by Scott Ridley
Barrell presented Kendrick with instructions granting him broad authority:
The ship Columbia and sloop Washington being completely equipped for a voyage to the Pacific Ocean and China, we place such confidence in you as to give you the entire command of this enterprise. It would be impossible upon a voyage of this nature to give you with propriety very binding instructions, and such is our reliance on your honor, integrity and good conduct, that it
would be needless at any time. You will be on the spot, and as circumstances turn up you must improve them …
Barrell also handed out medallions engraved in pewter, copper, and silver to commemorate the voyage. One side of the medallions depicted the two ships under sail and read: “Columbia and Washington Commanded By J. Kendrick.” The reverse held the names of the ships’ owners and around the rim read: “Fitted At Boston, N. American For The Pacific Ocean.”
One of those who received a medallion was the commander’s wife, Huldah Pease Kendrick. She would have come up the day before from the village of Wareham. Still at home were three boys: Benjamin, Alfred, and Joseph, all under age twelve, and little six-year-old Huldah.
Although she was accustomed to frequent separations during twenty years of marriage, Huldah Kendrick faced a much deeper emotional strain now that two of her sons were shipping off. Torn between pride in their mission and apprehension at such a long journey, it was likely she lingered with her boys and husband and was among the last passengers rowed ashore.
Below deck, the men and boys arranged themselves, taking a measure of one another in the dim, lamplit space under the foredeck. Haswell made notes in his journal as the other officers settled into their narrow cabins. Amid the high hopes and emotion of the evening, no one could imagine what would unfold in an odyssey driven by Kendrick’s perseverance and vision. In the years to come, word would drift back in scant letters and news from other ships of this man who became part legend, buying up a huge tract of land that would benefit the new nation, allegedly going renegade, and helping to push the world toward a global war. The obscure wilderness harbor they were headed for at Nootka would become a flashpoint around which the destinies of European empires would turn. For America, more than a decade and a half before Lewis and Clark, Kendrick would inspire voyagers and open a gateway to the
Pacific. But that was far ahead, unforeseen in the night’s mix of anticipation and high emotion.
If they slept at all, it was not long. At the edge of this great harbor, in the early dark before dawn with a purple-gray light rising, the two ships made their way out of the channel for open sea.
CHAPTER TWO
Passage to the Underworld
Cape Horn
MARCH–APRIL, 1788
TUESDAY, MARCH 5, east of Cape Horn—Five months into the voyage, memories of the last festive night in Boston had long faded. Kendrick had taken the ships on a shakedown cruise across the Atlantic to Cape Verde, off the western coast of Africa, where he reorganized the Columbia’s hold and rested and fattened his men for the arduous months ahead. At the turn of the year, they ran down the coast of South America, staying well offshore to avoid Spanish patrols. At the desolate Falkland Islands they stopped for water and final preparations.
With more than a little trepidation, on February 28, 1788, they set out on a flood tide at dusk from the West Falklands and made their way into blustery winds and mountainous seas to round Cape Horn. Five days later, the bold, barren outline of Staten Land loomed north of them and a gale rapidly approached from the west.
The irregular seas began to lengthen into large, thick swells. From the pitching quarterdeck of the Columbia, John Kendrick watched the Lady Washington heeling and plunging in the waves behind them. Ahead, the gray mass of clouds was blackening into twisted peaks along the horizon. Kendrick ordered his crew to tack and the Washington followed.
Climbing over these steep southern swells, the Columbia’s hold was filled with the bulk of their provisions for two years and an assortment of trade goods: tin mirrors, beads, calico, mouth harps, hunting knives, hatchets, files, and bar metal that could be worked into chisels. Despite breaking up the hold and repacking the ship at Cape Verde, she still handled like a box on ice. Kendrick could only hope they would not encounter the mammoth storms that could gather as the southern winter approached. It would be cold. It would be bitterly cold, the only certainty of the days ahead.
THE SHIPS RAN SOUTHWARD, trying to skirt the edge of the storm, making good headway through cold rain and spray. They had prepared for this for months, but there was no imagining the extreme conditions they would face. Everyone had heard tales in port about rounding the Horn. It was like a passage into the underworld. Ceaseless wind. Blinding ice storms. Utterly black nights. Immense waves. Exhausted men washed overboard. Some could name the ships lost. Nineteen-year-old mate Robert Haswell recalled in his journal that Britain’s Lord Anson, seeking to raid Spanish ships and settlements along the Pacific, had led a squadron here in March 1741 and met disaster. Only four of seven ships made it through and hundreds of men perished. Haswell thought it improbable that the Lady Washington and Columbia attempting passage at the same time of year could succeed where Anson in the finest ships had nearly failed.
Kendrick stayed on deck watching the approach of the storm and then went below, where the air was filled with the scent of pipe smoke and bilgewater and the incessant sound of the waves pounding on the hull. Goats brought on board at Cape Verde bleated in a makeshift pen. Around them planks groaned and creaked, and seawater began to drip overhead from the seams of the deck.
Kendrick knew another part of Lord Anson’s story that painted an even more dismal picture than Haswell had noted in his journal: Five large Spanish warships, each more than twice the size of the Columbia, under the command of Don José Pizzaro, had pursued Anson’s squadron. In the region they were crossing through now, the ships had been stuck by a brutal storm that raged for three days. The Spanish ships became scattered, and then the Hermosa with five hundred men went down. Pizzaro’s surviving ships were driven west. The Guipscoa split her mainsail, and in the rolling seas the mainmast was sprung. Battering from huge waves opened her upper works, and seams and bolts were drawn from the upper timbers. With a foot of snow on deck and unable to keep up with the leakage, the upper deck was cut away and the cannons and an anchor jettisoned. Fearing the ship was coming apart, the captain wrapped six turns of an anchor cable around the hull to keep it together. More gales followed. After three weeks of continual horror, the crew drove the ship onto the shore of Brazil. Two hundred fifty of her seven hundred men were dead. Pizzaro’s command ship, the Asia, ultimately made it back to Brazil in May after sixty days and losing half the seven hundred men aboard. The Esperanza followed with only fifty-eight alive of four hundred fifty men, and the Estevan suffered similarly.
Anson had weathered that storm just ahead of Pizzaro’s ships, escaping the full force of the seas by running south. He believed that the Andes Mountains funneled the strongest storms and highest seas closest to shore. Four hundred miles below the Horn at 62° south latitude, halfway to the edge of the Antarctic Circle, he found that the storms were severe but moderated, with intervals of sun in the bright, hard cold.
Kendrick was racing toward that line now, outrunning the gale coming on, and trading the brutal winds and high seas for the bitter cold, hopeful that it would give him and his men a few days of intermittent respite and headway to the west.
TWO NIGHTS LATER, ON MARCH 7, they encountered the first frost forming on the sails and deck. Still laboring in heavy weather, they came across swimming penguins and a small whale. The wind intensified, forcing them down to reefed topsails and storm jibs. As the seas built, the decks became awash.
As much as contending with the seas and storms buffeting the ships, they were in a race against time. Prolonged fatigue, injuries, and scurvy were what had broken the men of Anson’s and Pizarro’s ships. And they were still far from the point where Anson h
ad met the worst storms.
Kendrick had far fewer men than Anson, almost a skeleton crew by comparison, who bore the work in two alternating watches. On the Lady Washington, with Captain Robert Gray and ten men, one watch was led by Davis Coolidge and one by Robert Haswell. On the Columbia, with Kendrick and forty men and officers, one was led by first mate Joseph Ingraham and the others by Robert Green and John Cordis. Usually the watches would come on deck every four hours, with all hands on from 4 to 8 p.m., but shorter watches would be set in the fierce cold and storm conditions, and the free watch could be called out of an exhausted sleep at any time, swallowing a jigger of rum before going topside to shake out reefs or furl sail.
By Sunday, March 9, the ships had made three hundred miles south-southwest from where they first encountered the gale, and were now midway to the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Twenty-foot swells and sleet made the deck slick with ice and it became hard to stand watch.
Kendrick worried about the punishment the ships were taking, especially the Washington. As she struggled to follow into the wind, he watched the sloop’s hull disappear underwater. Swells surged over her until only the mast and reefed sail were visible, and then whitewater rushed off as she resurfaced to meet the next wave. Although the Columbia’s freeboard was higher, intermittent waves washed waist deep down her deck. Bedding and everything below on both vessels was soaked. Men were constantly working the bilge pumps.
Watch was kept in the cold by men clinging to lines strung on deck, but proved futile when the wind finally moderated and a heavy fog blew in. The mist closed around them and turned the night blind. They tried to hold their course by compass but had no opportunity for a sextant reading on the sun or moon. With the Washington intermittently passing out of sight at night, Kendrick was greatly concerned that the two ships would become separated. But by some miracle, mornings found the sloop still on the southern horizon.
During the week of March 17 the weather turned excessively cold. Large “islands of ice” appeared, and blowing sleet and snow caked everything. On deck, men struggled to clear the rigging and halyards that controlled the sails. For the topmen, who tended the upper courses of sail, conditions aloft grew incredibly treacherous. Climbing fifty or seventy feet in the air, they clung to an icy yard and looped footropes as they took in sail, the ship rocking them far out over the lurching swells, and the wind shrieking and cracking around them.
Anson had lamented the loss of one of his best seamen overboard, something that haunted all captains and sailors. Fighting through a storm and unable to turn back for him, they watched as he swam vigorously. Anson later anguished that the men grew more grieved “as we lost sight of him struggling with the waves, and concerned that he might continue long sensible of the horror of his irretrievable situation.”
Kendrick undoubtedly watched his sons on deck amid the increasing hazards. As frost and snow hardened in the intense cold, they worked with the crew to clear the blocks and lines and hack ice off the yards, mast, and rails with belaying pins. If ice built up a thick rime, the ship could become impossible to handle. Mountainous seas could easily broadside them and send the hull over on her beam ends. Or if the lines clogged in the frozen blocks, the voyagers could find themselves facing an iceberg they would be helpless to avoid. After the first two weeks, squalls and constant headwinds began to wear them down. Haswell wrote on March 17: “Winds have allowed us to gain but little Westing and at this time our prospect of weathering the Cape is very unfavorable.”
A MONTH BEHIND THEM, a British ship known as the Bounty, captained by William Bligh, would sail through five weeks of howling weather and nearly round the Horn before a massive storm drove her hundreds of miles backward to start over. With a number of his crew suffering from exhaustion, cracked ribs, and dislocated shoulders, Bligh turned toward South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope to take the long way through the Indian Ocean into the Pacific. This decision, which added months to the Bounty’s frustrating voyage, helped bring about the infamous mutiny that was to come.
On Kendrick’s ships, numbing cold increased the grumbling among the men. As on most vessels, there were divisions among them. Perhaps because of their Loyalist leanings, Robert Haswell, first mate Simeon Woodruff, and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Roberts, formed a clique among the officers. Haswell identified another group as “the captain’s people,” which included second mate Joseph Ingraham and many of the seamen.
Problems were evident at the outset of the voyage, according to Haswell, and after the forty-two-day passage to Cape Verde, Kendrick had gotten into a heated disagreement with first mate Simeon Woodruff, who seemed to be at the forefront of dissent. Kendrick disliked the way the Columbia handled in Atlantic squalls and likely faulted Woodruff, who was responsible for the packing of the hold. In the harbor at Praia, Cape Verde, Kendrick ordered the hold broken up and repacked. The order received little cooperation from Woodruff, so Kendrick took on the work with the men himself. Woodruff’s British navy background and the haughty attitude of royal officers differed greatly from Kendrick’s style, and Woodruff’s celebrity status may have prompted him to act like something of a peacock. At the end of the first week of December, Kendrick removed him from his position as first officer of the Columbia. He offered Woodruff the choice of staying aboard as a passenger and undertaking tasks he was set to, or leaving the expedition. Woodruff requested that he be allowed to go on board Gray’s ship, the Lady Washington. After more bickering, Woodruff refused to sign departure papers. Kendrick ordered him before the mast, where Woodruff spent the night in the open air without bedding. In the morning he signed the papers and was set ashore at Praia.
Haswell felt Woodruff’s departure as a personal blow, and he protested bitterly in his journal: “This Gentleman was of known abilities as a navigator and greatly experienced as a Seaman he had Commanded several ships out of London, he was an officer under the Great Captain James Cook on his last Voyage to the Pacifick Ocean.” Woodruff had clearly puffed himself up. Whatever he had told Haswell or the crew, he was not listed as an officer on Cook’s ship, but a gunner’s mate.
The day after Woodruff was set ashore, the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Roberts, claimed that his health was declining and asked Kendrick for a discharge. Kendrick responded that he’d grant the request if Roberts would pay for his passage from Boston to Cape Verde. Roberts refused. Nevertheless, the next day Kendrick gave him permission to go ashore. Roberts did not return, and Kendrick received a note from the governor of the island saying that Roberts had sought his protection, complaining of “inhuman treatment.” Kendrick attempted to have Roberts returned, at one point finding him in the street and encouraging him at sword point toward the beach, but Roberts cried out for the militia and refused to go back to the ship.
As they were preparing to leave Cape Verde on December 21, an officer of a Danish East India vessel came on board the Columbia and said that Dr. Roberts had changed his mind and was willing to return to the ship if he would not be flogged. Kendrick knew better than to take malcontents or those unable to handle adversity on an extended voyage. Kendrick was also confident that they had the skills on board to minister to the crew’s health as well as the unpredictable doctor could. He refused to let Roberts reboard and left him at Praia.
Tensions continued to mount as the ships bounded southward toward Cape Horn. One day Haswell struck and bloodied one of the men, Otis Liscomb, for not responding to his orders to come up on deck. When Kendrick saw Liscomb’s bloody face, he exploded and grabbed Haswell and slapped him. He told him that he would take his pistol and blow his brains out if he found him on his quarterdeck again. Haswell was removed from his cabin to common quarters with the men. He requested that Kendrick allow him to leave the ship for another vessel, and Kendrick agreed he could take the first vessel they encountered. Unfortunately, no other ship appeared. At the Falklands, Haswell was transferred to the Lady Washington to serve under Gray.
Haswell’s bitterness and Gray’s brash ambition w
ould reinforce one another in the close quarters of the Lady Washington. Both Haswell and Gray thought that the time spent at Cape Verde was an unnecessary delay, bringing them late into their passage around the Horn. They would go on to pose a lasting problem for Kendrick. Like the discontent on the Bounty, their animosity would take time to deepen. Kendrick paid them little attention. On these pitch-black nights in wild seas, what Haswell and Gray might think was the least of his concerns.
On March 19, the ships were nearly five hundred miles south of Cape Horn at Anson’s line of 62° south latitude. Quick, freakish storms clouding blue skies with blinding sleet and snow flashed past them and then broke into sunshine again in less than an hour. In those intervals they managed to press forward. Three days later, on March 22 they were about 670 miles south-southwest of Cape Horn. Having passed the halfway point in rounding the Horn, they shifted their course northwest. They were just approaching the region where Anson had met the most dire storms and seas.
Between four and five in the morning on April 1, nearly four weeks after they had encountered the first gale, the night watch on the Columbia found the wind reversing from the northwest to the south and stiffening. Kendrick knew this was a sign of dangerous weather. The Columbia took the shifting winds full on the stern and changed course, attempting to race ahead of it, running with huge seas where the wind disappeared in the troughs and gusted again as the ship climbed to the top of the next swell and sledded down its face. In a maneuver known as “wearing ship,” the sails swung with sudden violence across the mast exerting a force that could strain stays, snap lines, shred canvas, and dismast a ship. In the turbulent darkness, the Columbia fired a signal gun for the Washington and she followed. Swells were rising out of the blackness, bigger than any they had seen thus far, probably topping forty feet.