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NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , MA Y/JUNE 2002
and his trading partner, the colorful and luckless John Kendrick,
exchanged ships and Gray set off across the Pacific in Columbia
Rediviva to China to trade seal, otter and beaver pelts bartered
from Indians with cheap trinkets and glass beads (known as
"traders' beads"), and returned to Boston. He and his crew were
the first U.S. citizens to take the American flag around the world.
It was on his second voyage to the Pacific Northwest,
entering the Pacific Ocean as before through the perilous
passage around Cape Horn, that Gray claimed discovery of the
Columbia River — which, as a matter of note, would have
astonished the people who lived along the river for thousands
of years and knew about its presence all along.
Gray stayed two weeks in the river. Afterward he sailed
a second time to China. Later that year Vancouver, who had
missed the river, sent one of his ships, Chatham commanded
by Lt. William Broughton, to explore the Columbia after he
learned of Gray's claim. Broughton charted 100 miles upriver
and named Mount Hood (locals called it Wy'East) after an
aristocratic sponsor of Vancouver's Northwest expedition. As a
result of his work, Vancouver attempted to claim discovery of
the Great River for himself (and, of course, for England's King
George III).
Gray's claim, however, prevailed. When Britain and the
United States squabbled over territorial claims to the Northwest
in the early 19th century, Gray's ship's logbook of his discovery
was a critical factor that made Oregon and Washington two of
the United States.
Although Gray put an end to the search for a liquid
thoroughfare through the Americas (along with an overland jaunt
by Lewis and Clark in 1803-06) that started when Columbus
found them in his way exactly 300 years earlier, a northern sea
route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans was navigated in
the years 1903 to 1905 when Roald Amundsen of Norway sailed
and drifted across the top of North America. And in 1969, the
U.S. oil tanker Manhattan plowed a similar course through ice
clogged Arctic waters accompanied by ice-breakers. But, of
course, the Panama Canal was built and has been operating
since 1914 And jet airplanes fly around the world in less than
a day, which mocks the hardships and deaths of early globe
girdling mariners who lived and died at the mercy of wind, water
and disease.
This palindromic year of the new millennium/century
the nations of the Americas commemorate the 510th anniver
sary of Christopher Columbus' first voyage in search of India.
Some celebrate, others bitterly denounce the intrusion of Europe
upon the western hemisphere and the consequences of half a
millennium of conquest and epidemic. The intense eruption of
controversy resembles the dispute between intellectuals of the
HENDRICK WILLEM VAN LOON
18th century in which Rosseau, Voltaire, et al, argued that the
European discovery of the Americas had cost millions of lives
and the wholesale destruction of native culture, and was thus
a blight upon the history of civilization
A smaller, less controversial acclaim is paid Robert
Gray and the bicentennial + 10 of his claim of discovery of
the fabled River of the West on May 11,1792 Yet the
consequences have been a microcosm of all that Europe
accomplished or ruined in this half of the world Almost
immediately white Americans and Europeans came in Gray's
wake to trade, to settle, to supplant and eventually eradicate
native culture. The Great River has itself been tamed with dams,
the massive forests on both sides of its banks logged and
replaced with cities and farms, and the millions of salmon (which
until only recently were so numerous it was claimed a person
could cross the wide river on their backs) have dwindled to only
an endangered few. The exchange of a natural wilderness for a
human wasteland is relatively recent. The Pacific Northwest has
been a last small corner for Western exploration, with the
exception of the Poles and Antarctica. Gray opened up a major
portion of the last frontier, yet the annual celebration has less to
do with his discovery of the great river than it does the present
and future generations of native strangers who dwell among the
vanished ruins of a fatally vulnerable culture our predecessors
overran
The present tenants of the Columbia River basin inherit
a legacy of raw exploitation and waste.The riches once so abun
dant have been despoiled, virtually all used up in only a few
generations Even the big river has not escaped the pollution of
modern society, known as one of the most radioactive rivers in
the world as a result of Hanford plutonium and Trojan nuclear
waste; and it is a garbage dump for towns and cities along its
banks — industrial pollution is a major offender.
