Hail Columbia: The Early Pacific World in American History

Key Learnings

At the time of the American Revolution, the Pacific world was a busy, changing, interconnected global place.
Commerce and trade shaped and influenced life in the region.
Interactions between indigenous peoples and Euro-Americans were central to the region's future development.

The Pacific as the Ocean of the Future

In 1900, John Hay stated: "The Mediterranean is the ocean of the past, the Atlantic is the ocean of the present, and the Pacific is the ocean of the future."
Similar to how the study of the Mediterranean revolutionized history through the Annal School, and the Atlantic world became a focal point in the early 2000s, the Pacific World is now gaining recognition for its historical importance.

The Vastness and Significance of the Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean is the largest geographic feature on Earth.
It is a site of convergence for Europeans, indigenous peoples, and Asians.
Asian imperial powers could have dominated the Pacific and influenced North American history if events in the 15th century had unfolded differently.

Chinese Exploration and the Ming Dynasty

In the 15th century, Chinese Ming treasure ships under Admiral Zheng He (died in 1431) explored the East Indies and Indian Ocean.
The Mongol threat led to China focusing on a strong central state and protecting its northern borders.
Confucian social thought, which placed merchants at the bottom of the social hierarchy, also weighed against Chinese commercial imperial expansion.

Japanese Isolation

In 1543, Portuguese sailors shipwrecked on Tanegashima, Japan, leading to annual visits by the Portuguese by 1571.
Jesuits established missions in Japan.
In 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu unified Japan under military rule and in 1614, anti-Christian edicts restricted foreign shipping.
Japan became closed off to foreigners for over 200 years.

Spanish Domination of the Pacific

With Japan and China absent, the Pacific opened to other powers.
Spain was the first European power to establish colonies in the Pacific.
In 1565, the Spanish began sailing from Mexico to Manila, Philippines, exchanging gold, silver, tobacco, sugar, and cotton for tea, spices, and silk.
The Manila trade became a trans-shipment point for Spanish silver from Mexico to China.
By the 1630s, the Pacific trade between Manila and Mexico exceeded the value of the Atlantic trade between Spain and Mexico.
Some historians argue that Pacific trade and the demand for silver in China shaped the world economy in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Russian Expansion into Siberia and the Pacific

In 1581, the Russians began expanding their Muscovite Empire into Siberia.
By 1648, they established their first colony on the Pacific at Okhotsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
In 1728, they signed a treaty with China establishing a boundary.
Vitus Bering discovered the Bering Straits and returned with sea otter pelts, which were valued by the Chinese.
Sea otters were abundant along the coasts of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California.
Russian colonists exploited the Aleut people for sea otter pelts in the Aleutians.
The Russian system of colonization involved extortion, with colonists holding women and children hostage while men were forced to work.
Reforms in 1748 and 1760 urged hunters to treat indigenous peoples with more respect, but these had little effect.

Spanish Concerns and Colonization of California

In the 1750s and 1760s, the Spanish worried about the Russian presence in the Pacific Northwest.
In 1765, they began planning the conquest of California, establishing a naval base in Baja California and moving north.
In 1769, Gaspar de Portolá and Father Junípero Serra established Mission San Diego.
By 1782, the Spanish had established a string of missions from Baja to San Francisco, eventually totaling 21 missions and a half-dozen military garrisons.
The Franciscan plan was to transform indigenous peoples into Christians and loyal subjects through education and labor.
Indigenous laborers produced a flourishing economy in California, but their labor was concentrated and exploited.
Harsh discipline, including shackles and whipping posts, was common.
Resistance was common, including revolts and flight to the mountains.
Spanish colonialism caused a dramatic population decline due to disease and a plummeting birth rate.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the mission population numbered about 20,000, a decline of about a third in thirty years.

Fur Trade

Russians came to the Pacific Coast in search of furs.
Beginning in 1780, indigenous peoples began hunting otters for the Spanish.
From 1786 to 1790, 10,000 otter pelts were collected from the California coast by mission Indians, valued at more than 3,000 Spanish dollars in 1790.
Spanish interest in the Northwest Coast was to secure the region as a buffer zone between possible Russian colonies and Spain's center of Imperial activity in Mexico.

British Exploration and Trade

In the 1760s and 1770s, James Cook explored much of the Pacific Ocean.
In 1788, Cook landed on the Northwest Coast at Nootka Sound, where he found indigenous peoples eager to trade for metal.
He named the Hawaiian Islands the Sandwich Islands after the Earl of Sandwich.
Hawaii was emerging as a powerful and sophisticated political state with superb seafaring capabilities.
The Kanaka Maoli (indigenous Hawaiians) initially received the British well but later attacked and killed Cook after a navigational device went missing.
Cook's shipmates sold otter pelts for £2,000 upon returning home, sparking British interest in the economic value of sea otter pelts.
The British returned to the Northwest Coast to trade and explore.

British Activity

The result of the British returning to the Pacific Northwest was a rush of traders to the Nootka Sound and the Columbia River areas.
In 1785, John Mears built a trading house at Nootka Sound in British Columbia.
That same year, James Hanna sailed from Nytka with \$20,000 worth of sea otter pelts, which he sold in Canton, China.
When he returned to Nytka the following year, he found six English ships in the sound trading under the authority of the British East India Company. Two of them captained by Nathaniel Portlock and George Dixon had actually been officers on Cook's third expedition.
Over the next decade, Britain sent more than 25 expeditions to the region, to the West Coast of what is today Canada.

Changes in the Pacific Northwest

The Pacific Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples were not a pristine pre contact indigenous peoples.
Horses from the Pueblo revolt had already begun to reshape the societies on the fringes of the plains throughout the 1700s, including those in the Rocky Mountains.
Also, pandemic diseases had already struck the region, reshaping its demographic, political and economic history in important ways.
A smallpox epidemic that had its origins in Boston during the American Revolution, the transmission was tracked by historians, epidemiological historians. One named Elizabeth Finn, traced out the transmission pattern and the chain of transmission from the battle of Boston in the American revolution all the way to the Pacific Northwest Coast.
The maritime fur trade accelerated these changes.
Trade with Europeans brought wealth to indigenous economies.
Pacific Northwest tribes were extremely materialistic and eager to acquire manufactured goods, especially those made of metal.
Indigenous peoples shaped the trade, conducting business onshore and following indigenous customs.

Social Reformulation

The fur trade brought social change and the rise of a powerful warrior culture.
Power shifted from shamans to the warrior class.
The Tlingits rose to prominence as primary middlemen in the trade, largely through their military prowess.
Increased militarism destabilized communities as wealth flowed in, especially through the indigenous slave trade.

Epidemic Diseases

The most destructive effect of the fur trade was the heightened increase of instances of epidemic diseases.
Between 1780 and 1782, smallpox arrived in the region, causing many deaths.
Multiple epidemics ravaged the region.

Conclusion of Northwest

The point is that long before Americans even arrived, long before Lewis and Clark, before any of that, this was a region being dramatically reshaped and reformed by the effects of European colonialism.
And one indication of that is that Pacific Northwest Indigenous populations declined by 80% between 1774 and 1848 when it formed and became part of The United States.

Nootka Sound

All of this British activity in the region alarmed the Spanish.
And in 1789, established their own fort in Nuecasao and it began the Spanish like this. And they began seizing British vessels.
The British threatened war over the principle of freedom of the seas and the right of Britons to trade wherever they there were no established foreign settlements. You see this was would be the new way that the British would approach colonialism after their defeat in the American revolution. Trade, mercantilism, and not extensive settlement as before.
The Spanish and the British resolved their dispute in what came to be known as the Nootka Sound Convention signed in 1790.
But the Spanish were too weak to contest the British for long.
So they agreed to the British trader. They agreed that the British traders could work wherever they pleased along unoccupied coasts, and they would return compensated property and that they would dismantle their fort. And so the Spanish back out of the Pacific Northwest in other words.
In response to the Nootka Sound affair, Americans first formulated the doctrine of staying neutral in European quarrels. So they said, well, we're not gonna have any part to do with this.
But American traders were already involved in the Kassel because they were eager to participate in the sea otter trade with China.

American Involvement

In 1783, John Ledyard, an American who had also been part of the Cook expedition, published his journal of Captain Cook's last voyage to the Pacific Ocean.
Between 1788 and 1792, only 15 American vessels arrived to do any trading at Nootka Sound. But between 1795 and 1805, once the Napoleonic Wars began, 50 American vessels showed up and only nine British vessels showed up.
And then between 1850 and 1815 when the Napoleonic wars continued, but of course America also gets drawn in with the war of eighteen twelve, which will be the subject of my next lecture.
We still see 40 American vessels showing up, but only three British vessels showing up.

Robert Gray and Hawaii

One of these American traders was named Robert Gray.
In 1787, his ship Columbia departed Boston and traveled to the Pacific by way of Cape Horn.
They spent 1788 trading on Nocate Sound and then sailed China in 1789.
On the way to China in 1789, Gray stopped the Hawaiian Islands and he would be the first American to land there.
There he replenished his stocks of food, water, and wood, and he purchased 150 live hogs.
He also returned a passenger, a native man who was arrayed in a feather cloak and helmet that was shaped like a Roman soldier and was featured in his later accounts.

Relations with Hawaii

This voyage opened political relations between the Hawaiian state and the newly created United States of America, on equal terms.
Americans cut a deal with Chief Kamehameha, assisting him in consolidating power in exchange for the right to hire Kanaka (Hawaiian sailors).
By 1795, Kamehameha united all of Hawaii under his leadership, establishing the House of Kamehameha.
Hawaii became the hub of the Pacific Basin trade system and a powerful, sophisticated, and independent state.
Within a decade, the Hawaiian nation had a written constitution and foreign embassies.
Indigenous peoples responded to colonialism in innovative ways, sometimes through nationalism and imperialism.

Russian American Company

The Russians consolidated their trade under the Russian American Company.
Alexander Baranov married the daughter of an Aleutian chief and founded Three Saints Bay, Alaska.
The Russian American company established a trading post in Sitka Sound (New Archangel, Alaska).
The Tlingits, armed by the Americans, were able to resist the Russians to some degree.
In 1812, the Russians planted a trading house at Fort Ross on Bodega Bay in Northern California, marking the southernmost point of Russian settlement in North America.

Final Thoughts

The Pacific world was a busy, changing, interconnected global place at the time of the American Revolution.
Commerce and trade shaped life in the region.
Indigenous peoples were central to its future.