by Scott Ridley
While the Columbia plowed heavily, the Washington raced over the massive waves as the winds increased. Lamplight on the Lady Washington dropped in and out of sight, and by daylight, with the full force of the storm approaching, she was nowhere to be seen.
Aboard the Washington, Haswell used the same language as Anson to describe the devastation that had struck his ships near this spot: “a perfect hericain.” In the first few hours, huge breaking swells stove in the Washington’s port side quarterboards. With the deck surging underwater, and towering swells breaking nearly on top of her, Haswell huddled with Gray and his crew below deck, believing they faced certain destruction at any moment. Both officers cursed Kendrick for delaying so long at Praia, for keeping them at the Falklands, and for leading them into a storm they might never escape. In three days of raging seas and fierce blizzard, the ships became entirely lost to one another. Neither knew if the other survived, or if the dreams they had embarked with six months earlier were now doomed.
The men on board the Washington were exhausted, soaked to the bone, and cold, with no hope of getting dry. The sloop’s jib stay was carried away, and only the first mate, Davis Coolidge, and Haswell were in good enough health to go aloft to attempt repair in a wind that pummeled and stung them. For the next ten days they continued through a constant series of violent squalls, and on April 12 Haswell wrote that a gale arose “greatly sirpassing any thing before I had aney Idea of.” Immense swells lifted the entire length of the Washington. They lashed the wheel and kept the sloop facing west and hunkered down under bare poles, waiting, and expecting a final thundering wave to sink them at any moment.
On board the damaged Columbia, Kendrick kept a standing order to watch for the Washington. Day after day she failed to appear. When night closed down over the icy, windblown hell, the crew lay caught between hope and despair for their shipmates, and uncertainty about their own fortunes. As the fury continued, Kendrick doubtless wondered what he had brought his sons into. If they survived to return home, they would carry word of the loss of the Washington and her captain and crew, something he dreaded as much as the failure of the voyage.
In the few distracted moments he had, Kendrick might have marveled at how close their experience had been to Anson’s. The same first gale, the same frozen westing, the same brutal storm as they turned northward. At this point, with his ships scattered and his crew debilitated, Anson had feared Pizarro’s Spanish warships coming upon him, unaware that they had been devastated in the storm behind him a month earlier. At least he did not have to fear the Spanish out here, Kendrick might have thought; there was only the howling wind and sea to contend with. Little did he know that, not far ahead, Spanish ships would soon be searching for them.
CHAPTER THREE
Spain’s Frontier
Mexico City
MARCH–APRIL, 1788
AFTER PIZARRO’S SQUADRON WAS DESTROYED chasing Lord Anson, Spain had sent ships around the Horn during the southern summer, in December and January, and built up a meager fleet to protect and supply Pacific ports. Foreign vessels attempting passage to the coveted Spanish domain in the winter were left first to the ravages of the Horn, but messages about strange ships stopping at ports in Brazil or farther south were often passed to Spanish officials. Approaching from the Falklands, far offshore, Kendrick’s ships remained unreported. But despite any precautions Kendrick had taken, his voyage was an open secret.
DON DIEGO DE GARDOQUI, Spain’s minister in New York, was the first to find out about Kendrick’s expedition, and he promptly sent word to Madrid on the weekly packet that ran from New York to Cadiz. A brilliant and beguiling diplomat, Gardoqui had arrived in the United States in late 1784, after sailing to Havana with José de Galvez, the minister of the Indies who had won him this post. Dressed in a richly brocaded coat and a perfumed and powdered wig, Gardoqui was presented to Congress in its chamber on Wall Street on Saturday, July 2, 1785. To the members attending, he embodied Old World Europe and the complicated and tenuous relationship between the confederated states and Spain.
Although now in decline, Spain remained a global superpower and held a vast domain, drawing tribute and taxes from an empire that reached from islands in the Caribbean to Mexico, Central America, nearly all of South America, and across the Pacific to the Philippines. In North America, Spain’s territory dwarfed the thirteen states. Spanish Florida included the future states of Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and disputed lands in Georgia and along the Mississippi River north to Natchez. The Louisiana Territory encompassed the present states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. To the west, New Spain combined the areas of Texas, New Mexico, California, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. Additionally, Nuevo Galicia contained northern California, Oregon, and Washington and ran north through British Columbia into Alaska.
Administration and protection of the immense Iberian domain was organized in an elaborate structure in the hands of viceroys in Havana, Mexico City, Lima, Buenos Aires, and Manila. The tiered bureaucracy under them was made up of provincial governors, captaincies general, alcaldes (mayors), consejos (local councils), and local leaders of missions, parishes, and villages. Positions were inherited, purchased, or granted as honors or signs of favor. Maintaining fleets and militias was costly, and within this complex administration, communication was slow and cumbersome. Advance intelligence was vital, and foreign ministers and consuls were the critical eyes and ears of the empire. Their first task was to maintain control of the far-flung colonies and the vital stream of tribute and taxes. To do this, they kept all unlicensed foreigners out of Spanish waters and territories.
Congress was divided and cautious in its judgment of Spain. Its dealings with Gardoqui were complicated by the fact that his family bank had channeled funds to the Revolution and that King Carlos III had eventually committed troops and warships to help defeat the British. Spain had entered the war late in 1779, bound by the “Family Compact” treaty to protect France, not to support American independence. Spain’s chief interest was in regaining lands it had lost to Britain in the Seven Years’ War, more than a decade earlier. Shortly after entering the war, Spanish troops opened a second front along the Mississippi, securing Baton Rouge and Saint Louis and fighting as far north as Fort Saint Joseph in present-day Michigan. In the Gulf, they captured British settlements at Mobile and Pensacola, and Spanish ships took the Bahamas and other British islands in the Caribbean. At the war’s end, with the common British enemy defeated, Spain had regained some of her former lands, but feared an independent American republic acting as a hostile neighbor and a model for increasingly rebellious South American colonies. Spain’s goal was for the United States to become a dependent client nation, and to prevent its expansion.
A steady stream of American settlers was already coming over the Appalachians into the “middle lands” east of the Mississippi River. They viewed the river as their great highway, and a route to ship trade goods from settlements southward through New Orleans. This made the river a particular source of contention. In 1784, Spain shut down the lower Mississippi, preventing Americans from proceeding overland or down to the Gulf without a passport from Spanish officials. When Gardoqui came before Congress, discussions had been deadlocked for two years over America’s right to navigate the river and settle the “middle lands.” In the Peace Treaty of 1783, Britain had granted this frontier territory to the United States with the tantalizing prospect that Congress would then sell millions of acres to settlers and speculators to finance America’s war debt. Britain expected the lion’s share of the income to be paid to its subjects who had suffered losses in the war, one of the treaty’s terms. Britain also knew that the grant of this territory would create deep conflicts with Spanish land claims in the region and would disrupt any alliance between Spain and the rebellious Americans.
Gardoqui was presented to Congress as the minister King Carlos III had empowered to resolve these
disputes. However, his private instructions were to keep any progress in negotiations at bay and to disrupt union between the states. Word of Garodqui’s intent had been secretly noted in Europe. The French minister at Madrid, Armand Marc, Count de Montmorin, wrote to foreign minister Charles Gravier, Count de Vergennes, in Paris: “The cabinet of Madrid thinks it has the greatest interest not to open the Mississippi to the Americans, and to discourage them from making establishments on that river, as they would not delay to possess themselves of commerce with New Orleans and Mexico, whatever impediments should be opposed to their progress, and that they would become neighbors the more dangerous to Spain, as even in their present weakness they conceive vast projects for the conquest of the western shore of the Mississippi.”
Gardoqui took a house in New York City’s Vauxhall Gardens, at the lower end of Broadway near Federal Hall. To advance his mission he built up a network of agents and friendly informants. Generations of experience in European diplomacy had refined spying and coercion to a subtle art. The viceroy in Mexico City sent a small fortune of fifty thousand pesos to him annually for his work. From that fund, desperate American merchants, frontiersmen, and elected officials received an array of payments and favors.
In 1786, Gardoqui was nearly successful in having Congress relinquish a claim of rights to navigate the Mississippi. Secretary of State John Jay had recommended acceptance of a treaty that would relinquish rights to the river for twenty-five years in return for rights of commerce with Spain, which would largely benefit the New England states. This angered pioneers in the “middle lands.” The Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark gathered militia, and scattered incursions and attacks began mounting on Spanish settlements in contested areas. Gardoqui believed that state officials and members of Congress had encouraged some of the attacks.
BY THE SUMMER OF 1787, Gardoqui was plotting with James Wilkinson, a former general in the Continental Army who was referred to as the “Washington of the West,” to set up a Spanish colony in the middle lands. Wilkinson would lead settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee, which were not yet states, to form an independent government loyal to Spain. The citizens of the new colony would have rights on the Mississippi River and act as a buffer to halt American expansion. Wilkinson warned Spanish officials that the move could result in war, and as talk of the plan spread, the prospects of war indeed heated up. While Congress tried to restrain states and independent pioneers, Britain offered one hundred thousand pounds and support of a ten-thousand-man militia in the Appalachian region to invade Louisiana and take control of the region from Spain. The pioneer militia would proceed south, and British ships would capture New Orleans from the Gulf. Britain wanted George Rogers Clark to lead the invasion. Clark was no friend of the British, but he was determined to rid the area of Spaniards and push down the Mississippi, with or without the support of Congress.
THIS AGITATION FOR WAR was part of the political atmosphere in September 1787 when Congress granted the sea letter for the Columbia and Lady Washington. For Gardoqui, Joseph Barrell’s venture to the Pacific Northwest Coast intensified the difficulty of stopping expansion of the United States. The voyage posed a new affront to Spain’s efforts to maintain dominion in the Pacific, which had been held under a papal grant for more than two centuries.
The largest potential crack in Spain’s ancient claim was the legendary Northwest Passage, said to cross North America and connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Ancient texts called it the “Strait of Anian.” Discovery of the passageway had long been sought by many nations. Giovanni Caboto, sailing under the name John Cabot for the English, had looked for it in the North Atlantic as early as 1497. After raiding the Spanish coast in 1579, Francis Drake searched for the strait from the Pacific, as a shortcut home to England. He ended up on the Oregon coast and named the area “New Albion.” When the Spanish found out, they sent their own expeditions northward from Mexico.
Created by Guillaume de l’isle, this 1752 map, and copies later made from it, set off a wave of interest to discover the Northwest Passage connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The map shows the coast of California north to the Bering Strait with the legendary Strait of Juan de Fuca opening to a “West Sea” or “Inland Sea” close to the headwaters of the Mississippi. To the north, the Straits of Admiral de Fonte connect through long waterways to Hudson’s Bay. Benjamin Franklin as well as other leading scientists and hydrographers of the time believed in the existence of the fabled passage.
In one of the prevalent Spanish stories, Juan de Fuca (Ioannis Fokas), a Greek captain sailing for Spain in 1592, discovered what he believed to be the Strait of Anian leading to an inland sea, which he sailed for twenty days. He said a tall stone column rising from the sea marked the entrance. Fuca told his tale to the British consul in Venice, Michael Lok, who sent it to the English court. From there it was incorporated in the popular book Purchas His Pilgrimes, published in London in 1625.
According to another story, in 1640 Spanish admiral Bartholome de Fonte discovered a strait leading from the Pacific into the northwest American coast. There he encountered a ship captained by a man named Nicholas Shapley, who said he had sailed westward from Boston and through Hudson’s Bay.
