On October 3 the Columbia left America for China; and on July 29, 1793, came to the home harbor of Boston. Sometime between 1806 and 1809, Gray died in South Carolina, a poor man. It is doubtful if his widow's petition to Congress ever materialized in a reward for any of his descendants. Kendrick, eclipsed by his brilliant assistant, was accidentally killed in Hawaii by the wad of a gun fired by a British vessel to salute the Lady Washington. From the date 1793 or 1795 the little sloop drops out of sea-faring annals.
What is Gray's place among pathfinders and naval {239} heroes? Where does his life's record leave him? It was not spectacular work. It was not work backed by a government, like Bering's or Cook's. It was the work of an individual adventurer, like Radisson east of the Rockies. Gray was a man who did much and said little. He was not accompanied by a host of scientists to herald his fame to the world. Judged solely by results, what did he accomplish? The same for the United States that Cook did for England. He led the way for the American flag around the world. Measuring purely by distance, his ship's log would compare well with Cook's or Vancouver's. The same part of the Pacific coast which they {240} explored, he explored, except that he did not go to northern Alaska; and he compensated for that by discovering the great river, which they both said had no existence. And yet, who that knows of Cook and Vancouver, knows as much of Gray? Authentic histories are still written that speak of Gray's discovery doubtfully. Gray did much, but said little; and the world is prone to take a man at his own valuation. Yet if the world places Cook and Vancouver in the niches of naval heroes, Gray must be placed between them.
There is a curious human side to the story of these glory seekers, too. Bulfinch was so delighted over the discovery of the Columbia, that he had his daughter christened "Columbia," to which the young lady objected in later years, so that the name was dropped. In commemoration of Don Quadra's kindness in repairing the ship Columbia, Gray named one of his children Quadra. The curios brought back by Ingraham on the first voyage were donated to Harvard. Descendants of Gray still have the pictures drawn by Davidson and Haswell on the second voyage. The sea chest carried round the world by Gray now rests in the keeping of an historical society in Portland; and the feather cloak worn up the street by the boy Atto, when he marched in the procession with Gray, is treasured in Boston.[1]
[1] Much concerning Gray's voyages can be found in the accounts of contemporary navigators like Meares and Vancouver; but the essential facts of the voyages are obtainable from the records of Gray's log-book, and of diaries kept by his officers. {241} Gray's log-book itself seems to have passed into the hands of the Bulfinch family. From a copy of the original, Thomas Bulfinch reprinted the exact entry of the discovery on May 11, 1792, in his Oregon and Eldorado, a Romance of the Rivers, Boston, 1866. The log-book is now on file in the Department of State, Washington; but that part from which Bulfinch made his extract is missing; nor is it known where this section was lost as it was in 1816 that Mr. Charles Bulfinch made a copy of this section from the original. Greenhow's Oregon and California, Boston, 1844, issued under the auspices of Congress, gives the log-book in full from May 7th to May 21st. Hubert Howe Bancroft in his Northwest Coast, Volume I, 1890, reproduces the diary in full of Haswell for both voyages. It is from Haswell that the fullest account of the Indian plots are obtained; but at the time of the discovery of the Columbia, Haswell was on the little sloop Adventure, and what he reports is from hearsay. His words in the entry of June 14 are; "They (the Columbia) had very disagreeable weather but … good success… They discovered a harbor in latitude 46 degrees 53 minutes north.… This is Gray's Harbor. Here they were attacked by the natives, and the savages had a considerable slaughter made among them. They next entered Columbia River, and went up it about thirty miles, and doubted not it was navigable upwards of a hundred miles.… The ship (Columbia) during the cruise had collected upwards of seven hundred sea-otter skins and fifteen thousand skins of other species." The pictures made by Davidson, the artist, on the second voyage, owned by collectors in Boston, tell their own story. From all these sources, and from the descendants of Gray, the Rev. Edward G. Porter collected data for his lecture before the Massachusetts Historical Society, afterward published in the New England Magazine of June, 1892. The Massachusetts Historical Proceedings for 1892 have, by all odds, the most complete collection of data bearing on Gray. The archives include the medal and three of Davidson's drawings, also papers relating to the Columbia presented by Barrell. The Salem Institute has also some data on the ships. The Massachusetts Proceedings for 1869-1870 also give, from the Archives of California, the letter of Governor Don Pedro Fages of Santa Barbara to Don Josef Arguello of San Francisco, warning the latter against the American navigators. Greenhow obtained from the Hydrographical Office at Madrid the report of Captain Bruno Heceta's voyage in 1775, when he sighted the mouth of a river supposed to be the Columbia.
