The Deadly Voyages of Captain Thorn

0:00Expedia and VisitScotland invite you to come step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past that is fully present today and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape today at Expedia.com slash VisitScotland. It's baseball, but so much more.

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1:04On this episode, we go back a few hundred years for the tale of a missing ship on the northwest coast. The narrative weaves together so many threads that stretch far, far beyond the mysterious cove where the vessel is reputed to have met its fate. This story is about a ship, but really it concerns a man named Jonathan Thorne. We touch on diplomacy, war, trade, colonialism, indigenous history, a man deeply lacking in emotional intelligence to put a charitable spin on it, and even the Goonies.

1:35I think one of the driving factors for him is he is so ready to be done with his passengers. And this is where I really, I kind of waffle on, is he a villain or is he a victim? McAndrew Burns is executive director of the Clatsop County Historical Society.

2:06He wants to dump these guys and get on with his mission, which is to head north and meet with the Russians and do some trading along the route. And he just, he's anxious to get in, get a stockade and an outpost built and get these guys off his ship. Burns is sitting at a picnic table behind a huge Victorian house, not far from the mouth of the Columbia River. He's talking about one of the most infamous characters in Pacific Northwest maritime history, Captain Jonathan Thorne.

2:39Thorne was a young man around 30 years old and a veteran of the U.S. Navy when he was hired by John Jacob Astor, America's first multimillionaire. The job was to sail the ship from New York to the northwest coast of North America. Besser has this vision of, he's already got the largest fur company in the United States, the American Fur Company. And he's a rival to the two biggies, the Northwest Company from the British and the Hudson's Bay Company from the British.

3:10And they're kind of using up all the furs in the Great Lakes area and kind of this next frontier for the fur industry is the Pacific Northwest. This was in 1811, just a few years after the American explorers Lewis and Clark had identified the northwest coast as a great place to expand American interests in the business of exporting furs to Asia. And Lewis and Clark get back and John Jacob Astor starts to formulate based on their maps and their descriptions that rather than the risk of sending my ships from New York,

3:44why not set up some permanent outposts and why don't we kind of follow the Lewis and Clark trail and I can ship stuff over land? And then I really just have to have my ships running back and forth between China and the Pacific Northwest and goods can be shipped both directions using the same route. And that's why Captain Thorne sailed the Tonkin from New York all the way to the Pacific Northwest, carrying supplies necessary to establish a settlement at the mouth of the Columbia. The settlement would be called Astoria in honor of John Jacob Astor.

4:18But before a location could be chosen to begin building Astoria, Captain Thorne had to enter the Columbia River and find a safe place to land the ship. This meant getting across a treacherous spot at the river's mouth called the Columbia Bar.

4:33It's here that wind, waves, tide and current, and an unseen and constantly shifting shoal of sand often combine and amplify with deadly results to mariners. Even today, with modern aids to navigation and a huge jetty built of boulders by the Army Corps of Engineers, the Columbia Bar can be a hazard to marine traffic. And the area is still called Graveyard of the Pacific for the hundreds of vessels lost there over the centuries. Captain Thorne was certainly not used to entering a mouth as dangerous as the Columbia River Bar.

5:09You know, the Native Americans weren't going to come out past the bar because they were smarter than we're not going to try to cross that thing. You know, once a ship comes in, then we'll start talking to you and welcoming you and trying to, you know, make some trades with you. So there's no lighthouse. There's no Coast Guard. Before Captain Thorne's attempt on a blustery day in March of 1811, only a handful of other sailing vessels had successfully crossed the bar, including the first ship to make it. That vessel was captained by American Robert Gray in 1792, who named the river Columbia after his ship.

5:43British explorer Captain George Vancouver crossed the bar too, though he had famously sailed past the mouth before Robert Gray and somehow missed claiming the river for Great Britain. Vancouver's oversight still puzzles historians. Captain Thorne's fame, which is actually more like infamy, comes not from any feat of exploration or from naming a key piece of the landscape. Thorne is remembered mostly for his temper and his impatience, which on that day at the mouth of the Columbia turned deadly.

