Tolmie joined the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1832 after finishing his education at the University of Glasgow. Soon, he was sent to the Pacific Northwest to manage and build a fort at the recently established Nisqually House, a fur trading warehouse in modern-day Washington state’s Puget Sound. Departing September 15, 1832, Tolmie would travel aboard the H.B.C. supply ship, Ganymede, to the Pacific Northwest. His journey is interesting both for his personal reflections and activities and for what it reveals about British maritime travel during the period. Travelling south from Britain, the Ganymede sailed past West Africa, crossed the Atlantic, around Cape Horn, and then toward Hawaii. After arriving in Hawaii on March 27, 1833, Tolmie spent time engaging in leisure activities, attending church, reading, and botanizing, collecting and documenting various plants. After nearly two weeks on Oahu, Tolmie departed again on a ship called the Fawn for the Pacific Northwest, where he would arrive on May 4, 1833, after nearly eight months at sea.
While far from an eventful trip, with Tolmie dedicating much of his journal during this period to his reflections on the works he read, Tolmie’s journey shows the increasing expanse and connectivity of the British Empire during the early nineteenth century and the isolation of its fringest extremities, such as the H.B.C. forts which dotted the Pacific Northwest. Powered only by sail, journeys of this kind were lengthy ordeals. The following storymap should provide a clear image of Tolmie’s journey
As this storymap demonstrates, Tolmie’s journey
Beyond highlighting the often monotonous and uncomfortable nature of maritime travel in the period, Tolmie’s journal is also enlightening for what it reveals about how people in the period experienced and wrote about the empire they occupied and travelled through. In Tolmie’s account, he repeatedly writes about the isolation and length of his travel. Beyond spatial isolation, Tolmie constructs the Pacific Northwest as an uncivilized, untamed region occupied by non-Christian Indigenous peoples. A passage from his time in Hawaii about attending church is particularly illustrative.
“This day [next] week if all is well, shall attend Divine Service at Oahu & going as I am into a savage country I may not for many years, or perhaps never again have an opportunity of witnessing, & joining in its performance under a sacred roof.”
Tolmie, Journals, 129.
Clearly, before he had even entered the region, Tolmie had constructed in his mind a view of the Pacific Northwest as an isolated and uncivilized space based on its spatial and cultural distance from the “civilized” world. This is an argument that many scholars who analyze traveller journals and narratives make.
Sources
- Ryan, Simon. The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia. England: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- Tolmie, William Fraser. Physician and Fur Trader: The Journals of William Fraser Tolmie. Vancouver: Mitchel Press Limited, 1963.
- Vibert, Elizabeth. Traders’ Tales: Narratives of Cultural Encounters in the Columbia Plateau, 1807-1846. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.