Bostonians strolled to Long Wharf on a fair autumn Sunday on 30 September 1787 to bid bon voyage to two tiny wooden ships that were to sail on the morning tide. Captain John Kendrick of Wareham, Massachusetts, went aboard in early afternoon with other officers and the most important Boston citizens. “The evening was spent in murth and glee,” one officer wrote in his journal. “Our friends parted not with us untill late in the evening . . . and there wishes for our Prosperity resounded from every tongue.”1
Excitement ran high. This was to be more than a routine voyage to New York or England. These ships, the square- rigged Columbia Rediviva, 212 tons burden, and the sloop Lady Washington, 90 tons, were to go into strange waters on the opposite side of the continent to conduct explorations and establish a new route of commerce. Never before in the short history of the young nation had U. S. ships embarked on such an adventure.
The reports of the voyage of Captain James Cook of England in search of a Northwest Passage through North America a decade earlier had provided inspiration for this initial foray of the Boston men, as they became known, to the opposite coast. The journal of Cook’s voyage published by the British Admiralty and the writings of an American, John Ledyard, who was with Cook as a corporal of Marines, noted the possibilities of acquiring furs cheaply from natives of the Northwest coast and trading them in China for silks, spices, teas, and porcelains highly desired in eastern cities.
Thomas Bulfinch, a Boston physician, called a meeting of potential investors in his Bowdoin Square mansion one evening in 1787 to hear from his son, Charles, a recent Harvard graduate, who had learned of the trading possibilities while touring Europe. From that meeting and others that followed five Boston men and a New Yorker decided to invest $50,000 to acquire, rebuild, and outfit two vessels. The ships would make a three-year cruise around Cape Horn and up the Pacific Coast to the Northwest, then across the Pacific to Macao or Canton, and around Cape of Good Hope and back to Boston.
The biggest contributor was Boston merchant Joseph Barrell. Others were Charles Bulfinch, later a famous Boston architect; John Derby, a Salem shipowner; Crowell Hatch, a Cambridge sea captain; Samuel Brown, a Boston merchant; and John M. Pintard, a New York financier. As captains they selected two veterans of sea warfare against the English in the American Revolution. Captain Kendrick, 45, became master of the ship Columbia Rediviva and commander of the expedition. Robert Gray, 32, of Tiverton, Rhode Island, became master of the consort, the sloop Lady Washington.2
Armed with sea letters from high officials and carrying newly minted coins and commemorative medals, the two ships departed Cape Cod before dawn 1 October 1787. The Columbia Rediviva carried a crew of 28 and the Lady Washington a crew of 11. They were stocked with extra canvas, spars, and anchors and carried trade goods such as iron, axes, and baubles. They were armed with cannons and swivel guns because each ship had to be ready to repel attack by natives or foreign men-of-war.
Almost from the beginning Kendrick had problems with leadership. In generally fine weather he failed to crowd on canvas en route to the Cape Verdes off Africa, according to Robert Haswell, 19-year-old third officer of the Columbia Rediviva, whose journal is the only remaining major account of this voyage. Once there Kendrick spent far too long loading supplies, water, and livestock, including “one hundred forty Goats, two Bulls and a Cow, three Hogs and three Sheep.’’3 Gray later complained that the stay lasted 36 days more than necessary. Chief Officer Simeon Woodruff, who had sailed with Cook into the Northwest waters, made his discontent known and was fired. Then the surgeon. Dr. Roberts, asked to be released because of “ill health.” When again at sea, John Nutting, the astronomer, disappeared, a possible suicide. Kendrick and Haswell had a violent argument in which the captain struck the young officer. Kendrick later transferred Haswell to the Lady Washington as second mate.4
Arriving on 16 February 1788 at Brett’s Harbor on Saunders Island in the Falklands, Kendrick wanted to wait until the next favorable weather season instead of chancing Drake Passage around South America in March, recognized as the stormiest month of the year.5 Gray offered to take the Lady Washington alone around the Horn. Kendrick then yielded and the two vessels sailed on 28 February 1788 after stocking wild pigs, fish, fowl, and water found at the deserted island.
