Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (23 page)

“If you find them kind, as I hope you will,” wrote Astor in his instructions, “be so to them. If otherwise, act with caution and forbearance, and convince them that you come as friends . . . be particularly careful on the coast, and not 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.”

Astor, in other words, had warned Captain Thorn:
Be kind . . . and beware
.

The Clayoquot, however, in the interest of conducting a beneficial trade with the
Tonquin,
seemed willing to overlook Captain Thorn’s insult to their chief Nookamis. Just after daybreak the morning after the contretemps on deck, another big cedar canoe paddled its carved prow alongside the ship. Captain Thorn and McKay still slept belowdecks. The Indians held up packets of furs to trade, apparently signaling a willingness to accept Thorn’s prices. The watch on deck let the first canoe of paddlers on board.

Captain Thorn and McKay were summoned from below, along with Joseachal. As the threesome emerged on deck, Clayoquot Indians stood at the ready to trade with sea otter fur packets in hand. James Lewis, the clerk from New York, monitored the display of bales of blankets, metal pots, blue glass beads, knives, and other trade goods. More canoes pulled alongside the
Tonquin
. More Clayoquot climbed over the rail with their bundles of furs, eager to trade. McKay and Joseachal grew anxious. They had warned Captain Thorn not to let more than a few Indians aboard at one time.

The captain again dismissed McKay and his warnings. He pointed to his ten bristling cannon, and his many loaded firearms belowdecks, not to mention the nine thousand pounds of gunpowder in the hold.

“I won’t believe that a parcel of lazy, thieving Indians has the courage to attack a ship like this,” he told McKay, according to the account by Astorian Ross Cox, which again captured the spirit of this encounter on the deck of the
Tonquin,
even if not its exact wording.

Captain Thorn let the trade open, sticking, apparently with satisfaction, to his low terms, trading the Clayoquot one blanket and one knife for each of the lustrous sea otter furs that he would sell in Canton for many times that value. As far as Captain Thorn was concerned, John Jacob Astor’s West Coast empire had finally opened for business. It went well. The Clayoquot traded one fur after the other, tossing the blankets they acquired into the waiting canoes below, paddled by Clayoquot women.

Joseachal, suspicious, watched closely. He noticed that some Indians on deck wore fur mantles over their shoulders, and he wondered if they might hide something underneath. He pointed it out to McKay, who brought it to the attention of Captain Thorn. With a smile of contempt, according to the accounts, the captain dismissed Joseachal’s and Mackay’s concern, noting that with all the firearms on board, the
Tonquin
“would be more than a match for three times the number” of Clayoquot.

As more climbed aboard, however, Thorn himself grew concerned at the throng of Indians roaming the
Tonquin’
s deck. Others in their big cedar canoes nosed up to its copper-clad hull. They could see still more canoes setting out from the village along the cove. Following McKay’s urgings, Captain Thorn issued the order to clear the decks, unfurl the topsails, and weigh anchor. The
Tonquin
would sail out of the cove and away from Clayoquot village, removing the ship from the fray.

Seven sailors scrambled aloft to let loose the sails. As they climbed the ratlines a Clayoquot chief on deck gave a signal. In unison, the Clayoquot warriors on deck emitted a ferocious war cry. They jerked war clubs and knives from their bundles of fur and from beneath their mantles. And then they attacked.

Known as
pogamoggan
s or
Ka’heit’am
(“killing object”), the war clubs were highly decorated and coveted objects, crafted of polished materials such as whalebone and stone, finely shaped with balls or knobs or spikes at the end of a slender bone or wooden handle—sometimes flexible and whiplike—the graceful whole designed to inflict maximum blunt-force trauma to the skull. The
pogamoggan
offered a weapon par excellence in close, hand-to-hand combat—for instance, in tight spaces like the deck of the
Tonquin
.

None of the Americans or Europeans on deck was armed—neither Captain Thorn, nor McKay, nor the sailors themselves. As was routine, they had left firearms, although loaded, belowdecks. Nor did Captain Thorn’s ten cannon, aimed seaward, away from the ship, or his nine thousand pounds of gunpowder in the hold prove remotely useful on the Clayoquot Indians’ chosen, and very cramped, field of battle.