The present generation is bitterly divided about Gray's
legacy, and each side of the controversy utilizes extremes in
its arguments to exploit or preserve. On the one hand it might
be considered that a great civilization has reached its maximum
westward movement on the North American continent in the
Pacific Northwest, on the other are the extreme environmental
damages which an expanding population and its technology
have wrought upon the landscape.
It is unfortunate that what remains of Gray's legacy is
coveted by the nation at large, including the water of the river
itself. It is likely that the decisions have already been removed
from local say-so. Just as likely, a massive earthquake that is
predicted for sometime soon will rearrange the region into
something very different.
Hail Columbia.
These pages are dedicated to the late Rolf Klep,
Founder of the Columbia River Maritime Museum.
HELLO COLUMBUS
Five hundred and ten years ago, on Friday, October 12,
1492, a Genoa seaman stumbled onto the western hemisphere
while seeking passage to the far East. One world was born that
day but the world that was here began that instant to die.
Christopher Columbus missed his mark by half a world,
and by that doubled the world's size. The old civilizations of
Europe sent their most favored and dumped their least on the
shores of the New World, although they were equals in their
fervent obliteration of the worlds they found; and they turned
on each other as well.
200 years later the Great Thinkers of the 18th century
debated the consequences of the European discovery of
the American continents, and concluded the costs had been
too high for the gains. The Great Thinkers wished the Great
Navigator had never set sail or had perished with his three small
ships on the ocean — although someone would have claimed
discovery of the New World eventually, and many had made
landfalls in the same hemisphere from both Atlantic and Pacific
Oceans hundreds, even thousands of years before. And
Columbus might himself have wished he never sailed either.
He died poor and in disgrace.
Unknown at first to the invading Europeans, who sought
wealth with murder and enslavement of the primitive tribes they
initially encountered, were great civilizations as autocratic,
expansive and cruel as their own. A renaissance of western
civilization, a rebirth of classical knowledge, culminated in the
calamitous error of Columbus, who refused to believe that he
had blundered upon an entirely unknown landmass that blocked
his passage to the ancient East.
And immediately he began the cruel harvest of native
inhabitants that was to last the better part of four centuries. As
the natives perished by the millions from slaughter, forced labor,
disease and despair, it seemed that half of Africa was emptied
to provide slaves for New World plantations and mines, and
millions died before ever reaching the Americas.
New civilizations spawned upon the ruins of the
obliterated, often deeply influenced by them, and one in
particular emerged from seeds of radical ideas brought across
the Atlantic from nations that spurned them into exile.This new
culture was uncomfortably germinated by various peoples who
had come to stay, some as seekers, others as slaves; and its
government was founded on the heretical proposition that
people should be free and equally rulers of the state.The ideal
was always in conflict with reality. At times the tension created
brilliant advances in civil liberties. Most of the time progress
wgs slow, bloody, and often as not retrogressive. The major
contradictions of the growing republic were its long acceptance
of slavery and the remorseless extermination of native cultures,
an 'ethnic cleansing' repeated in other places in more recent
times.
The annual observance of Columbus' first voyage to
the Americas, named after a later Italian explorer who was not
fooled into believing he had reached Asia, is heated and contro
versial Some celebrate, others bitterly denounce the intrusion
of Europe upon the western hemisphere and half a millennium
of conquest, epidemic and cultural genocide. Words of placation
or condemnation are exchanged: the Old World "encountered'
"invaded' "conquered' "converged' with the New, depending
on the perspective of the speakers.
However one might feel, Columbus and his successors
are as inescapable a fact of history as a great meteor that set
fire to North America in a matter of minutes and ended the long
age of dinosaurs. Columbus' voyage began the end of the long
age of seclusion of descendants of stoneage Asian hunters who
had crossed over in periods when the Bering Sea was shallow
and the continents were connected at their northern extremities,
and were subsequently cut off from the rest of the human world
when the waters rose again.
The ancient cycles of pre-Columbian civilizations
disappeared under the onslaught of invaders who were oblivious
of them; in the same manner, sometime in the future, the
civilizations that have grown from their ruins will be devoured,
deteriorate or self-destruct — and in the words of Lafcadio
Hearn, who favored the resurgence of Asia over the West, post
Columbian cultures "will be as missed as the ichthyosaur."
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