A New England Ne'er-do-well, turned from the Door of Rich Relatives, joins Cook's Expedition to America—Adventure among the Russians of Oonalaska—Useless Endeavor to interest New England Merchants in Fur Trade—A Soldier of Fortune in Paris, he meets Jefferson and Paul Jones and outlines Exploration of Western America—Succeeds in crossing Siberia alone on the Way to America, but is thwarted by Russian Fur Traders
When his relatives banged the door in his face, turning him destitute in the streets of London, if John Ledyard could have foreseen that the act would indirectly lead to the Lewis and Clark exploration of the great region between the Mississippi and the Pacific, he would doubtless have regarded the unkindness as Dick Whittington did the cat, that led on to fortune. He had been a dreamer from the time he was born in Groton, opposite New London, Connecticut—the kind of a dreamer whose moonshine lights the path of other men to success; but his wildest dreams never dared the bigness of an empire many times greater than the original states of the Union.
{243} Instead he had landed at Plymouth, ragged, not a farthing in the bottom of his pockets, not a farthing's possession on earth but his hopes. Those hopes were to reach rich relatives in London, who might give him a lift to the first rung of the world's climbers. He was twenty-five years old. He had burned his ships behind him. That is, he had disappointed all his relatives in America so thoroughly that he could never again turn for help to the home hands.
They had designed him for a profession, these New England friends. If Nature had designed him for the same thing, it would have been all right; but she hadn't. The son of a widowed mother, the love of the sea, of pathless places, of what is just out of sight over the dip of the horizon, was in his blood from his father's side. Friends thought he should be well satisfied when he was sent to live with his grandfather at Hartford and apprenticed to the law; but John Ledyard hated the pettifogging of the law, hated roofed-over, walled-in life, wanted the kind of life where men do things, not just dicker, and philosophize, and compromise over the fag-ends of things other men have done. At twenty-one years of age, without any of the prospects that lure the prudent soul, he threw over all idea of law.[1]
Friends were aghast. Manifestly, the boy had {244} brains. He devoured information, absorbed facts like an encyclopaedia, and observed everything. The Greek Testament and Ovid were his companions; yet he rebelled at the immured existence of the scholar. At that time (1772), Dartmouth was the rendezvous of {245} missionaries to the Indians. The college itself held lectures to the singing of the winds through the forests around it. The blowing of a conch-shell called to lessons; and a sort of wildwood piety pervaded the atmosphere. Urged by his mother, Ledyard made one more honest attempt to fit his life to a stereotyped form, and came to study at Dartmouth for the missionary's career.
It was not a success. When he thought to get a foretaste of the missionary vocation by making a dugout and floating down the whole length of Connecticut River, one hundred and forty miles, the scholarly professors were shocked. And when he disappeared for four months to make a farther test by living among the Mohawks, the faculty was furious. His friends gave him up as hopeless, a ne'er-do-well; and Ledyard gave over the farce of trying to live according to other men's patterns.
What now determined him was what directs the most of lives—need for bread and butter. He became a common sailor on the ship of a friend in New London, and at twenty-five landed in Plymouth, light of heart as he was light of purse. The world was an oyster to be opened by his own free lance; and up he tramped from Plymouth to London in company with an Irishman penniless as himself, gay as a lark, to the world's great capital with the world's great prizes for those with the wits to win them. A carriage with driver {246} and footman in livery wearing the armorial design of his own Ledyard ancestors rolled past in the street. He ran to the coachman, asked the address, and presented himself at the door of the ancestral Ledyards, hope beating high. The relationship was to be the key to open all doors. And the door of the ancestral Ledyards was shut in his face. The father was out. The son put no stock in the story of the ragged stranger. He did not even know that Ledyards existed in America. What was to hinder any common tramp trumping up such a story? Where were the tattered fellow's proofs? Ledyard came away with just enough wholesome human rage to keep him from sinking to despair, or to what is more unmanning, self-pity. He had failed before, through trying to frame his life to other men's plans. He had failed now, through trying to win success through other men's efforts—a barnacle clinging to the hull of some craft freighted with fortune. Perhaps, too, he fairly and squarely faced the fact that if he was to be one whit different from the beggar for whom he had been mistaken, he must build his own life solely and wholly on his own efforts.
On he wandered, the roar of the great city's activities rolling past him in a tide. His rage had time to cool. Afternoon, twilight, dark; and still the tide rolled past him; past him because like a stranded hull rotting for lack of use, he had put himself outside the tide of human effort. He must build up his own career. That was the fact he had wrested out of his {247} rage; but unless his abilities were to rot in some stagnant pool, he must launch out on the great tide of human work. Before he had taken that resolution, the roar of the city had been terrifying—a tide that might swamp. Now, the thunder of the world's traffic was a shout of triumph. He would launch out, let the tide carry him where it might.
All London was resounding with the project of Cook's third voyage round the world—the voyage that was to settle forever how far America projected into the Pacific. Recruits were being mustered for the voyage. It came to Ledyard in an inspiration—the new field for his efforts, the call of the sea that paved a golden path around the world, the freedom for shoulder-swing to do all that a man was worth. Quick as flash, he was off—going with the tide now, not a derelict, not a stranded hull—off to shave, and wash, and respectable-ize, in order to apply as a recruit with Cook.
In the dark, somewhere near the sailors' mean lodgings, a hand touched him. He turned; it was the rich man's son, come profuse of apologies: his father had returned; father and son begged to proffer both financial aid and hospitality—Ledyard cut him short with a terse but forcible invitation to go his own way. That the unknown colonial at once received a berth with Cook as corporal of marines, when half the young men of England with influence to back their applications were eager to join the voyage, speaks well for the sincerity of the new enthusiasm.
{248} Cook left England in midsummer of 1776. He sighted the Pacific coast, northward of what is now San Francisco, in the spring of 1778. Ledyard was the first American to see the land that lay beyond the Rockies. It was not a narrow strip as men had thought, but a broad belt a thousand miles long by a thousand broad, an unclaimed world; for storms drove Cook offshore here; and the English discoverer did not land till abreast of British America.
At Nootka thousands of Indians flocked round the two vessels to trade. For some trinkets of glass beads and iron, Ledyard obtained one thousand five hundred skins for Cook. Among the Indians, too, he saw brass trinkets, that must have come all the way from New Spain on the south, or from the Hudson's Bay Fur Company on the east. What were the merchants of New York and Philadelphia doing, that their ships were not here reaping a harvest of wealth in furs? If this were the outermost bound of Louisiana, Louisiana might some day be a part of the colonies now struggling for their liberties; and Ledyard's imagination took one of those leaps that win a man the reputation of a fool among his contemporaries, a hero to future generations. "If it was necessary that a European should discover the existence of the continent," he afterward wrote, "in the name of Amor Patriae let a native explore its resources and boundaries… It is my wish to be the man."
Cook's ships passed north to Oonalaska. Only {249} twenty-five years before, the Indians of Oonalaska had massacred every white settlement on the island. Cook wished to send a message to the Russian fur traders. Not many men could be risked from the ship. Fired with the ambition to know more of the coast which he had determined to explore, Ledyard volunteered to go for the Russians with two Indian guides. The pace was set at an ambling run over rocks that had cut Ledyard's boots to tatters before nightfall. He was quite unarmed; and just at dark the way seemed to end at a sandy shore, where the waves were already chopping over on the rising tide, and spiral columns of smoke betrayed the underground mud huts of those very Indian villages that had massacred the Russians a quarter of a century before. The guides had dived somewhere underground and, while Ledyard stood nonplussed, came running back carrying a light skin boat which they launched. It was made of oiled walrus hide stretched like a drum completely round whalebones, except for two manholes in the top for the rowers. Perpheela, the guide, signalled Ledyard to embark; and before the white man could solve the problem of how three men were to sit in two manholes, he was seized head and heels, and bundled clear through a manhole, lying full length imprisoned like Jonah in the whale. Then the swish of dipping paddles, of the cold waves above and beneath, shut out by parchment thin as tissue paper, told Ledyard that he was being carried out to sea, spite of dark and storm, {250} in a craft light as an air-blown bladder, that bounced forward, through, under, over the waves, undrownable as a fish.
There was nothing to do but lie still. The slightest motion might have ruptured the thin skin keel. On he was borne through the dark, the first American in history to travel by a submarine. At the end of what seemed ages—it could not have been more than two hours—after a deal of bouncing to the rising storm with no sound but the whistling of wind and rush of mountain seas, the keel suddenly grated pebbles. Starlight came through the vacated manholes; but before Ledyard could jump out, the boat was hoisted on the shoulders of four men, and carried on a run overland. The creak of a door slammed open. A bump as the boat dumped down to soft floor; and Ledyard was dazzled by a glare of light to find himself in the mess room of the Russian barracks on Captain Harbor, in the presence of two bearded Russian hunters gasping speechless with surprise to see a man emerging from the manhole like a newly hatched chicken from an egg.
Fur rugs covered the floor, the walls, the benches, the berth beds lining the sides of the barnlike Russian barracks. The windows were of oiled bladder skin; the lamps, whale-oil in stone basins with skin for wick. Arms were stacked in the corner. The two Russians had been sitting down to a supper of boiled salmon, when Ledyard made his unannounced {251} entrance. By signs he explained that Captain Cook's ships were at a near harbor and that the English commander desired to confer with Ismyloff, chief factor of the Russians. Rising, kissing their hands ceremoniously as they mentioned the august name and taking off their fur caps, the Russians made solemn answer that all these parts, with a circumambient wave, belonged to the Empress of Russia; that they were her subjects—with more kissing of the hands. Russia did not want foreigners spying on her hunting-grounds. Nevertheless, Ledyard was given a present of fresh Chinese silk underwear, treated to the hottest Russian brandy in the barracks, and put comfortably to bed on a couch of otter skins. From his bed, he saw the Indians crowd in for evening services before a little Russian crucifix, the two traders leading prayers. These were the tribes, whom the Russians had hunted with dogs fifty years before; and who in turn had slain all Russians on the Island. A better understanding now prevailed.
