Celebrate America250: First American Circumnavigation

August 9, 1790. Capt. Robert Gray completed the first American circumnavigation of the world, sailing into Boston Harbor after having departed almost three years before.

Americans had been trying to trade with China for several years, and financier Robert Morris financed the trading voyages. But they had not been very successful because it was hard to find American goods that China wanted. British Capt. James Cook's journal had been published in the US in 1784, in which he described taking furs in the Pacific Northwest and then selling them in China, and Boston merchant and architect Charles Bulfinch read it. He realized there was another approach to Chinese trade that might be successful - he wanted to send American ships to the Pacific Northwest to harvest furs and take them to China where they would be traded for tea, silks, porcelain, and other Chinese goods that were in high demand in the new country called America. In 1787, Bulfinch organized a group of Boston merchants who financed two ships commanded by Robert Gray to attempt this triangular trade.

Robert Gray sailed his two ships, Lady Washington and Columbia, from Boston in September 1787 to the Azores, the Falklands, around Cape Horn, and up the western coast of the Americas to the Pacific Northwest. He spent two years exploring and trading with the Indians for furs.

In 1790, he left the Lady Washington to continue trading for furs while he took a cargo of furs west in the Columbia. He stopped in the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii), where he took on passengers, and then sailed to Canton, China. After selling his furs and purchasing a cargo of tea, he continued sailing west through the Indian Ocean around the Cape of Good Hope, returning to Boston in August 1790. Even though the voyage was a financial disappointment, Gray had proved that the concept of the triangular maritime fur trade was possible.

Gray was celebrated in Boston for completing the first American circumnavigation. Governor John Hancock organized a parade and reception for Gray, and some Hawaiian passengers from the Columbia joined the parade in native garb. Within a few weeks Gray had departed on another voyage to the Pacific, quickly followed by other merchant ships from Boston. On this voyage Gray discovered the Columbia River in 1792, which formed the basis for America's claim to the rich Oregon Country. Gray continued on to China again and completed his second circumnavigation in July 1793 when he returned to Boston.

What was the legacy of Robert Gray's circumnavigations? The Russians and Spanish had been taking furs in the Pacific Northwest for decades and selling them in their home countries, but Gray and his financial sponsor Bulfinch were the first to understand that they could make more profit by selling the furs in China and then importing Chinese goods to America and Europe. American merchants dominated the maritime fur trade for four decades. The fledgling American maritime industry out-competed wealthier and better-established European countries in this trade.

Gray's voyages, trading, and exploration of the Pacific Northwest made its riches known to Americans and provided a basis for the United States to claim the region. The Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1803 opened an overland route to the Oregon Country, and American settlers started to flood into the region in the 1830s on the Oregon Trail. In 1846 Britain and the US divided the region, which eventually became the states of Oregon and Washington and the province of British Columbia.

Although Robert Gray is little-remembered today, the name of his ship, Columbia, was one of the inspirations for the name of the lunar command module on Apollo 11 and the space shuttle Columbia. (Columbia, as the personification of America, was the other inspiration.) His legacy as one of the first American international traders lives on in America's global commercial dominance.