Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (9 page)
Authors: Peter Stark
Yankee sailors and Hawaiian swimmers both possessed their own advantages in these extreme circumstances. While not expert swimmers, and often not swimmers at all, the Yankee sailors knew the shock of cold water, and from all their cold-ocean seafaring, also knew of that state of drowsiness and lassitude that foretells the slip into hypothermia. What the Hawaiians had going for them, besides their extraordinary swimming ability and centuries-old tradition of small boats on the open sea, was their stockier body types and subcutaneous fat. Modern research shows that Asiatic peoples tend to have a thicker layer of under-the-skin fat, especially in the upper body, than do Caucasians. This would serve them as an insulating layer, but when the warning symptoms of hypothermia commenced, unlike the Yankee sailor, they probably wouldn’t recognize them or know the warning signs of hypothermia and how to fight it.
*
Despite the water’s incredible chill as they swam beside the small boat, the Hawaiians managed to slosh water from the pinnace until it was buoyant enough to hold one of them. As darkness descended on the Pacific, one of the Hawaiians climbed over the gunwales into the swamped boat and resumed bailing by rapidly scooping water with his hands and splashing it over the side. The currents of the outgoing tide now carried them out to sea, away from the immediate danger of the breakers on the bar. Soon the pinnace was afloat, bobbing on the waves. The other Hawaiian climbed in, too.
They noticed Weeks nearby, clinging to his oar. They maneuvered the pinnace near to him. Weeks was now so tired and cold he could barely hold himself to his oar. The two Hawaiians tried to pull him into the pinnace, but their hands, with fingers stiffened by the extreme cold water, didn’t possess the strength to grip him. Finally, the two Hawaiians leaned over the gunwales, seized Weeks’s clothing in their teeth, and by wrenching upward with their heads, pulled him aboard the pinnace.
Now the true ordeal began. The three were wet, very cold, nearly naked, and at sea in a small boat along a dangerous coast smashed by heavy breakers, in the dark of the night. One of the Hawaiians, exhausted and deeply chilled, eventually lay down in the bottom of the boat, having seemingly given up hope. The other also seemed to fall into a stupor, refusing to move. Weeks, despite the difficulty of holding himself upright in his condition, struggled to the oars and began to row, trying to keep the boat far enough offshore to avoid the breakers. He understood that he had to row not only to stay out of the surf, but to keep working his muscles to generate body heat and avoid being overcome by a hypothermic stupor.
Around midnight, the Hawaiian lying in the bottom of the boat died. The other Hawaiian lay on top of him and stayed there, unmoving and silent.
Weeks kept on rowing, for all purposes alone.
Just across the bar, the
Tonquin
also struggled as night fell over the Pacific. Her two anchors dragged over the bottom as the tide flowed out and the wind died, leaving her without sail power, slowly but irrevocably pulling her toward the rocks and surf of the headland of Cape Disappointment. The crew worked desperately to keep the ship from running aground and breaking up in the violent surf. But as the night deepened, reported Ross, the tide began to turn. First was a slack tide—that period between an outgoing tide and an incoming one. Then the tide began to flow inward, the tidal currents now pushing into the Columbia’s broad mouth instead of exiting it. Around midnight, with a rising wind that helped power the ship, these tidal currents carried the
Tonquin
into the safety of the cove just inside Cape Disappointment, known as Baker’s Bay. With their ship safely anchored, the exhausted sailors took to their berths for a rest.
The following morning, March 26, a party rowed across the placid bay to the shore. It consisted of Captain Thorn, McKay, Ross, and several others. They planned to climb to the summit of Cape Disappointment, which looked like a smaller version of Gibraltar, topped by a few wind-gnarled evergreen trees, and scout the coast for survivors or signs of the two missing boats.
“We had not proceeded fifty yards,” reported Ross, “when we saw Steven Weeks, the armourer, standing under the shelter of a rock, shivering and half-dead with cold.”
They couldn’t get him to talk, or perhaps he wasn’t able, to tell what happened to his boat mates in the pinnace. The party brought him back to the
Tonquin,
warmed him, and gave him food and clothes. (Franchère, also a witness to the rescue, reported Weeks was stark naked when found.) When Weeks finally began to talk, he could barely be understood, he “appeared so overpowered with grief and vexation.”
