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  Perhaps incited by the short, feisty McDougall, McKay now stepped forward from the Canadian contingent to address Captain Thorn.

  “We will defend ourselves rather than suffer such treatment.”

  Captain Thorn, just then turning to leave, suddenly spun around on his heel to face McKay.

  “I will blow out the brains of the first man who dares disobey my orders aboard my own ship.”

  “In the midst of this scene,” wrote another clerk, Alexander Ross, “Mr. David Stuart, a good old soul, stept up, and by his gentle and timely interference put an end to the threatening altercation.

  “This was the first specimen we had of the captain’s disposition,” Ross continued, “and it laid the foundation of a rankling hatred between the partners and himself.”

  And so went the great venture’s first hours at sea.

  Despite the tension, the Tonquin’s passage was relatively uneventful until she had sailed from New York Harbor well down into the Southern Hemisphere. As the horizon of the East Coast dropped from sight and they sailed out into the Atlantic, Franchère sensed just how deeply into the wilds he was headed. It would be nine thousand miles and three and a half months to Cape Horn, and that would mark only the halfway point to the Northwest Coast. He admitted that, as a sensitive person, he would have abandoned the venture right then if it were possible.

  “One must have experienced it one’s self,” he wrote, “to be able to conceive of the melancholy which takes possession of the soul of a man of sensibility, at the instant that he leaves his country and the civilized world, to go to inhabit with strangers in the wild and unknown lands.”

  By September 14, only a week out of New York Harbor, the first flying fish, indicating warmer tropical waters, zipped through the ship’s rigging and fell to the Tonquin’s deck. Ten days later the crew and passengers caught two dolphins and cooked them, a delicious break from the monotony of hard bread, salt beef, and salt pork. On October 5, sailing southeast across the Atlantic toward Africa to take advantage of the trade winds, they spotted the hazy, rocky headlands of the Cape Verde Islands, off Africa’s coast.

  Some of the younger passengers asked Captain Thorn to land at the islands so they could claim they had touched Africa. Captain Thorn refused what he thought a frivolous request, despite the chance to refill the Tonquin’s emptying water barrels. They sailed onward toward the equator. A few days off Cape Verde, a large ship fell in at a distance behind the Tonquin—a brig carrying twenty cannon but no identifying flag. As the big, threatening mystery ship shadowed them, Captain Thorn, glassing the vessel from afar, believed she might be a British warship preparing to board the Tonquin.

  It was a growing problem and festering point of irritation for the young, proud U.S. republic, having fought free of its British colonial bonds barely twenty-five years earlier. British warships cruising in the Atlantic recently had boarded American commercial vessels to search for British subjects aboard as crew or passengers—of which there were often many, as in the case of the Tonquin. The British ships dragooned these errant subjects of the Crown into the ongoing war against Napoleon, where Britain needed all available men. The young U.S. government deeply resented this British “stop-and-search” interference in American shipping, a resentment that would only grow. Captain Thorn had steered clear of the Cape Verde Islands in part to avoid British vessels that might be lurking there.

  Now came the game of cat-and-mouse, and Captain Thorn played it to his strengths. Known as a fast and well-constructed ship, Astor’s Tonquin was only three years old, and her hull was sheathed in copper, which kept it free of boring worms and clinging weed growth, and gave her extra speed compared to a simple wooden hull. She carried ten guns, plus gunports that made it look as if she carried twenty, plus two fake guns in her bow. She also carried on this voyage a great number of available hands in the form of crew plus passengers, to load and fire the guns in rapid succession if it came to a fight. This gave Captain Thorn an advantage, as the other ship appeared to carry a small crew to man its guns.

  First trying to outrace the big brig, Captain Thorn ordered all sails set. The wind blew fair as he coaxed from the Tonquin maximum speed. All day the stranger easily stayed with the Tonquin. As dusk fell, she broke away and vanished into the quick tropical night. It appeared they’d finally shaken the ominous vessel. When dawn broke, however, they spotted the twenty-gun stranger still trailing them, even closer, seeming to want the Tonquin to identify herself without it doing likewise. Captain Thorn showed no American colors, knowing this could provoke a boarding, with many of his passengers then hauled off to fight Napoleon.

