Britannia's Navy on the West Coast of North America, 1812–1914

Barry Gough

• Publisher: Seaforth Publishing
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781473881365
• eBook ISBN: 9781473881389
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The influence of the Royal Navy on the development of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest was both extensive and effective. Yet all too frequently, its impact has been ignored by historians, who instead focus on the influence of explorers, fur traders, settlers, and railway builders. In this thoroughly revised and expanded edition of his classic 1972 work, naval historian Barry Gough examines the contest for the Columbia country during the War of 1812, the 1844 British response to the aggressive American agenda of President Polk's Manifest Destiny and cries of Fifty-four forty or fight, the gold-rush invasion of 30, 000 outsiders, and the jurisdictional dispute in the San Juan Islands that spawned the so-called Pig War. The author also looks at the Esquimalt-based fleet in the decade before British Columbia joined Canada and the Navy's relationship with coastal indigenous peoples over the five decades that preceded the Great War.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Admiral John Moresby, Two Admirals (London: John Murray, 1909; rev. ed., London: Methuen and Co., 1913), 52–53.

2. Ibid., 55–59.

3. Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge, Some Recollections, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1919), 118–19.

4. See Barry M. Gough, “Sea Power and South America: The ‘Brasils’ or South Station of the Royal Navy 1808–1837,” The American Neptune, 50, no. 1 (1990): 26–34.

5. See Barry M. Gough, Pax Britannica: Ruling the Waves and Keeping the Peace before Armageddon (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 185–86, and sources used.

6. Journal of the Grampus, July 28, 1846, Byam Martin Papers, Add. MSS. 41, 472, BL.

7. Leonard B. Irwin, Pacific Railways and Nationalism in the Canadian-American Northwest, 1845–73 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 222.

PROLOGUE

1. Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, rev. ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 205.

2. Waging wars with France and the United States was a factor that brought a rapid decline of British vessels in the maritime fur trade (primarily that for sea otter). See F.W. Howay, “An Outline Sketch of the Maritime Fur Trade,” in Canadian Historical Association Annual Report, 1932 (Ottawa: CHA, 1932), 7. Also James R. Gibson, Sea Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785–1941 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992).

3. William McGillivray [?], “Some Account of the Trade Carried on by the North-West Company,” fol. 20, Royal Commonwealth Society Collections, University of Cambridge Library.

4. McTavish, McGillivrays and Company to McTavish, Fraser and Company, January 23, 1810, Q/113, pp. 228–30, LAC; published as “Appeal of the North West Company to the British Government to Forestall John Jacob Astor’s Columbia Enterprise,” Canadian Historical Review, 17 (September 1936): 306.

5. G.C. Davidson, The North West Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1918), 134.

6. For details, see James P. Ronda, Astoria and Empire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). On the loss of the Tonquin, see the brief account, written the year after the event, in Robert F. Jones, Astorian Adventure: The Journal of Alfred Seton, 1811–1815 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993), 91–94.

7. S. McGillivray to Lord Liverpool, November 10, 1810, Q/113, pp. 221–23, LAC.

8. See Richard Glover, ed., David Thompson’s Narrative, 1784–1812, vol. 40 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1962), 358–59; and see also A.S. Morton, “The North West Company’s Columbian Venture and David Thompson,” Canadian Historical Review, 17 (1936): 284–88. For various historians’ interpretations of Thompson’s apparently faltering progress, see Barbara Belyea, “The ‘Columbian Enterprise’ and A.S. Morton: A Historical Exemplum,” BC Studies, 86 (Summer 1990): 3–27.

CHAPTER ONE

1. For sources and further discussion, see Barry M. Gough, Pax Britannica: Ruling the Waves and Keeping the Peace before Armageddon (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. xxx.

2. Instructions, J.W. Croker (secretary of the Admiralty) to Captain J. Hillyar, March 13, 1813, Adm. 2/1380, pp. 367–79.

3. Quoted in F.W Howay, W.N. Sage and H.F. Angus, British Columbia and the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942), 34.

4. John Macdonald of Garth, “Journal from England to the Columbia River, North West Coast of America,” MG 19, A 17, LAC; printed in B.C. Payette, ed., The Oregon Country under the Union Jack (Montreal: privately printed, 1961), v–x. Hereinafter cited as Macdonald Journal, with date.

5. Rear-Admiral Sir Manley Dixon to Croker, June 21, 1813. Adm. 1/21; also Gerald S. Graham and R.A. Humphreys, eds., The Navy and South America, 1807–1823: Correspondence of the Commanders-in-Chief on the South American Station, vol. 104 (London: Navy Records Society, 1962), 93–95. Hereinafter cited as Navy and South America.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. A.T. Mahan, Sea Power in Its Relations to the War of 1812 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1905), 2:248.

9. On the early activities of the Racoon, see the indispensable John A. Hussey, ed., The Voyage of the “Racoon”: A “Secret” Journal of a Visit to Oregon, California and Hawaii, 1813–1814 [by Francis Phillips] (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1958), ix–xi.

10. Dixon to Croker, June 9, 1813, Adm. 1/21.

11. Reasons are given in Dixon’s secret instructions to Hillyar of July 1, 1813, ibid.

12. Macdonald Journal, July 9, 1813.

13. Dixon to Croker, March 12, 1813, Adm. 1/21; Navy and South America, 98.

14. Admiralty Instructions to Hillyar, March 12, 1813, most secret, Adm. 2/1380, pp. 370–75. The instructions were to be opened 30 leagues south of Rio.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Dixon to Croker, June 21, 1813, Adm. 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Prologue
• one War Comes to the Columbia Country
• two Empire of the Seas
• three Man-of-War Diplomacy in the Oregon Crisis
• four Colonizing the Perfect Eden
• five War with Russia in the Pacific
• six Gold-Rush Crises
• seven Pig War on the San Juan Islands
• eight Send a Gunboat!
• nine Esquimalt, Anchor of Empire
• ten No Need for Glory: Anglo-American Tensions
• eleven The Lengthening Shadows: Armageddon Approaches
• APPENDIX A Changing Boundaries of the Pacific Station
• APPENDIX B Pacific Station: Ships and Complements, 1847–1867
• APPENDIX C Distribution of the Royal Navy, 1861–1874
• APPENDIX D Commanders-in-Chief and Senior Naval Officers: Pacific Station, 1837–1914
• APPENDIX E Changing Technology in British Warships, 1810–1914
• APPENDIX F British Warships on the Northwest Coast of North America or in British Columbia Waters, 1778–1908
• APPENDIX G Types and Classes of British Warships on the Northwest Coast of North America or in British Columbia Waters, 1778–1914
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography