of
the report. They ascended to the foot of the first rapid, about two
hundred miles, but could hear nothing of any white men being in the
neighborhood.

Not long after their return, however, further accounts were received,
by two wandering Indians, which established the fact that the Northwest
Company had actually erected a trading house on the Spokane River, which
falls into the north branch of the Columbia.

What rendered this intelligence the more disquieting was the inability
of the Astorians, in their present reduced state as to numbers, and
the exigencies of their new establishment, to furnish detachments
to penetrate the country in different directions, and fix the posts
necessary to secure the interior trade.

It was resolved, however, at any rate, to advance a countercheck to this
post on the Spokan, and one of the partners, Mr. David Stuart, prepared
to set out for the purpose with eight men and a small assortment of
goods. He was to be guided by the two Indians, who knew the country and
promised to take him to a place not far from the Spokan River, and in a
neighborhood abounding with beaver. Here he was to establish himself and
to remain for a time, provided he found the situation advantageous and
the natives friendly.

On the 15th of July, when Mr. Stuart was nearly ready to embark, a canoe
made its appearance, standing for the harbor, and manned by nine white
men. Much speculation took place who these strangers could be, for it
was too soon to expect their own people, under Mr. Hunt, who were to
cross the continent. As the canoe drew near, the British standard was
distinguished: on coming to land, one of the crew stepped on shore, and
announced himself as Mr. David Thompson, astronomer, and partner of
the Northwest Company. According to his account, he had set out in the
preceding year with a tolerably strong party, and a supply of Indian
goods, to cross the Rocky Mountains. A part of his people, however, had
deserted him on the eastern side, and returned with the goods to the
nearest Northwest post. He had persisted in crossing the mountains
with eight men, who remained true to him. They had traversed the higher
regions, and ventured near the source of the Columbia, where, in the
spring, they had constructed a cedar canoe, the same in which they had
reached Astoria.

This, in fact, was the party despatched by the Northwest Company to
anticipate Mr. Astor in his intention of effecting a settlement at the
mouth of the Columbia River. It appears, from information subsequently
derived from other sources, that Mr. Thompson had pushed on his course
with great haste, calling at all the Indian villages in his march,
presenting them with British flags, and even planting them at the forks
of the rivers, proclaiming formally that he took possession of the
country in the name of the king of Great Britain for the Northwest
Company. As his original plan was defeated by the desertion of
his people, it is probable that he descended the river simply to
reconnoitre, and ascertain whether an American settlement had been
commenced.

Mr. Thompson was, no doubt, the first white man who descended the
northern branch of the Columbia from so near its source. Lewis and
Clarke struck the main body of the river at the forks, about four
hundred miles from its mouth. They entered it from Lewis River, its
southern branch, and thence descended.

Though Mr. Thompson could be considered as little better than a spy in
the camp, he was received with great cordiality by Mr. M’Dougal, who
had a lurking feeling of companionship and good-will for all of the
Northwest Company. He invited him to head-quarters, where he and his
people were hospitably entertained. Nay, further, being somewhat in
extremity, he was furnished by Mr. M’Dougal with goods and provisions
for his journey back across the mountains, much against the wishes Of
Mr. David Stuart, who did not think the object of his visit entitled him
to any favor.

On the 23rd of July, Mr. Stuart set out upon his expedition to the
interior. His party consisted of four of the clerks, Messrs. Pillet,
Ross, M’Lennon, and Montigny, two Canadian voyageurs, and two natives of
the Sandwich Islands. They had three canoes well laden with provisions,
and with goods and necessities for a trading establishment.

Mr. Thompson and his party set out in company with them, it being
his intention to proceed direct to Montreal. The partners at Astoria
forwarded by him a short letter to Mr. Astor, informing him of their
safe arrival at the mouth of the Columbia, and that they had not
yet heard of Mr. Hunt. The little squadron of canoes set sail with a
favorable breeze, and soon passed Tongue Point, a long, high, and rocky
promontory, covered with trees, and stretching far into the river.
Opposite to this, on the northern shore, is a deep bay, where the
Columbia anchored at the time of the discovery, and which is still
called Gray’s Bay, from the name of her commander.

