Besides the ship’s stores, the two vessels carried a cargo of hardware, tools, utensils, buttons, toys, beads, etc., to be bartered with the Indians. The State and Federal Governments granted special letters to the captains, and “hundreds of medals signalizing the enterprise were put aboard for distribution wherever the vessel touched. Years afterward some of these medals and cents and half-cents of the State of Massachusetts were to be found in the wake of the Columbia among the Spaniards of South America, the Kanakas of Hawaii and the Indians of Oregon.”[23]
The two little vessels fared bravely around Cape Horn, and steered north until they reached the fur wilderness country of the great Northwest. After many hardships and thrilling adventures the Columbia returned to Boston with a cargo of tea from China. It was a famous voyage in the history of American commercial enterprise, but it brought so little profit to the owners that Captain John Derby and one other partner sold out their shares in the Columbia. She was refitted, however, and again sent to the Northwest in 1790 in command of Captain Gray. On this voyage Captain Gray discovered the Columbia River shortly after he had met at sea the English navigator, Vancouver, who reported passing the mouth of a small stream “not worthy his attention.” By so close a margin did Vancouver miss the long-sought great river of Oregon, and the chance to claim the Northwestern America for the British flag by right of discovery.
On May 19, 1792, Captain Gray landed with his seamen, after sailing twenty-five miles up the river and formally named it the Columbia. “It has been claimed for many men before and since Marcus Whitman that they saved Oregon to the United States. But surely the earliest and most compelling title to this distinction is that Captain Robert Gray of Boston, and the good ship Columbia. They gave us the great river by the powerful right of discovery, and the great river dominated the region through which it ran.... The voyage of the Columbia was plainly and undeniably the first step which won for the United States a grip on the Oregon territory that no diplomatic casuistry and no arrogant bluster could shake.[23]
FOOTNOTES:
[22] (July 18, 1774.) “Captain John Derby who carried to England the tidings of Lexington battle, appears at headquarters in Cambridge and relates that the news of the commencement of the American war threw the people, especially in London, into great consternation, and occasioned a considerable fall of stocks; that many there sympathized with the Colonies.” (Felt’s Annals of Salem.)
[23] “The American Merchant Marine,” by Winthrop L. Martin.
CHAPTER X
ELIAS HASKET DERBY AND HIS TIMES
(1770-1800)
Elias Hasket Derby, the son of Captain Richard Derby, and a brother of Captain John Derby, was the most conspicuous member of this great seafaring family, by reason of his million-dollar fortune, his far-seeing enterprise and his fleet of ships which traded with China, India, Mauritius, Madeira, Siam, Arabia and Europe. He was the first American to challenge the jealous supremacy of the East India, the Holland, the French and the Swedish chartered companies in the Orient. He made of commerce an amazingly bold and picturesque romance at a time when this infant republic was still gasping from the effects of the death grapple of the Revolution. He was born in 1739, went to sea as had his father and his grandfather before him, and like them rose to the command and ownership of vessels while still in his youth. As told in a previous chapter, he was the foremost owner of Salem privateers during the Revolution, and finding the large, swift and heavily manned ship created by the needs of war unfitted for coastwise and West India trade, he resolved to send them in search of new markets on the other side of the globe.
No sooner was peace declared than he was making ready his great ship, the Grand Turk, for the first American voyage to the Cape of Good Hope. The Grand Turk had been built in 1781 for privateering and as a letter of marque. She was of three hundred tons burden, the largest vessel built in a Salem shipyard until after the Revolution, and Elias Hasket Derby was proud of her speed, her beauty and her record. During the Revolution she mounted twenty-two guns and fought them handily. On her second cruise as a privateer she captured two rich prizes, took them into Bilboa, and more than paid for herself. Later the Grand Turk made several cruises in West India waters and, among other successes, captured a twenty-gun ship, the Pompey, from London.
This was the ship with which Elias Hasket Derby blazed a trail toward the Orient, the forerunner of his pioneering ventures to the East Indies. Of the methods and enterprise of Elias Hasket Derby, as typified in such voyages as this of the Grand Turk, one of his captains, Richard Cleveland, wrote in his recollections of the methods and enterprise of this typical merchant of his time: