by Scott Ridley
Russian empress Catherine II ordered an immediate translation of Cook’s journal, and gathered an expedition under one of Cook’s former officers, Joseph Billings. A number of Cook’s other officers enlisted in British merchant ventures to launch from London and Macao for the Northwest Coast. They were interested in the fabled passage, but primarily sought the treasure in furs that Cook had discovered. Floridablanca recognized that the immense wealth that might be gained from trading sea otter furs to China created what seemed to be a real-life quest for the fabled golden fleece. Viceroy Flores had noted this would be “the richest trade of Great China and India.” Whoever captured the sea otter trade would control riches, territory, and possibly the legendary passage through North America.
For Britain, the quest for this treasure became part of a larger Pacific campaign to “swing to the East” after the American Revolution. Through the exploration and claims of James Cook and Francis Drake, the British believed they had a valid claim to the Pacific coast of America. Consistent with what Spanish officials feared, the sea otter trade would soon become an important part of London’s strategy to assert that claim and break Spain’s ancient dominion over the Pacific.
To counter the surging interest in the Northwest Coast of America, Floridablanca reaffirmed a standing policy to exclude foreign ships from Spanish waters and set out a plan to send war frigates into the region. At the City Palais in the dusty valley of Mexico City, Viceroy Flores received a royal order issued from Madrid on November 9, 1787, six weeks after Kendrick had sailed from Boston. Flores, a stout naval commander who had spent his career hunting pirates in the Mediterranean and the West Indies, knew how to deal with illegal ships. The first step was to stop the Russians who were already established to the north. He reviewed Floridablanca’s order, which coincided with instructions already sent to the port of San Blas, a naval station three hundred miles from Mexico City on the Pacific coast south of the Baja Peninsula. Ships were to be prepared for a mission to search as far as 61° north latitude, the vicinity of the Kenai Peninsula at the northern end of the Gulf of Alaska.
Conditions at the royal port at San Blas reflected how thinly Spanish men and material were spread. The harbor was a shallow channel carved out of a tidal river surrounded by mangrove swamps and rain forest. The main town was on a hill a mile up the river and contained a ramshackle village, military warehouses, a customs house, and a church. Those stationed there considered it an unhealthy place. Most of the year the woods were thick with mosquitoes and black-throated magpies. Crocodiles lurked in the inlets and muddy lagoons. Grass huts on stilts clustered along the shore. The inner harbor in the river was barely accessible and could only moor four ships. Other vessels had to anchor in the bay, outside the swells that broke onshore.
Despite its threadbare appearance, for nearly twenty years San Blas had been a critical base for shipbuilding and support of the missions in California. José Camacho, an aging navigator, was in charge of the port. Like other officers, he kept a ranch in the healthier upland climate at Tepic, thirty miles inland. With his lieutenants, he commanded the local militia and three armed frigates: the Santiago (225 tons), the Favorita (193 tons), and the Princesa (189 tons). In addition there were two armed packets, or supply ships, the Aranzazu and San Carlos El Filipino. These ships patrolled the coast, supplied the missions in California, and carried out periodic trans-Pacific voyages to Manila.
When Flores’s order to send ships to Alaska arrived in early 1788, Estevan José Martinez, captain of the Princesa, was the only officer available to lead an expedition. A portly, balding man with a neatly trimmed beard, Martinez was raised to command. He had been trained at the naval center of San Telmo in Seville, a city with ancient seafaring traditions. Somehow he had ended up here, patiently serving his king during the past fifteen years in San Blas, and awaiting an opportunity to make his mark. He was said to be a nephew of Viceroy Flores and was known as a garrulous man, clever, and accustomed to handling rough crews. As a pilot under Juan Perez he had gone north in 1774 but had not been included in the 1775 expedition or the mission to stop James Cook’s exploration. He was familiar enough with the thousands of cold foggy bays and coves along the northern coast to recognize how difficult it would be to locate the Russians. His orders were to discover their outposts, gather intelligence on their operations and plans, check the accuracy of maps of the coast included in Cook’s journal, and to take possession of harbors and other sites that offered advantages for Spain along the coast.
In view of the pressure building in this region, he knew that the viceroy and court ministers would be watching the outcome of his mission. The difficulty of the task presented a challenge that both vexed and excited him. After studying Cook’s journal and the charts provided by Flores, on March 8, 1788, Martinez departed for the north. On board the Princesa were ninety-two men and officers and two chaplains. The San Carlos, commanded by pilot Gonzalez Lopez de Haro, carried another chaplain and eighty-six crew and officers. Slipping offshore, they passed Cabo San Lucas at the tip of the Baja Peninsula and by mid-April were halfway to the Gulf of Alaska.
CHAPTER FOUR
Refuge
APRIL–JUNE, 1788
IN THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC, forty-five hundred miles south of San Blas, the Columbia was struggling in the aftermath of the harrowing storm. As hurricane winds bore down and parted the two ships, the Columbia had been driven back toward the east. Her mainmast had cracked, the hull was leaking, and the sternpost holding the rudder was damaged. As they lay stalled below Cape Horn, the crew worked to make repairs in continuing squalls. Kendrick kept a signal lantern lit for the Washington and fired periodic shots from a cannon, but received no response. The nights were gloomy and frozen, and fear settled among the crew as they headed back into the winds
Far to the southwest, Robert Gray welcomed the empty horizon as the storm cleared. He was enraged that Kendrick’s delay at Cape Verde had led him into this winter passage and so close to death, but he now saw an opportunity to escape Kendrick’s command. Just before leaving the Falklands, Kendrick had written orders for what Gray should do if they were separated, or if the Columbia perished. The first step was a rendezvous at the remote island of Mas Afuera, 540 miles off the coast of Chile. After repairing a split mainsail, Gray aimed the sloop for the island. During the next week, as they made their way northward, the air warmed. Ice crusted on the hull slowly melted. Intermittent gales continued, but nothing like the thundering deluge the sturdy little ship had survived. Once beyond the west entrance to the Straits of Magellan, the strong Humboldt Current and prevailing southwesterlies carried them into more temperate seas and the vast serenity of the rolling Pacific.
They fell into a steady routine, accompanied by thick schools of porpoises running beside the ship, and the first flying fish they had seen in this ocean. Three weeks after parting with the Columbia, clouds on the horizon indicated land. Then, at 1 P.M. on April 22, the peak of Mas Afuera poked up into the sky thirty miles off. They brought the ship within four or five miles of shore and scanned the steep, forbidding cliffs that stood partially shrouded in clouds. The great hunk of volcanic rock towered up hundreds of feet along the shore. Far above them the profile of the bare, humped mountain ridge broke above the cloud mass at more than four thousand feet. Before sunset they hove to, waiting through the night to search out a landing spot and take on water and wood.
The next morning Gray scanned the horizon. As he expected, the slow-sailing command ship, if she still existed, was nowhere in sight. He determined that he had fulfilled his orders from Kendrick, and was now on his own.
THROUGH THE GLASS in the early daylight they could see flocks of wild goats grazing on upland precipices and thousands of seals swarming over the rocks along the steep shore. Many streams of fresh water were pouring down the cliff face where brush and trees grew along the edge. In the ship’s boat, first mate Davis Coolidge circled the island, which was only six or seven miles long, and found it uninhabited,
with steep cliffs, heavy surf, and no place to land without great danger. Twenty years before, British captain Philip Carteret had noted that the only way to get water from the island was to anchor a boat outside the surf and swim ashore with empty casks and a line to haul filled casks back out. Haswell mentioned Carteret’s daring maneuver, and most likely had an account of his Pacific voyage on board. Nevertheless, the Washington lacked equipment to haul the casks. Having crewmen plunge into the icy shorebreak wasn’t an option. Frustrated, Gray briefly considered stopping at Mas a Tierra, the main island of the Juan Fernándes archipelago, about 120 miles east, but there was a greater risk in taking on water there. They were lightly armed and alone, and could easily lose their ship to the Spanish.
Several hundred miles north lay a pair of uninhabited islands. The latitude was fairly certain, but the longitude was vague. Gray thought they could find them. Measuring longitude was still a trial-and-error process for all ships. A sextant, the triangular handheld sighting instrument that gave optical fixes on the sun, moon, and stars, functioned well for calculating latitude. Longitude, however, required accurate chronometers, which were still being experimented with. The common method of calculating longitude was to plot a course from the last known point, using compass direction and estimated speed, with an allowance for drift and variance of currents, to locate the new position. Measuring speed was a matter of tossing a log with a knotted line overboard and timing the “knots” drawn out behind the ship. Miscalculation of longitude on long voyages frequently resulted in wrecks or a course that missed an island or harbor altogether. Ships could end up hundreds of miles from their destination and wander at sea far past the time that provisions and water gave out.
Without waiting a day longer at the planned rendezvous, Gray took the Lady Washington northward. He assumed the uninhabited islands would be nearly due north of Mas Afuera, which meant they could run by compass alone. As a precaution, during the next week he reduced water rations to two quarts per man per day. After a few days of anxious sailing, on the morning of May 3 they sighted Ambrose Island sixty miles to the northwest. It took more than a day to approach in light winds. The shore was swarming with seals. And the banks above the shore were eroded, showing brilliantly colored layers of sediment that delighted the men, who, aside from Mas Afuera, had seen little but the sea and sky for two months. High up on top of the banks was a plain with sparse vegetation where they hoped to find water. They took the longboat ashore on the lee side of the island. As they attempted to climb the crusty volcanic slope while carrying empty water casks, rocks crumbled and shifted beneath them, setting off landslides and cave-ins that frightened them. They retreated to the narrow shore and then spent fruitless hours trying to find another way up. Finally they resigned themselves to staying along the shore, where they killed a number of seals and sea lions for their oil and skins. Fish also abounded in the shallows, and at the end of the day they returned to the ship with a welcome supply of fresh meat, but no water.
Gray pressed on. During the next three weeks they made almost sixteen hundred miles and by May 24, under variable winds, passed far west of the Galapagos Islands without seeing them. They had run out of islands that might have offered some chance to replenish wood and water, and eagerly watched for the approach of rain clouds.
A MONTH BEHIND THEM, the Columbia paused offshore at Mas Afuera. Not finding the Washington at the rendezvous gave Kendrick deepened concern for her crew’s fate. He had been ordered by Joseph Barrell “not to touch at any part of the Spanish dominions on the western continent of America, unless driven there by some unavoidable accident.” With the Columbia still needing repairs, his water and wood running low, and hoping for some word of the sloop, Kendrick decided to risk putting in at Mas a Tierra. Hauling off to the east, they soon saw its folded ridges and craggy line of peaks rising out of the ocean, desolate and barren. This was the island where Alexander Selkirk had been marooned for four years beginning in 1704, which was the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. To the Spanish it was known as Juan Fernándes Island, after the sailor who discovered it in 1574. The isolated location had made it a frequent haunt for pirates, and Lord Anson had taken refuge there after his battered passage around the Horn in 1741. Anson’s lost sloop, Tryal, caught up with him at anchor in the harbor. On the verdant north shore, he had nursed his men and ships back into a raiding force, and later succeeded in taking Spain’s Acapulco treasure galleon, which was laden with taxes and tribute. Following this, the viceroy in Lima occupied the island and established a settlement in 1750 with the dual purpose of serving as a penal colony and discouraging foreign use as a haven for privateers raiding the South American coast.
Kendrick was headed toward the island’s Spanish colony in Cumberland Bay. He thought the treatment the Columbia would receive depended on the temper of periodic uprisings and unrest along the coast, and even more on the personality of the local governor. He was unaware of the danger they were in, and did not call the crew to prepare the guns. They were in no shape to fight, and it made more sense to be prepared to run, if events fell to that.
Coming around the high, barren mountain on the north side in a bright morning light, Kendrick stopped a mile offshore, scanning the harbor, which opened to a bay and a broad green valley spilling onto a beach. Sparse trees climbed up to the base of the eroded ridges. A small fort with yellow-brown stone walls occupied a high bank on the west side. Across a creek, a scattering of tiny houses and fenced gardens of convicts and outcasts dotted a grassy field. A few small fishing boats sat at anchor, but there were no ships. The Washington was not there.