From hence, the general course of the river for about seventy miles
was nearly southeast; varying in breadth according to its bays and
indentations, and navigable for vessels of three hundred tons. The
shores were in some places high and rocky, with low marshy islands at
their feet, subject to inundation, and covered with willows, poplars,
and other trees that love an alluvial soil. Sometimes the mountains
receded, and gave place to beautiful plains and noble forests. While
the river margin was richly fringed with trees of deciduous foliage, the
rough uplands were crowned by majestic pines, and firs of gigantic size,
some towering to the height of between two and three hundred feet, with
proportionate circumference. Out of these the Indians wrought their
great canoes and pirogues.

At one part of the river, they passed, on the northern side, an isolated
rock, about one hundred and fifty feet high, rising from a low marshy
soil, and totally disconnected with the adjacent mountains. This was
held in great reverence by the neighboring Indians, being one of their
principal places of sepulture. The same provident care for the deceased
that prevails among the hunting tribes of the prairies is observable
among the piscatory tribes of the rivers and sea-coast. Among the
former, the favorite horse of the hunter is buried with him in the same
funereal mound, and his bow and arrows are laid by his side, that he
may be perfectly equipped for the “happy hunting grounds” of the land of
spirits. Among the latter, the Indian is wrapped in his mantle of
skins, laid in his canoe, with his paddle, his fishing spear, and other
implements beside him, and placed aloft on some rock or other eminence
overlooking the river, or bay, or lake, that he has frequented. He is
thus fitted out to launch away upon those placid streams and sunny lakes
stocked with all kinds of fish and waterfowl, which are prepared in the
next world for those who have acquitted themselves as good sons, good
fathers, good husbands, and, above all, good fishermen, during their
mortal sojourn.

The isolated rock in question presented a spectacle of the kind,
numerous dead bodies being deposited in canoes on its summit; while on
poles around were trophies, or, rather, funeral offerings of trinkets,
garments, baskets of roots, and other articles for the use of the
deceased. A reverential feeling protects these sacred spots from robbery
or insult. The friends of the deceased, especially the women, repair
here at sunrise and sunset for some time after his death, singing his
funeral dirge, and uttering loud wailings and lamentations.

From the number of dead bodies in canoes observed upon this rock by
the first explorers of the river, it received the name of Mount Coffin,
which it continues to bear.

Beyond this rock they passed the mouth of a river on the right bank
of the Columbia, which appeared to take its rise in a distant mountain
covered with snow. The Indian name of this river was the Cowleskee. Some
miles further on they came to the great Columbian Valley, so called by
Lewis and Clarke. It is sixty miles in width, and extends far to the
southeast between parallel ridges of mountains, which bound it on the
east and west. Through the centre of this valley flowed a large and
beautiful stream, called the Wallamot, which came wandering for several
miles, through a yet unexplored wilderness. The sheltered situation of
this immense valley had an obvious effect upon the climate. It was a
region of great beauty and luxuriance, with lakes and pools, and green
meadows shaded by noble groves. Various tribes were said to reside in
this valley, and along the banks of the Wallamot.

About eight miles above the mouth of the Wallamot the little squadron
arrived at Vancouver’s Point, so called in honor of that celebrated
voyager by his lieutenant (Broughton) when he explored the river.
This point is said to present one of the most beautiful scenes on the
Columbia; a lovely meadow, with a silver sheet of limpid water in the
center, enlivened by wild-fowl, a range of hills crowned by forests,
while the prospect is closed by Mount Hood, a magnificent mountain
rising into a lofty peak, and covered with snow; the ultimate landmark
of the first explorers of the river.

Point Vancouver is about one hundred miles from Astoria. Here the reflux
of the tide ceases to be perceptible. To this place vessels of two and
three hundred tons burden may ascend. The party under the command of
Mr. Stuart had been three or four days in reaching it, though we have
forborne to notice their daily progress and nightly encampments.

From Point Vancouver the river turned towards the northeast, and
became more contracted and rapid, with occasional islands and frequent
sand-banks. These islands are furnished with a number of ponds, and
at certain seasons abound with swans, geese, brandts, cranes, gulls,
plover, and other wild-fowl. The shores, too, are low and closely
wooded, with such an undergrowth of vines and rushes as to be almost
impassable.

