The Tonquin Sails for Astor's Empire

On August 23, 1810, John Jacob Astor bought the bark Tonquin for $37,860 to launch the Pacific Fur Company, his bid to plant a trading post on the Columbia River before any rival flag got there first. Two weeks later, on September 8, 1810, the Tonquin cleared New York Harbor under Captain Jonathan Thorn, a U.S. Navy lieutenant, carrying four company partners, a dozen clerks, more than a dozen Canadian voyageurs, and tradesmen bound for a coast none of them had seen. Thorn ran the ship like a warship and the partners ran their own conversations in Gaelic and French just to shut him out of them, a standoff that nearly got a boatload of men marooned off the Falkland Islands that December. The Tonquin reached the mouth of the Columbia the following March, and the outpost its passengers built there that May became Astoria, the first permanent American settlement on the Pacific coast.