The Empty Anchorage

Finally, the explorers of the Lewis and Clark Expedition were getting their first good view of the Columbia River’s junction with the Pacific. “the Ocian is imedeately in front and gives us an extensive view of it from Cape disapointment to Point addams,” reported William Clark on 15 November 1805. But he saw no ships at anchor. Nothing.

Clark later made a map of that empty scene, with a forlorn little anchor showing where American and European ships put in from the Pacific to trade with the local Indians. And contrary to hope, Clark and co-leader Meriwether Lewis saw no trading vessels at that anchorage during the entire winter they spent in the vicinity. The home-bound captains started back up the river in March, 1806, wondering where all the ships had been.

Their non-rendezvous not only produced one of the most puzzling yarns of the Lewis and Clark adventure—for a Boston merchantman perhaps sailed in and out of the Columbia estuary unseen by any Expedition member—but also generated over the years a harvest of unwarranted speculation by some historians of the Expedition. These strained theories dealt with the state of mind of the American explorers upon reaching their Western goal, and the “inexplicable” failure of President Jefferson to send a ship to resupply or even rescue the transcontinental travelers.

In his instructions for the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Jefferson gave Lewis the clear option of coming home by sea if it seemed the overland trip to the Pacific had been so scary that it seemed “eminently dangerous” to go back the same way. Even if there were no such fears, Jefferson also gave a non-optional order to “send two of your trusted people back by sea,” with a copy of the Expedition’s records, aboard any ship encountered on the coast.

That the captains couldn’t hook up with a ship during their four-month stay at the Columbia’s mouth was “the greatest disappointment of their journey,” concluded John Bakeless in his 1947 book on the Expedition.^[3]John Bakeless, Lewis and Clark, Partners in Discovery. (New York: Wm. Morrow, 1947), 129. “They would much rather have gone by ship,” wrote Western historian David Lavender in a 1958 account of the non-rendezvous.^[4]David, Lavender, Land of Giants (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1958), 52. yet the upbeat sentiments recorded in the captains’ journals support neither conjecture, and Lavender has abandoned that earlier view in his excellent new Lewis and Clark book, The Way to the Western Sea.^[5]David Lavender, The Way to the Western Sea (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 267, 294.

Certainly the tired and tattered traveling party would have been delighted to stumble upon a Yankee trading vessel at the Columbia anchorage, with its news of home and a trove of luxuries the men were in want of—salt, tobacco, whiskey. Indeed, the hope of a ship’s arrival was a factor in the captains’ decision to endure a rainy winter at the river’s mouth instead of seeking drier quarters inland. According to the Indians, ships would start arriving by February.

Far from regarding the sea as an escape route home, the just-arrived leaders were already fitting a ship’s stores into their plans for going back by land. Tobacco and new clothes would of course be nice, but Clark ranked other items more important in a journal entry written just nine days after his first view of the empty anchorage. From a ship, he said, “we might precure a fresh Supply of Indian trinkets to purchase provisions on our return home.”

No trinkets would be needed at sea, or in the ports of Hawaii or China. But the Expedition was desperately low on trashy blue beads, the don’t-leave-home-without-them currency of tribes the party would re-encounter on the way back over the Rockies. After their relatively peaceful outward trip Lewis and Clark couldn’t think it “eminently dangerous” to meet those Indians again in order to tie up some important loose ends of Western geography. Lewis wanted to check out a shortcut between the Bitterroot Mountains and the Great Falls of the Missouri, missed during the looping outbound journey, and to prove the northern extent of the Louisiana Purchase at the Marias River watershed; Clark knew the President would be interested in an eyewitness account of the fabled Yellowstone. There was plenty to make the land, not the sea, their preferred route home.