About thirty miles above Point Vancouver the mountains again approach
on both sides of the river, which is bordered by stupendous precipices,
covered with the fir and the white cedar, and enlivened occasionally by
beautiful cascades leaping from a great height, and sending up wreaths
of vapor. One of these precipices, or cliffs, is curiously worn by time
and weather so as to have the appearance of a ruined fortress, with
towers and battlements, beetling high above the river, while two small
cascades, one hundred and fifty feet in height, pitch down from the
fissures of the rocks.

The turbulence and rapidity of the current continually augmenting as
they advanced, gave the voyagers intimation that they were approaching
the great obstructions of the river, and at length they arrived at
Strawberry Island, so called by Lewis and Clarke, which lies at the
foot of the first rapid. As this part of the Columbia will be repeatedly
mentioned in the course of this work, being the scene of some of its
incidents, we shall give a general description of it in this place.

The falls or rapids of the Columbia are situated about one hundred and
eighty miles above the mouth of the river. The first is a perpendicular
cascade of twenty feet, after which there is a swift descent for a
mile, between islands of hard black rock, to another pitch of eight feet
divided by two rocks. About two and a half miles below this the river
expands into a wide basin, seemingly dammed up by a perpendicular ridge
of black rock. A current, however, sets diagonally to the left of this
rocky barrier, where there is a chasm forty-five yards in width. Through
this the whole body of the river roars along, swelling and whirling
and boiling for some distance in the wildest confusion. Through this
tremendous channel the intrepid explorers of the river, Lewis and
Clarke, passed in their boats; the danger being, not from the rocks, but
from the great surges and whirlpools.

At the distance of a mile and a half from the foot of this narrow
channel is a rapid, formed by two rocky islands; and two miles beyond is
a second great fall, over a ledge of rocks twenty feet high, extending
nearly from shore to shore. The river is again compressed into a channel
from fifty to a hundred feet wide, worn through a rough bed of hard
black rock, along which it boils and roars with great fury for the
distance of three miles. This is called “The Long Narrows.”

Here is the great fishing place of the Columbia. In the spring of the
year, when the water is high, the salmon ascend the river in incredible
numbers. As they pass through this narrow strait, the Indians, standing
on the rocks, or on the end of wooden stages projecting from the banks,
scoop them up with small nets distended on hoops and attached to long
handles, and cast them on the shore.

They are then cured and packed in a peculiar manner. After having
been opened and disemboweled, they are exposed to the sun on scaffolds
erected on the river banks. When sufficiently dry, they are pounded fine
between two stones, pressed into the smallest compass, and packed
in baskets or bales of grass matting, about two feet long and one in
diameter, lined with the cured skin of a salmon. The top is likewise
covered with fish skins, secured by cords passing through holes in the
edge of the basket. Packages are then made, each containing twelve of
these bales, seven at bottom, five at top, pressed close to each other,
with the corded side upward, wrapped in mats and corded. These are
placed in dry situations, and again covered with matting. Each of these
packages contains from ninety to a hundred pounds of dried fish, which
in this state will keep sound for several years.**

     **(Lewis and Clarke, vol. ii. p. 32.)

We have given this process at some length, as furnished by the first
explorers, because it marks a practiced ingenuity in preparing articles
of traffic for a market, seldom seen among our aboriginals. For like
reason we would make especial mention of the village of Wishram, at the
head of the Long Narrows, as being a solitary instance of an aboriginal
trading mart, or emporium. Here the salmon caught in the neighboring
rapids were “warehoused,” to await customers. Hither the tribes from
the mouth of the Columbia repaired with the fish of the sea-coast, the
roots, berries, and especially the wappatoo, gathered in the lower parts
of the river, together with goods and trinkets obtained from the ships
which casually visit the coast. Hither also the tribes from the
Rocky Mountains brought down horses, bear-grass, quamash, and other
commodities of the interior. The merchant fishermen at the falls acted
as middlemen or factors, and passed the objects of traffic, as it were,
cross-handed; trading away part of the wares received from the mountain
tribes to those of the rivers and plains, and vice versa: their packages
of pounded salmon entered largely into the system of barter, and being
carried off in opposite directions, found their way to the savage
hunting camps far in the interior, and to the casual white traders who
touched upon the coast.

