The Beaver

The Beaver by Roger Pocock (1927)

Roger Pocock's "The Beaver" tells the history of the first steamship to ply the Pacific Ocean, from her construction in England through her decades of service on the British Columbian coast. The vessel was built by Messrs. Boulton and Watt at Blackwall on London River during the reign of George IV, launched by a duchess who christened her the Beaver, and greeted with three cheers by the merchant adventurers of the Hudson's Bay Company. Ugly but solidly made of copper-bolted oak, she sailed with her engines packed in the hold and her masts brigantine-rigged, travelling under convoy of the barque Columbia around Cape Horn. The voyage was troubled from the start. The ship's master, a peppery and quarrelsome figure, logged his officers for dishonesty and drunkenness, drove them to illness, and finally at the Columbia River provoked his crew to open mutiny. When sailors Phillips and Wilson were ordered flogged, Phillips called on the crew to rescue him and they rushed the captain, who drew his sword and defended himself, wounding one seaman before succeeding in tying Phillips up and administering punishment. Wilson then voluntarily demanded eleven strokes for himself so as to share the experience with his shipmate. At Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, then the Hudson's Bay Company's chief establishment on the Pacific coast under the authority of the great Doctor McLauchlan, the Beaver shipped her paddles, fired up her engines, and offered an excursion trip for the ladies. She then made her first ocean voyage under steam, eight hundred miles up the coast to British Columbia, departing on the last day of May in 1836, two years before the Atlantic was crossed under steam. Along the Vancouver coast she discovered an outcrop of steam coal judged the finest on the Pacific Ocean. In her years of prominence she served as a small armed trading vessel, conducting commerce with indigenous peoples and bombarding their villages from Puget Sound to Alaska. In middle age she became a survey ship exploring coastal waters. As she aged, her boiler leaked and had to be plugged with rags on sticks. She ended her days as a grimy tug, forgotten, allowed to lie as a weed-grown wreck near the new City of Vancouver until a storm gave her a sea burial after fifty-two years of service. In 1851 the Beaver brought nuggets of Californian gold to the factor at Fort Simpson. The factor at first refused the gold, then bought it at half value, and then showed it to Edenshaw, head chief of the Haida nation. Edenshaw learned that each small nugget was worth a great pile of blankets, and after borrowing a specimen to show his people in the Queen Charlotte Islands, an old woman told him she knew where such material could be found. She led him by dugout canoe to the outer coast, where a streak of quartz and gold seven inches wide and eighty feet long crossed a headland. They filled a bushel basket with loose pieces and left them in the canoe while they went back for more, only to return and find that Edenshaw's young son Charlie had thrown the entire first load into the water to watch the dogfish. Enough gold was saved to purchase many bales of blankets, and Edenshaw later claimed that had he known the full value of his find he would have gone to England and married the queen's daughter. Word spread along the coast and the Hudson's Bay Company brigantine Una arrived, her crew blasting the rocks while oiled Indians seized the loose gold faster than sailors could wrestle it from them. The Una eventually sailed with a cargo of gold but was wrecked in the Straits of Fuca. The following year Gold Harbor filled with small vessels guarded by a gunboat, and together they harvested two hundred eighty-nine thousand dollars in gold. After the warship Thetis departed, the schooner Susan Sturgis returned alone in winter for a second load. One day while all hands dined below, Indians came aboard, secured the hatches, took the crew prisoner, marched them ashore through deep snow, and stripped them. Only Captain Rooney and his mate Lang were permitted to keep their undergarments. The common seamen were sold to the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Simpson, while Rooney and Lang were kept as slaves, chopping firewood by day under guard and sleeping in a dark corner of an Indian house at night, fed on scraps of offal. One old woman secretly hid dried clams within their reach beneath the matting. They also cultivated the friendship of Chief Bearskin's son, and Bearskin himself was a decent man, though Edenshaw proved brutal. After the schooner was plundered and broken up, a dispute arose between Bearskin and Edenshaw over ownership of the captives, and twice Lang was placed on a block with his execution imminent before Bearskin relented. Both men were eventually sold to Captain McNeill, who clothed them and put them aboard the Beaver. During the passage south a storm carried away the steering gear, and Lang, being a ship's carpenter, repaired it and saved the vessel and all aboard. That rescued slave became the pioneer ship-builder of Western Canada.

By Roger Pocock · First published 1927 · Genre: Historical Fiction, Maritime Adventure, Biography · 1,460 words

First lines

In the heart of the city of Victoria I once found an old log barn, the last remnant of Fort Camosun, and climbing into the loft, kicked about in a heap of rubbish from which emerged some damp rat-gnawed manuscript books. From morning to evening, and far into the dusk, I sat reading there the story of a great adventuress, a heroine of tonnage and displacement, the first steamer which ever plied on the Pacific Ocean.

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animals · beavers · wildlife · nature · Canadian literature · adventure · exploration · naturalism · survival · wilderness · ecology · animal behavior

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The Beaver is listed on Textopian as a historical account by Roger Pocock, dated 1927 CE.

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