In the morning Ledyard looked over the fur establishment; galliots, cannon-mounted in the harbor for refuge in case of attack; the huge lemon-yellow, red-roofed store-room that might serve as barracks or fort for a hundred men; the brigades of eight, of nine, of eleven hundred Indian hunters sailing the surfs under the leadership of Ismyloff, the chief factor. Oonalaska was the very centre of the sea-otter hunt. Here, eighteen thousand otter a year were taken. At once, {252} Ledyard realized how he could pay the cost of exploring that unclaimed world between New Spain and Alaska: by turning fur trader as Radisson, and La Salle, and the other explorers had done.
Ismyloff himself, who had been out with his brigade when Ledyard came, went to visit the Englishman; but Ismyloff had little to say, little of Benyowsky, the Polish pirate, who had marooned him; less of Alaska; and the reason for taciturnity was plain. The Russian fur traders were forming a monopoly. They told no secrets to the world. They wanted no intruders on their hunting-ground. Could Ledyard have known that the surly, bearded Russian was to blast his new-born ambitions; could Ismyloff have guessed that the eager, young, beardless corporal of marines was indirectly to be the means of wresting the Pacific coast from Russia—each might have smiled at the tricks of destiny.
Ledyard had two more years to serve in the British navy when he returned from Cook's voyage. By another trick of destiny he was sent out on a battle ship to fight against his native country in the Revolutionary War. It was a time when men wore patriotic coats of many colors. His ship lay at anchor off Long Island. He had not seen his mother for seven years, but knew that the war had reduced her to opening a lodging house for British officers. Asking for a week's furlough, Ledyard went ashore, proceeded to his mother's {253} house, knocked at the door, and was taken as a lodger by her without being recognized, which was, perhaps, as well; for the house was full of British spies. Ledyard waited till night. Then he went to her private apartments and found her reading with the broad-rimmed, horn-framed spectacles of those days. He took her hands. "Look at me," he said. One glance was enough. Then he shut the door; and the door remains shut to the world on what happened there.
That was the end of British soldiering for Ledyard. He never returned to the marines. He betook himself to Hartford, where he wrote an account of Cook's voyage. Then he set himself to move heaven and earth for a ship to explore that unknown coast from New Spain to Alaska. This was ten years before Robert Gray of Boston had discovered the Columbia; twenty years before the United States thought of buying Louisiana, twenty-five years before Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific. Many influences worked against him. Times were troublous. The country had not recovered sufficiently from the throes of the Revolution to think of expanding territory. Individually and collectively, the nation was desperately poor. As for private sailing masters, they smiled at Ledyard's enthusiasm. An unclaimed world? What did they care? Where was the money in a venture to the Pacific? When Ledyard told how Russia was reaping a yearly harvest of millions in furs, even his old friend, Captain Deshon, whose boat had {254} carried him to Plymouth, grew chary of such roseate prospects. It was characteristic of Ledyard that the harder the difficulties proved, the harder grew his determination to overcome. He was up against the impossible, and instead of desisting, gritted his teeth, determined to smash a breach through the wall of the impossible, or smash himself trying. For six months he besieged leading men in New York and Philadelphia, outlining his plans, meeting arguments, giving proofs for all he said of Pacific wealth, holding conference after conference. Robert Morris entered enthusiastically into the scheme; but what with shipmasters' reluctance to embark on such a dangerous voyage and the general scarcity of funds, the patience of both Ledyard and Morris became exhausted. Ledyard's savings had meanwhile dwindled down to $4.27.
In Europe, Cook's voyage was beginning to create a stir. The Russian government had projected an expedition to the Pacific under Joseph Billings, Cook's assistant astronomer. These Russian plans aimed at no less than dominance on the Pacific. Forts were to be built in California and Hawaii. In England and India, private adventurers, Portlock, Dixon, Meares, Barclay, were fitting out ships for Pacific trade. Some one advised Ledyard to attempt his venture in the country that had helped America in the Revolution, France; and to France he sailed with money loaned by Mr. Sands of New York, in 1784.
{255} In Paris Ledyard met two of the most remarkable men in American history, Paul Jones, the naval hero, and Jefferson. To them both he told the marvels of Pacific wealth, and both were far-sighted enough to share his dreams. It was now that Jefferson began to formulate those plans that Lewis and Clark afterward carried out. The season was too late for a voyage this year, but Paul Jones loaned Ledyard money and arranged to take out a ship of four hundred tons the following year. The two actually went over every detail together. Jones was to carry the furs to China, Ledyard with assistants, surgeon, and twenty soldiers to remain at the fur post and explore.
But Paul Jones was counting on the support of the American government; and when he found that the government considered Ledyard's promises visionary, he threw the venture over in a pique.
Was Ledyard beaten? Jefferson and he talked over the project day after day. Ledyard was willing to tramp it across the two Siberias on foot, and to chance over the Pacific Ocean in a Russian fur-trading vessel, if Jefferson could obtain permission from the Russian Empress. Meanwhile, true soldier of fortune, without money, or influence, he lived on terms of intimacy with the fashion of Paris.
"I have but five French crowns," he wrote a friend. "The Fitzhughes (fellow-roomers) haven't money for tobacco. Such a set of moneyless rascals never {256} appeared since the days of Falstaff." Again—"Sir James Hall, on his way from Paris to Cherbourg, stopped his coach at our door. I was in bed, but having flung on my robe de chambre, met him at the door.… In walking across the chamber, he laughingly put his hand on a six livre piece and a louis d'or on my table, and with a blush asked me how I was in the money way. Blushes beget blushes. 'If fifteen guineas,' said he, 'will be of any service to you, here they are. You have my address in London.'"
While waiting the passports from the Empress of Russia, he was invited by Sir James Hall to try his luck in England. The very daring of the wild attempt to cross Siberia and America alone appealed to the English. Half a dozen men, friends of Cook, took the venture up, and Ledyard found himself in the odd position of being offered a boat by the country whose navy he had deserted. Perhaps because of that desertion all news of the project was kept very quiet. A small ship had slipped down the Thames for equipments, when the government got wind of it. Whether the great Hudson's Bay Company of England opposed the expedition as intrusion on its fur preserve, or the English government objected to an American conducting the exploration for the expansion of American territory, the ship was ordered back, and Ledyard was in no position to confront the English authorities. Again he was checkmated, and fell back on Jefferson's plan to cross the two Siberias on foot, and chance it over {257} the Pacific. His friends in London gathered enough money to pay his way to St. Petersburg.
January of 1787 saw him in Sweden seeking passage across the Baltic. Usually the trip to St. Petersburg was made by dog sleighs across the ice. This year the season had been so open, neither boats nor dog trains could be hired to make the trip. Ledyard was now thirty-six years old, and the sum of his efforts totalled to a zero. The first twenty-five years of his life he had wasted trying to fit his life to other men's patterns. The last five years he had wasted waiting for other men to act, men in New York, in Philadelphia, in Paris, in London, to give him a ship. He had done with waiting, with dependence on others. When boats and dog trains failed him now, he muffled himself in wolfskins to his neck, flung a knapsack on his back, and set out in midwinter to tramp overland six hundred miles north to Tornea at the head of the Baltic, six hundred miles south from Tornea, through Finland to St. Petersburg. Snow fell continually. Storms raged in from the sea. The little villages of northern Sweden and Finland were buried in snow to the chimney-tops. Wherever he happened to be at nightfall, he knocked at the door of a fisherman's hut. Wherever he was taken in, he slept, whether on the bare floor before the hearth, or among the dogs of the outhouses, or in the hay-lofts of the cattle sheds. No more waiting for Ledyard! Storm or shine, early and late, he {258} tramped two hundred miles a week for seven weeks from the time he left Stockholm. When he marched into St. Petersburg on the 19th of March, men hardly knew whether to regard him as a madman or a wonder. Using the names of Jefferson and Lafayette, he jogged up the Russian authorities by another application for the passport. The passport was long in coming. How was Ledyard to know that Ismyloff, the Russian fur trader, whom he had met in Oonalaska, had written letters stirring up the Russian government to jealous resentment against all comers to the Pacific? Ledyard was mad with impatience. Days slipped into weeks, weeks into months, and no passport came. He was out of clothes, out of money, out of food. A draft on his English friends kept him from destitution. Just a year before, Billings, the astronomer of Cook's vessel, had gone across Siberia on the way to America for the Russian government. If Ledyard could only catch up to Billings's expedition, that might be a chance to cross the Pacific. As if to exasperate his impatience still more, he met a Scotch physician, a Dr. William Brown, now setting out for Siberia on imperial business, who offered to carry him along free for three thousand of the seven thousand miles to the Pacific. Perhaps the proceeds of that English draft helped him with the slow Russian authorities, but at last, on June 1, he had his passport, and was off with Dr. Brown. His entire earthly possessions at this time consisted of a few guineas, a suit of {259} clothes, and large debts. What was the crack-brained enthusiast aiming at anyway? An empire half the present size of the United States.
From St. Petersburg to Moscow in six days, drawn by three horses at breakneck pace, from Moscow to Kazan through the endless forests, on to the Volga, Brown and Ledyard hastened. By the autumn they were across the Barbary Desert, three thousand miles from St. Petersburg. Here Brown remained, and Ledyard went on with the Cossack mail carriers. All along the endless trail of two continents, the trail of East and West, he passed the caravans of the Russian fur traders, and learned the astonishing news that more than two thousand Russians were on the west coast of America. Down the Lena next, to Yakutsk, the great rendezvous of the fur traders, only one thousand miles more to the Pacific; and on the great plain of the fur traders near Yakutsk he at last overtook the Billings explorers on their way to America. Only one guinea was left in his pocket, and the Cossack commandant reported that the season was too far advanced for him to cross the Pacific. What did it matter? He would cross the Pacific with Billings in spring. He was nearer the realization of his hopes than ever before in his life; and surely his success in tramping twice the length of Sweden, and in crossing two continents when almost destitute augured well for his success in crossing from the Pacific to the Missouri.
Not for a moment was his almost childlike confidence {260} disturbed by a suspicion of bad faith, of intentional delay in issuing the passports, of excuses to hold him back at Yakutsk till the jealous fur traders could send secret complaints to St. Petersburg. Much less was he suspicious when Billings, his old friend of Cook's voyage, himself arrived, and invited him on a sled journey of exploration up the Lena while waiting.[2]
On sledges he went up the Lena River with a party of explorers. On the night of February 24 two or three of the officers and Ledyard were sitting in the mess room of Irkutsk playing cards. They might laugh at Ledyard. They also laughed with him. Wherever he went, went gayety. Gales of boisterous laughter were on the wind. Hopes as tenuous as the wind were in the air. One of the great Bering's sons was there, no doubt telling tales of discovery that set each man's veins jumping. Suddenly a tremendous jingling of bells announced some midnight arrival post-haste at the barracks' door. Before the card players had risen from their places, two Cossacks had burst into the room stamping snow from their feet. Marching straight over to Ledyard, they seized him roughly by the arms and arrested him for a French spy, displaying the Empress's written orders, brought all the way from St. Petersburg. To say that Ledyard was dumfounded is putting it mildly. Every man in the room knew that he was not a French spy. Every man {261} in the room knew that the arrest was a farce, instigated by the jealous fur traders whom Ismyloff's lying letters had aroused. For just a second Ledyard lost his head and called on Billings as a man of honor to confute the charge. However Ledyard might lose his head, Billings was not willing to lose his. He advised Ledyard not to provoke conflict with the Russian authorities, but to go back to St. Petersburg and disprove the charge. Was it a case of one explorer being jealous of another, or had Billings played Ledyard into the fur traders' trap? That will never be known. Certain it is, Billings made mess enough of his own expedition to go down to posterity as a failure. Some of the officers ran to get Ledyard a present of clothes and money. As he jumped into the waiting sledge and looked back over his shoulder at the group of faces smiling in the lighted doorway, he burst into a laugh, but it was the laugh of an embittered man, whose life had crumbled to ruin at one blow. The Cossacks whipped up the horses, and he was off on the long trail back, five thousand miles, every mile a sign post of blasted hopes. Without a word of explanation or the semblance of a trial on the false charge, he was banished out of St. Petersburg on pain of death if he returned.
Ragged, destitute, the best years of his life gone, he reached London, heartbroken. "I give up," he told the English friends, who had backed him with money, and what was better than money—faith. "I give up," {262} he wrote Jefferson, who afterward had Lewis and Clark carry out Ledyard's plans.
The men of the African Geographical Society in London tried to cheer him. When could he set out to explore the source of the Nile for them?
"To-morrow," answered Ledyard, with the heedlessness of one who has lost grip on life. The salary advanced paid off the moss-grown debts of his disappointed past, but he never reached the scene of his new venture. He died on the way at Cairo, in November, 1788, for all hope had already died in his heart. The world that has entered into the heritage of his aims has forgotten Ledyard; for the public acclaims only the heroes of success, and he was a hero of defeat. All that Lewis and Clark succeeded in doing for the West, backed by the prestige of government, Ledyard, the penniless soldier of fortune, had foreseen and planned with Jefferson in the attic apartments of Paris.[3]
[1] The world owes all knowledge of Ledyard's intimate life to Jared Sparks, who compiled his life of Ledyard from journals and correspondence collected by Dr. Ledyard and Henry Seymour of Hartford.
[2] In Sauer's account of the Billings Expedition, some excuse is given for the conduct of Billings on the ground that Ledyard had been insolent to the Russians.
[3] Ledyard's Journal of Cook's Last Voyage, Hartford, 1783, and Sparks's Life of Ledyard, Cambridge, 1829.
Activities of Americans, Spanish, and Russians on the West Coast of America arouse England—Vancouver is sent out ostensibly to settle the Quarrel between Fur Traders and Spanish Governors at Nootka—Incidentally, he is to complete the Exploration of America's West Coast and take Possession for England of Unclaimed Territory—The Myth of a Northeast Passage dispelled forever
With Gray's entrance of the Columbia, the great drama of discovery on the northwest coast of America was drawing to a close.