We have already noticed certain contrarieties of character between the
Indian tribes, produced by their diet and mode of life; and nowhere are
they more apparent than about the falls of the Columbia. The Indians
of this great fishing mart are represented by the earliest explorers as
sleeker and fatter, but less hardy and active, than the tribes of the
mountains and prairies, who live by hunting, or of the upper parts of
the river, where fish is scanty, and the inhabitants must eke out their
subsistence by digging roots or chasing the deer. Indeed, whenever an
Indian of the upper country is too lazy to hunt, yet is fond of good
living, he repairs to the falls, to live in abundance without labor.

“By such worthless dogs as these,” says an honest trader in his journal,
which now lies before us, “by such worthless dogs as these are these
noted fishing-places peopled, which, like our great cities, may with
propriety be called the headquarters of vitiated principles.”

The habits of trade and the avidity of gain have their corrupting
effects even in the wilderness, as may be instanced in the members of
this aboriginal emporium; for the same journalist denounces them as
“saucy, impudent rascals, who will steal when they can, and pillage
whenever a weak party falls in their power.”

That he does not belie them will be evidenced hereafter, when we have
occasion again to touch at Wishram and navigate the rapids. In the
present instance the travellers effected the laborious ascent of this
part of the river, with all its various portages, without molestation,
and once more launched away in smooth water above the high falls.

The two parties continued together, without material impediment, for
three or four hundred miles further up the Columbia; Mr. Thompson
appearing to take great interest in the success of Mr. Stuart, and
pointing out places favorable, as he said, to the establishment of his
contemplated trading post.

Mr. Stuart, who distrusted his sincerity, at length pretended to adopt
his advice, and, taking leave of him, remained as if to establish
himself, while the other proceeded on his course towards the mountains.
No sooner, however, had he fairly departed than Mr. Stuart again pushed
forward, under guidance of the two Indians, nor did he stop until he had
arrived within about one hundred and forty miles of the Spokan River,
which he considered near enough to keep the rival establishment in
check. The place which he pitched upon for his trading post was a point
of land about three miles in length and two in breadth, formed by the
junction of the Oakinagan with the Columbia. The former is a river which
has its source in a considerable lake about one hundred and fifty miles
west of the point of junction. The two rivers, about the place of their
confluence, are bordered by immense prairies covered with herbage, but
destitute of trees. The point itself was ornamented with wild flowers
of every hue, in which innumerable humming-birds were “banqueting nearly
the livelong day.”

The situation of this point appeared to be well adapted for a trading
post. The climate was salubrious, the soil fertile, the rivers well
stocked with fish, the natives peaceable and friendly. There were easy
communications with the interior by the upper waters of the Columbia and
the lateral stream of the Oakinagan, while the downward current of the
Columbia furnished a highway to Astoria.

Availing himself, therefore, of the driftwood which had collected in
quantities in the neighboring bends of the river, Mr. Stuart and his men
set to work to erect a house, which in a little while was sufficiently
completed for their residence; and thus was established the first
interior post of the company. We will now return to notice the progress
of affairs at the mouth of the Columbia.




CHAPTER XI.

     Alarm at Astoria.--Rumor of Indian Hostilities.--
     Preparations for Defense.--Tragic Fate of the Tonquin.

THE sailing of the Tonquin, and the departure of Mr. David Stuart and
his detachment, had produced a striking effect on affairs at Astoria.
The natives who had swarmed about the place began immediately to drop
off, until at length not an Indian was to be seen. This, at first, was
attributed to the want of peltries with which to trade; but in a little
while the mystery was explained in a more alarming manner. A conspiracy
was said to be on foot among the neighboring tribes to make a combined
attack upon the white men, now that they were so reduced in number. For
this purpose there had been a gathering of warriors in a neighboring
bay, under pretext of fishing for sturgeon; and fleets of canoes were
expected to join them from the north and South. Even Comcomly, the
one-eyed chief, notwithstanding his professed friendship for Mr.
M’Dougal, was strongly suspected of being concerned in this general
combination.

