Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival by Peter Stark
Authors: Peter Stark
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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—twenty 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 (later to be arrested by Russian authorities), 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
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—twenty 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 (later to be arrested by Russian authorities), 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
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