History of Benton County, Oregon, Part 13

Author: David D. Fagan
Publication date: 1885
Publisher:
Number of Pages:

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At Ounalaska Cook remained five days, and on the second of July sailed north- ward along the coast, searching faithfully for a passage eastward. On the ninth of August he reached a point which he correctly believed to be the utmost extremity of the continent, and upon it he bestowed the name of Cape Prince of Wales. The va- rious names and titles of that worthy prince appear to have been as liberally scattered about by the loyal English explorers as were the saints of the Roman calendar by the devout subjects of Spain. Cook crossed Behring's strait from this point, finding it but fifty miles in width, and landed upon the coast of Asia. He explored the Asiatic coast of the Arctic ocean northwestward to Cape North in latitude 68 degrees and 56 minutes, and the American coast northeastward as far as Icy Cape, in latitude 70 de- grees and 29 minutes, and being prevented by ice from progressing further returned to Ounalaska, where he fell in with some Russian traders, who soon convinced him that they knew far less of the geography of the North Pacific than he did. He then proceeded to the Sandwich islands to spend the winter, and was slain in an unfortunate affray with the natives on the island of Hawaii on the sixteenth of February, 1779.

The death of this renowned explorer, though a sad blow to the enterprise, did not terminate it altogether; yet the results accomplished thereafter were by no means as

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great as they would have been had operations been directed by the great executive ability and geographical knowledge possessed by Cook. Captain Charles Clerke suc- ceeded to the command, and in March, 1779, sailed from the Sandwich islands, with the purpose of passing into the Arctic sea and thence, if possible, into the Atlantic. He headed northward and on the twenty-ninth of April entered the harbor of Petro- paulovski in the Bay of Avatscha, the chief military station of Russia in Kamtchatka, where he was received with great courtesy by the officials of the czar. Clerke then sailed into Behring's strait, but was prevented from advancing even as far as the year before by the vast quantities of ice, having arrived too early in the season. Being in ill health and discouraged by his want of success, Captain Clerke returned to Petro- paulovski, and died near that port on the twenty-second of August. Lieutenant John Gore succeeded to the command, but deeming the vessels in too battered a condition to endure another season in that rigorous climate, he sailed at once for his native land by the way of Canton, where he had learned, through the Russians, would be found a good market for the furs he had on board.

The vessels arrived in Canton early in December, bearing the first cargo of furs taken from America proper to China, and with the exception of the cargo taken there by Benyowsky and the Polish refugees in 1770, the first to be conveyed into the Celestial Kingdom by sea. This was a very important circumstance, since it was one of the greatest factors that led to the development of the American coast north of California, The furs had been purchased from the natives at Nootka sound, Prince William's sound and other points visited, the seamen exchanging for them the merest trifles in their possession. No care was taken to buy only valuable kinds since they were not purchased upon speculation ; nor was any thought taken of their preservation, many of them being ruined as an article of merchandise by being used for beds and cloth- ing. It was only when they reached Petropaulovski and saw how eager the Russians were to purchase them and ship them overland to China that the officers realized how valuable a cargo they possessed. They pursuaded the seamen to cling to their furs until they arrived in Canton, where they assured them much better prices would be realized. The outcome was that what was aboard the two vessels was sold for more than $10,000, and the result so excited the cupidity of the crew, that, though their voyage had already been extended over a space of three years and a half, they became " possessed with a rage to return to the northern coasts, and, by another cargo of skins, to make their fortunes, which was, at one time, not far short of mutiny." The insub- ordinate tendencies of the crew were repressed, and the Resolution and Discovery sailed homeward from ('anton, passed around the Cape of Good Hope, and arrived in England early in October, 1880, having been absent four years and three months, during which time no tidings of them had been received at home, and having lost their gallant commander in battle and his able associate by the hand of disease.

England was at that time engaged in war with both Spain and France, while the patriotic struggle of her American colonies for independence was causing her to put forth her utmost energy to uphold her authority in regions already under her domin- ion ; she had neither time nor means to attempt anything more in foreign countries until her present troubles were overcome, consequently the lords of admiralty withheld from publication the official record of the voyage until after the conclusion of peace,

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and it was not made public until during the winter of 1884-5. By comparison of voyages it will be seen that Cook saw no portion of America not previously visited by the Spaniards, who had formally taken possession, or by Russian explorers; but his explorations had been so careful, his observations so thorough and his records so accurately kept, that he revolutionized the ideas of Pacific geography.

There remains yet to be recorded a voyage made by the Spaniards contempora- neously with that of Cook, though each was conducted in ignorance of the other. The discoveries of Heceta and Bodega were considered highly important by the authorities of Spain, and they ordered another expedition to be fitted out to make a more thorough examination of the coast, which was not ready for sea for three years. The Princesa and Favorita, the former under the command of Captain Ignacio Arteaga, leader of the expedition, and the latter commanded by Bodega and Maurelle, sailed from San Blas February 7, 1779, only nine days prior to the death of Cook on the island of Hawaii. They visited only such places as had been seen before by Heceta and Bodega, following closely the course pursued the previous year by Captain Cook. Mount St. Elias having been reached and the coast line being observed to run steadily to the west, they were lead, as had been Cook, to look carefully for the Straits of Anian, but, like him, were disappointed. Arteaga was not gifted with the qualities that make a suc- cessful pioneer, and becoming discouraged at his want of success and by the symptoms of scurvy observed among the crew, he ordered both vessels to return to San Blas, where they arrived late in November. The observations, records and charts made during this voyage were very inaccurate and of but little value, and the expedition was productive of no benefit to Spain, nor did it reflect any glory upon the nation ; yet the officers were rewarded by promotion for their good conduct. Spain had, in the meantime, become involved in war with England and was neither in the condition nor mood to pursue further investigations north of her settlements in California until peace was restored.

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CHAPTER IX.

BEGINNING OF THE FUR TRADE ON THE PACIFIC COAST.

Cook's Return to England Produces great Results-Russian American Trading Company -- Undertaking of John Ledyard-Voyage of the French Explorer LaPerouse-The East India, South Sea, and King George's Sound Companies-Meares Spends a Horrible Winter in the Arctic Regions-Berkeley Discovers the Straits of Fuca -Second Voyage of Captain Meares-He Explores the Straits of Fuca and Attempts to Enter the Columbia.

The lords of admiralty could pigeon-hole the log books of the Resolution and Discovery, but they could not so easily seal the lips of their excited crews, whose tales of the lands visited, wonderful objects and strange races of people seen, and, above all, of the ease with which fortunes could be made, by buying furs on the American coast for a song and trading them in China for valuable cargoes of silks, porcelain and tea, aroused a universal interest in the Pacific, which only the existing state of hostilities in Europe and America was potent to hold in check. The Russians, also, had learned much through the contact of their traders with the English explorers, both on the island of Ounalaska and at the port of Petropaulovski; and, being unhampered by wars, were the first to take advantage of the discoveries of Cook and reap from them substantial results. An association called the Russian American Trading Company was organized in 1781, and in 1783 an expedition of three vessels was sent to the American coast to examine it and plant colonies on the islands and continent as far east as Prince William's sound. The expedition was absent three years and success- fully accomplished its mission. These settlements and the power of the Russian Amer- ican Trading Company were gradually extended until through them Russia obtained complete control of the Alaskan coast as far south as latitude 54 degrees and 40 minutes, and exerted great influence in the Pacific, even establishing in later years a settlement in California, which will be referred to again in these pages.

Several unsuccessful efforts were made to open up a trade between the American coast and China, especially by John Ledyard, an American seaman who had been one of the crew of Cook's vessel. He sought both in America and France to interest capi- talists, but was unsuccessful in his efforts to secure backing in his enterprise. He then undertook to cross Russia and Siberia to Kamtchatka, sail thence to Nootka sound, and then traverse the American continent to the Atlantic. In furtherance of this scheme he secured a passport from the empress of Russia, and had advanced as far as Irkutsk, when he was arrested, conducted to the Polish frontier of Russia, and released with the injunction not to again enter the empire. This action was probably instigated by the Russian American Trading Company, which did not relish the idea of a foreigner be- coming so familiar with a region which it proposed to monopolize for its own benefit.

King Louis XVI., of France, dispatched an expedition under the command of a most competent and scientific navigator named LaPerouse, in 1785, immediately after

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the publication of Cook's journal had verified the tales of his seamen and infused into the commercial world a spirit of adventure in the Pacific. La Perouse was instructed to "explore the parts of the northwest coasts of America which had not been examined by Cook, and of which the Russian accounts gave no idea, in order to obtain informa- tion respecting the fur trade, and also to learn whether, in those unknown parts, some river or internal sea might not be found communicating with Hudson's bay or Baffin's bay." LaPerouse reached the coast in the vicinity of Mount Fairweather June 23, 1786, where he remained at anchor several weeks, and then sailed southward, examin- ing the coast and discovering that many points formerly considered portions of the mainland were, in reality, but parts of islands. Though the first to ascertain this fact he received no credit for it, since his vessels were wrecked in the New Hebrides and his journal was not published until 1797, several years after other explorers had discovered and made known the same facts.

England's anxiety to further her interests in the Pacific led her to adopt a policy which, so far as the American coast was concerned, had the effect of hampering her efforts to secure a foothold on the coast. Notwithstanding the fact that the Hudson's Bay Company had been instrumental in checking the general progress of the nation on the Atlantic coast, and had headed off or rendered futile all explorations of its territory, Great Britain seems not to have learned a lesson from experience and was ready to repeat the experiment. To the great East India Company she had granted chartered rights which have been so well improved that a vast territory, an enormous commerce, millions of subjects, in fact a new empire, have been added to the British crown, and the queen of England now subscribes herself empress of the Indies. To this com- pany was granted the privilege of trading with the Asiatic coast and adjacent islands of the Pacific to the complete exclusion of all other British subjects whatever. To a new association called the South Sea Company a like exclusive privilege of all the commerce of the American coast of the Pacific was given. Thus all independent English traders were shut out from the Pacific entirely, and Great Britain was com- pelled to rely upon these two companies for the advancement of her interests in this quarter of the globe; since no vessels but those of the East India Company could carry the English flag around the Cape of Good Hope and none but those of its rival could enter the Pacific by the way of Cape Horn. But it was soon found that the interests of these two companies were antagonistic and their granted privileges con- flicting, when applied to the practical demands of trade. The South Sea Company could load its ships with furs at Nootka and Prince William's sound, but it could not dispose of them in China; on the other hand its powerful rival which controlled the Chinese market was debarred from sending its vessels to trade for furs on the American coast.

The first successful voyage was that of James Hanna, an Englishman, who sailed from Macao in 1785, and procured a cargo of furs at Nootka sound, which he sold in China for $20,000. He repeated the trip the following year, but encountered so much opposition from other traders who were then on the coast, and found so poor a market in China, which had been glutted with furs, that nothing was realized from the specu- lation. In 1785 the King George's Sound Company was organized in,England and procured special permits from the South Sea Company and the East India Company,

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.A. D. Welling, Lith. Portiond, Or.

FARM RESIDENCE OF CALEB DAVIS. Erected 1878. 4 Miles Southwest of Corvallis, Benton County, Oregon.

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which enabled it to trade in the Pacific waters. The King George and Queen Charlotte were dispatched to the American coast under the command of Captains Portlock and Dixon, and traded two years without paying expenses because of the competition and overstocked market. Two other vessels were sent by the company, which arrived in 1787 just before Portlock and Dixon took their departure; but the new discoveries made by all these traders were confined to ascertaining that the coast above the 49th parallel was fringed by hundreds of large and small islands, and that it was only these islands which had been visited by the earlier explorers.

This led to the idea that the whole northwestern continent was in fact but an immense archipelago of islands, through which it would be possible to reach the Atlantic. This was the opinion formed by Captain Meares in 1789, who assigned as one of his reasons for holding that belief, that " the channels of this archipelago were found to be wide and capacious, with near two hundred fathoms deep of water, and huge promontories stretching out into the sea, where whales and sea-otters were seen in incredible abundance. In some of these channels there are islands of ice, which we may venture to say could never have formed on the western side of America, which possesses a mild and moderate climate; so that their existence cannot be reconciled to any other idea, than that they received their formation in the eastern seas, and have been drifted by the tides and currents through the passage for whose existence we are contending." The intelligent mariner seems to have forgotten the ice encountered by Cook in Behring's strait and the terrible winter he himself spent on the Alaskan coast.

Captain Meares was a lieutenant of the British navy, off duty and on half pay. In 1787 the great East India Company fitted out two vessels to trade between Nootka sound and China, assigning the Nootka to the command of Meares and the Sea-Otter to Lieutenant Walter Tipping. This was the second venture of the company in this direction, as two small vessels had been dispatched the year before, which had enjoyed a reasonable measure of success.

The Sea- Otter is known to have reached Prince William's sound, but her voyage from that port is hidden in mystery while her ultimate fate is unknown. It is prob- able that she and her crew went to the bottom of the sea, for if wrecked upon the coast and her crew murdered by the natives, it would seem almost impossible that no trace of them should ever have been discovered. The Nootka, also, followed the course of the Japan current, crossed the Aleutian group between Ounamak and Ounalaska islands, and finally came to anchor in Prince William's sound, with the purpose of spending the winter there and resuming the voyage in the spring. During October, November and December their stay in the sound was quite endurable, but the horrors of an Arctic winter, with which English seamen were entirely unfamiliar, then began to crowd upon them. Ice hemmed in the vessel, snow covered it in drifts, all fowl and animal life deserted the sound, including the migratory natives who had been living there when they arrived. The sickly sun peeped over the horizon's rim but a few moments at noon, and then the almost perpetually-falling snow obscured it from view, " tremendous mountains forbade almost a sight of the sky, and cast their nocturnal shadows over the ship in the midst of day," scurvy, that horrible scourge of the sea, began its ravages among the crew, and horrors were " heaped on horror's head." From January to May twenty-three of the men died and the remainder were rendered unfit 9

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to perform any labor whatever. In May the birds and animals returned, the ice dis- appeared, the natives once more greeted their stricken visitors, the vessel was released from its icy chains, and in June Meares sailed to the Sandwich islands and from there to China, having achieved but the honor of being the first English navigator to spend the winter on the Alaskan coast. The East India Company were satis- fied with these two disastrous voyages, but not so Captain Meares, who began making preparations for another visit to the American coast.

The entrance to the Straits of Fuca were seen for the first time since they were entered by the old Greek pilot by Captain Berkeley, an Englishman, though in com- mand of a ship belonging to the Austrian East India Company. In sailing south from the coast of Vancouver island in his vessel the Imperial Eagle, Captain Berkeley noticed a broad opening between latitudes 48 and 49 degrees and just north of Cape Flattery, south of which Cook, Bodega and Heceta had made such careful search for the reputed passage. Noting the discovery upon his chart but making no effort to explore the opening, Berkeley continued south along the coast and at the Isla de los Dolores lost a boat's crew at the hands of Indians almost at the same spot where Bo- dega's men had been murdered; and for this reason he called the unfortunate place Destruction island.