“You did it purposely,” he finally exclaimed in anger to the assembled group.
Weeks calmed down a bit after those aboard the
Tonquin
recounted how the ship had slammed over and over on the bar and had struggled, too, through the night, in danger of being smashed on the rocks of the cape.
Weeks then told his story. After the Hawaiian had died in the bottom of the pinnace about midnight, and the other Hawaiian lay down atop him, Weeks continued to row. When the incoming tide began to flow toward shore, the pinnace was pulled toward the breakers, and he rowed all the harder to stay at sea to avoid them. When dawn broke, he was only a quarter mile from the breakers, and perhaps a half mile offshore from Cape Disappointment itself.
“I paused for a moment, ‘What is to be done?’ I said to myself; ‘death itself is preferable to this protracted struggle.’ ”
Weeks turned the prow of the boat to the shore and decided he’d reach land, or die trying.
As he rowed into the breakers, they swept up the boat from the stern and pushed it forward toward shore, as if surfing. As the sun was just rising, he found himself and the boat “thrown up high and dry on the beach.”
With “benumbed limbs,” Weeks dragged himself from the boat. He also managed to drag out the Hawaiian who was still barely alive and haul him to the edge of the forest, where “covering him with leaves I left him to die.”
As he gathered leaves, Weeks happened to spot a beaten path at the forest’s edge. He followed it around the base of Cape Disappointment to the bay on its inside, where he ran into the
Tonquin
and the party led ashore by Captain Thorn.
The Hawaiian whom Weeks buried in the leaves still lived. Discovered the next day, feet bleeding, legs swollen, nearly dead, he was warmed by a giant bonfire on the beach and carried back to the
Tonquin
. The Hawaiian in the bottom of the boat, however, had perished. The other twenty-three Hawaiians aboard the
Tonquin
came ashore the following day and held an elaborate burial ceremony on the sandy beach, placing sea biscuit and pork under his arms and tobacco under his genitals for the journey to the next world. The Hawaiians prayed and chanted in unison over him, which gave the
Tonquin
diarists to understand that these Pacific islanders possessed a greater spiritual sophistication than they had guessed.
Neither of the two other members of the pinnace, the mariner Job Aitken and sailmaker Coles, was ever seen again. Nor was any sign of the genial Mr. Fox and his boat ever found, nor his crew of voyageurs, which included the popular brothers Lapensée and Joseph Nadeau, all of respectable Canadian families, and the old sailor John Martin. In the three attempts sent by Captain Thorn, eight of the approximately sixty of Mr. Astor’s men aboard the
Tonquin
had died simply trying to land the expedition at the Columbia’s mouth.
It was not a good beginning for John Jacob Astor’s Pacific empire.
M
R
. A
STOR, MEANWHILE, WROTE TO
W
ILSON
P
RICE
Hunt of the Overland Party about possible rivals.
John Jacob Astor usually dealt with rival enterprises in one of three ways. First he tried to buy them out. If that didn’t work, he tried to form a partnership with them. If he failed to join them, he tried, through relentless competition, to crush them.
He had scrupulously planned for two years how to deal with possible rivals for his West Coast empire. He had tried several times, over months of negotiations, to forge a West Coast partnership with the firm most likely to challenge him—the North West Company, that consortium of Scottish fur traders based in Montreal with outposts stretching from Lake Superior all the way to the Rockies.
Astor knew the Scottish partners well from previous trips to Montreal, where, over the years, he’d purchased many thousands of dollars’ worth of their furs. They in turn had wined and dined him at their Beaver Club and at dinner parties in their homes. On one occasion in 1808, Astor’s daughter Magdalen accompanied him to one of these parties, and the after-dinner dancing had lasted until midnight, with a French cotillion, then all the rage in New York, performed in her honor. Beyond their sociability, Astor knew them as expert, efficient, and far-flung fur traders. One of their men, Alexander Mackenzie—no relation to Donald Mackenzie of the Overland Party—had reached the Pacific Coast twelve years before Lewis and Clark by traveling through Canada and crossing the Rockies, all far to the north of the Missouri route. They in turn knew Astor as an innovative businessman and a take-no-prisoners competitor with money to burn.
