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"Europeans go around the world saying they
are the harbingers of civilization, but it was Africa
and Asia that civilized us in the beginning. ’’
-THOR HEYERDAHL (1914-2002)
Before anything else you must remember
that when the American ship Columbus Reborn
entered the river that bears its name in the
robust spring of 210 years ago, a culture that
vibrantly dwelled on both shores for maybe
20,000 years at that moment began to become
extinct.
The history we celebrate is our own
cultural history — that which we supplanted
has generally been ignored as insufficient not
worth popular study. Until recently. Now, a
few generations removed from their obliteration
as hemispheric monarchs, we are interested in
them. So new are we that we might be regarded
as a pustule growing from the skin of a leathery
twenty millennia culture that was decimated by
its parasitic visitors. We know little of their
history, assorted myths and a few bones to fill
in the vast gaps of time in broadly general rather
than individual narrative.
BY MICHAEL McCUSKER
When Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in
1492 he thought he would have a straight passage west around
the world to India and trump the competition by opening up the
riches of Asia for his employer, the newly reestablished Christian
monarchy of Spain. Instead he bumped into a rock, and for three
hundred years Europeans looked for a waterway through it, a
passage west to the East that connected the Atlantic Ocean to
the Pacific.
Ever since the Crusades of the 11 th and 12th centuries
Europe was hungry for the silks and spices of Asia. The Christ­
ian hordes were greedy for pagan wealth but were unsuccessful
taking it by conquest. The Saracens, as the armies of the Cross
called them, once they expelled the infidels were more than
happy to trade with them, Europe's gold and silver in exchange
for Asia's silk and spice.
For centuries the only door to the East from the West
(and vice/versa) was through the narrow Mediterranean (the
Middle Sea) and the merchants of Venice, who trounced their
rivals Pisa and Genoa for virtual monopoly as go-between.
In the 15th century, when Ottoman sultans ruled almost
all of western Asia and eastern Europe (including the once
magnificent Byzantine empire) the first of the great Atlantic
seafaring nations, Portugal, sent its small sailing ships to
explore an endrun around Africa to the rich ports of India and
China. It took them nearly a century to round the Cape of Good
Hope and sail into the Indian Ocean in 1498, six years after the
Great Navigator collided with the western hemisphere.
Columbus, who was an unemployed seaman from
Venice’s rival Genoa, first tried to convince the Portuguese
that it would be easier to reach India by sailing west across the
Atlantic Ocean. Spain, which had just kicked out the last of
its Moslem North African conquerors and reenfranchised its
medieval monarchy, was anxious for global wealth and power
after seven centuries of foreign occupation and hired Columbus
who, as it turned out, underestimated the Earth's circumference
and had not calculated the presence of the American continents.
Spain, though disappointed that India was not so easily
reached after all, built a world empire on the riches of American
civilizations it destroyed and the gold and silver it mined with the
forced labor of incorrectly named Indians and black African
slaves.
England and France came late into the action of looting
the western hemisphere, and although ancient rivals, each was
determined to undermine the Spanish empire. Each independ-
ently sought a passage through North America to Asia primarily
because Spain controlled the south Atlantic (Papal Bull split the
world between Spain and Portugal until the former consumed
the latter) — but Francis Drake got through the Straits of
Magellan at the bottom of South America, and after raising
a great fuss sinking Spanish ships and sacking Spanish
settlements, sailed up along what is now the Oregon coast,
looking for the Pacific entrance to such a Northwest Passage in
1579 How far up he came and where he stopped to scrape his
ship's hull is disputed and almost every developer building a
condo in a cove hires an historian to claim Drake landed there.
(Even the Nehalem River Valley is claimed to be Drake's ‘New
Albion'.) What is not disputed is that he sailed across the Pacific
Ocean in a single ship, the Golden Hinde, to get back home to
England because fleets of angry Spanish were waiting for him
on his backtrail.
Nine years later Drake played a major part in wrecking
a large Spanish fleet that intended to invade England, called
COLUMBIA EPIC
"Mind the surf," said Captain Gray,
his sailors draped like dying birds,
across the rail,
"It's not the lullaby you think
Out here the breakers rise
three houses high.
The drop is deeper
than God's frown
scratched hard
into the bottom sand
bejeweled with rusted cups
and sailors' skeletons.
Shoals stretch their rubber mouths
a foot below the foam"
And then he raised his sail.
-L ynda L esowsk . i
even today by sardonic Spaniards "The Invincible Armada".
That English victory in August 1588 began England's long rise
to world power. Along the way it colonized and lost a strip of
Atlantic seacoast in North America to rebellious colonists who
declared themselves a new nation and immediately set off to
grab a large share of Asia's bounty for itself.
Hopes for a Northwest Passage to the Pacific through
North America faded over the centuries — Spain lost its lengthy
supremacy and ships from the northern European nations took
the long ways around Capes Horn and Good Hope — but a new
legend replaced it. Now there was thought to be a Great River of
the West which was said to be called by Native Americans the
"Oregon". People thought the Missouri River was navigable to
the Rocky Mountains, and after a short portage, the great
western river could be reached and traversed straight to the
Pacific.
But like the Northwest Passage, no one could find this
Great River. The great English explorer James Cook sailed past
it in bad weather in 1778. Ten years later, in 1788, another
Englishman, John Mears, a free-lance entrepreneur, tried and
gave up, naming Deception Bay and Cape Disappointment to
discourage others who might follow him, and George Vancouver
and his royal expedition were just off the mouth of the river in
1792 but were deceived as was Mears four years earlier by surf
breaking across the bar. The Spanish explorer Bruno Heceta
thought he had found the river in 1775 (which he named the
"San Roque") but was unable to get in because his crew was too
weak from scurvy to man their ship across the tempestuous bar.
In the spring of 1792, the same year Vancouver sailed
past, on May 11, an American from New England, Robert Gray,
took his ship Columbia Rediviva ('Columbus Reborn') through
the wild surf at the bar and entered the fabled river, which he
named "Columbia" after his vessel — and the Great Admiral of
the Ocean Sea himself.
Robert Gray has been rescued from obscurity; at least
he is remembered every Day of Discovery'. On his first voyage
to the Pacific Northwest four years earlier in 1788 (the same
year Mears gave up on the Great River) in another ship, Lady
Washington, Gray sailed into what is now Tillamook Bay. Gray
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