Alarmed at rumors of this impending danger, the Astorians suspended
their regular labor, and set to work, with all haste, to throw up
temporary works for refuge and defense. In the course of a few days they
surrounded their dwelling-house and magazines with a picket fence
ninety feet square, flanked by two bastions, on which were mounted four
four-pounders. Every day they exercised themselves in the use of their
weapons, so as to qualify themselves for military duty, and at night
ensconced themselves in their fortress and posted sentinels, to guard
against surprise. In this way they hoped, even in case of attack, to be
able to hold out until the arrival of the party to be conducted by Mr.
Hunt across the Rocky Mountains, or until the return of the Tonquin. The
latter dependence, however, was doomed soon to be destroyed. Early in
August, a wandering band of savages from the Strait of Juan de Fuca made
their appearance at the mouth of the Columbia, where they came to fish
for sturgeon. They brought disastrous accounts of the Tonquin, which
were at first treated as fables, but which were too sadly confirmed by
a different tribe that arrived a few days subsequently. We shall relate
the circumstances of this melancholy affair as correctly as the casual
discrepancies in the statements that have reached us will permit.

We have already stated that the Tonquin set sail from the mouth of
the river on the fifth of June. The whole number of persons on board
amounted to twenty-three. In one of the outer bays they picked up,
from a fishing canoe, an Indian named Lamazee, who had already made
two voyages along the coast and knew something of the language of the
various tribes. He agreed to accompany them as interpreter.

Steering to the north, Captain Thorn arrived in a few days at
Vancouver’s Island, and anchored in the harbor of Neweetee, very much
against the advice of his Indian interpreter, who warned him against the
perfidious character of the natives of this part of the coast. Numbers
of canoes soon came off, bringing sea-otter skins to sell. It was too
late in the day to commence a traffic, but Mr. M’Kay, accompanied by a
few of the men, went on shore to a large village to visit Wicananish,
the chief of the surrounding territory, six of the natives remaining on
board as hostages. He was received with great professions of friendship,
entertained hospitably, and a couch of sea-otter skins prepared for him
in the dwelling of the chieftain, where he was prevailed upon to pass
the night.

In the morning, before Mr. M’Kay had returned to the ship, great numbers
of the natives came off in their canoes to trade, headed by two sons of
Wicananish. As they brought abundance of sea-otter skins, and there was
every appearance of a brisk trade, Captain Thorn did not wait for
the return of Mr. M’Kay, but spread his wares upon the deck, making a
tempting display of blankets, cloths, knives, beads, and fish-hooks,
expecting a prompt and profitable sale. The Indians, however, were
not so eager and simple as he had supposed, having learned the art of
bargaining and the value of merchandise from the casual traders along
the coast. They were guided, too, by a shrewd old chief named Nookamis,
who had grown gray in traffic with New England skippers, and prided
himself upon his acuteness. His opinion seemed to regulate the market.
When Captain Thorn made what he considered a liberal offer for an
otter-skin, the wily old Indian treated it with scorn, and asked more
than double. His comrades all took their cue from him, and not an
otter-skin was to be had at a reasonable rate.

The old fellow, however, overshot his mark, and mistook the character of
the man he was treating with. Thorn was a plain, straightforward sailor,
who never had two minds nor two prices in his dealings, was deficient in
patience and pliancy, and totally wanting in the chicanery of traffic.
He had a vast deal of stern but honest pride in his nature, and,
moreover, held the whole savage race in sovereign contempt. Abandoning
all further attempts, therefore, to bargain with his shuffling
customers, he thrust his hands into his pockets, and paced up and down
the deck in sullen silence. The cunning old Indian followed him to and
fro, holding out a sea-otter skin to him at every turn, and pestering
him to trade. Finding other means unavailing, he suddenly changed his
tone, and began to jeer and banter him upon the mean prices he offered.
This was too much for the patience of the captain, who was never
remarkable for relishing a joke, especially when at his own expense.
Turning suddenly upon his persecutor, he snatched the proffered
otter-skin from his hands, rubbed it in his face, and dismissed him
over the side of the ship with no very complimentary application to
accelerate his exit. He then kicked the peltries to the right and left
about the deck, and broke up the market in the most ignominious manner.
Old Nookamis made for shore in a furious passion, in which he was
joined by Shewish, one of the sons of Wicananish, who went off breathing
vengeance, and the ship was soon abandoned by the natives.

