Chapter VIII 1785-1792 — Robert Gray, the American Discoverer of the Columbia
Boston Merchants, inspired by Cook’s Voyages, outfit two Vessels under Kendrick and Gray for Discovery and Trade on the Pacific—Adventures of the First Ship to carry the American Flag around the World—Gray attacked by Indians at Tillamook Bay—His Discovery of the Columbia River on the Second Voyage—Fort Defence and the First American Ship built on the Pacific
It is an odd thing that wherever French or British fur traders went to a new territory, they found the Indians referred to American traders, not as “Americans,” but “Bostons” or “Bostonnais.” The reason was plain. Boston merchants won a reputation as first to act. It was they who began a certain memorable “Boston Tea Party”; and before the rest of the world had recovered the shock of that event, these same merchants were planning to capture the trade of the Pacific Ocean, get possession of all the Pacific coast not already preëmpted by Spain, Russia, or England, and push American commerce across the Pacific to Asia.
{211} What with slow printing-presses and slow travel, the account of Cook’s voyages on the Pacific did not become generally known in the United States till 1785 or 1786. Sitting round the library of Dr. Bulfinch’s residence on Bowdoin Square in Boston one night in 1787, were half a dozen adventurous spirits for whom Cook’s account of the fur trade on the Pacific had an irresistible fascination. There was the doctor himself. There was his son, Charles, of Harvard, just back from Europe and destined to become famous as an architect. There was Joseph Barrell, a prosperous merchant. There was John Derby, a shipmaster of Salem, a young man still, but who, nevertheless, had carried news of Lexington to England. Captain Crowell Hatch of Cambridge, Samuel Brown, a trader of Boston, and John Marden Pintard of the New York firm of Lewis Pintard Company were also of the little coterie.
Departure of the Columbia and the Lady Washington. Drawn by George Davidson, a member of the Expedition. Photographed by courtesy of the present owner, Mrs. Abigail Quincy Twombly.
If Captain Cook’s crew had sold one-third of a water-rotted cargo of otter furs in China for ten thousand dollars, why, these Boston men asked themselves, could not ships fitted expressly for the fur trade capture a fortune in trade on that unoccupied strip of coast between Russian Alaska, on the north, and New Spain, on the south?
“There is a rich harvest to be reaped by those who are on the ground first out there,” remarked Joseph Barrell.
Then the thing was to be on the ground first—that {212} was the unanimous decision of the shrewd-headed men gathered in Bulfinch’s study.