6:15Historians have been sometimes, I think, very fairly judgmental of Captain Thorne, and other times I think maybe he gets a little bit of a raw deal. He did not handle arriving in stormy weather at the mouth well. I think that clearly any historian would agree. It's stormy, it's going to pass, wait a few days, and no, let's throw eight men's lives away, when if you just waited a few days, you could have come right in. The lives of those eight men would be thrown away while trying to cross the Columbia Bar.

6:50Unfortunately, this wasn't to be the only occasion on the northwest coast of North America when Captain Jonathan Thorne's missteps would lead to death and destruction. The next time it happened, it would be on a scale beyond anyone's grasp, and it still leaves many questions unanswered to this day. From KSL Podcasts, I'm Felix Bunnell. This is Unsolved Histories, the deadly voyages of Captain Thorne. We'll see you next time.

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8:01Astoria, Oregon is a popular tourist destination these days. It's at the mouth of the Columbia River an hour or so from Portland. It was once a busy center of maritime traffic and commerce, but along its riverfront nowadays, 19th century canneries have given way to breweries, and old warehouses have become maritime museums. The hills above the river in Astoria are lined with Victorian homes, including one made famous by a Richard Donner-directed classic film about a group of misfit kids and their search for pirate gold,

8:33which was shot here in the 1980s. Haven't you ever heard of that guy? What's his name? The pirate guy. One-eyed willy. One-eyed willy. Like the Goonies, Astor's men were seeking treasure. Not gold, but fur, when they sailed the Tonkin. There's a beloved first mate. Somehow, when there's a captain that's a questionable character, there's always a beloved first mate, Mr. Fox. It's like Gilligan's Island. It is. Or the mutiny on the bounty. McAndrew Burns of the Clatsop County Historical Society says it was a stormy day in early spring

9:05when Captain Thorne and the passengers and crew of the Tonkin arrived at the mouth of the Columbia River on March 22, 1811. From the ship, it wasn't clear where the safest path was through the Sandy Shoal. That's the bar in Columbia Bar. On this particular day, as it often is at that time of year, the bar was hidden beneath the waves and swell.

9:30Swell is the name for big, rolling seas that can swamp even a big vessel. All the moving water at the mouth of the Columbia resulted from a complex and rapidly shifting mix of wind, tidal current from the Pacific Ocean, and river current, too. Captain Thorne's solution was to send a small boat out ahead to scout a path for the ship to follow. With the wind and water in fierce motion, no one on board thought this was a good idea. The first group he puts into a longboat to kind of see if there's a safe way across this tumultuous sea

10:03is Mr. Fox, and the beloved first mate refuses to go at first. And Captain Thorne says, I'm ordering you, and he says, I'm going to die. And he says something about, if you were afraid of a watery death, you should have stayed in New York. Captain Thorne's impatience and unwillingness to wait for better and safer weather to cross the Columbia Bar put his men in peril that day. It wasn't the first time on the long voyage where Thorne's actions endangered men who were aboard the Tonkin. The ship sailed from New York in September 1810.

10:36From there, they went thousands of miles south in the Atlantic Ocean to the tip of South America, where they rounded the treacherous Cape Horn. Remember, this is more than a hundred years before the Panama Canal, so there was no other route. From Cape Horn, they sailed thousands more miles to Hawaii, and then another 1,500 to the northwest coast. The voyage took six months. But trouble first came only weeks into the voyage, in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Argentina. So they stopped the Falkland Islands, they're almost out of fresh water,

11:06and they need to make some repairs, and a number of the passengers, the clerks and the partners, they go on land to kind of explore a little bit. It's the formal status of those passengers that seems to have presented a problem for Captain Thorne. They weren't like the Navy crew members who would have been under his command were the Tonkin, a Navy ship. They weren't even crew members under Thorne's command at all. They were clerks and partners, men hired by John Jacob Astor to run a fur business,

11:36who had to travel by ship to get to the job site. And he had said, we're going to leave at two o'clock, make sure you're back on board at two. And two comes, and there's one long boat with eight guys still on shore, and he starts sailing away. You know, he raises the anchor and unfurls the sails or whatever you do on a ship. And the eight guys hit the beach, and they start waving, hey, don't leave, you forgot us. And he can clearly see them, and he just keeps going. Captain Thorne then ordered the crew members who were under his command to keep going,

12:09even though other clerks and partners on board the ship were begging Thorne to go back and pick up the men left behind. That gave the stranded men little choice but to try and catch up. And they jump in this boat, and they're sailing away, or rowing away, and it's four or six hours. Finally, after hours of watching the desperate men trying to catch up to the sailing ship in a rowboat, Captain Thorne was convinced to stop. It wasn't because he suddenly became sympathetic to the men's plight. It was only because a relative on board the Tonkin picked up a weapon.

