s. His present plan was to form a fur company and
establish a series of trading posts along the Missouri River, reaching
overland across the Rocky Mountains until they joined the posts on the
Pacific. The place he selected for his Pacific depot was the mouth of
the Columbia River.

The principal rival of the Astor Fur Trading Company was the Northwest
Company. Astor tried to persuade the company to join him in his new
venture. When it refused to do so as an organization, he approached
individual employees of the Company, and in 1810 formed the Pacific Fur
Company. Among the incorporators were four Scottish Canadians, Messrs.
McKay, McDougall, David Stuart, and Robert, his nephew. There were
several other partners, including Wilson Price Hunt, of New Jersey.

It was planned that Hunt should lead an overland expedition from St.
Louis, while the four Scotsmen mentioned went around the Horn, and that
they should meet at the mouth of the Columbia River, where the trading
post was to be situated. Most of the employees of the company were
Canadians who had enjoyed large experience in the fur business. Among
these were included a large number of French _voyageurs_.

Thus the _Tonquin_, owned by a German, captained by an American, with a
crew including Swedes, French, English, Negroes, and Americans,
carrying out a party of Scottish and French Canadians and one Russian,
{263} started on her memorable voyage to establish a trading post under
the American flag! The crew of the _Tonquin_ numbered twenty-three
men. The number of passengers was thirty-three.

The story of her voyage is related in the letters of the captain to Mr.
Astor, and more fully in a quaint and curious French journal published
at Montreal in 1819, by M. Gabriel Franchere, one of the Canadian
clerks who made the voyage.

The _Tonquin_ was pierced for twenty guns, only ten small ones being
mounted. The other ports were provided with imposing wooden dummies.
She had a high poop and a topgallant forecastle. The four partners,
with James Lewis, acting captain's clerk, and one other, with the two
mates, slept in the cabin or wardroom below the poop. Forward of this
main cabin was a large room extending across the ship, called the
steerage, in which the rest of the clerks, the mechanics, and the
Canadian boatmen were quartered.

Thorn seems to have felt to the full all the early naval officer's
utterly unmerited contempt for the merchant service.