Who first fell to the deck differs with various accounts, but the melee aboard the
Tonquin
appears to have occurred like this:

The clerk Lewis, whose job was to keep track of transactions with trade goods, was bending over a bale of blankets when the war cry erupted. A Clayoquot chief instantly stabbed him in the back as the cry reverberated, and Lewis stumbled over the blankets and tumbled down a companionway.

McKay, arms crossed, observing, was leaning against the taffrail (stern rail) on the larboard (left) side of the ship as the attack began. According to one account, he alone had taken the precaution to arm himself with a pair of pistols stuck in his pockets and briefly defended himself, killing a warrior. But his was a one-shot defense. Other Clayoquot clubbed him over the head with their
pogamoggan
s, then shoved him over the taffrail into the sea, where he was seized by women who waited in the canoes below.

Captain Thorn was third. Standing in his customary spot on the quarterdeck as the war cry sounded, he reached into his pocket and jerked out the only weapon he carried on his person when striding the decks of his ten-cannon vessel—a pocketknife. As the warriors rushed at him with clubs and knives, he thrust and slashed at their bellies with his knife, eviscerating four of them, but suffering bad wounds himself. Staggering with blood loss, he fought toward the cabin entryway where the firearms were stored.

“Covered with wounds, and exhausted from the loss of blood,” as one testimonial described the moment, “he rested himself for a moment by leaning on the tiller wheel, when he received a dreadful blow from a . . .
pautumaugan,
on the back part of the head, which felled him to the deck.”

The Clayoquot finished him off with knives and clubs, tossing his body over the rail into the sea.

The other Clayoquot aboard had spread out on the ship’s deck while the trading was under way, both fore and aft, two or three of them surreptitiously following each sailor. As the war cry sounded, they attacked their chosen victims, who, unarmed, didn’t stand a chance. The sailors crumpled to the deck under crushing head blows from
pogamoggan
s and thrusting stab wounds from the just-traded steel knives that the Clayoquot had hidden beneath their fur mantles.

Rather than confronting head-on and against impossible odds the massive power of Western warfare technology in the form of the
Tonquin’
s ten cannon and countless firearms, the Clayoquot had executed a well-planned, disciplined attack on their own terms. Had he survived, Captain Thorn, master and commander of that tremendous firepower, surely would have called the Clayoquot ambush “cowardly.” On the deck of the
Tonquin,
as in so much warfare, each side played by whatever “rules of warfare” and definition of “bravery” and “cowardice” gave it maximum advantage.

The Clayoquot chief and his warriors, however, failed to account for one factor in their surprise attack: the seven sailors who had climbed aloft on Captain Thorn’s order to unfurl the sails.

Though unarmed, the sailors could easily enough repel or avoid any Indian attackers who tried to clamber up the ratlines after them. From yardarms and rigging, they watched the chaotic massacre on the
Tonquin
below, the blood and the sprawled bodies of their shipmates spilling across the decks, the last death groans falling silent in just a few minutes. The sailors aloft could either jump from the rigging down into the sea, where the war canoes surely would pursue them, or attempt to reach the cabin, where the firearms were stored.

They chose the latter. With the alacrity of sailors who have spent a lifetime aloft, they seized with calloused hands the running lines, such as halyards and sheet ropes, “slipped” down them, and leapt into a hatchway open to belowdecks. One of them fell from the rigging and perished either from the fall or blows from the Clayoquot. Another was killed outright. A third, believed to be the armorer, Stephen Weeks, who had barely survived the awful night with the Hawaiians in the small boat off the Columbia Bar, suffered a critical wound making his escape down the hatchway.

There were five or six survivors taking refuge belowdecks in the cabin at this point, although accounts vary as to the exact number: four still-healthy sailors who had jumped down from the rigging, another man from aloft (probably Weeks) who had sustained a bad wound, and, it seems, the New York clerk, James Lewis, who, on being stabbed, had tumbled over a bale of blankets and down the hatchway.

The survivors barricaded themselves in the cabin belowdecks, broke out pistols, rifles, and muskets stored there, and fought back, shooting through the cabin skylights and out the companionway. Their fusillade sent the Clayoquot warriors jumping over the rails and down to their canoes. The survivors then opened fire on the fleeing canoes with the
Tonquin’
s roaring deck cannon. Captain Thorn’s long-distance and industrial instruments of war flung balls and shards of metal whistling across the cove at some 1,700 feet per second and ripped through the paddlers’ mostly naked bodies. Many nevertheless made it safely to the shore.