When Mr. M’Kay returned on board, the interpreter related what had
passed, and begged him to prevail upon the captain to make sail, as from
his knowledge of the temper and pride of the people of the place, he was
sure they would resent the indignity offered to one of their chiefs. Mr.
M’Kay, who himself possessed some experience of Indian character,
went to the captain, who was still pacing the deck in moody humor,
represented the danger to which his hasty act had exposed the vessel,
and urged him to weigh anchor. The captain made light of his counsels,
and pointed to his cannon and fire-arms as sufficient safeguard against
naked savages. Further remonstrances only provoked taunting replies and
sharp altercations. The day passed away without any signs of hostility,
and at night the captain retired as usual to his cabin, taking no more
than the usual precautions.

On the following morning, at daybreak, while the captain and Mr. M’Kay
were yet asleep, a canoe came alongside in which were twenty Indians,
commanded by young Shewish. They were unarmed, their aspect and demeanor
friendly, and they held up otter-skins, and made signs indicative of
a wish to trade. The caution enjoined by Mr. Astor, in respect to the
admission of Indians on board of the ship, had been neglected for some
time past, and the officer of the watch, perceiving those in the canoe
to be without weapons, and having received no orders to the contrary,
readily permitted them to mount the deck. Another canoe soon succeeded,
the crew of which was likewise admitted. In a little while other canoes
came off, and Indians were soon clambering into the vessel on all sides.

The officer of the watch now felt alarmed, and called to Captain Thorn
and Mr. M’Kay. By the time they came on deck, it was thronged with
Indians. The interpreter noticed to Mr. M’Kay that many of the natives
wore short mantles of skins, and intimated a suspicion that they were
secretly armed. Mr. M’Kay urged the captain to clear the ship and get
under way. He again made light of the advice; but the augmented swarm of
canoes about the ship, and the numbers still putting off from shore, at
length awakened his distrust, and he ordered some of the crew to weigh
anchor, while some were sent aloft to make sail.

The Indians now offered to trade with the captain on his own terms,
prompted, apparently, by the approaching departure of the ship.
Accordingly, a hurried trade was commenced. The main articles sought by
the savages in barter were knives; as fast as some were supplied they
moved off, and others succeeded. By degrees they were thus distributed
about the deck, and all with weapons.

The anchor was now nearly up, the sails were loose, and the captain,
in a loud and peremptory tone, ordered the ship to be cleared. In an
instant, a signal yell was given; it was echoed on every side, knives
and war-clubs were brandished in every direction, and the savages rushed
upon their marked victims.

The first that fell was Mr. Lewis, the ship’s clerk. He was leaning,
with folded arms, over a bale of blankets, engaged in bargaining, when
he received a deadly stab in the back, and fell down the companion-way.

Mr. M’Kay, who was seated on the taffrail, sprang on his feet, but was
instantly knocked down with a war-club and flung backwards into the sea,
where he was despatched by the women in the canoes.

In the meantime Captain Thorn made desperate fight against fearful odds.
He was a powerful as well as a resolute man, but he had come upon
deck without weapons. Shewish, the young chief singled him out as his
peculiar prey, and rushed upon him at the first outbreak. The captain
had barely time to draw a clasp-knife with one blow of which he laid
the young savage dead at his feet. Several of the stoutest followers
of Shewish now set upon him. He defended himself vigorously, dealing
crippling blows to right and left, and strewing the quarter-deck with
the slain and wounded. His object was to fight his way to the cabin,
where there were fire-arms; but he was hemmed in with foes, covered with
wounds, and faint with loss of blood. For an instant he leaned upon the
tiller wheel, when a blow from behind, with a war-club, felled him to
the deck, where he was despatched with knives and thrown overboard.

While this was transacting upon the quarter-deck, a chance-medley fight
was going on throughout the ship. The crew fought desperately with
knives, handspikes, and whatever weapon they could seize upon in the
moment of surprise. They were soon, however, overpowered by numbers, and
mercilessly butchered.

As to the seven who had been sent aloft to make sail, they contemplated
with horror the carnage that was going on below. Being destitute of
weapons, they let themselves down by the running rigging, in hopes
of getting between decks. One fell in the attempt, and was instantly
despatched; another received a death-blow in the back as he was
descending; a third, Stephen Weekes, the armorer, was mortally wounded
as he was getting down the hatchway.

The remaining four made good their retreat into the cabin, where they
found Mr. Lewis, still alive, though mortally wounded. Barricading the
cabin door, they broke holes through the companion-way, and, with the
muskets and ammunition which were at hand, opened a brisk fire that soon
cleared the deck.

Thus far the Indian interpreter, from whom these particulars are
derived, had been an eye-witness to the deadly conflict. He had taken no
part in it, and had been spared by the natives as being of their race.
In the confusion of the moment he took refuge with the rest, in the
canoes. The survivors of the crew now sallied forth, and discharged some
of the deck-guns, which did great execution among the canoes, and drove
all the savages to shore.

For the remainder of the day no one ventured to put off to the ship,
deterred by the effects of the fire-arms. The night passed away without
any further attempts on the part of the natives. When the day dawned,
the Tonquin still lay at anchor in the bay, her sails all loose and
flapping in the wind, and no one apparently on board of her. After a
time, some of the canoes ventured forth to reconnoitre, taking with them
the interpreter.

They paddled about her, keeping cautiously at a distance, but growing
more and more emboldened at seeing her quiet and lifeless. One man
at length made his appearance on the deck, and was recognized by the
interpreter as Mr. Lewis. He made friendly signs, and invited them on
board. It was long before they ventured to comply. Those who mounted
the deck met with no opposition; no one was to be seen on board; for Mr.
Lewis, after inviting them, had disappeared. Other canoes now pressed
forward to board the prize; the decks were soon crowded, and the sides
covered with clambering savages, all intent on plunder. In the midst
of their eagerness and exultation, the ship blew up with a tremendous
explosion. Arms, legs, and mutilated bodies were blown into the air, and
dreadful havoc was made in the surrounding canoes. The interpreter was
in the main-chains at the time of the explosion, and was thrown unhurt
into the water, where he succeeded in getting into one of the canoes.
According to his statement, the bay presented an awful spectacle after
the catastrophe. The ship had disappeared, but the bay was covered with
fragments of the wreck, with shattered canoes, and Indians swimming for
their lives, or struggling in the agonies of death; while those who had
escaped the danger remained aghast and stupefied, or made with frantic
panic for the shore. Upwards of a hundred savages were destroyed by the
explosion, many more were shockingly mutilated, and for days afterwards
the limbs and bodies of the slain were thrown upon the beach.

The inhabitants of Neweetee were overwhelmed with consternation at this
astounding calamity, which had burst upon them in the very moment of
triumph. The warriors sat mute and mournful, while the women filled
the air with loud lamentations. Their weeping and walling, however, was
suddenly changed into yells of fury at the sight of four unfortunate
white men, brought captive into the village. They had been driven on
shore in one of the ship’s boats, and taken at some distance along the
coast.

The interpreter was permitted to converse with them. They proved to
be the four brave fellows who had made such desperate defense from
the cabin. The interpreter gathered from them some of the particulars
already related. They told him further, that after they had beaten off
the enemy and cleared the ship, Lewis advised that they should slip
the cable and endeavor to get to sea. They declined to take his advice,
alleging that the wind set too strongly into the bay and would drive
them on shore. They resolved, as soon as it was dark, to put off quietly
in the ship’s boat, which they would be able to do unperceived, and to
coast along back to Astoria. They put their resolution into effect; but
Lewis refused to accompany them, being disabled by his wound, hopeless
of escape, and determined on a terrible revenge. On the voyage out, he
had repeatedly expressed a presentiment that he should die by his own
hands; thinking it highly probable that he should be engaged in some
contest with the natives, and being resolved, in case of extremity,
to commit suicide rather than be made a prisoner. He now declared his
intention to remain on board of the ship until daylight, to decoy as
many of the savages on board as possible, then to set fire to the powder
magazine, and terminate his life by a signal of vengeance. How well he
succeeded has been shown. His companions bade him a melancholy adieu,
and set off on their precarious expedition. They strove with might and
main to get out of the bay, but found it impossible to weather a point
of land, and were at length compelled to take shelter in a small cove,
where they hoped to remain concealed until the wind should be more
favorable. Exhausted by fatigue and watching, they fell into a sound
sleep, and in that state were surprised by the savages. Better had it
been for those unfortunate men had they remained with Lewis, and
shared his heroic death: as it was, they perished in a more painful and
protracted manner, being sacrificed by the natives to the manes of their
friends with all the lingering tortures of savage cruelty. Some time
after their death, the interpreter, who had remained a kind of prisoner
at large, effected his escape, and brought the tragical tidings to
Astoria.

Such is the melancholy story of the Tonquin, and such was the fate of
her brave but headstrong commander, and her adventurous crew. It is a
catastrophe that shows the importance, in all enterprises of moment,
to keep in mind the general instructions of the sagacious heads which
devise them. Mr. Astor was well aware of the perils to which ships
were exposed on this coast from quarrels with the natives, and from
perfidious attempts of the latter to surprise and capture them in
unguarded moments. He had repeatedly enjoined it upon Captain Thorn,
in conversation, and at parting, in his letter of instructions, to be
courteous and kind in his dealings with the savages, but by no means to
confide in their apparent friendship, nor to admit more than a few on
board of his ship at a time.

Had the deportment of Captain Thorn been properly regulated, the insult
so wounding to savage pride would never have been given. Had he enforced
the rule to admit but a few at a time, the savages would not have been
able to get the mastery. He was too irritable, however, to practice the
necessary self-command, and, having been nurtured in a proud contempt of
danger, thought it beneath him to manifest any fear of a crew of unarmed
savages.

With all his faults and foibles, we cannot but speak of him with esteem,
and deplore his untimely fate; for we remember him well in early life,
as a companion in pleasant scenes and joyous hours. When on shore, among
his friends, he was a frank, manly, sound-hearted sailor. On board
ship he evidently assumed the hardness of deportment and sternness of
demeanor which many deem essential to naval service. Throughout
the whole of the expedition, however, he showed himself loyal,
single-minded, straightforward, and fearless; and if the fate of
his vessel may be charged to his harshness and imprudence, we should
recollect that he paid for his error with his life.

The loss of the Tonquin was a grievous blow to the infant establishment
of Astoria, and one that threatened to bring after it a train of
disasters. The intelligence of it did not reach Mr. Astor until many
months afterwards. He felt it in all its force, and was aware that it
must cripple, if not entirely defeat, the great scheme of his ambition.
In his letters, written at the time, he speaks of it as “a calamity, the
length of which he could not foresee.” He indulged, however, in no
weak and vain lamentation, but sought to devise a prompt and efficient
remedy. The very same evening he appeared at the theatre with his usual
serenity of countenance. A friend, who knew the disastrous intelligence
he had received, expressed his astonishment that he could have calmness
of spirit sufficient for such a scene of light amusement. “What would
you have me do?” was his characteristic reply; “would you have me stay
at home and weep for what I cannot help?”




CHAPTER XII.

     Gloom at Astoria--An Ingenious Stratagem.--The Small-Pox
     Chief.--Launching of the Dolly.-An Arrival.--A Canadian
     Trapper.-A Freeman of the Forest--An Iroquois Hunter.--
     Winter on the Columbia.-Festivities of New Year.

THE tidings of the loss of the Tonquin, and the massacre of her crew,
struck dismay into the hearts of the Astorians. They found themselves
a mere handful of men, on a savage coast, surrounded by hostile tribes,
who would doubtless be incited and encouraged to deeds of violence by
the late fearful catastrophe. In this juncture Mr. M’Dougal, we are
told, had recourse to a stratagem by which to avail himself of the
ignorance and credulity of the savages, and which certainly does credit
to his ingenuity.

The natives of the coast, and, indeed, of all the regions west of the
mountains, had an extreme dread of the small-pox; that terrific scourge
having, a few years previously, appeared among them, and almost swept
off entire tribes. Its origin and nature were wrapped in mystery, and
they conceived it an evil inflicted upon them by the Great Spirit, or
brought among them by the white men. The last idea was seized upon by
Mr. M’Dougal. He assembled several of the chieftains whom he believed to
be in the conspiracy. When they were all seated around, he informed them
that he had heard of the treachery of some of their northern brethren
towards the Tonquin, and was determined on vengeance. “The white men
among you,” said he, “are few in number, it is true, but they are mighty
in medicine. See here,” continued he, drawing forth a small bottle and
holding it before their eyes, “in this bottle I hold the small-pox,
safely corked up; I have but to draw the cork, and let loose 

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