Throughout March the crew members were constantly wet, miserable, and exhausted as the ships labored through ice fields, gale force winds, fog, and “huge over-grone seas” that foamed over the forecastles. In the early morning darkness of 1 April 1788, the Columbia Rediviva disappeared during a violent “hericain.” Gray knew not whether the ship was afloat or swallowed by the sea. Gray sailed on because his commander had ordered that should separation occur “by bad weather or any other axerdent What Ever you air to proseed on your voige Round Cape horn in to the pacific ocan and then stand to the Northward as far as the Lattd. 49 degrees 16 minutes North..there you will find a harbour By the name of Nootka Sound on the west side of North American.”6
On 2 August 1788, “to our inexpressible joy,” as Has- well wrote, the Lady Washington made landfall on the Pacific Coast of North America in 41 degrees 36 minutes north latitude, a few miles south of the present Oregon- Califomia boundary.7 For nearly two weeks Gray sailed close to the Oregon shore seeking a harbor where he might find furs and fresh victuals for his scurvy-stricken crew. Natives came out in canoes to make welcoming gestures. Haswell was certain the natives had not before seen white men.
On 10 August Indians armed with bows and arrows came alongside in canoes and handed up fine quality sea otter furs for which they willingly accepted trifles. Two days later Gray sent Chief Mate Davis Coolidge and a party ashore in a boat. This was the first recorded occasion on which white men had set foot in what is now the state of Oregon. Coolidge found firewood but no anchorage for the sloop. The exact site of the landing is unknown, but it likely was near Cape Lookout in Tillamook County.
As he ran before a gathering storm, on 14 August, Gray found his first harbor at 45 degrees 27 minutes north latitude. This first recorded entry by a white man’s ship on the Oregon coast was in Tillamook Bay. Although it is known that Spanish, English, French, and Russian ships had sailed off the coast, and legends exist of shipwrecks that brought white men ashore and of a treasure chest being brought ashore in a boat and buried, the written history of Oregon surely began in 1788 with the journal of Robert Haswell in Tillamook Bay.
(Oregonians celebrated the bicentennial of the arrival of the first white men in their state at ceremonies in two Tillamook Bay communities. Garibaldi and Tillamook, in July and August 1988. A 600-foot hill near the bay entrance was named “Captain Gray’s Hill” and a pageant dramatizing the adventures of Robert Gray was presented at Tillamook High School. Other events are planned in Washington and Oregon in 1992 in observance of Gray’s discovery of Gray’s Harbor and the Columbia River 200 years ago.)
A canoe came from the village after the Lady Washington anchored inside the bay and the sailors handed out presents to the natives. This encouraged other Indians, who brought cooked crabs and baskets of berries. “These were the most acceptable things they could have brought to most of our seamen who were in a very advanced state of the scurvey and was a means of a restoration of health to 3 or four of our Companey who would have found one months longer duration at sea fatal,” Haswell wrote.
Three days later, after replenishment of the water and wood supply and receipt of many furs and fresh food, Gray decided to up anchor and head for Nootka, where his commodore, Kendrick, might be waiting in the Columbia Rediviva. But a sudden wind change caused the Lady Washington to go lightly aground and Gray decided he must wait for a more favorable wind and tide. With that, Coolidge, Haswell, and five of the crew rowed ashore. The sailors began to cut grass for the remaining livestock on board and the officers visited the village, where they were entertained by feats of arms and a “long and hedious” dance.8
As Coolidge and Haswell returned to the sandy beach to look for clams, they saw one of the crew, Marcus Lopius (Lopez), a black youth whom Gray had taken aboard in Cape Verde Islands as his cabin attendant, chasing an Indian. The native had snatched the lad’s cutlass and run off. The two officers and a sailor ran after Lopius and, as they drew near, saw he had caught the native but was surrounded by angry, armed natives. Haswell reported that they “drenched their knives and spears with savage feury in the boddy of the unfortunate youth” who fell under the attack. He rose and staggered toward his friends but the natives fired arrows into his back “and he fell within fifteen yards of me and instantly expiered while they mangled his lifeless corse.” The three fled to the sloop. The Indians pressed their attack by canoe until Gray fired the ship’s guns. They attacked again the next day but once more were repulsed by cannon fire.