Silence fell over the cove. Bodies and blood lay spilled over the
Tonquin’
s deck. Other corpses drifted beside the hull or slowly sank beneath the sea, among them Captain Thorn’s. McKay, who at the start of the battle had been bludgeoned over the head and shoved over the taffrail to the waiting women in the canoes below, originally might have been singled out for lighter treatment. Astorian participant and chronicler Ross Cox believed the Clayoquot wished to take McKay hostage and ransom him to Astoria, and had tried to detain him on shore before the planned attack to keep him safe.

“Mr. M’Kay,” observed another chronicler and Astorian, Alexander Ross, “was a great favourite among the Indians.”

For all his adaptability to Native American culture, however, McKay also stood out as something of an oddball within his own society—“very active, but whimsical and eccentric,” was how Ross described him. Ross told the story of McKay, for amusement, setting fire to a tall fir tree when a man was climbing in its upper limbs, forcing him to leap to the limbs of another tree for safety, like a squirrel. Captain Thorn, on the other hand, while fierce and rigid aboard ship, was known to be a well-mannered gentleman within polite society.

“[W]e remember him well in early life,” wrote Irving, who had known Thorn as a young man, “as a companion in pleasant scenes and joyous hours.”

One could argue that Alexander McKay and Captain Thorn represented two competing approaches to the world’s remote coasts on the part of the first European visitors. Thorn performed well within a tightly structured and disciplined system, but was absolutely at a loss when outside clear-cut rules and boundaries, while McKay was a free-form improviser who seemed vastly adaptable to other societies. Neither approach, however, worked out well for them when the
Tonquin
met the Clayoquot, although it seems McKay almost escaped.

After he was bludgeoned over the head and shoved over the taffrail, McKay was said to remain alive for a time either in the sea alongside the women’s canoes, or in one of the canoes itself. Then, however, the Clayoquot women observed Thorn, with his slashing pocketknife, killing their chief Shee-wish, son of the great chief Wickaninnish and supposed instigator of the attack. The women took revenge on their hostage McKay, either by ramming him with the pointed blades of their paddles or employing the traditional war clubs, or, perhaps, both.

“The last time the ill-fated gentleman was seen,” wrote Cox, “his head was hanging over the side of a canoe, and three savages, armed with
pautumaugan
s, were battering out his brains.”

Night fell. No more Clayoquot canoes embarked from shore. The interpreter Joseachal remained in the village. When the attack erupted, he had jumped over the rail into the sea and offered himself up as a slave to the women in the canoes, who hid him under woven mats.

What exactly occurred overnight aboard the
Tonquin
among the five or six survivors is partly testimony, partly conjecture. They most certainly deliberated sailing the ship out of the cove under the cover of night. This would offer their safest route of escape, equipped with all that firepower to defend themselves against the Clayoquot war canoes. But the task of setting sail on a square-rigged ship with only four able-bodied men proved utterly daunting, this on a ship that normally carried a crew of more than twenty, where sailors climbed aloft to unfurl sails, teams of others stayed on deck to haul in unison on halyards, others sheeted-in the sails, worked the windlass to raise the anchor, took the wheel to steer. The strenuous job demanded many hands working precisely in tandem. Besides, according to Irving’s account, a headwind blew into the cove. The ship would struggle even with a full crew to sail clear of the cove’s entrance and gain the open water beyond.

The second option was to take to the longboat and make a run for it. Under the cover of darkness, they could slip out of the cove and head down the coast, where, if their luck held with the weather and they stayed well offshore, they could row and sail undetected the two hundred miles down to Astoria and safety.

Four of the five survivors chose this option. However, one of the five, believed to be either James Lewis, the clerk, or Stephen Weeks, the armorer, apparently elected not to make the escape by longboat, and insisted he would remain aboard the
Tonquin
. Either he suffered wounds too severe to allow him to travel, or he believed he had a better chance of survival on board the ship, or he had some other plan in mind. Perhaps, mortally wounded and utterly exhausted, the single individual Lewis or Weeks (and the other may have been his dead or dying comrade) simply no longer cared and wished only that his comrades save themselves. According to Irving’s account, Lewis had claimed on the voyage around Cape Horn to the West Coast that he would prefer suicide to being taken and tortured by Indians.