12:41One of the partners, I think it was his nephew, Stuart, pulls some weapons and threatens to blow Captain Thorne's head off if you don't stop and let them catch up or go back. And I think in that case, he goes back and catches them. Prevailing winds in the Pacific Ocean meant that ships traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast would stop at what was then called the Sandwich Islands, now called Hawaii. It was there in that tropical paradise where, once again, Captain Thorne's impatience contributed to another battle with the clerks and partners.

13:15In Hawaii, the same exact thing happens. This time, he's not threatened. But my understanding is that time, he doesn't stop and go back. He just stops. And they still have to spend six hours catching up to him. And his rationale is, I gave an order. We were leaving it, too. And I've got a schedule that I'm keeping. And I'm under orders from John Jacob Astor to deliver this group and successfully get my ship around the Cape and to the mouth of the Columbia. And you're not obeying. I'm not going to wait for you.

13:46Part of this is a bad combination with these clerks who are chafing under this kind of command and are grumpy about the conditions. And then Thorne is, he's like 30 or something. Yeah, I do know from our perspective, he's a relatively young man for the time period. 30 is fairly seasoned. But I think he's just not used to people that don't instantly, yes, sir. And that he has to kind of explain himself. And I'm the captain of the ship. I don't have to explain myself to anybody. And, you know, I think for some of the partners, there's an overinflation of how important we are.

14:20And they didn't understand that this is not a luxury cruise. This is transportation. Those partners and clerks on board the Tonkin who couldn't be ordered around are one of the reasons we know so much about the voyage from New York. No less than three of the men would later publish exhaustive and unvarnished eyewitness accounts of Astor's enterprise on the northwest coast, including the difficulty getting there. Those men were Alexander Ross, Ross Cox, and Gabrielle Franchier. Astor also commissioned American writer Washington Irving,

14:52better known for the legend of Sleepy Hollow, to pen a more sympathetic version of the story.

14:59Back on board the Tonkin on that fateful day in March 1811, it probably didn't come as much of a surprise to anyone that Captain Thorne wasn't willing to wait for the weather to improve before attempting to cross the Columbia Bar. First Mate Fox wasn't the only one Thorne ordered into a longboat, which is a big rowboat, to find a safe route through the Sandy Shoal. Also aboard were several Kanakas, or native Sandwich Islanders, recruited at the previous stop in Hawaii. They were young, strong men with plenty of experience

15:31handling small boats on the ocean. Still, they were no match for the graveyard of the Pacific. Many clerks, Ross and Franchier, they write, they all have kind of the same story here, but everyone was crying. Despite the protests, Captain Thorne insisted that the longboat be lowered over the side of the Tonkin. And Fox looks up as the boat's going down, and he says, yeah, my uncle died here, and now I'm going to die here too. I'll see you on the other side, boys, or something like that.

16:02And we all knew he was never going to come back, and he never did. And there were a number of Hawaiians that were also lost. This spring, Uber Eats has you covered. Whether you're celebrating mom, dad, or your favorite grad, not all of us are great planners, and with the Uber Eats gift hub, you don't have to be. Send flowers, perfume, champagne, or just their favorite meal straight to their door. Gifts arrive in as little as 25 minutes, and you can add a personalized video message

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17:16The actions of Captain Thorne at the mouth of the Columbia have never been made into a Hollywood movie, though there was a theatrical play produced in Portland recently about the entire Astoria Odyssey, which touched on the events aboard the ship. In 1810, John Jacob Astor funded two expeditions, one over land and one by sea. Of the 140 people he engaged, 61 died and two went insane. In fact, it's such a compelling story.