The explorers were ready to start back up the Columbia in late March 1806, and still no trading vessels had appeared. Surely a sail would soon poke above the Pacific horizon; from Indian information Lewis and Clark had made a list of 13 sea captains who regularly came to trade or hunt elk.^[6]Just as Lewis and Clark moved homeward up the Columbia the Sitka-based Russian ship Juno, commanded by Count Nikolai Rezanov, appeared at the river’s mouth. Bad winds and currents prevented … Continue reading To follow the spirit of Jefferson’s instructions the party might have been expected to leave two note-book-laden enlisted men behind, waiting to catch the first seaborne ride home. But Lewis decided against it, rationalizing that his 31-man force was “too small to think of leaving any of them to return to the U’States by sea, particularly as we shall be necessarily divided into three or four parties on our return in order to accomplish the objects we have in view.” Besides, he said, the overland group probably would get home ahead of any wandering sea trader.

Matters would have been greatly simplified had a U.S. Navy frigate stood into the Columbia estuary during that winter, expressly dispatched by Jefferson to meet whatever needs the explorers had. Why didn’t he do it?

“Jefferson’s failure to send a ship to the mouth of the Columbia is inexplicable,” wrote Bernard DeVoto in his condensed edition of the journals.^[7]Bernard DeVoto, ed., The Journals of Lewis and Clark (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), 293. That was “one of the great mysteries connected with the Lewis and Clark expedition,” said Richard Dillon, Lewis’s biographer.^[8]Richard Dillon, Meriwether Lewis (New York: Coward-McCann, 1965), 224.

It was a judgment call that might be debated, but the President’s reasons weren’t that mysterious: his small Navy was fighting a war elsewhere, which would have made a relief voyage quite difficult, both logistically and politically.

When Jefferson entered office in 1801, the Navy was just unwinding from the recent undeclared sea war with France. Frigates hastily built during that war were being laid up, which at first was fine with the new President, who saw the Navy as a symbol of Big Government. As Vice President in 1799 he had opposed a bluewater force which, he said, “by its own expenses and the eternal wars in which it will implicate us, will grind us with public burthens, and sink us under them.”^[9]Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President, Second Term (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974 paperback ed.), 493.

But Jefferson soon found himself conducting a new naval buildup. Ships from the Barbary states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli had for some years been raiding American and European trading vessels in the Mediterranean, unless bribes were paid to call them off. By early 1802, half of the U.S. Navy’s 14 commissioned frigates were either protectively cruising the Mediterranean or under orders to go there; all the rest were under repair or laid up. Ships of the Mediterranean fleet were rotated home as their crews’ enlistments expired, and replaced by others taken out of mothballs for the Jefferson’s Barbary Coast War. In August 1803, as Lewis waited for drunken Pittsburgh carpenters to finish the expedition’s keelboat, the frigate Constitution—later famed as “Old Ironside”—sailed from Boston for three years of Mediterranean duty.

In October 1803, the 36-gun frigate Philadelphia ran aground off Tripoli and was captured; three months later an American raiding party led by Capt. Stephen Decatur blew her up. The loss of the Philadelphia, Jefferson told Congress, “renders it expedient to increase our force, and enlarge our expenses in the Mediterranean.”^[10]Walter Lowrie and Matthew Clarke, eds. American State Papers, Naval Affairs. (Washington: 1832-61)20 March 1804, 1:122.

When the President wrote Lewis’s instructions in June 1803, nobody knew when—or whether—the explorers would reach the Pacific at the Columbia or anywhere else. It would have required a wild guess for the government to peel off a warship from its hard-pressed fleet for a precision linkup with the land party, so Jefferson just outlined his opportunistic plan for hitchhiking on any available merchant vessel. The next decision-point for sending a ship was in July 1805, when Lewis’s first report of the Expedition’s progress reached Washington from Fort Mandan. Lewis told the President the Columbia’s mouth was still his goal, but gave no target date except to suggest misleadingly that he didn’t plan to linger there, but instead might make it all the way back to “this place” by the winter of 1805-1806.^[11]Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 1:234.

Instead of sending emergency orders to the nearest port, Jefferson promptly left for the cool breezes of Monticello. Clearly, the Expedition’s timetable was still too fluid to plan a Columbia rendezvous when the Navy already had six frigates, four brigs, two schooners, one sloop, two bomb vessels, and 16 gunboats stationed on the other side of the world.^[12]Gardner Allen, Our Navy ad the Barbary Corsairs (Hamdon, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1965 reprint of 1905 ed.), 226. Though the U.S. signed a Barbary peace treaty on 10 June 1805, hostilities … Continue reading Besides, it looked like bad politics. Diverting one of the handful of ships then on home duty, such as the new 18-gun brig Hornet, might have provided cries from Federalists that the President was gambling with national security to promote his Louisiana Purchase boondoggle. The President could have chartered a civilian ship for a Lewis and Clark rendezvous, but that would have just added to a rising $1.4 million naval budget that his own Republicans in Congress were already complaining about.^[13]In his 1893 edition of Nicholas Biddle‘s The History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (New York: Francis P. Harper), Elliott Coues observed that the advantage of sending a relief ship to the … Continue reading

Whether Navy or chartered, a Lewis and Clark resupply ship leaving an East Coast port would have had to reach the Pacific Northwest by way of stormy Cape Horn—still no pleasure cruise in 1805. Sailing ships could fight their way around the tip of south America in a lucky seven or eight days, or be stuck there for weeks by contrary winds.^[14]Cape Horn’s capacity for torpedoing schedules was shown vividly during the notorious voyage of HMS Bounty, attempting in 1788 to sail westward in the Pacific to collect island breadfruit. Capt. … Continue reading The uncertain timing was hardly ideal for a sea captain trying to match movements with an overland expedition on a slippery schedule of its own.

True, such voyages were being made rather routinely in the blossoming Northwest fur trade. Captain Samuel Hill, of Boston, gave this account:

I sailed in the Lydia on the 31 August 1804, and proceeded round Cape Horn, touched at the Sandwich Islands and arrived in Safety on the North West Coast, at Columbia River, on 5 April 1805 where we remained near a month, during which time I eyscended the main or S. Eastern Branch of the Columbia, to the Great Rapids in my boat, a distance I believe of about 140 miles or perhaps less.”^[15]Samuel Hill, >Autobiography of Samuel Hill and Other Matter About Him (Manuscript in New York Public Library), 12.

So it took Hill seven months to sail from Boston to Cape Disappointment. If in July 1805, Jefferson had issued instant drop-everything orders to a Navy ship conveniently in port, a similar seven-month trip would have brought it into the Columbia estuary in February 1806. Perfect timing: Lewis and Clark were rusting in the rain at Fort Clatsop, still hoping to see a sail. But what if Lewis had been able to stick to his optimistic schedule sent to Washington the year before? He would already have been gone, perhaps shivering back in North Dakota. Or what if the outbound explorers had blithely paddled up the Marias River, thinking it was the Missouri, and getting stranded without horses in the mountains? What if storms had blocked Cape Horn, or corrupt provisioners in Norfolk had delayed the supply ship’s departure? In retrospect Jefferson’s non-action seems justified by so many “what ifs”—including the actual course of events in a risky naval mission proved unnecessary to the expedition’s success. No more blue beads? Lewis and Clark instead wangled Indian provisions with a fake medical practice, and even sold the buttons off their uniform coats. One way or another, they coped.

Captain’s Hill’s Lydia

The non-rendezvous story is incomplete, of course, without a further account of Captain Hill’s Boston brig, Lydia. After his first call at the Columbia’s mouth in April 1805, (when Lewis and Clark were just leaving Fort Mandan), Hill steered north toward the well-established Indian fur trading center at Nootka sound, on Vancouver Island. At a stop along the way he was given a letter signed by Englishman John R. Jewitt, begging to be rescued from captivity by Indians at Nootka. A vocal faction of the Lydia’s crew advised against getting involved, but Hill sailed to Nootka and freed Jewitt and a companion. The onboard controversy about this dramatic rescue evidently was Hill’s one big memory of the whole voyage. “Thus it pleased the Almighty will, that I should succeed in effecting what so many of my countrymen laughed me to scorn for wishing to attempt,” the captain gloated years later.^[16]Hill, Autobiography, 13. “My health was impaired” by the onboard feud over Jewitt’s rescue, wrote Hill, who feared it would hurt his standing with Lydia owner Theodore Lyman. By … Continue reading

Jewitt was saved on 19 July 1805. As a passenger on the Lydia, he picked up the story in a ghost-written narrative published in 1815, after Lewis and Clark had become heroes. “Nearly four months” after the rescue, said Jewitt’s narrative, the Lydia again put into the Columbia estuary to get timber for new masts. “We proceeded about ten miles up the river, to a small Indian village, where we heard from the inhabitants, that captains Clark and Lewis, from the United States of America, had been there about a fortnight before, on their journey overland, and had left several medals with them, which they shewed us.”^[17]Robert Heizner, ed., Narratives of the Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt While Held as a Captive of the Nootka Indians of Vancouver Island, 1803 to 1805 (Ramona, California: Ballena Press, … Continue reading

Jewitt gave no date for this encounter, and Hill didn’t mention it at all, but a post-rescue sail of “nearly four months” would have put the Lydia into the Columbia estuary in November 1805. That meant Lewis and Clark had arrived at the western end of their overland journey about two weeks before the Lydia met the Indians, so the brig and the Expedition seemingly were in the vicinity at the same time. For some reason, the Indians never told Lewis and Clark of the ship’s visit. Thus the Lydia missed its “rendezvous with history.”

But not entirely. Its Indian trading mission completed, the Lydia sailed for China in August 1806, reaching Canton on 2 November 1806 (Hill’s date). The brig carried a “paper” left with the Indians by Lewis and Clark before their departure the previous March. As described in a Lewis journal entry for 18 March 1806, the document told of the Expedition’s arrival at the Pacific, listed the party’s names and mapped its overland route. Interestingly, the paper’s conveyance by the Lydia is mentioned neither in Jewitt’s narrative nor in Hill’s autobiography. We know about it only from a third writer, Philadelphia lawyer Nicholas Biddle, in his 1814 authorized narrative of the Expedition. Biddle reported that in January, 1807, a “gentleman at Canton” made a copy of the paper and forwarded it on the Lydia’s final homeward leg to “his friend in Philadelphia,” with this explanation:

“Captain Hill, while on the coast met some Indian natives near the mouth of the Columbia river, who delivered to him a paper, of which I enclose you a copy. It had been committed to their charge by Captains Clarke and Lewis, who had penetrated to the Pacific Ocean.”^[18]James Hosmer, Intro., History of the Expedition of Captains Lewis and Clark, Reprinted from the Edition of 1814 (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), 2:216-17.

The Lydia left China in February, 1807, and reached Boston the following May, with both Jewitt and Hill still silent about any “paper.” However, the copy somehow got into Biddle’s hands in time for him to use it in his 1814 narrative. (Was Biddle himself the “friend in Philadelphia”?) Thus the Lydia’s tenuous Lewis and Clark connection has been part of the expedition’s literature almost from the beginning.

An Unresolved Story

There are, however, loose ends to the Lydia story. At face value, the historical record describes two separate incidents connecting the Lydia and the expedition; Jewitt’s claim of encountering Indians who had seen the explorers in November 1805, and Biddle’s story of Captain Hill getting the Lewis and Clark “paper” from Indians after the Expedition’s departure in March 1806. Were there really two? Jewitt’s memory could have been shaky. He kept a diary of his Nootka captivity, but stopped it after his rescue in July 1805. Years later, Connecticut ghostwriter Richard Alsop used “repeated interview” with the freed sailor to produce the Jewitt narrative published in 1815, including recollected details of what happened after the rescue.

What if the Lydia’s Columbia visit for new masts—the one Jewitt recalled happening in November 1805—actually occurred in April 1806? That would have precluded the poignant tale about the near-miss between the brig an the Expedition, while allowing Captain Hill to pick up the Lewis and Clark “paper” in line with Biddle’s story. The idea is plausible enough to have persuaded David Lavender in his new book that Jewitt probably got his Columbia estuary dates mixed up, and that “there was no ship there during the Americans’ stay.”^[19]Lavender, Western Sea, 400.

The fact remains, however, that Jewitt was there and Lavender wasn’t. The argument finally hinges on the credibility of an eyewitness. The Lydia, alas, seems fated for an enduring stormy voyage through history.