2003, Free Press, NY, 307

From Chapter 5: Starting Over, to Chapter 10: Getting Settled the author details the preparations for, the ordeal of, and the immediate aftermath of, the half year long journey across the Atlantic to Africa, down to the Antarctic Circle, up to Hawaii, and finally to the mouth of the deadly Columbia river. Not only was the voyage largely harsh, but on arrival, half the crew was lost, killed outright by the cruel Captain Thorn. The captain seems to have been insane, and was obsessed with the Canadian and European clerks hired by Astor taking over the ship for the British. Over the entire expedition hangs the pall of the British Empire and its fleet.

A ribald picture of New York, where English plays drew visitors, opium was sold openly on the sidewalk and wanted posters for escaped slaves abounded, is brought quickly into focus and then let pass, as the concerns of the hazardous ocean voyage come into focus. The captain was a veteran of the Barbary Pirate wars, the Brits were on the prowl for American merchants and war with the Empire loomed.

The three-masted bark, the Tonquin, was 96-feet long, 25-feet wide, and 12-feet long; a swift shallow draft ship that would not be able to easily haul the vast cargo [including the makings of another ship] and the 21 crew and 33 passengers. The captain was basically an insane war survivor. The passengers ranged from drunken adventurers to snobby clerks. The crew consisted of cruelly treated and long suffering men with a mixture of experience ranging from seasoned to green. The trip itself was worthy of a book and is sketched nicely by the author.

The sailors slept in crawl spaces and closets just below the deck. The passengers, who were not partners, were treated like crew by Captain Thorn, and some of the partners nearly killed the captain over various points of contention along the way. The behavior level of these men was at about the level of 14-year-old boys of the year 2015, and most brought firearms with them!

The cook was a freed black man by the name of Thomas Work, who was regarded as an excellent chef. One hopes he fared better than most of the crew, many of whom were doomed. To give an idea of how rough life was for a poor man 200 years ago, consider this fellow’s last name! Even on this civilian craft—which, was armed, and by today’s standards would be regarded as a rogue vessel operated by military contractors—the lives of the crew were forfeit, expended like so much grease to ease the passage of the precious goods intended for the construction of Astoria.

As first mate, Ben Fox, was assigned to man a boat in storm-tossed seas with inexperienced sailors—an assignment that all regarded as certain death—he said to the passengers, “My uncle was drowned here not many years ago, and now I am going to lay my bones with his. Farewell, my friends. We shall perhaps meet in the next world.”

And so he died, on the job, together with his luckless crew. Then more men were sent to their death and ignored by the ship as their boat floundered, having pointed the way into the Columbia River mouth with their lives.

The elements of the first stage of this expedition, including the visit to the modernizing Polynesian nation of Hawaii, are the stuff of a classic adventure-horror story such as The Thing or of an Edgar Rice Burroughs’ lost world novel.

Finally having reached their destination—and to the native’s amazement—devoting great energy to the killing of the enormous redwood trees, the expedition clerks and partners—few of which had any wilderness experience—got drunk. During this wild party, as the cruel Captain Thorn looked on from his ship, one of the leaders of the expedition sent a man up to fetch something out of a tree, and then set the tree on fire as a prank!

And so, in April of 1811a handful of clerks—men who had managed fur inventories back east—stood on the edge of a vast and rugged wilderness, alive only due to the kindness of the well-adjusted natives, the boldest of them poised to strike out for the Rocky Mountains in search of a pass that could accommodate wagons. It is obvious from the text that whites were tolerated and treated well by the Indians because they brought useful goods in return for furs. The Indians of the interior would, in the decades to come, become understandably displeased with whites coming into their territory with no intention of trading, only of taking furs for themselves. That the yet to arrive Mountain Men would sometimes fall victim to, or be drawn into feuds with, the tribes who now hunted these lands, seems inevitable.

In Across the Great Divide, Laton McCartney sets the stage with such detail that the reader is left marveling over the fact that enough of these men survived their own folly and the ill will of their fellows, to have accomplished their goal, let alone leave a detailed record. Of one thing there was no doubt, a handful of these men possessed the courage and intelligence necessary to rise to the occasion.