The next voyage of importance was that of the second visit to our coast by Cap- tain Meares. In China the Portuguese were given special privileges and exemptions, and in order to reap the advantage of this two vessels were fitted out at the Portuguese port of Macao, near Canton, having nominal captains of that nation and receiving permission from the governor to carry the Portuguese flag. Their actual commanders were Captain Meares of the ship Felice, and William Douglas of the brig Iphigenia, though those gentlemen appear upon the papers simply in the capacity of supercar- goes. Nor was this alone the object of the use of Portugal's flag, since by so doing the act of Parliament excluding all British vessels from the Pacific except those of the East India and South Sea companies could be evaded. Greenhow endeavors to prove that these two vessels were actually the property of Juan Cavallo, the Portuguese whose name appears as owner in the ship's papers, and that the Portuguese captains were the bona fide commanders of the vessels; and he so far succeeds in his effort as to raise a strong presumption that, if such was not the case, these Portuguese were at least something more than mere figureheads in the enterprise. The plan of the voy- age was for the Felice to go to Nootka sound and coast up and down from that harbor exploring the coast and trading with the natives ; the Iphigenia was to proceed at once to Cook's inlet and trade southward to Nootka, where one of the vessels was to load all the furs and return to Macao, the other to remain there or at the Sandwich islands until spring.

In pursuance of this plan of operations the Felice sailed for Nootka sound in the winter of 1787-8, and immediately upon her arrival the construction of a small schooner was begun by her crew, to be used for trading along the coast. While this work was progressing Meares made a short voyage southward; but before going he secured from Maquinna, the chief, the privilege of erecting a house for the abode and protection of the working party left behind. The consideration for this favor was a brace of pistols and the free gift of the house and its contents when he took his final

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departure. This shows conclusively that the house was only for temporary occupancy, yet Meares, afterwards, in view of subsequent events, laid claim to having made a permanent settlement in the name of the king of England ; though how he could have done so while acting, even nominally, in the capacity of supercargo of a Portuguese vessel, he fails to explain.

Having built his house, and surrounded it with a rampart of earth surmounted with a small cannon for the protection of its inmates, Meares sailed south along the coast in search of the passage which had been discovered the previous year by Berkeley. On the twenty-ninth of June, 1788, in latitude 48 degrees and 39 minutes, he observed a broad inlet, and in his narrative lays claim to its first discovery, by claiming that " the fact of the coast along which we were now sailing had not been seen by Captain Cook, and we know no other navigator, said to have been this way, except Maurelle," though in the introduction to the narrative he mentions the fact of Berkeley's discovery the year before. He says: "From the masthead, it was observed to stretch to the east by the north, and a clear and unbounded horizon was seen in this direction as far as the eye could reach. The strongest curiosity impelled us to enter this strait, which we shall call by the name of its original discoverer, John de Fuca." Duffin, mate of the Felice, was sent up the strait with a boat's crew of thirteen men and provisions for a month. They returned in a week, every one of them suffering from wounds received in a conflict with the natives. The boat had proceeded only ten miles up the strait, [Meares claimed thirty, but Duffin's statement places it at ten ], and had been attacked with great ferocity and bravery by the savages who seemed not to care for the destruc- tion caused by the fire arms nor to be frightened by the noise they made. They used their bows and arrows, clubs, stone bludgeons, spears and slings with great skill and effect, so much so that had it not been for the protection afforded by the awning of the boat few of the crew would have escaped with their lives.

Meares then sailed south in search of the Rio de San Roque of Heceta. On the fifth of July he observed a headland which he called Cape Shoalwater and on ap- proaching nearer the coast the next day saw beyond this a promontory which he con- ceived to be one side of Heceta's inlet. He says: " After we had rounded the prom- ontory a large bay, as we had imagined, opened to our view, that bore a very promising appearance, and into it we steered with every encouraging expectation. The high land that formed the boundaries of the bay was at a great distance, and a flat, level country occupied the intervening space ; the bay itself took rather a westerly direction. As we steered in the water shoaled to nine, eight and seven fathoms, when breakers were seen from the deck right ahead, and, from the masthead, they were observed to extend across the bay ; we therefore hauled out, and directed our course to the opposite shore, to see if there was any channel or if we could discover any point. The name of Cape Disappointment was given to the promontory ( Cape Hancock ), and the bay obtained the title of Deception bay. *

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History of Benton County, Oregon, Part 13

Author: David D. Fagan Publication date: 1885 Publisher: Number of Pages:

Author: David D. Fagan
Publication date: 1885
Publisher:
Number of Pages: