When the Tonquin arrived off the Northwest Coast and mouth of the Columbia River on March 22, 1811, it had left all tropical antics far in its wake. Here wind squalls from the northwest swept across the charcoal sea. Huge swells tossed the ship. Roaring white breakers smashed against the shoreline of this far edge of the North American continent, stretching away endlessly north and south in a misty gray-green band of impenetrable forest and rocky headlands, backed by ranges of snowy mountains. Here was the fabled destination—the epicenter of the great empire-to-be! If they hadn’t understood just how wild and remote and storm-battered the Northwest Coast was when they left the bustle of New York and the scented islands of Hawaii, they did now. From this spot, sending and receiving any communication to their familiar world would take roughly one year.

But whatever safety and shelter was offered by this wild coast was blocked by a four-mile-long sandbar across the Columbia’s mouth. Still today one of the world’s most dangerous navigational hazards, here the power of the largest river of the western continent, discharging an average of 265,000 cubic feet of water per second, collides head on with the power of the world’s largest ocean. The Pacific tides and swells entering the river’s mouth fight against the outgoing river’s discharge. This battle throws up ferociously steep mounds of water, up to twelve feet high, known as standing waves. They can literally stand a boat up on end. At the same time, incoming swells from the North Pacific, generated by powerful storms thousands of miles out at sea and thirty feet and more in height, tower over the shallows of the bar. Crashing down in a tumult of foam and spray further churned by the winds and tidal currents, these waves create what seems to be a giant cauldron where the earth’s hydraulic forces converge.

Somewhere in this chaos of wind and wave and powerful tides the Seagoing Party had to find the gap in the shallow sandbar. It was only through this single channel that the main current of the Columbia River exited the continent, and they could enter.

“The wind was blowing in heavy squalls, and the sea ran very high,” wrote Franchère, about their arrival off the Columbia’s mouth, adding that they could plainly see the breakers crashing from three miles off.

Captain Thorn gave orders to prepare the whaleboat. Mr. Fox, he ordered, would act as captain. For his crew, Mr. Fox would take the French-Canadian brothers Lapensée, in addition to Joseph Nadeau, and John Martin. Their mission was to row into the wild confusion of wind and wave and current and “sound” the bottom—measure the water’s depth to locate the deeper channel across the shallow bar. Fox was taken aback. Three of the four men assigned to pull the oars of the whaleboat into one of the most treacherous spots in the world’s oceans were French Canadians who had never before been to sea—Nadeau was a barber from Montreal and the two brothers had worked as porters at Lachine Rapids, just above Montreal. John Martin, an experienced but aging Yankee seaman, didn’t have the power of youth at the oars.

Couldn’t Captain Thorn assign a more experienced crew to man the oars? asked Fox.

No, replied Thorn. He needed all experienced sailors aboard the Tonquin to handle her in these conditions.

“Mr. Fox,” wrote Alexander Ross, who witnessed this scene unfolding on the deck of the Tonquin, “then represented the impossibility of performing the business in such weather, and on such a rough sea, even with the best seamen.”

“[T]he waves [are] too high for any boat to live in,” Fox pleaded to Captain Thorn.

The captain had already turned away. He now spun around to face Fox.

“Mr. Fox, if you are afraid of water, you should have remained in Boston.”

Fox didn’t reply. He simply turned to the crew and issued the fateful order: Lower the boat.

Only a handful of ships had, by this time, crossed the Columbia bar. The Columbia River itself had been discovered by Europeans only eighteen years earlier. For European sailing ships, almost all the other coastlines of the world were on the way to somewhere. The Northwest Coast was not and remained obscure, unknown, and impossibly remote for centuries after most other coastlines of the world had been charted. Spaniards first had sailed northward from their colonies in Mexico as far as today’s Oregon in the 1600s. But the cool, wet, rugged Northwest Coast inhabited by Indian tribes living in wooden longhouses and traveling in large cedar canoes didn’t compel them like the benign climates and monumental, gold-encrusted civilizations of the Aztecs and Incas far to the south. For a century and a half, the Northwest Coast, in geopolitical terms at least, remained a vast no-man’s-land while Europe’s seafaring powers, such as Spain, France, and Britain, assembled their colonial empires elsewhere on the globe. In the second half of the 1700s, a flurry of interest from several European powers converged on the Northwest Coast. After pushing their empire across Siberia to the Far East, the Russians, with the Bering Expedition in 1741, sailed across the North Pacific to the Aleutian Islands and Alaskan coast, and quietly began to develop a fur trade with natives there. With Russia poking around Alaska’s Pacific Coast, Spain felt threatened and swung her attention northward from Mexico. Starting in 1769, Franciscan Father Junípero Serra planted a string of missions up the Pacific Coast as far north as today’s San Francisco Bay. Beyond this point, however, the coastline grew colder, wetter, more forested, and less attractive for settlement.

As Father Serra built his missions for Chris tian ity in California, and small Russian ships traded for furs up in the Aleutians, Captain Cook explored the South Pacific for Britain and for science. On his Third Voyage in 1776, however, British authorities assigned Cook a secret mission in the North Pacific that also had much to do with commerce—locate the Pacific end of the legendary Northwest Passage. The Passage had been a coveted geographical object sought since Columbus—a water route across North America that offered European merchants a shortcut to the trading wealth of the Orient. Hoping to find the Northwest Passage—and to collect the resulting 20,000-pound prize from the British government—Cook captained two ships, the Resolution and Discovery, which made landfall at present-day Oregon, then coasted northward all the way to the Arctic Ocean probing for the Passage or the mouth of the long-rumored Great River of the West. Legends abounded about this river, passed along from Indian tribes deep in the interior. The European explorers fervently hoped that the rumors referred to an actual waterway that linked the Great Lakes with the Pacific Ocean. Almost the entire stretch of this coast was terra incognita—outside the arctic realms, this was the last major section of the earth’s continental coastline that hadn’t yet been charted. The expedition, however, didn’t work out as planned. Cook didn’t locate the Pacific mouth of the great crosscontinental waterway on his first attempt. It was while resupplying and repairing in Hawaii for another foray that he was killed by islanders in the surf at Kea lakekua Bay. But Cook’s surviving officers and crew nevertheless made a discovery that would determine the future of the Pacific Rim.

While seeking the mysterious waterway amid the deep inlets of the Northwest Coast on their initial visit, Cook’s men had traded trinkets with Indian tribes for furs. To the amazement of Cook’s officers and crew, when they reached China after his death they discovered that the spectacularly lustrous sea otter furs purchased for one dollar’s worth of trinkets from Northwest Coastal Indians sold for the equivalent of a hundred dollars cash in Macao and Canton.

“The rage with which our seamen were possessed to return to [the Northwest Coast],” reported one of Cook’s officers, “and, by another cargo of skins, to make their fortunes, at one time, was not far short of mutiny.”

Although its huge and wealthy empire had existed for millennia, China was then an inward-looking country hardly known to the West. The Son of Heaven, as China’s emperor was called, ruled over an elaborate and entrenched bureaucracy of mandarins who, besides carrying out his bidding, celebrated their refined tastes in literature, cuisine, and dress. This official class happened to covet robes trimmed with luxurious furs. They had caressed the lustrous pelt of the sea otter furs brought by the Russian promyshlenniki from Alaska that made it across the Middle Kingdom’s restrictive borders. There may have even been official decrees that mandarins trim parts of their robes with sea otter fur.

Among the Cook expedition’s British sailors hoping to make a fortune in sea otters was a lone New Englander, John Ledyard. With the Cook voyage, he had become the first native-born American citizen to set foot on North America’s Pacific Coast. A romantic and footloose son and grandson of sea captains who had died young, Ledyard had dropped out of Dartmouth College and a career in the ministry, built a dugout canoe, and paddled down the Connecticut River and out into the wide world, eventually signing on with Cook and his Resolution and Discovery.

After the Third Voyage’s end in 1780, the thirty-year-old Ledyard returned to New England. In a four-month flurry of writing, Ledyard knocked out a memoir about his travels with Cook in which he reported the sea otter discoveries, as did other memoirists of the voyage. Promoting with his memoir the idea of setting up a beaver skin and otter fur trade, Ledyard assembled a consortium of Philadelphia and Boston merchants to finance ships to the Northwest Coast and launch the first American—or European—fur trade with China. As the plan neared fruition, however, the partners intrigued against each other. Ledyard’s great scheme collapsed. He would, however, play a significant if largely unsung role in planting the first American colony on the West Coast.

The ever-restless Ledyard didn’t quit after the Boston fiasco, sailing for Europe in 1784 and assembling a consortium of Brittany merchants. When this also fell apart, he traveled to Paris and called on the newly appointed American minister to France, forty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson. The two hit it off instantly. They shared a passion for exploration, geography, native tribes, and Indian vocabularies. Both of their fathers had been adventurous men who had died young. Ledyard, having visited both Asia and the Northwest Coast, expounded to Minister Jefferson on his innovative theory that native tribes had traveled from Asia across the narrow Bering Strait to populate the Americas. Jefferson was fascinated. They often dined together at Jefferson’s Paris house in Jefferson’s fine gilt chairs, in front of a crackling fire, amid a wide-ranging welter of conversation with other footloose young Americans who were living in the Paris of the Enlightenment. Jefferson also lent the ever-broke Ledyard sums equivalent today to a thousand dollars simply to survive.

“My friend, my brother, my Father,” Ledyard wrote to Jefferson, “I know not by what title to address you. . . .”

Jefferson’s own father had been a Virginia planter and pioneering surveyor who, when Thomas was a young boy, had joined an exploratory surveying expedition deep into Virginia’s western wilderness. Due in part to this legacy of exploration and mapmaking, Jefferson grasped the geography of North America on a far more continental scale than most of his contemporaries. Starting as a young man, he looked west to the wilderness that lay beyond the Appalachians. As governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781, he commissioned military expeditions far beyond Virginia’s settlements into the wilderness lands that lay over the Appalachians, including a proposal to erect a fort—its design meticulously sketched by his own hand—where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi some seven hundred miles west of Virginia’s coast. Ledyard’s stories opened Jefferson’s eyes to the wealth in furs and geographical possibilities of the Northwest Coast. At their “petite soupers” in front of his Parisian fireplace in 1785 he enthusiastically embraced Ledyard’s scheme for an American sea voyage to the Northwest Coast to trade for furs and sell them on the rich Chinese market. Jefferson was also suspicious of a French scientific expedition similar to Cook’s that was just then sailing for the Pacific under Lapérouse; he believed it, too, had hidden commercial designs on the West Coast. After a third attempt to assemble a consortium of merchants came to nothing, a frustrated Ledyard, brainstorming with Jefferson, hatched a plan to set off alone to the Northwest Coast. Like the ancient native peoples in his migration theory, Ledyard planned to cross Siberia by foot and coach, hop the Bering Strait by small Russian fur boat to Alaska, then, as explorer rather than trader, walk across North America to his home in Connecticut.

“[M]y tour round the world by Land,” Ledyard described it to Jefferson.

And off John Ledyard went—20 years before the Lewis and Clark expedition—having planted in the future president’s mind a glimpse of the potential economic and political significance of the Northwest Coast and Pacific Rim.

As the lone romantic adventurer struck off into the Russian winter, expeditions from several nations simultaneously prepared to sail for the Northwest Coast in the mid-1780s with the exclusive commercial purpose of trading at high profit for sea otter and other valuable furs. John Meares, a former Royal Navy officer, sailed for the Northwest Coast in 1786 to trade and got trapped in ice far in the north, in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, losing twenty-three of his crew to scurvy. Russian traders built a permanent fur post in Alaska in 1784. Boston merchants under Charles Bulfinch raised funds for two American ships, the Columbia Rediviva and the Lady Washington. Commanded by Captain Robert Gray and Captain John Kendrick, these sailed out of Boston Harbor in 1787 to round Cape Horn and head for the West Coast.

It’s a measure of the scale and remoteness of the Northwest trade that it took three years for Captain Gray to complete his trading mission. (Kendrick didn’t return with him.) After acquiring sea otter furs in late 1788 and early 1789, he sailed across the Pacific to Canton, traded the Columbia’s cargo of pelts and loaded up with Chinese tea, and sailed across the Indian Ocean, around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope then up the South and North Atlantic, finally returning home to Boston Harbor in August 1790. He was welcomed by a parade celebrating his feat for captaining the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe. Captain Gray, however, wasted little time celebrating. Seeing vast opportunities in the Pacific, a mere six weeks after arriving in Boston, he and the Columbia again sailed for the Northwest Coast.

Trading practices had changed just in the four years since his first visit. Enough merchant ships, both American and British, had touched at the Northwest Coast in the rush for fur that the natives trading with the “Boston men,” as they knew whites, charged far higher prices in nails, knives, and other goods than during his first voyage. Gray wasn’t inclined to negotiate. He and other sea captains began to take furs by force. The Indians retaliated, and the violence escalated in the Coastal Indian villages of today’s Vancouver Island.

“I was sent,” wrote John Boit, one of Gray’s officers, in his journal entry for March 27, 1792, “with three boats all well man’d and arm’d, to destroy the village of Opitsatah. . . . [I] am grieved to think Capt. Gray shou’d let his passions go so far. . . . This fine village [of two hundred houses and massive ceremonial wood carvings], the work of Ages, was in a short time totally destroy’d.” Investigating the coast southward for new trading opportunities, Captain Gray guided his ship across a treacherous bar ripped by currents and pounded by heavy surf. He found himself in the mouth of a large and powerful river that discharged into the Pacific. On May 12, 1792, Captain Gray, during his second visit to the Northwest Coast, thus became the official Euro-American discoverer of the long-rumored Great River of the West. Sailing thirteen miles up it, he named it after his ship—the Columbia. He realized from its volume that it was a very large river but he had no idea how far into the North American continent it might reach.

Five months later a rival explorer, British naval officer George Vancouver, on a four-year mission to chart the entire Northwest Coast, arrived at the river’s mouth. Sending small boats one hundred miles up it, Vancouver officially claimed the river and its enormous unexplored interior basin for Britain, setting up a potential conflict of claims to a chunk of territory whose size no one knew and to a river whose source was unknown

By the time Astor’s ship, the Tonquin, arrived at the Columbia bar in 1811, American and British merchant ships, using Hawaii as a port of call, had been sailing to the Northwest Coast for more than twenty years, since Captain Gray’s first arrival. Thus John Jacob Astor didn’t originate the idea of trading goods for furs on the Northwest Coast and selling them across the Pacific in China. What Astor did was to conceive it on a scale far larger, more global, more intricate, more elegant, and more profitable than anyone had before. His innovation was to link the interior North American fur trade over the Rockies with the Pacific coastal fur trade and link that to the Russian Alaskan fur trade, and link that to China, to London, to Paris, to New York. Astor’s thinking revolved on entire continents and oceans.

Astor, along with Thomas Jefferson, understood the global implications of the Pacific Rim and its role in a future world far more clearly than his contemporaries—that one day it would serve a role equal to or greater than the Atlantic’s, and finally knit the globe into one great trading empire. Those passengers arriving at the mouth of the Columbia aboard the Tonquin under Captain Thorn’s command in late March 1811 would be the first emissaries to make that global empire a reality.

One wonders why Captain Thorn simply didn’t wait for the weather to settle a bit before sending Mr. Fox in a small boat into the tumult of wave and squall and current to look for a channel through the Columbia Bar. Trying to fathom the captain’s exact reasoning is as imprecise an exercise as trying to sound the Columbia Bar. Captain Thorn had been undermined and humiliated by the Scottish partners, clerks, and voyageurs throughout the six-month voyage from New York Harbor. He trusted no one aboard his ship. In his eyes, even his first mate, Mr. Fox, had grown far too friendly with the Scottish partners. In Hawaii, Captain Thorn had heard rumors from passing ship captains that diplomatic tensions were rising between the United States and Britain. He prepared himself should the partners who were British citizens attempt mutiny aboard his ship. Deeply isolated—from his passengers, his own officers and crew—and surrounded by the infinite and uncaring Pacific, Thorn’s mind took its own turns. No one, including Thorn himself, could say exactly what those were. Irving and Ross claim that it was simply malice on Thorn’s part. It’s conceivable, however, that in his regimented adherence to mission, configured with his anger and humiliation and paranoia, he believed he was doing his commander in chief, Mr. Astor, a favor by dispatching the whaleboat over the bar in this tumultuous weather, carrying a load of bad apples, and thus weeding out these, the most expendable of the men.

In the shrieking northwest squalls, the Scottish partners could see that this mission amounted to near suicide for the men assigned to the boat. McKay and McDougall approached Captain Thorn on deck and asked that he wait for a break in the weather.

“But he was deaf to entreaties,” reported Ross, “stamped, and swore that a combination was formed to frustrate all his designs. The partners’ interference, therefore, only riveted him the more in his determination, and Mr. Fox was peremptorily ordered to proceed.”

Fox was now visibly upset. He had personal ghosts that haunted the Columbia Bar. He turned to the Scottish partners, Ross wrote, with tears in his eyes.

“ ‘My uncle was drowned here not many years ago, and now I am going to lay my bones with his.’ ”

Fox then shook hands with the partners and others standing near him on deck, and climbed down into the boat. One of the partners handed him a pair of bedsheets, which could serve as a sail.

“Farewell, my friends!” Fox called out. “We will perhaps meet again in the next world.”

The small boat then pushed off from the side of the tossing Tonquin, and all hands aboard lined the rail in silence to watch her row into the chaos.   

From ASTORIA: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark. Copyright © 2014 by Peter Stark. Reprinted courtesy of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.