17:46Even the morning news team at the radio station where I work in Seattle was able to pull off our own condensed performance. We did it a few years back to mark the anniversary of the landing of the Astorians. I put together a script using language taken from those original accounts written by the clerks and partners. And that's me doing the narration. The man in charge of the ship was a strict disciplinarian. His name was Captain Jonathan Thorne, and his character had become clear not long after the Tonquin left New York the previous September. Astor's men spend all their time laying about on the deck

18:19and writing in their journals. When it's lights out, it means it's off with your lamps. Now!

18:26If any man shall disobey me, I shall blow his brains out! I wasn't the only one who didn't take kindly to being told to snuff my candle at eight bells. It's very important that I document every step of this long journey. That's Ross Cox, one of at least three fur traders on board the Tonquin who later published their accounts of life on the ship with Captain Thorne and of the attempt to settle and found what would become Astoria. And this was just five years after Lewis and Clark had explored the same area. If you ask me, the whole voyage around the Cape was cursed with trouble on account of Captain Thorne.

18:59No, that's not a member of the Star Trek's crew. That's another of the many scribes aboard the ship, Gabrielle Franchera. In the Falkland Islands, where we stopped for fresh water, Thorne was sailed through. He knew he'd left behind eight of my shipmates. Eight good men, abandoned. The behavior of those men threatened the success of our endeavors, and they deserve to be left behind. Had the wind not hauled ahead soon after leaving the harbor's mouth, I should positively have left them for good. They seemed to have no idea the value of property, nor any regard for Mr. Astor's interest.

19:31Ah, those poor fellows had but oars. They were forced to row for dear life for more than three hours to catch up with the ship. When we hauled them aboard, their palms were raw and bloodied. As I say, let the punishment fit the crime. Their own dallying was the cause of their fate, and they deserved it. Aye, perhaps, perhaps. Yes, but no one deserved to die in pursuit of profits. That's the chief mate, old Mr. Fox. Captain Thorne was imperious over those many months between New York and the northwest coast,

20:01but his actions became downright deadly at the mouth of the mighty Columbia, where the swell was continuous, and the monstrous waves and maniacal winds gave a sense of foreboding that even the most ignorant sailor couldn't ignore. I need a man to get in one of the whale boats and lead us into the river. Sure. The bar is treacherous, and the proper channel isn't obvious from the ship, so there's no other option. You there! Frank, do you mean me, Captain? Yes, you, Fox. As I say, take the whale boat and three of the Canadians and Old John and find the channel

20:32so that Tonquin can follow you into more tranquil waters upriver. But, Captain Thorne, I beg of you, the wind, the waves, I'm sure to die. May I at least take some competent sailors with me? Nay, ye coward, do as I say. That is an order. But, Captain Thorne, that's a death sentence. Quiet, you! I am sent off without semen to man my boat, in boisterous, rather, and our most dangerous part of the northwest coast. My uncle was lost a few years ago on this same bar,

21:04and I am now going to lay my bones alongside his. Fox and his comrades reluctantly set off in the whale boat. All eyes were strained after the little bark as it pulled for shore, rising and sinking with the huge rolling waves, until it entered, a mere speck, among the foaming breakers and was soon lost to view. Evening set in, night succeeded and passed away, and morning returned without the return of the boat. The next day, Mr. Stewart and Mr. McKay were sent forth in the small boat known as the Pinnace to search for Mr. Fox and the others in the whale boat.

21:37The wind and waves forced them to quickly return. Then another party was sent out by Captain Thorne. On board the tiny boat this time were Mr. Aiken, one of the officers, the sailmaker John Coles, the armorer Stiff and Weeks, and two of the sandwich islanders. They managed to find the channel through the bar, but then the wind and waves swept them out to sea. Only Mr. Weeks would survive, brought them back to the ship by one of the natives, very alive. As the radio play points out,

22:10Captain Thorne insisted on trying again to find a navigable channel by sending out a different small boat, which meant the deaths of more crew members. They try it twice. The first time they lose everybody, the second time they do rescue a couple, but bodies are washed up on shore, so eight guys are thrown away. And that was too much, apparently, even for Captain Jonathan Thorne. So, like other more strategic mariners of that era, he decided the Tonkin would wait out the bad weather. Then, within a day or two, the seas are calm enough that he can sail the ship in,

22:42and they end up across the river, on the north side of the river, in Baker's Bay for a while. And they're trying to decide, where are we going to build this little outpost? Where is the best spot? The men aboard the Tonkin ultimately landed on the south side of the river, site of present-day Astoria, Oregon. Being ashore meant they were free of Captain Thorne's tyranny, and they eagerly began building the settlement. It was their job, and they needed a place to live and work. And they choose the south side of the river, not terribly far from where Lewis and Clark spent their winter encampment at Fort Clatsop.