From the fort, the governor of the island, Don Blas Gonzales, recognized a ship in distress. Gonzales was sergeant major at the Isla Juan Fernándes military post and leader of its civil government. He was a plain man and tried to be a just and pious administrator. Foreign ships were sometimes seen passing offshore, but rarely entered the bay. This was the first ship he had seen flying the red-and-white striped colors of the United States. He quickly summoned an officer, Nicholas Juanes, to put out in a fishing boat with an armed guard.
Kendrick was comforted at the sight of only one small boat approaching with a few armed men. As it came alongside, he made signs of peace and invited the two Spanish soldiers on board. Juanes questioned Kendrick in Spanish, which no one among the officers or crew fully understood. Kendrick tried to explain in French that he needed safe anchorage to make repairs and take on fresh water and wood. He said they were sailing in company with a packet boat that had become separated from them in a storm. In Juanes’s account, Kendrick said that General Washington of the United States had sent him on this expedition to inspect the Russian settlements north of California.
Juanes noted that the ship carried three officers and a crew of forty. Eighteen of the crew seemed to be boys between twelve and sixteen years old. For armament there were ten cannons: two large stern chasers, and two canons on each side of the ship, interspersed with four smaller cannons. Juanes noted that none of the younger crew appeared trained in the use of weapons. The captain and crew seemed friendly and nonthreatening. Kendrick offered copies of the ship’s papers. Juanes took the first mate, Joseph Ingraham, back into the harbor with him to request permission to enter. Juanes reported what he had found and said he believed there was little cause for suspicion. Don Blas Gonzales was intrigued by the American ship, and he decided to inspect this curious Bostonesa Fragata himself.
The Columbia moored less than a pistol shot off the wharf, under the guns of the fort. Gonzales watched the captain boldly come ashore to meet him, taking his hand and asking in French for his hospitality. He had not yet received instructions from the viceroy to seize the Columbia and Washington. Although royal law dating from 1692 required Gonzales to consider all foreign ships in Spanish waters as enemies, there was also a universal code of mercy for those in distress at sea. And it was clear the Americans were in distress.
Although communication was difficu
lt, Kendrick was affable and charming, and his deference led to mutual respect between the men. Gonzales inspected the damage to the ship and noted gun placements and the structural differences with European ships. The high quarterdeck gave officers a clear view of the whole ship and created ample quarters below it. Gonzales marveled at the fine woodworking in the ship’s cabins, and concurred with Juanes that these voyagers meant no harm. He was impressed that they had weathered the Horn. Putting the ugly prospect of seizing this ship aside, he granted six days for repairs and provisioning, though he warned that there was a scarcity of wood and almost everything else. No one was to go ashore without his permission, and all contact with the island’s inhabitants was to be avoided. When Kendrick asked about his missing sloop, Gonzales had no information to offer.
Relieved for the moment by a chance to repair and resupply, Kendrick set the ship’s carpenters, Isaac Ridler and James Hemmingway, to work on the mast and the damaged sternpost and rudder. Cargo was shifted in the hold to find the source of leaks, and a boat was sent to the little creek to fill water casks under the noses of the fort’s soldiers.
Four days after the Americans arrived, a Spanish packet, the Delores, appeared with provisions for the settlement and dispatches from Callo, Peru. The packet was headed to Valparaiso, Chile. A Frenchman on board was sent for by the governor to assist in examining the Columbia’s papers. In addition to the sea letter from Congress, Kendrick showed him an official letter of the Sieur l’Etombe, the French consul at Boston. Kendrick also undoubtedly regaled him with memories of his privateering days in Nantes a decade earlier. The Frenchman did not want to end up in the middle of an imbroglio, and so he found nothing amiss. Through the captain of the packet, Kendrick sent a brief letter to Joseph Barrell, telling him they had arrived at Juan Fernándes after a “fatiguing passage of eighty-six days from Falkland Islands, and the misfortune of parting with the Sloop Washington on the first of April.” Wanting to deliver only good news, as was typical of his messages, Kendrick added a postscript that he believed the Washington was safe.