The negotiations went down to a final round. It was a complicated deal that Astor offered the North West Company, made more complicated by certain trade embargoes the United States had recently imposed on Canada. In essence, Astor would buy into the existing North West Company fur operations in the upper Midwest, and they’d buy into his start-up fur operations on the Pacific Coast. The proposal was, by any standards, a gargantuan deal. It embraced much of the tradable wealth of the western half of the continent and converted it into global trading capital. Whether measured by market share, percentage of gross domestic product, or geographical scope, Astor’s commercial scheme, unregulated by government bodies, existed on a scale that would probably dwarf even the largest mergers of our era. He was striving for a near-global monopoly on fur.
For months, Astor waited impatiently in New York as the North West Company partners debated his proposal, one group in Montreal, another at a meeting in July 1810 at the great baronial hall of Fort William on Lake Superior, the major post and staging area that the NWC had built some distance up the shoreline from Grand Portage. A strict decorum prevailed at these North West Company annual July gatherings. The Scottish partners sat at the long polished table before the huge fireplace, while clerks and those of lesser rank occupied wooden tables further back in the Great Hall. A maitre d’ from Montreal oversaw the serving staff, which presented a feast with china and white linen tablecloths. From this elegant hall and simple Council House in the wilderness of Lake Superior, surrounded by all the gunsmithing shops and warehouses and kitchens and other supporting outbuildings of the fort, the Scottish partners of the North West Company controlled the trade in thousands upon thousands of square miles of northern forest.
In considering Astor’s proposal, the partners had huge issues to resolve, and there was much at stake. Not only could the future of the company turn on these deliberations, but the future political configuration of North America itself and the role of the Pacific Ocean in global trade. The debate raged onward, over hours, over days, in formal meetings in the spare Council House. How to split the profits with Astor? How long would it take even to turn a profit? And who took the losses?
Between meetings, the former Highlanders adjourned to the Great Hall next door and feasted on wilderness delicacies such as fatty beaver tail and spit-roasted venison, braised moose heart and smoked whitefish, as well as the roast beef, veal, and legs of mutton provided by the fort’s own farm. They drank French wines, port, Madeira, and brandy, imported by freight canoe from Montreal, along with savory Double Gloucester cheeses as they considered how much of their best fur territory to concede in order to join this endeavor. Would it be worth the risk of giving up half ownership of what they knew to be profitable in the Great Lakes region? It was necessary also to decide whose Pacific “empire” it would be, and whether they could establish a better Pacific fur trade without Astor. But to answer this question, they had to decide who had the better claim to the West Coast. Did the Americans have any rightful claim whatsoever to any lands west of the crest of the Rocky Mountains at the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase?
The questions were difficult, in many cases unanswerable, and in all cases the outcome remained extremely uncertain. Their sense of doubt—perhaps a legacy from their wind-blasted Scottish Highlands backgrounds—finally prevailed over Astor’s vision, optimism, and drive.
As the wintering partners at Fort William debated the proposal, the North West Company partners who remained in Montreal decided to vote no, their answer arriving first via express messenger at Astor’s offices in New York. Consensus between the two groups was complicated by long lags in communication with the partners at Fort William. Not having received news of the Montreal partners’ decision, wintering partners voted in favor of accepting Astor’s offer, with caveats—he could give them a third of his Pacific enterprise and they would work with him, but they also wanted to guard their own interests on the Pacific side of the Rockies.
Having heard only “no,” Astor now had to reconfigure his plans for the enterprise, rearranging the players he had assembled—who led, and who followed, and who might be loyal to whom. He thought carefully about how to make adjustments, restlessly working over the problem from his offices on Liberty Street. He may have mulled over this great business problem, this continental destiny, when, for exercise and amusement, he rode his horse along country paths of upper Manhattan Island looking at properties to buy, or in the evenings, when he and Sarah attended the opera.
He and Sarah were increasingly well-known New Yorkers. Music lovers who maintained a comparatively modest way of life, they nevertheless had begun to nurture more refined tastes, in the arts, in the company they kept, even in their pride in the Parisian silver tea set they liked to bring out for guests. A driven, focused businessman from the start, John Jacob Astor also was driven by the need to be someone important, to be recognized, to prevail, as he’d pledged when a young man selling bread and cakes. He had chosen a far larger destiny than the life of a butcher’s son in Walldorf. Of all the places in the world, North America compelled him toward it, where the sheer scale and vast wilds of the continent offered an enormous blank slate for someone of his ambition. With his grand plan now launched, he had moved decisively toward putting much of the western half of the continent within his personal domination and profit. He could eventually prevail at a level far beyond the burghers he once envied with their big brick houses on Broadway—indeed, at a level that was global in scope.
Within this grand vision, the issues Astor had to contend with day by day were nonetheless practical ones: With the merger off, would the North West Company now make a run at the rich Pacific Rim sea otter trade, too? What about the interior Northwest trade, and the Missouri River trade? Could he trust his own men who had formerly worked for the North West Company to stay loyal to him if a fierce rivalry unfolded on the West Coast and across the Pacific? Would his empire and fleet end up staring down the cannon barrels of the world’s most powerful fighting force—the British Royal Navy?
Astor wrote to Hunt, who was at the time in St. Louis trying to gather more recruits to take to the Nodaway winter camp. He told Hunt that as any partnership with the North West Company was no longer possible, he had demoted Donald Mackenzie and promoted Hunt to sole leader of the Overland Party. International tensions continued to rise with Great Britain over the boarding of ships in the Atlantic and other territorial issues, and without the North West Company merger, Astor wanted to ensure that the leadership of his Overland Party and West Coast empire stayed with the loyal Mr. Hunt of Trenton, New Jersey, rather than with a British subject, former North West Company employee, and Highlander like Donald Mackenzie—no matter how expert the latter was in the wilds.
Once its Montreal partners had voted down the proposed partnership with Astor, the Montreal headquarters of the North West Company did, in fact, begin to make its own countermoves. Its Scottish fur trading partners weren’t about to give over the entire western continent to John Jacob Astor. Their own trader Alexander Mackenzie, after being the first European to reach the Pacific Coast overland from Canada, had written that whichever country first established settlements at the Columbia River would control a vast empire. As far as they were concerned, the Columbia River basin was
British,
not U.S., territory. They claimed it on the strength of the earlier coastal explorations of Captain Cook, George Vancouver, and Alexander Mackenzie himself, thus laying their own claim to a chunk of the Pacific Rim the size of France—and possibly far larger.
“No establishment of the [United] States on that river or on the coast of the Pacific should therefore be sanctioned,” the Montreal partners had earlier warned authorities in London.
The “wintering” partners at Fort William dispatched their “maybe” after meeting on the Astor proposal. But, instead of east to London, they dispatched it and instructions accompanying it westward by express canoe out on the chain of rivers and lakes that led into the wilderness beyond Lake Superior. The message was addressed to David Thompson, already a legend for the thousands of square miles of unknown terrain in interior North America he’d explored and mapped for the North West Company. The Indians knew him as “Koo-koo-Sint”—“Star-Looker”—in reference to the many celestial observations he’d made with navigational instruments. With an aptitude for mathematics, refined mapmaking abilities, and expert skills for surviving in the wilds, David Thompson was a professional where Hunt was a beginner.
While the wintering partners at Fort William had voted to consider joining forces with Astor in some way, they also very much wanted to protect their own interests on the West Coast. The message from the North West Company wintering partners at Fort William ordered Thompson to proceed directly to the mouth of the Columbia.
The game for Astor had shifted. It no longer resembled solitaire, arranging and rearranging the cards, but rather another game he played frequently on his outdoor portico—checkers. He now had a tenacious opponent working the board across from him with thousands of square miles of North American terrain and the Pacific Rim empire at stake, as well as fortunes—and lives—that would be made or lost based on the fitness of his strategy.
