by Stark, Peter
Powerful, tightly knit, and more warlike societies, these were cultures of the “voyaging” or “war” canoe, massive craft up to sixty-five feet long and eight feet wide that could carry up to sixty paddlers, their bows fiercely carved with a bald eagle or a human face or other figures, painted in the characteristic red, black, or white. Some, like the Clayoquot, were whaling societies, which demanded feats of tremendous seamanship and bravery as the canoes put out into the open sea with a harpooner in the bow who had undergone weeks or months of ritualized purification. A great deal of intertribal trade occurred up and down this rich, two-thousand-mile coast. Tribes that crafted especially finely woven rain hats of the inner bark of a cedar tree might trade them to tribes rich in salmon or whale, or villages that hewed the best voyaging canoes might trade the vessels for strings of detalium—mollusk shells that looked like miniature tusks and served as Northwest Coastal currency.
In short, the Northwest Coastal Indians were extremely sophisticated traders and bargainers, to the surprise and sometimes the distress of the first Europeans to arrive, including Captain Thorn. The first few European trading ships to Vancouver Island found they could purchase the sea otter furs cheaply. The Northwest Coast Indians used the plush furs to cover their sleeping benches and for other purposes, but didn’t hunt it with any more verve than they did other sea mammals. The Russian fur traders who had begun to work the Alaskan coast had come to call the sea otter furs “soft gold” for the incredible prices they brought on the Chinese market, a discovery also made by Captain Cook’s men. An enormous demand grew from China’s wealthy and educated mandarin class, who used furs to line their vests and trim their robes.
Sea otter pelts mesmerized the luxury-loving beholder. With nearly one million fine hairs per square inch, the sea otter possesses the densest fur of any mammal known. The fineness and denseness of the hairs give it a soft, luxurious touch. It’s this coat that allowed the sea otter to thrive in frigid coastal waters all along the northern Pacific Rim—from California, to Alaska and the Aleutians, to Kamchatka, to the northern islands of Japan. Unlike other cold-water marine mammals such as the seal, it has no insulating blubber layer and relies on this double coat of fur for warmth. Outer guard hairs protect the soft, dense inner hairs, which trap air bubbles and serve as an insulating layer that keeps the otter’s actual skin dry.
Even then, since the sea otter needs to maintain a very high metabolism to keep its inner furnaces hot, it eats up to 25 percent of its body weight daily—diving for bottom-dwelling mollusks such as clams, mussels, abalone, and creatures like sea urchins and octopus. It pries these off the rocks, stuffs them into an armpit pouch of skin along where it also carries a rock, swims to the surface, and lies floating on its back, where it can eat in repose, pounding open the hard shells with its rock, using its belly as a kind of table. Sea otters gather in large groups of one hundred or more called “rafts,” where they float together amid kelp beds and ocean swells and groom and fluff their fur meticulously to maintain its insulating properties. A mother sea otter nurses her baby pups while they rest on her belly, and when she dives for food, she wraps them in strands of kelp so they don’t drift away in her absence.
The native hunters of the Northwest Coast learned how to exploit the sea otter’s habits, and did so especially efficiently after fur traders arrived from Russia and then other nations coveting the furs. The Aleuts, in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, paddled baidarkas—seagoing kayaks—in the predawn darkness in large groups and stealthily surrounded the floating otters. Shooting in unison, they released arrows or spears at the animals. Each hunter’s arrow carried a distinctive marker so he would get credit for the kill with the Russian traders who accompanied them. Farther south, Coastal Indians used special canoes for sea otter hunting, paddling out in wide rows to scout a broad expanse of calm seas and kelp beds, and releasing on discovery special arrows tipped with bone points.
The first American and British ships traded for sea otter furs on the Northwest Coast in the late 1780s. The next wave discovered that the Indian bargainers—knowing demand when they saw it—had raised the price heftily. Angered at the price rise, some American and British trading ships took furs by force or threat of violence. This quickly escalated with retaliations and counter-retaliations. Thus, as mentioned earlier, John Boit’s complaint in his journal in 1792 that his commander ordered him to destroy the village called Opitsatah: “[I] am grieved to think Capt. Gray shou’d let his passions go so far. . . .”
As it happened, that very village, Opitsatah, and the nearby village of Clayoquot were Captain Thorn’s first trading stop in the Tonquin. Boit’s incident at Opitsatah had occurred almost two decades before, but only the previous year another unfortunate incident took place when an American fur-trading ship took aboard about a dozen Clayoquot Indians as hunters on a fur-trading voyage far down the West Coast, promising to return them home afterward. Their usefulness at an end, however, their Captain Ayres of Boston casually abandoned the Clayoquot hunters on some uninhabited islands off the California coast. Only a few had survived the long overland trek back home through hostile tribal territories.
That memory was still fresh for the Clayoquot, and so interpreter Joseachal had warned Captain Thorn against entering this particular inlet along Vancouver Island. Astor, likewise, had explicitly warned Captain Thorn in his instructions. Having spent his early business career trading directly with the Iroquois and related tribes of upstate New York, Astor had some grasp of Native American culture, the system of economics, the respect they demanded, and also, surely, the vengeance that could result when such respect was not given. Captain Thorn did not.
“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 pogamoggans 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 pogamoggans, 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 pogamoggans 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 pautumaugans, 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.