On the third day the Lady Washington escaped from the bay that Gray named “Murderers Harbour.” How many natives might have died is unknown; Haswell fired his pistol at one pursuer point blank, as did Coolidge. The ship’s guns may have taken a toll. While the two officers and one sailor suffered arrow wounds, all recovered.
It is ironic that the first murder after the white man arrived in Oregon was of a black man by red men.
On 16 September 1788 Gray brought his sloop into Nootka Sound just short of a full year since leaving the opposite side of the continent. He found two English brigs and a schooner all flying Portuguese flags commanded by England’s John Meares, who also had recently sailed along the Oregon and Washington coasts. Gray began to prepare the Lady Washington to cruise for skins before going to Macao for more trade goods. But in a week a bedraggled Columbia Rediviva was sighted on the horizon. She had survived the terrible battering of the hurricane, but she also had lost two seamen to scurvy. To Gray’s disgust, Kendrick, ever one to procrastinate, canceled Gray’s decision to sail and ordered that both ships winter over in Nootka Sound.9
After a cold, wet winter the Lady Washington set sail southward in March 1789 to trade for furs. The sloop first entered Clayoquot Sound, a short distance from Nootka, then explored more than 25 miles into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the first ship of any nation to do so. Charles William Barkley, an English captain sailing in the Imperial Eagle under an Austrian flag, had discovered (or rediscovered) the strait just two years earlier. He had named it for a Greek captain, Apostolas Valerianos, who had claimed he entered a passage in that latitude in 1592 while sailing for Spain under the name Juan de Fuca.10
Weather forced Gray to turn north. After pausing at Nootka he cruised inside the Queen Charlotte Islands, establishing that they were islands. He named them for George Washington, but the name bestowed earlier by their discoverer, Captain George Dixon of the ship Queen Charlotte, prevailed. Dixon believed the land was an island but did not sail beyond it to prove it.
Above 55 degrees north latitude, Gray fled into an inlet to escape a blow, but angry seas catapulted the sloop onto a rocky bank where the waves threatened to destroy her. Risking death, Haswell, joined by several sailors, jumped onto the wave-swept rocks with lines while others in a boat ran out a hawser and a kedging anchor. Slowly, the sloop was pulled free, but not without suffering heavy damage to hull and rigging. The brave action of the crew saved the little ship. The nearest help was 500 miles away at Nootka. Gray sailed for that harbor, trading for furs at every opportunity.
The Lady Washington was again made ready for sea and the Columbia Rediviva, which had not moved from Nootka Sound since arriving there in 1788, now sailed with the Lady Washington to Clayoquot. Here, on 28 July 1789, Captain Kendrick surprisingly ordered Gray to take command of the Columbia Rediviva and to sail with all the 1,000 or so furs for China. Kendrick never made the reason for the change clear. Gray wrote to the ships’ owners from Canton on 18 December 1789 only that “Capt. Kendrick thought best to change Vessells and take all the property [trade goods] on board the Sloop Washington and Cruise in her himself on the Coast, and for me to make the best of my way to the Sandwhich Islands, there to procure sufficient provisions to carry us to Canton . . . ”11
Kendrick’s later actions indicate that he desired to set himself up as an independent trader, because he made what he called a “sham” sale of the sloop to himself and traded for furs without any accounting to the owners. He also remodeled the Lady Washington into a brig while in China.
Gray sailed in the Columbia Rediviva from Clayoquot on 30 July 1789 and arrived in Hawaii four weeks later, becoming the first American captain to bring his ship into the islands. He tarried only three weeks. He loaded fruit and “salted five Punchions of Pork and took on deck One hundred and fifty live hogs,” as he wrote to Barrell. Nine weeks later, he was in Canton. He peddled enough furs to acquire a cargo of Bohea tea, which he carried around Cape of Good Hope to Boston on 10 August 1790. For the first time, a U. S. ship and captain had circumnavigated the globe.
All of Boston, including Governor John Hancock, acclaimed the feat and the newspaper Columbia Centinel of 11 August 1790 said the success of the voyage “commanded the attention and respect of the European Lords of the soil, to the American flag.” But Columbia Rediviva's cargo of tea suffered water damage on the long voyage home and the sponsors made little, if any, profit. However, they immediately decided to send Gray in the Columbia Rediviva on a second trip.
Haswell, who had moved to the Columbia Rediviva with Gray in Clayoquot Sound, was assigned as his chief mate. The Columbia Rediviva sailed again on 2 October and this time Gray rounded Cape Horn in good weather and arrived in Clayoquot Sound 4 June 1791.
While Haswell kept a partial journal of Gray’s second voyage, as did the ship’s clerk, John Box Hoskins, the journal of the teenage fifth officer, John Boit, Jr., was the most complete. The original log for the early part of the second voyage (28 September 1790 to 20 February 1792) has recently come to light in the Library of Congress. Earlier the entire log except for certain copied fragments had been thought lost.
Besides cruising for sea otter furs in Northwest waters, the crew that winter also built the first U. S. ship constructed on the West Coast of the United States. The frame of a 40-ton sloop had been brought from Boston and the sailors completed it with timbers and planks cut from the evergreen forests around Clayoquot. The sloop, named the Adventure, was put under command of Haswell. After frustrating an attack by Indians, the two vessels sailed in opposite directions from Clayoquot on 2 April 1792, the Adventure going north and the Columbia Rediviva south.
Gray was familiar with the voyage of Spaniard Bruno Heceta in 1775, during which he had sighted two capes near 46 degrees north latitude and detected a strong current that he thought might indicate “the mouth of some great river or of some passage to another sea”—that is, the Northwest Passage, or the River of the West.
Gray detected the strong current that Heceta had reported, but adverse weather kept him from steering the Columbia Rediviva through the breakers. He sailed on north and near Cape Flattery encountered the vessels of George Vancouver, British naval explorer. Vancouver also had just passed up the coast but had failed to note anything of possible consequence between the two capes near 46 degrees and 10 minutes, where Gray thought he had detected a strong current. Captain Vancouver was more interested in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, so Gray again turned south. Each went on to make history simultaneously. Vancouver explored the Strait of Juan de Fuca, cruised the Strait of Georgia, establishing that the island since named for him was, indeed, an island, and discovered Puget Sound (named for his lieutenant, Peter Puget).
Gray proceeded down the rugged Pacific Coast and on 7 May sailed the Columbia Rediviva into an undiscovered bay that he named Bulfinch’s Harbor for one of his sponsors. Others, however, named it for the captain, and this fine port on the southern coast of Washington is now known as Gray’s Harbor. Boit, the chronicler, suspected this was the much-sought great river, but wrote “we was fearfull to send a Boat on discovery.”
The Columbia Rediviva's crew was remorseful after a frightful nighttime encounter on 8 May, in which the Columbia Rediviva fired her nine-pound cannon and muskets into a canoe loaded with some 20 natives who seemed to threaten the sailors by coming close aboard despite warnings. “We dashed her all to peices and no doubt kill’d every soul in her,” Boit wrote. “But they was too near us for to admit of any hesitation how to proceed.” This was one of several such deadly incidents in the Northwest as cultures clashed. Kendrick had to fight off an attack on the Lady Washington in which as many as 50 natives were killed. The Columbia Rediviva lost Second Mate Joshua Caswell and two sailors in an ambush. One of Kendrick’s sons was killed by natives in Queen Charlotte Islands.
