Around the World on the Columbia

HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

Come with me on a voyage around the world with the officers and crew of the ship Columbia. Formally named the Columbia Rediviva and accompanied by the sloop Lady Washington, the ship was owned by a group of prominent Bostonians and charged with opening up trade between Boston and China. Almost by accident, the Columbia became the first American ship to visit the west coast of North America, the first American ship to land in the Hawaiian islands, and the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe. Over the course of five years and two expeditions, the crew completed two circumnavigations, brought the first native Hawaiian to visit Boston, and “discovered” the Columbia river (which would have been news to the dozens of villages and thousands of inhabitants on the river). The mighty river of the west had previously been thought to be a myth, and navigating up this river established US land claims in what would eventually become seven states. The Oregon Country was contested between Russia, Spain, and Britain, but the Columbia’s expedition opened it to Boston merchants, and pretty soon all American traders on the west coast were known as the Boston men.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/233/

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Around the World on the Columbia

• Robert Haswell’s log of the 1787 voyage
• Don Martinez passes news of the Columbia to Boston
• The Columbia returns to Boston in 1790
• John Quincy Adams writes to Abigail Adams about the Columbia’s 1790 return
• John Boit’s log of the 1790 voyage
• Haswell’s partial log of the 1790 voyage
• Captain Robert Gray’s surviving 1790 log entries
• The detailed map of the Northwest created on the 1790 voyage
• History of the Columbia River by William Denison Lyman
• Hubert Howe Bancroft’s History of the Northwest Coast
• How Charles Bulfinch recovered Robert Gray’s log
• Dean A Fales’ 1960 paper on Joseph Barrell
• A 1989 thesis on the second voyage
• The Life of Letters of Charles Bulfinch, Architect by Ellen Susan Bulfinch
• Samuel Eliot Morrison’s The Maritime History of Massachusetts 1783-1860
• Martha Gray’s petition for a Revolutionary widow’s pension
• Morrison’s” Boston Traders in the Hawaiian Islands, 1789-1823″
• The images below are from a museum in San Francisco