After the death of Bering on the Commander Islands, and of Cook at Hawaii, while on voyages to prove there was no Northeast Passage, no open waterway between Pacific and Atlantic, it seems impossible that the myth of an open sea from Asia to Europe could still delude men; but it was in hunting for China that Columbus found America; and it was in hunting for a something that had no existence except in the foolish theories of the schoolmen that the whole northwest coast of America was exploited.
{264} Bering had been called "coward" for not sailing through a solid continent. Cook was accused of fur trading, "pottering in peltries," to the neglect of discovery, because his crews sold their sea-otter at profit. To be sure, the combined results of Bering's and Cook's voyages proved there was no waterway through Alaska to the Atlantic; but in addition to blackening the reputations of the two great navigators in order to throw discredit on their conclusions, the schoolmen bellicosely demanded—Might there not be a passage south of Alaska, between Russia's claim on the north and Spain's on the south? Both Bering and Cook had been driven out from this section of the coast by gales. This left a thousand miles of American coast unexplored. Cook had said there were no Straits of Fuca, of which the old Greek pilot in the service of New Spain had told legends of fictitious voyages two centuries before; yet Barclay, an East India English trader, had been up those very straits. So had Meares, another trader. So had Kendrick and Gray, the two Americans. This was the very section which Bering and Cook had left untouched; and who could tell where these straits might lead? They were like a second Mediterranean. Meares argued they might connect with Hudson Bay.
Then Spain had forced matters to a climax by seizing Meares's vessels and fort at Nootka as contraband. That had only one meaning: Spain was trying to lay hands on everything from New Spain to Russian {265} territory on the north. If Spain claimed all north to the Straits of Fuca, and Russia claimed all south to the Straits of Fuca, where was England's claim of New Albion discovered by Sir Francis Drake, and of all that coast which Cook had sighted round Nootka?
Captain George Vancouver, formerly midshipman with Cook, was summoned post-haste by the British Admiralty. Ostensibly, his mission was to receive back at Nootka all the lands which the Spaniards had taken from Meares, the trader. Really, he was to explore the coast from New Spain on the south, to Russian America on the north, and to hold that coast for England. That Spain had already explored the islands of this coast was a mere detail. There remained the continental shore still to be explored. Besides, Spain had not followed up her explorations by possession. She had kept her navigations secret. In many cases her navigators had not even landed.
Vancouver was still in his prime, under forty. Serving in the navy from boyhood, he had all a practical seaman's contempt for theories. This contempt was given point by the world's attitude toward Cook. Vancouver had been on the spot with Cook. He knew there was no Northeast Passage. Cook had proved that. Yet the world refused credence.
For the practical navigator there remained only one course, and that course became the one aim, the consuming ambition of Vancouver's life—to destroy the {266} last vestige of the myth of a Northeast Passage; to explore the northwest coast of America so thoroughly there would not remain a single unknown inlet that could be used as a possible prop for the schoolmen's theories, to penetrate every inlet from California to Alaska—mainland and island; to demonstrate that not one possible opening led to the Atlantic. This was to be the object of Vancouver's life, and he carried it out with a thoroughness that left nothing for subsequent explorers to do; but he died before the record of his voyages had been given to the world.
The two ships, Discovery and Chatham, with a supply ship, the Daedalus, to follow later, were fitted out for long and thorough work. Vancouver's vessel, the Discovery, carried twenty guns with a crew of a hundred men. The tender, Chatham, under Broughton, had ten guns and forty-five men. With Vancouver went Menzies, and Puget, and Baker, and Johnstone—names that were to become place marks on the Pacific. The Discovery and Chatham left England in the spring of 1791. A year later found them cutting the waves from Hawaii for America, the New Albion of Drake's discovery, forgotten by England until Spain's activity stimulated memory of the pirate voyage.
A swashing swell met the ships as they neared America. Phosphorescent lights blue as sulphur flame slimed the sea in a trail of rippling fire; and a land bird, washed out by the waves, told of New Albion's shore. {267} For the first two weeks of April, the Discovery and Chatham had driven under cloud of sail and sunny skies; but on the 16th, just when the white fret of reefs ahead forewarned land, heavy weather settled over the ships. To the fore, bare, majestic, compact as a wall, the coast of New Albion towered out of the surf near Mendocino. Cheers went up from the lookout for the landfall of Francis Drake's discovery. Then torrents of rain washed out surf and shore. The hurricane gales, that had driven all other navigators out to sea from this coast, now lashed Vancouver. Such smashing seas swept over decks, that masts, sails, railings, were wrenched away.
Was it ill-luck or destiny, that caught Vancouver in this gale? If he had not been driven offshore here, he might have been just two weeks before Gray on the Columbia, and made good England's claim of all territory between New Spain and Alaska. When the weather cleared on April 27, the ocean was turgid, plainly tinged river-color by inland waters; but ground swell of storm and tide rolled across the shelving sandbars. Not a notch nor an opening breached through the flaw of the horizon from the ocean to the source of the shallow green. Vancouver was too far offshore to see that there really was a break in the surf wash. He thought—and thought rightly—this was the place where the trader, Meares, had hoped to find the great River of the West, only to be disappointed and to name the point Cape Disappointment. Vancouver was {268} not to be fooled by any such fanciful theories. "Not considering this opening worthy of more attention," he writes, "I continued to the northwest." He had missed the greatest honor that yet remained for any discoverer on the Pacific. Within two weeks Gray, the American, heading back to these baffling tides with a dogged persistence that won its own glory, was to succeed in passing the breakers and discovering the Columbia. As the calm permitted approach to the shore again, forests appeared through the haze—that soft, velvet, caressing haze of the dreamy, lazily swelling Pacific—forests of fir and spruce and pine and cypress, in all the riot of dank spring growth, a dense tangle of windfall and underbrush and great vines below, festooned with the light green stringy mosses of cloud line overhead and almost impervious to sunlight. Myriad wild fowl covered the sea. The coast became beetling precipice, that rolled inland forest-clad to mountains jagging ragged peaks through the clouds. This was the Olympus Range, first noticed by Meares, and to-day seen for miles out at sea like a ridge of opalescent domes suspended in mid-heaven.
Vancouver was gliding into the Straits of Fuca when the slender colors of a far ship floated above the blue horizon outward bound. Another wave-roll, and the flag was seen to be above full-blown sails and a square-hulled, trim little trader of America. At six in the morning of April 29, the American saluted with a {269} cannon-shot. Vancouver answered with a charge from his decks, rightly guessing this was Robert Gray on the Columbia.
Puget and Menzies were sent to inquire about Gray's cruise. They brought back word that Gray had been fifty miles up the Straits of Fuca; and—most astounding to Vancouver's ambitions—that the American had been off the mouth of a river south of the straits at 46 degrees 10 minutes, where the tide prevented entrance for nine days. "The river Mr. Gray mentioned," says Vancouver, "should be south of Cape Disappointment. This we passed on the forenoon of the 27th; and if any inlet or river be found, it must be a {270} very intricate one, inaccessible … owing to reefs and broken water.… I was thoroughly convinced, as were most persons on board, that we could not possibly have passed any cape … from Mendocino to Classet (Flattery)."
Keen to prove that no Northeast Passage existed by way of the Straits of Fuca, Vancouver headed inland, close to the south shore, where craggy heights offered some guidance through the labyrinth of islands and fog. Eight miles inside the straits he anchored for the night. The next morning the sun rose over one of the fairest scenes of the Pacific coast—an arm of the sea placid as a lake, gemmed by countless craggy islands. On the land side were the forested valleys rolling in to the purple folds of the mountains; and beyond, eastward, dazzling as a huge shield of fire in the sunrise, a white mass whiter than the whitest clouds, swimming aerially in mid-heaven. Lieutenant Baker was the first to catch a glimpse of the vision for which every western traveller now watches, the famous peak seen by land or sea for hundreds of miles, the playground of the jagged green lightnings on the hot summer nights; and the peak was named after him.—Mount Baker.
For the first time in history white men's boats plied the waters of the great inland sea now variously known as Admiralty Inlet, Puget Sound, Hood Canal. There must be no myth of a Northeast Passage left lurking in any of the many inlets of this spider-shaped sea. {271} Vancouver, Menzies, Puget, and Johnstone set out in the small boats to penetrate every trace of water passage. Instead of leading northeast, the tangled maze of forest-hidden channels meandered southward. Savages swarmed over the water, paddling round and round the white men, for all the world like birds of prey circling for a chance to swoop at the first unguarded moment. Tying trinkets to pieces of wood, Puget let the gifts float back as peace-offerings to woo good will. The effect was what softness always is to an Indian spoiling for a fight, an incentive to boldness. When Puget landed for noon meal, a score of redskins lined up ashore and began stringing their bows for action. Puget drew a line along the sand with his cutlass and signalled the warriors to keep back. They scrambled out of his reach with a great clatter. It only needed some fellow bolder than the rest to push across the line, and massacre would begin. Puget did not wait. By way of putting the fear of the Lord and respect for the white man in the heart of the Indian, he trained the swivel of the small boat landward, and fired in midair. The result was instant. Weapons were dropped. On Monday, midday, June 4, Vancouver and Broughton landed at Point Possession. Officers drew up in line. The English flag was unfurled, a royal salute fired, and possession taken of all the coast of New Albion from latitude 39 to the Straits of Fuca, which Vancouver named Gulf of Georgia. Just a month before, Gray, the American, had preceded this act of {272} possession by a similar ceremony for the United States on the banks of the Columbia.