With that tragic night behind him, Gray took the Columbia on south and now made the greatest discovery in the maritime history of the young nation. On 11 May 1792 he found and sailed into the legendary Great River of the West, one of the mightiest rivers in the world. Gray’s journal for the days 7 May and 10 to 20 May 1792 was copied by Charles Bulfinch in 1816 and thus has been preserved while the remainder has been lost. It details how Gray’s major discovery occurred:
“May 11th ... at 4: P.M. saw the entrance of our desired port, bearing E.S.E. distance six leagues: in steering sails and hauled our wind in-shore. At 8 A.M., being a little to windward of the entrance of the Harbuor, bore away, and run in E.N.E. between the breakers. . . . When we were over the bar, we found this to be a large river of fresh water, up which we steered.”12
Gray’s journal and Boit’s journal corroborate each other on the experiences of the ship Columbia Rediviva within “this noble river,” as Boit called it. The ship moored ten miles upstream one-half mile off the northern shore. Trading began with the natives for sea otter furs and salmon in the friendliest relationship encountered on the coast.
Gray on the third day weighed anchor and the ship sailed an additional 15 miles upriver to what was later named Gray’s Bay, where the ship ran lightly aground. It had missed the main channel that lay nearer the south (Oregon) side.
Natives brought many huge fish, known today as the Chinook salmon, which the crew were overjoyed to receive. On 15 May Gray decided to move to a better anchorage downstream. That afternoon Gray and the ship’s clerk, John Hoskins, went ashore in the jolly-boat. Boit’s journal records that “I landed abrest of the ship with Capt. Gray to view the countrey & take possession.”13
Boit mentioned taking possession of the river in his journal, but the words were inserted above a line, leading some historians to contend that this was a later interpolation by persons unknown and might have been done to convince the English that Gray had conducted a formal act of claiming the river for the United States. But a close examination of the original manuscript indicates that this interlineation (“& take possession”) conformed to the many other interlineations in the journal and in context could only have been entered by Boit himself. On the centennial of the discovery in 1892, Edward Porter of Boston, citing private sources, wrote in New England Magazine that “Gray raised the American flag and planted coins under a large pine tree, thus taking possession in the name of the United States.”14 Of course, natives had lived along the river for 12,000 years or more.
It cannot be refuted that Gray brought the Columbia Rediviva into the River of the West ahead of the ship of any other nation. In its boundary dispute with England, Gray’s entry gave the United States its strongest claim to the territory that comprises the present states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and the western portions of Montana and Wyoming, because the river drains much of this vast region as it flows 1,200 miles from its headwaters in the Canadian Rockies to the Pacific between Oregon and Washington. The claim was backed by the Lewis and Clark overland expedition in 1804-06 and the founding of Astoria on the Oregon side near the mouth of the Columbia River in 1811.
James K. Polk, a Democrat, was elected President in 1844 with one of the nation’s most familiar slogans: ‘‘Fifty-four forty or fight.” That would have taken the Oregon Territory, as it was eventually called, clear to the Russian line in Alaska. But Polk didn’t fight. He had a war with Mexico in the offing, and compromised on the 49th parallel (minus the tip of Vancouver Island), the present northern boundary of Washington state. He did thus secure for the United States its first territory on the Pacific shore.