Following these stories, maps of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries showed the Straits of Admiral de Fonte arcing northward to Hudson’s Bay. Farther south, the Strait of Juan de Fuca was believed to lead from the Pacific to a great “river of the west” spoken of by Native Americans. It was suspected to reach eastward to the headwaters of the Missouri River. In 1745, the British Parliament offered a prize of twenty thousand pounds to the explorer who could locate it.
The Loyal Company of Virginia, a group of land speculators that included Thomas Jefferson’s father and the grandfather of Meriwether Lewis, began planning an expedition to the Missouri River in 1756 to see if rumors that it “communicated with the Pacific Ocean” were true. Nearly a decade later, at the close of the Seven Years’ War, the American frontier hero Robert Rogers, who had engaged in campaigns on the western frontier around the Great Lakes, said that after studying the subject and talking with Indians, he was convinced of the existence of the Northwest Passage. In 1765, Rogers proposed taking two hundred men on an expedition to find it. One of his captains, Jonathan Carver, eventually made the journey west and allegedly reached the headwaters of the Missouri River. Carver applied in vain for Parliament’s twenty-thousand-pound reward in 1773 and delivered a report and map to the King’s Board of Trade, which published it in 1778. Carver’s account names the “river Ouragon” for the first time and describes it as flowing into the mythical Strait of Anian. Thomas Jefferson read Carver’s account, and while awaiting a gathering of Congress at Annapolis in 1783, he wrote to George Rogers Clark suggesting that he lead an American expedition to find the legendary passage, one of many efforts Jefferson would make over the next twenty years.
ANY NATION VENTURING to the Pacific Northwest Coast was assumed by Spain to be searching for the entrance to the legendary passage and attempting to claim the territory surrounding it. This posed a dire threat to Spain’s dominion over the region. The Americans were already pushing the frontier westward in the Mississippi Valley, and now were about to appear in the Pacific. After receiving information on Kendrick’s expedition, Mexican viceroy Manuel Antonio Flores Maldonado wrote a warning to Antonio Valdes, minister of the Marine and the Indies, at Madrid: “We should not be surprised if the English colonies of America, republican and independent, put into practice the design of discovering a safe port on the South Sea [Pacific Ocean], and try to sustain it by crossing the immense land of this continent above our possessions of Texas, New Mexico, and the Californias. Much more might be expected of an active nation that bases all its hopes and resources on navigation and commerce; and, in truth, it would obtain the richest trade of Great China and India if it were to succeed in establishing a colony on the west coast of America.”
Flores believed that although it woul
d take several years to establish an American port on the Pacific, Kendrick’s expedition, along with probes from the English and Russians, had to be stopped.
The Count of Floridablanca by Francisco Goya. Don José Monino y Redondo, first Count of Floridablanca, was Spain’s foreign minister and chief statesman from 1777 to 1792. Much of his effort served to forestall decline of the once-dominant Spanish empire.
Diego de Gardoqui’s report to Madrid on Kendrick’s expedition from Boston would have been forwarded to Antonio Valdes as well as chief minister José Monino Floridablanca. The lean, sunken-faced Count Floridablanca had spent his career protecting the empire from internal and external threats. For more than a decade, reports had been filtering in concerning the plans of Russian merchant companies to extend their fur-trading operations down the Pacific coast from out posts that were established in 1761 off the coast of Alaska and expanded in 1784 to the mainland. He knew that at the urging of those Russian merchant companies, Russian empress Catherine II was now looking at the expanse of Canada to Hudson’s Bay and south to California.
Spain had settled its string of California missions along the Pacific coast at San Diego, Santa Barbara, Monterey, and San Francisco between 1769 and 1782 to secure its northern territory. Spanish warships were also sent north from Mexico in 1774 and 1775 to keep an eye on the Russian stations in Alaska and make explorations of the Northwest Coast. And in 1779 an expedition was sent to stop British captain James Cook from exploring for the Northwest Passage and making land claims. Cook concluded that a northern passage between the Pacific and Atlantic did not exist. But belief in the old stories was strong and when his journal was published in 1784, many, including Spanish officers in the Pacific, regarded Cook’s conclusion as mistaken.