Fort Astoria | Images of Old Hawaiʻi

During Captain Cookʻs visit to Hawaiʻi on his third voyage of exploration in 1779, then-Lieutenant King (later Captain) noted, “During the following night, the cutter belonging to the Discovery was stolen …”

“This irritated captain Cook, and he gave orders to stop all the canoes that should attempt to leave the bay, intending to seize and destroy them, if he could not recover the cutter by fair means.” (Captain King’s Journal)

“The natives now collected in vast numbers along the shore, and began to throng round captain Cook”. Shortly after, “Captain Cook, the last time he was seen distinctly, was standing at the water’s edge”.

“… he was desirous of preventing any farther bloodshed … whilst he faced the natives, none of them had offered him any violence, but having turned about to give his orders to those in the boats, he was stabbed in the back”. Cook was killed. (Captain King’s Journal)

One of the Hawaiians at the scene was Naukane, son of Kamanawa (Kamehameha’s uncle and one of his closest allies – Kamanawa (left) and Kameʻeiamoku, his twin brother (right) were later memorialized on the Hawaiʻi coat of arms.) (Kittelson)

When Kamehameha moved his Royal Center to Honolulu, his chiefs came with him. Naukane, then in his early twenties, accompanied his father and probably became involved in royal court life. However, fascinated by the growing number of ships calling in the islands, Naukane looked to the sea. (Kittelson)

His chance came in February 1811, when John Jacob Astor’s ‘Tonquin,’ under the command of Captain Jonathan Thorne, called. The captain wanted to hire twenty-four of the Islanders, twelve as seamen and the remaining half to establish a post for the Pacific Fur Company on the Columbia River.

This was the first large group of Hawaiians to come to America. The king appointed Naukane to go with them as a royal observer. (Duncan)

Because Naukane resembled one of the Americans, he became known as John Coxe and retained the name throughout his long and colorful life in the Pacific Northwest (he also went by John Cox and Edward Coxe, or, simply Coxe.) (Duncan)

The Tonquin reached the mouth of the Columbia in March; after a few days looking, they selected a site and by the end of May they had completed Fort Astoria. It was the first American-owned settlement on the Pacific coast of what was to become the United States.

Astor planned the post to grow into a permanent settlement, with plans to develop a large trade ring that included New York, the Pacific Coast, Russian Alaska, Hawaiʻi and China. The furs collected in the northwest and Alaska, would be shipped to China and exchanged for porcelain, silk and other cloth, and spices that would be brought back, via Hawaii to New York.

Other operators had other posts. In the summer of 1810, Jacques-Raphaël Finlay (Jaco Finley) of the North West Company built Spokane House at the junction of the Spokane and Little Spokane rivers.

Shortly after arriving in the northwest, Coxe started working for Canadian David Thompson of the North West Company. Coxe later spent the winter of 1811-1812 at Spokane House with Finlay. On those expeditions, Coxe became the first Hawaiian to visit the inland Northwest.

Coxe accompanied Thompson “across the Rocky Mountains from western Montana and in the long trail to Fort William on Lake Superior. … John Coxe also took the trail east from Fort William but his road led to Quebec, where he created a sensation with his stories of Hawaiʻi and his demonstrations of Polynesian dance steps.” (Taylor)

By 1813, Fort Astoria and all other assets in the area were sold to the North West Company – they renamed it Fort George. Coxe continued to work there until August, 1814, when all of the Hawaiians at Fort George were sent back to the Islands.

Comfortable with the service from the Hawaiians, in 1817, North West sent a ship “to bring as many of the Sandwich Islanders to the Columbia river as we could conveniently accommodate.” (Corney)

(In 1821, the Hudson’s Bay Company combined with the North West Company, and the post name was changed back to Fort Spokane.)

After he returned to Honolulu in 1815, Coxe probably reverted to his native name, Naukane. He was well received by Kamehameha.

Not only was Naukane the son of one of Kamehameha’s closest advisors, and a member of Liholiho’s entourage, but he had traveled widely. Kamehameha I died in 1819 and Naukane rose in stature when Liholiho ascended the throne. (Kittelson)

Naukane’s expeditions did not end on the American continent. Because of his familiarity with western ways (with travels to America, Europe & South America) and his personal ties, when Liholiho departed on November 27, 1823 to England aboard the L’Aigle to discuss the future of his Islands with George IV, Naukane accompanied the King.

The King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamāmalu died of measles in July 1824; apparently Naukane’s travels had built up his immunity, for he was hardly bothered by measles.

King George IV held an audience for the remaining Hawaiians at Windsor Castle on September 11; Coxe was present. The bodies of Liholiho and his queen were returned to Hawaii aboard the frigate Blonde captained by Lord Byron.

With the King dead, Naukane no longer was bound, and he immediately offered his services to the Hudson’s Bay Company and returned to the Northwest. He was only one of approximately thirty-five Islanders working for the company by 1825. (Duncan)

The firm’s base of operations had been transferred from Fort Spokane to a new site farther inland, Fort Vancouver. Coxe worked for a few more years; then the company retired him and gave him a plot of land two miles below the fort. (Kittelson)

Naukane died February 2, 1850. The vast plain between Fort Vancouver and the Columbia became the Hawaiian’s memorial – Coxe’s Plain … “A couple of miles below the fort (Vancouver) there were luxuriant meadows of great extent.”