Before he sailed the Columbia Rediviva out of this greatest river on the west side of the American continents. Gray gave it a name, ‘‘Columbia’s River,” for his ship. It was not the Northwest Passage of legend. But the Columbia has proved a major asset to the nation as an avenue into such ports as Astoria and Portland, Oregon; and Longview and Vancouver, Washington. Barges go as far inland as the Snake River tributary in Idaho. The Columbia provides hydroelectric power for much of the west; its waters have turned desert into valuable farm land. In early years it was an important fishery for Indians and whites, but 32 federal dams and overfishing greatly reduced salmon runs. Not until 1987 did federal, state, and Indian agencies begin to feel their attempts to restore the runs have shown much success.15
From Columbia’s River, Gray headed north for more explorations and trading, but this discovery was the high point of the great adventure that began in Boston in 1787. The ship Columbia Rediviva again found her way across the Pacific via Hawaii to Macao and Canton, then around the Cape of Good Hope across the Atlantic, arriving in Boston on 25 July 1793—a second circumnavigation. The ship again received a warm salute but once more the profits were far from substantial and the owners decided to abandon the game and sell the Columbia Rediviva. But Gray and Kendrick had shown the way and other Boston ships soon dominated the Northwest fur trade.
Gray resumed his career as an Atlantic sea captain and in 1799 commanded the privateer Lucy against the French. He died in relative obscurity on a voyage to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1806. His widow, Martha, tried to win a pension or grant of land in Oregon in later years for herself and four daughters but Congress did not act.16
John Kendrick, who had started out as head of the expedition and switched to command of the sloop, gained a fair degree of renown on several visits in Hawaii. Among other experiences, he brought the guns of the Lady Washington to bear on the winning side in a battle between two Hawaiian kings in 1794. He asked William Brown, captain of the British ship Jackal, to fire a salute in celebration. In so doing a cannon that had not been unshotted was fired and grape and ball pierced the side of the Lady Washington and killed Kendrick.
The sturdy little Lady Washington, a two-masted brig in her later years, never returned to Boston and was a complete loss to her owners. It is believed she and many of her sailors perished in a storm in the Strait of Malacca.
1. Robert Haswell, "A Voyage Round the World Onboard the Ship Columbia Rediviva and Sloop Washington," original manuscript in Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Hereafter listed as Haswell’s First Log. Page 3.
2. Oregon and Eldorado, Thomas Bulftnch, I. E. Tilton & Company, Boston, 1866. pp. 1-3. Quotes Joseph Barrell as saying, “There is a rich harvest to be reaped there by those who shall first go in.”
3. Haswell’s First Log, p. 7.
4. Ibid., pp. 9-28 passim.
5. Ibid., pp. 18-19; British Admiral George Anson in the Centurion was in grave danger of losing his flotilla to the storms around Cape Horn in March 1741.
6. Kendrick’s written orders to Gray at Brett’s Harbor, Falkland Islands, February 1788. Letter contained in Voyages of the Columbia, Frederick Howay, Massachusetts Historical Society, 1941.
7. HaswelI’s First Log, p. 47.
8. Ibid., p. 59.
9. Robert Gray's letter to Joseph Barrell from Nootka Sound, 13 July 1789, "Captain Kendrick's arriving deprived me of my intentions ... he thinking it best to winter here,” Massachusetts Historical Society.
10. Historians generally believe the story the Greek captain related to Michael Lok, Englishman, who interviewed him in Naples, was apocryphal. The Greek said he sailed through “Fretum Anian” and had found gold and silver along the way. Lok’s article appeared in Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrims, in 1625, and is often mentioned in histories.
11. Gray’s letter to Barrell from Canton 18 December 1789, Massachusetts Historical Society.
12. Text in Howay from Greenhow's History of Oregon and California, Boston, 1844, p. 436.
13. Journal of John Boit, Jr., fifth officer, manuscript in Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, p. 18.
14. Edward G. Porter, “The Ship Columbia and the Discovery of Oregon,” New England Magazine, June 1892, pp. 472-478.
15. R. Gregory Nokes, “Salmon Run Recovers After 50-Year Upriver Fight,” Portland Oregonian, 14 June 1987.
16. Private papers of William Twombly, Newton, Massachusetts, descendant of Robert Gray.