  The foaming prow of the big mystery brig now closed to a mere cable’s length, or about two hundred yards, from the wake swashing off the Tonquin’s stern. This sudden nearness of the ship, Franchère reported, put Captain Thorn in a state of “some alarm.”

  But this was also precisely why Astor had hired naval hero Thorn. Astor’s “gunpowder fellow” now came into his element—bristling confrontations between armed ships in the lawless reaches of the open sea. Realizing the Tonquin couldn’t outsail the brig, Thorn, as daylight brightened, ordered all crew and passengers on deck and had the ship’s drum “beat to quarters”—the rhythm that signaled to prepare the gun decks—and make as if all crew and the many passengers were loading all cannon. The mystery ship could hear the beat of the drum and see the scurry of activity toward the guns.

  Captain Thorn’s ruse worked. The sudden threat of the Tonquin’s twenty-plus cannon (or so it looked), manned by a large and energetic crew and a determined captain, apparently daunted the brig.

  “[A]bout ten A.M. the stranger again changed her course,” reported Franchère, “and we soon lost sight of her entirely.”

  As the southern journey progressed, Captain Thorn grew fed up with the “lubberly” whims of his unseamanlike passengers and became ever more rigid in his command. It was as if he were trying to discipline the entire sprawling Canadian wilderness in a sailing ship just one hundred feet long. He forbade the Scottish partners from gathering on the starboard side of the quarterdeck, the ceremonial area near the wheel where commanders of warships customarily stood. He banned the scribbling clerks from the quarterdeck altogether. He was shocked with the casual manner in which the Scottish partners, such as the wilderness veteran McKay or the genial David Stuart, supposedly dignified managers of Mr. Astor’s venture, would sit on deck passing a pipe as equals with common voyageurs, telling stories. When he found his amiable first mate, Mr. Fox of Boston, joining this shaggy Scottish-Canadian social circle, Thorn confined him belowdecks for three days.

  Thorn wrote long letters back to his boss, Mr. Astor, to be sent on any passing ship they met or port where they should happen to call, complaining how the partners impeded Astor’s great mission to the Pacific Coast. He railed against the partners’ “effeminacy,” their delicacy of habits, their need for entertainment and luxury, as if they expected “Fly-market on the forecastle, Covent-garden on the poop, and a cool spring from Canada on the main top.”

  And they whined about the food—this despite the hams and puddings he had them served in the luxury of the cabin.

  “When thwarted in their cravings for delicacies, they would exclaim it was d-d hard they could not live as they pleased on their own ship, freighted with their own merchandise. And these are the fine fellows who made such a boast that they could ‘eat dogs.’ ”

  It wasn’t just the partners who drove Captain Thorn wild. He complained in his letters to Astor that the scribbling clerks, far from being educated, had received their learning in barrooms and around billiard tables and had never ventured deeper into the woods than Montreal, except one, a schoolteacher, who was “as foolish a pedant as ever lived.” The assorted artisans or mechanics his ship carried as passengers were as worthless as anyone “that ever broke sea biscuit.” The voyageurs themselves—these wilderness hippies of their era—were a slovenly lot, with their singing and dancing at
all hours, their braggadocio, their dirty leather leggings, their overcoats cut from blankets. Like some angry father with teenage sons sleeping until noon after last night’s carouse, Captain Thorn periodically stormed into the forward cabin to roust the voyageurs from their “lubber nests” and make them bathe and get exercise on deck.

  This cultural clash aboard the Tonquin had its origins in the earliest European settlement of North America. The ship in many ways was a microcosm of the continent itself at that moment in 1810—national boundaries still undefined, and different peoples, even Northern European ones, largely unblended in what would eventually become known as the melting pot.

  The earliest French colonists in North America were aristocratic adventurers and entrepreneurs who established a settlement in today’s Nova Scotia shortly before Sir Walter Raleigh’s British colonists founded Jamestown in Virginia in 1607. Where these English colonists at Jamestown, and later, Plymouth, painstakingly chopped the forest acre by acre and planted seed by seed, the French soon discovered that their wealth was not in agriculture, but in the rich harvests of furs—especially beaver—from the millions of square miles of the continent’s vast interior. These fetched high prices in Europe, where the aristocracy increasingly valued furs and beaver felt hats as high-fashion items. Europe’s own wild, fur-bearing animals had been largely depleted by about 1600.

  The French in America held two tremendous advantages over the English for reaping that wealth in pelts, one geographic and one cultural. While the English had the Appalachians to cross to travel westward from their Atlantic settlements, no similar geographic barrier stood between the French settlements and the continent’s interior. An easy water route—the St. Lawrence River, the Great Lakes, and chains of rivers and lakes beyond—led directly from the French settlements to North America’s heart. Culturally, the French held an advantage in the fur trade because they, unlike the English, had few qualms about intermarrying with Native Americans and acculturating to an Indian way of life. They learned to hunt deer and moose like the natives, fish, live in the woods, trap the abundant beaver, paddle hundreds of miles by birch bark canoe or, in winter, make their way by snowshoe and toboggan.

  The early French also enjoyed a lighthearted streak and cheerful resilience about their travails in the North American wilds that the English decidedly lacked. While the Pilgrims grimly read their Bibles through the long dark nights, the first winters for the French in the New World wilderness centered around an eating and drinking society they named L’Ordre de Bon Temps—“The Order of the Good Times”—whose mission was to provide nightly feasts of wild game and generous quantities of wine accompanied by song and even comedy theater.

  The cultural mix of the French fur trade changed fundamentally after 1763—a change that was reflected in the cultural mix aboard the Tonquin—when Britain won Canada from France in the Seven Years’ War. From then on, Scottish Highlanders, immigrating from Britain, took over management of what had been the French-Canadian fur trade. With their main headquarters at Montreal, these Highland Scots eventually ran long strings of wilderness trading posts out of a great baronial hall on the shores of Lake Superior known as Fort William. Indians brought furs to the posts to trade for manufactured goods. Scots or French Canadians usually managed the posts and employed the French-Canadian voyageurs, as well as Indian guides and interpreters, to transport the ninety-pound packets of beaver and other furs. They loaded several tons of these packets into the big birch-bark freight canoes, carrying the furs from the wilderness posts back through the interior waterways of North America and into the warehouses in Montreal. From there they were shipped to the East Coast, or across the Atlantic to Europe.

  The fur trade embodied the economic differences between these groups that coexisted on the North American continent. The trade in Canada came under regulation by the British Crown, the great swaths of territory held by Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company granted by royal charter as monopolies. In the United States and its territories, despite the efforts of merchants to acquire government-backed monopolies, the trade was unregulated by charter and fell to individual operators. These American traders competed fiercely and with a free-for-all and cutthroat—at times literally—attitude in their dealings with one another and with Native Americans who supplied the furs. Certain aspects of the economic systems of North America remained works in progress.

  At least three distinct cultures were jammed together on the Tonquin, cheek-by-jowl, for five or six months: the chummy Scottish fur traders who had run Canadian wilderness posts and managed the Canadian trade, the good-time French-Canadian voyageurs who paddled their canoes, and the iron-fisted Yankee naval hero and his crew of American sailors. The Scotsmen and voyageurs had worked side by side for several decades in the fur trade and understood each other’s quirks. Not so the Yankee and the Scots. Tensions still ran deep between Americans and British from the Revolutionary War and its aftermath. Captain Thorn, an unyielding disciplinarian and ardent patriot, clearly hated the Scotsmen. And the Scotsmen, like a clannish yet argumentative family that sticks together against all outsiders, gladly—and en masse—returned the favor.

  BY MID-NOVEMBER, they’d crossed the equator and sailed well down into the Southern Hemisphere. The ship now had altered course, once again taking advantage of the winds, and steered southwest toward the tip of South America and Cape Horn, advancing from tropical calms toward the powerful winds of the southerly latitudes known as the Roaring Forties and the Furious Fifties. On the night of November 11, the wind suddenly shifted and a tremendous storm struck. While they had paddled their canoes through plenty of storms on Canada’s lakes and rivers, it was the first time many of the voyageurs and clerks had ridden out a tempest on a ship on the open sea—“with nothing,” as Franchère put it, “but the frail machine which bore me between the abyss of waters and the immensity of sky.”

  It was a frightening experience. The gale shrieked through the rigging, and rain and wind lashed the sea into a ghostly fury. Flashes of lightning and blasts of thunder surrounded the tossing ship, so that the tumult of the sea, wrote Franchère, “appeared all a-fire.”

  “[The] terrible tempest,” he wrote, “seemed to have sworn our destruction.”

  Toppling seas washed over the deck’s wooden planking, which, over the past weeks, had shrunk in the hot tropical sun. Seawater poured through the resulting gaps and drenched the men in the hammocks below.

  The gale subsided. Crew and passengers scrambled about belowdecks and worked together to plug a leak that had sprung in the ship’s hull, as well as to repair a jib boom that the wind had ripped. The wind shifted again, to the southwest. Now came a difficult judgment call for the commanding officer. On a square-rigger, fully bringing in the sails was a big job—the crew had to scramble aloft on ratlines, or rope ladders, then gather up and lash the canvas sails in tight bundles to the horizontal spars of the yardarms. On a large square-rigger, bringing in all the sails could take several hours, so if a gale threatened, the timing of an order to “shorten sail” was of utmost importance.

  The order went out from the quarterdeck for the crew to furl the top and topgallant sails, but, whether for lack of anticipation or underestimating its force, the Tonquin still carried too much sail when struck by the full force of the second gale. A particularly powerful gust typically appears like a dark shape ruffling across the sea’s surface. When it slams into a square-rigger, the whole ship strains, the deck tilting as she heels over, the hull surging forward through the swells, the rigging running taut like the strings of a giant musical instrument, the scream of wind through the lines suddenly jumping to a shriek. If a ship has too much sail, with a sudden BOOM the sails will start to “blow out,” the fabric splitting apart under the enormous pressure of the gust like an overfilled balloon, the canvas exploding into ragged shreds. Then BOOM, another, and another, the shreds flapping madly from the yardarms like kite tails while the ship careens over the sea.

  The
Tonquin, Ross reported, lost many sails in this storm. As the ship tossed through the heavy seas, six cannon tore loose from their moorings and rolled about on the deck “like thunder.” For seventeen straight hours, the ship “scudded” or was shoved from behind by the gale, making a distance downwind of 220 miles, or close to fourteen miles per hour, madly sailing on the verge of control.

  At 8:00 A.M. on November 14, a rogue wave curled ten feet above the stern of the Tonquin and toppled downward. Voyageurs, clerks, crew, Scottish partners, Captain Thorn—whatever their animosities toward each other—all grabbed for rigging and rails as the giant wave smashed onto the Tonquin’s deck around the mainmast and broke into a tumult of white water.

  “[B]y that means,” reported Ross, “[we] saved ourselves.”

  The concussive force of the wave threw the sailor manning the wheel clear across the quarterdeck, slamming him into rigging or rail, breaking two of his ribs, and sending him to his berth for a week.

  After forty hours of battering the ship, the gale eased. The ship’s carpenter went to work repairing leaks in the Tonquin’s otherwise solid and copper-sheathed hull while the sailmaker stitched his canvas.

  With the pause in the gales, Captain Thorn reassessed the ship’s supplies of freshwater and realized they were running dangerously low. On November 20, he reduced the water ration further to a pint and a half per day. Ten days later, on December 2, he cut it yet again—to a pint per day. This, the passengers complained, was a hardship when the diet consisted of so much salted meat. Thirsty men bargained with one another, saying they would give a gallon of brandy for a pint of water. Finally, on December 5, an officer in the masthead spotted one of the Falkland Islands.

  “[I]t is only those who have been three or four months at sea,” wrote Franchère, “who know how to appreciate the pleasure which one then feels even at the sight of such barren and bristling rocks as form the Falkland Isles.”