“A portion of these bore at that time the name of Coxe’s Plain, a name I think which it still continues to bear. Old Coxe, a native of the Sandwich Islands and a very original character, was the swine-herd and had his residence there among the oaks which dotted the verge of the plain.” (Anderson; Barry)

In the late-18th century, European and American trade and travel into the North American continent’s interior was largely by water. Merchants used canoes to trade with the tribes for the continent’s most valuable natural resource: furs.

Eastern and central North America had many navigable rivers. For western traders, finding a great western river became an obsession for fur traders and scientific and government expeditions.

The first non-Indian to encounter and identify the river was Spaniard Bruno de Heceta. In August, 1775, Heceta mapped what he called Cape of Saint Roc and Leafy Cape, respectively. He attempted to cross the bar under full sail, but was unable to do so.

In 1778, the great British navigator Captain Cook sailed by the river in the night. While he did not find Heceta’s river, his expedition traded for otter furs. Cook was killed in Hawai‘i early the next year, but his ships carried the furs to China where they discovered a lucrative trade market with the Chinese.

The reports of a potentially trade between western North America and China would spur traders from all nations to the West Coast.

In 1788, Britain sailor John Meares also failed to find a river; he give Cape Disappointment its name to commemorate his failed search. (This is what Heceta called Leafy Cape.)

In April, 1792, British naval expedition Captain George Vancouver passed by the river mouth and noted muddy water flowing into the sea. Noting the sand island and waves breaking on the bar, he discounted the entrance as the mouth of a small river as it looked like most of the rivers emptying into the Pacific north of San Francisco.

On the morning of May 11, 1792, American merchant Captain Robert Gray sailed across the bar and into the Columbia River estuary, the first documented non-Indian to do so.

That was the river’s discovery via sea; by land, after acquiring the ‘Louisiana Purchase’ in 1803, under the directive of President Thomas Jefferson, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, also known as the ‘Corps of Discovery Expedition’ (1804–1806,) was the first transcontinental expedition to the Pacific coast undertaken by the US.

“Ocian in view! O! the joy.” When Captain William Clark wrote these words in his journal on November 7, 1805, he was not standing at the Pacific Ocean but the Columbia River estuary. It would be another couple of weeks before he and Captain Meriwether Lewis would stand at what they had “been so long anxious to see.” (NPS)

Clark and members of the Corps of Discovery explored the headland in their final push to the Pacific Ocean. “I Set out at Day light and proceeded on a Sandy beech … 2 Miles to the inner extremity of Cape Disapointment …”

“… this Cape is an ellivated circlier point covered with thick timber on the iner Side and open grassey exposur next to the Sea and rises with a Steep assent to the hight of about 150 or 160 feet above the leavel of the water … this cape as also the Shore both on the Bay & Sea coast is a dark brown rock.”

“I crossed the neck of Land low and 1/2 of a mile wide to the main Ocian, at the foot of a high open hill projecting into the ocian, and about one mile in Sicumfrance. I assended this hill which is covered with high corse grass. decended to the N of it and camped. I picked up a flounder on the beech this evening. …” (Clark, November 18, 1806)

The Lewis and Clark Expedition would have an immediate effect on American interest in the Northwest. Fur baron John Jacob Astor was excited by the expedition’s success in recording the lands, resources and peoples.

Astor sought to create a global network of land and sea transportation for fur pelts, goods, information and services between China, Russia, Europe, the American east coast and the mouth of the Columbia River.

In June, 1810, Astor and others signed articles of agreement of the ‘Pacific Fur Company.’ They hoped to best the flourishing Northwest Company (who travelled by land,) which was a most powerful concern, by having a great depot at the mouth of the Columbia, in other words, by using the sea.

One of the vessels selected for the pioneer voyage was the ‘Tonquin,’ under the command of Captain Jonathan Thorn. Before getting to the American Northwest, they supplied at Hawai‘i.

They were unable to secure either water or provisions on the Island of Hawaii; on February 21, 1811, Thorn anchored the Tonquin off Waikiki. Here he met Kamehameha I and paid Spanish dollars for hogs, several goats, two sheep, a quantity of poultry and vegetables.

Needing additional manpower, Canadian partners aboard the Tonquin proposed to enlist thirty or forty native Hawaiians, because they had never seen watermen to equal them, not even among the voyageurs of the Northwest.

“Remarkable for their skill in managing light craft and able to swim and dive like waterfowl,” were the words used in describing the Hawaiians. Thorn objected to a large number; twelve were signed for the company and twelve for the ship. The trade-men were to serve three years, were to be fed and clothed and at the end of the term were to receive $100 in merchandise.

On February 28, 1811, the Tonquin sailed for the Northwest coast, and March 22, 1811, arrived off the mouth of the Columbia, where they encountered heavy seas. Thorn sent out several boats to find the river channel; two of them capsized and eight men died. One of the men was a Hawaiian.

Local history says that the “the neck of Land low and 1/2 of a mile wide to the main Ocian, at the foot of a high open hill” noted by Clark (five years before) was named Waikiki Beach in honor of this unnamed Hawaiian who was buried on the beach (Washington State Parks.)

In 1811, Astor’s Pacific Fur Company established Astoria, the first non-native trading post and settlement at the mouth of the Columbia River.

The Astor expedition to the Columbia-Pacific region would also be responsible for opening up the key overland route for western settlement in years to come.

In 1812 on a journey from Astoria to New York City, Robert Stuart, a partner in the Pacific Fur Company stationed at Fort Astoria, discovered South Pass, a low pass over the Rocky Mountains. This route could be made by wagon from the Missouri and Mississippi valleys and became known as the Oregon Trail. (Lots of information here is from NPS.)

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