23:15And they start building this little stockade. And there is sort of a time crunch of, I want to get this done as fast as possible and get cargo and things off the ship. And they start to cut out this little outpost.

23:31It was rough going at the little outpost, and the men were a little outmatched in terms of the work required and the resources they had available to get the job done. There's massive trees, and Alexander Ross is kind of my favorite. Remember, Alexander Ross is one of the clerks who later wrote a book. He talks about we'd spend three days chopping through one of these massive trees, and then it wouldn't fall because it was surrounded by other trees just as big. And then three weeks later, the wind would blow and the tree would fall down.

24:02And twice, the falling trees killed people. There was a blacksmith that blew his hands off in an explosion. Astoria wasn't doomed or hampered by some invisible curse. There just wasn't enough of the right kinds of material and the number of hands required to create a sustainable settlement. It didn't take long for the men to notice and to begin to complain. And at some point, one of these clerks writes, and we didn't have a doctor. If John Jacob Astor had cared a lick about us, he would have sent a doctor or even medical supplies,

24:34and we really had none. And because they're under this high activity of we've got to build a warehouse for the goods, they're living under a canvas. And it tends to rain here in Astoria. And they've all got dysentery. They're not eating well. They brought pigs, but they didn't want to slaughter and eat the pigs because pigs were dirty. McAndrew Burns says it was the Kanakas, the workers who joined the expedition in the Sandwich Islands, who figured out what it took to survive at Astoria. The Hawaiians actually start creating a little garden

25:06because they're the smart ones. Like, okay, this is where we're going to live for the next few years. We better figure this out. So they're not eating well. They're getting rained on. They're not having great success in building an outpost here. Some of the other men, Americans and Canadians hired by Astor to work on the fur enterprise, gave up and left, or tried to leave anyway. Three guys basically said, we're going home and start walking upriver, and Native Americans find them, and they're basically in shattered clothes and just crazy from exposure.

25:37And they bring them back, basically saying, did you lose these guys? Still, the beleaguered Astorians persevered. So it takes a couple of months, but basically they get some warehouses built and some structures for them to live in. They don't build the stockade quite yet. It's not until a little bit later they start getting nervous about all the Native Americans, that they think we better build something to protect ourselves. The relationship with the indigenous population was complex. The Astorians were counting on trading with them to get furs, and hope to coexist as peacefully as possible.

26:08But the Astorians were clearly outsiders with an agenda, so misunderstandings from differences in language and culture were always a potential for creating conflict and danger, as Captain Thorne would ultimately learn firsthand. It was early June when Captain Thorne focused on his next assignment as a member of Astor's team, to sail the Tonkin north along the coast of what's now Washington and British Columbia, and trade with indigenous people. Captain Thorne gets him established, gets him off his ship,

26:39and then he starts north. Trade in those days meant Thorne carried goods aboard the Tonkin, mostly non-perishable objects like mirrors, tools, beads, and various metal goods, which were prized by indigenous people, and for which they were willing to give up abundant animal skins and fur. Remember, Thorne taking the Tonkin north to trade was part of Astor's plan for creating a depot at Astoria from which to ship furs to Asia, where they commanded high prices and where goods like spices, tea, and silk could be imported to the United States.

27:12You know, it's not a large ship. I can't swear to the tonnage or anything, but it's a crew of, you know, maybe 24 or 25 guys, tops, somewhere near Vancouver Island. He's trying to deal with some native First Nations up in Canada to dicker over the price of some goods, and can we do some trading here? Perhaps it's hard to imagine the impatient and easily angered Captain Thorne acting as an emissary for trade and economic development, but that's what he was attempting to do as far as we know.

