Free Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival by Peter Stark

at the ship’s boat. By then, the Tonquin, making good speed on a good wind under Captain Thorn’s command, had already sailed three miles out to sea.
    All nine of the partners and clerks stranded on the island piled into the boat—twenty feet in length, built for half that number—and took to the oars. Backs bent in unison with each grunting stroke, they rowed hard after the Tonquin, expecting that the ship would “heave to” into the wind at any moment and wait for them to catch up. It did not. The Tonquin proceeded to sail onward, displaying full billowing canvas to the tops of the masts, into the open South Atlantic.
    They strained harder at the oars, fighting a tidal current. The ship was fast outpacing them. As they left the sheltered bay and pulled into the open ocean, the full force of wind and waves and spray swept over the little rowboat, drenching them in cold seawater. The Tonquin now had sailed ahead by more than two leagues—or six miles. Ever larger swells broke over the rowboat’s gunwales, dumping in seawater that sloshed around their feet. Taking turns with a bailing bucket, the passengers furiously scooped water from the bilge and tossed it overboard. The Falklands lie only six hundred miles from Antarctica. The water remains frigid even at the height of the Antarctic summer. If the rowboat swamped, the clerks and Scottish traders, even those who knew how to swim, would have no chance of survival.
    They momentarily paused at the oars. A brief, urgent discussion broke out: Should they chase onward into the tumultuous open sea after the Tonquin, or turn back to the immediate safety of the shore, where eventual death by exposure, starvation, or simply years of bare-handed isolation might await them?
    As they debated, the man who was bailing lost his grip on the bucket. It danced away on the heaving swells. Those at the oars heaved hard to swivel the rowboat to catch the errant bucket. One of the oars snapped. Now they were bobbing on the open swells, without a bailing bucket, and missing one oar, with the Tonquin still sailing away from them.
    They hesitated once more. Should they return to the barren island or chase after the Tonquin ? A decision was made: They would reach the ship—or die trying.
    “The weather now grew more violent,” reported Ross, “the wind increased. . . .”
    It was then, Ross wrote, as they despaired of reaching her, that they noticed the Tonquin begin to swing on the wind. Soon she had shifted course entirely. She bore down toward the oared vessel. After considerable maneuvering in the rough seas, the two vessels finally managed to pull alongside each other. The abandoned passengers climbed aboard from the tossing boat to the safety of the big ship.
    Franchère, who was in the boat, wrote that there was never any doubt of Captain Thorn’s clear intention to abandon them “upon those barren rocks of the Falkland isles, where we must inevitably have perished.”
    The timely intervention of young Robert Stuart had saved them. Robert was the nephew of Scottish partner David Stuart, the kinder and older trader who had mediated the power struggle the first night at sea out of New York Harbor. David Stuart, the uncle, was among the passengers in the struggling oared boat. When it had become clear on board the Tonquin that Captain Thorn had no intention of turning her around to save the boat and its passengers, the younger Stuart strode up to the captain on the quarterdeck. Whipping out two loaded pistols, he commanded Captain Thorn to alter course immediately.
    Do it, young Stuart demanded, or “you are a dead man this instant.”
    O N F EBRUARY 11, 1811, two months after leaving the Falklands and rounding Cape Horn, the Tonquin’ s crew spotted from fifty miles away the snowcapped cone of Mauna Loa volcano rising two and a half miles above the blue Pacific swells. The volcano marked the largest isle of the group that Captain Cook had named the Sandwich Islands when he had