27:43The details about what happens next are sketchy. Rather than a cluster of clerks who later wrote books, there's just one purported witness to what took place aboard the Tonkin on that first trading mission. And there's a lot of different versions, but basically the chief or the leader of the negotiation is on board the ship and they're arguing over the price. And some sources say Captain Thorne took a pelt and slapped this Native American across the face with it.

28:14Some say he grabbed him by the back of the head and rubbed his face in a pile of furs. Some say he took a fork and kind of, not stabbed him with it, but put it into his face and left an impression. There's some stories of he threw the guy into the water. But I think the gist of whatever version you're hearing, he insulted the heck out of him. And he wasn't a good negotiator. Not necessarily the most patient man. No, no. Captain Thorne apparently didn't realize,

28:45or maybe just didn't care, how dangerously offensive his actions were to the indigenous man. Then they came back the next day and we're going to keep negotiating. And at some point, weapons are drawn and there's a huge, fierce battle and the ship explodes.

29:03Details are scarce about what exactly happened. There's some wonderfully Hollywood-like stories of a wounded person, one of the sailors, finding his way into the hull of the ship and lighting off all the black powder and exploding it. Who knows? A battle ensued. The some hundred plus First Nation Native Americans were killed, decimating that tribe for a while. None of the Tonkin full crew survives.

29:36Life on the Northwest coast in the early 19th century could be brutal at times. There's no doubt. But the sudden explosion of a big sailing ship with the simultaneous deaths of more than a hundred people on board was a new level of violence and destruction, likely never before seen by anyone who witnessed it or experienced it.

29:58Colonialism brought so much destruction to indigenous people on the Northwest coast through disease and hand-to-hand violence. Still, the Tonkin stands out as something of a low point, even with all that would happen in the decades ahead. We know what we know about the demise of Captain Thorne, the Tonkin, the crew, and an unknown number of indigenous people from the account of just one person, an indigenous man from somewhere in what's now Oregon or Washington, who sailed with the Tonkin on that first,

30:29and only, voyage north to trade. There's a Native American that signs on as a translator, and there definitely are accounts of him that he left on the Tonkin. He comes back on foot, and he's got some stories. Whether he was still there, whether he escaped, whether he was allowed to leave because, oh, we don't want to kill you. We just want to kill the insulting white guys. Don't really know for sure.

30:59Again, there's a lot of different versions, and if you are one of those survivors and you come back here, you're going to have the best story that makes you look the best. And then, of course, there's just the oral traditions that, oh, yeah, there's that ship that blew up, and a hundred of our cousins got killed on it, and they just kind of take a life on their own, and other traders, fur traders going up and down the coast hear these stories. Even with those stories, no one has ever been able to definitively identify the spot where the Tonkin exploded.

31:31Theories point to Cleaquit Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Various expeditions have been mounted over the years, and some artifacts have been recovered, including an anchor found in 2003 that might have belonged to the ship. Still, no one has succeeded in locating what might be left of the ship and confirming at least part of the story of its final moments. The Astor-funded venture at Astoria never quite succeeded as a commercial enterprise, but that can't all be blamed on Captain Jonathan Thorne.

32:03Nothing quite seemed to work out in the Astorians' favor, and the competitors, the British firms known as the Northwest Company and the Hudson's Bay Company, always were more successful in the fur trade. Then, in 1812, Great Britain and the United States went to war against each other. When the men at Astoria learned that hostilities had broken out, they moved quickly to sell Astoria to the Northwest Company, a British-owned fur-trading enterprise, rather than risk having it be taken by military force,

32:33as unlikely as that seems, so far away from more well-known events of the War of 1812, such as the burning of the White House by British troops. Once the sale was complete, those Americans who worked for John Jacob Astor didn't exactly evacuate Astoria in a panic, in part because there was no easy way to leave. Many simply stayed on at the newly British settlement. And while it's true there were no battles anywhere near the Pacific Northwest, the actions of a British naval officer named Captain Black

33:04actually did bring that war to bear on the hapless Astorians. He's so disappointed when he sees, and I'm always careful to use the phrase stockade, this little stockade that they had built. It was not a fort. It never would have protected you if you were really in the middle of a shooting war. Captain Black of the British Navy really wanted to fight a battle at Astoria against the Americans, but the sale of the property by its American owners to the British-owned Northwest Company made that whole approach unnecessary. He says this, this was the fortress I was supposed to seize,

33:34and he makes some terribly dismissive phrase, like I could have knocked it down with my three-pounder in an hour, which is the smallest cannon he would have had on board, and worse, it's flying the British flag when he gets here. Maybe seeing that Union Jack flying over what was supposed to be the war booty of Captain Black's dreams was the last straw. And I think it's his anger that I've come all this way for this, and here I thought I was going to be rewarded handsomely, and songs were going to be sung, and my children's children were going to live off the infamy

34:05of this moment in history, and the Northwest Company is here, and they're welcoming their brethren, the British Navy have arrived, and hey, good to see you, and what the heck's going on here, and oh, we bought the place three months ago.

34:19Captain Black would have nothing of it. He was a man of war, and by God, he intended to fight the war against the Americans, right there on the banks of the Columbia River in what's now Oregon. And Captain Black is so upset that he says, you know, are the Americans still here? I want to sign, have them sign surrender papers, and the Americans are like, sure, I'll sign whatever you want, I don't care. I, Captain William Black, hereby claimed this land for His Majesty King George III, and name it Fort George

34:49in his honor. Yes! Yes, King George! You'll be in King George! You'll be in King George! They lower the British flag, they put the American flag back up, they have their surrender ceremony, and then they put the American flag down, put the British flag right back up, and Captain Black sails off into history, having created this huge mess. The huge mess was created by the decision by Captain Black to formally take Astoria as a war prize. Black's insistence on acting out a surrender and capture

35:20would come back to bite the British, and it would bite the British hard.

35:26According to noted historian Frederick Merck, it was this act that opened the door for another formal action when the War of 1812 was over and the British and Americans reached a peace settlement via the Treaty of Ghent. That's my favorite kind of end to the story of the founding of Astoria is the whole selling it to the Northwest Company and then the Treaty of Ghent is they decide that all land seized during the war shall be returned. The treaty called for all American territory

35:56captured by the British to be returned. Even though Astoria had first been sold, Captain Black essentially rewrote that history and made Astoria a spoil of war. Thus, the post-war question of Astoria, which had existed as a business enterprise in the political vacuum that was the early Oregon country, inadvertently helped give legitimacy to American territorial claims to what was then the most strategic piece of land in the region, the mouth of the Columbia River. And you've got the Northwest Company

36:27says here's our bill of sale, we purchased it. And you've got John Jacob Baster saying oh no, we surrendered it, so I want my property back. After years of negotiations, the British and Americans agreed to jointly occupy Oregon country. This would go on for nearly three decades before the boundary between the U.S. and what's now Canada would be settled in 1846. Ultimately, in part because of Captain Black and what happened at Astoria, the boundary would not be at the Columbia River where the British wanted it.

36:58Instead, the international border would be set 250 miles farther north at the 49th parallel. It's this little town at the mouth of the Columbia that holds up the War of 1812 for years as they debate what are we going to do about this place? Maybe if Captain Thorne, a U.S. Navy man at heart, had still been alive when Captain Black arrived, the two of them could have settled things more definitively or at least more dramatically with a good old-fashioned naval battle.

37:34For more information including photos, maps, and nautical charts, find us on social at Unsolved Histories Pod or visit our website unsolvedhistoriespod.com Episodes are posted every other Tuesday. Each cover is an unsolved, little-known,

38:04or mysterious event in history. Follow Unsolved Histories by KSL now wherever you get your podcasts. Unsolved Histories is researched, written, and hosted by me, Felix Bunnell. Production and sound design by Trent Sell. Voice acting by Aaron Mason. The Captain Thorne radio play featured Nick Kratia, Colleen O'Brien, Chris Sullivan, and Dave Ross of Cairo News Radio. Special thanks to Kate Seltzer, Andrea Smartin, Kellyanne Halverson,

38:35Ryan Meeks, Amy Donaldson, Ben Kebrick, Josh Tilton, and Dave Cauley. Our executive producer is Cheryl Worsley. Unsolved Histories is produced by KSL Podcasts in association with Rhapsody Voices.

38:57of KSL Pro to be

39:14and KSL.