Ranald, McLoughlin,Beaver

[George Lang]

Whoops, sorry about the slip: Ranald was in fact a *grand*son of Concomly.
And sorry to go so long.

Ranald’s trip to Japan was an adventure worthy of his lunatic predecessors,
Scot and Chinook.  He had himself cast off in a rowboat off the north
coast, making it look like he had been unjustly thrown out by a harsh
captain.  The Japanese didn’t buy the story.  Japan was officially closed
to all contact with the West, which Ranald knew, in fact that was his
point.  The legend has it that he was inspired in his mission after a
Japanese boat drifted up on the Washington shore when he was a boy,
demasted, or whatever, and than caught in the Black Current.  In the months
he spent in Nagasaki awaiting exchange as a hostage, he taught English to
Imperial interpreters who later dealt with Commodore Perry.  I think we can
indeed assume that he was the first speaker of Wawa to visit Japan (but
does anyone know who was on Perry’s ship?).  It is not true, but often said
that he was the first English teacher in Japan.

John McLoughlin certainly spoke French.  His mother, Angélique, had him
baptized (Lhush khakwa, Mike, uk bastEn tsEm) “Jean-Baptiste” on Dec 5,
1784, a few months after his birth.  Before the arrival of Fathers Demers
and Blanchet he was known to give Sunday services in French (in Rich’s
Intro to the 1941 edition of the McLoughlin Ft Vanc. Letters to the HBC).
“The only books [he used, per a letter to the Rev. Beaver, who clearly
rotted his socks] “were a French Bible and a Penser Y Bien
having no French
sermons my discourses were original compositions or translation from the
English.”

More fun for an Easter weekend: this touching on the Rev. Beaver, with whom
at one point McLoughlin had fisticuffs.

Beaver had a personal problem with McLoughlin’s country marriage with
Marguerite Wadin McKay.

“Unfortunately, Mrs McLoughlin’s history, details of which no doubt became
known to Beaver, was such as to make her peculiarly vulnerable to narrow-
minded criticism.  She had been first married, fur-trade fashion, to
Alexander McKay, of the North West Company, who later entered the service
of Astor’s Pacific Fur Company.  He was killed when the Tonquin was
destroyed in Clayoquot Sound, in 1811.  For long it was politely assumed
that it was only after news of McKay’s death reached the East that she
became the wife, once again after the custom of the fur trade, of John
McLoughlin.  But the records of the matter, though scanty, show clearly
that this was not so.  Everything suggests that McKay had deserted her, or
parted from her by mutual consent, before he left for the Pacific Coast;
and there was therefore nothing irregular about McLoughlin’s relations with
her, even before McKay’s death.  But the view the Rev. Herbert Beaver would
take of the whole episode can readily be imagined.”

There is a piece on “Marguerite Wadin McKay McLoughlin” in the Oregon His.
Quarterly, No. 36, pp. 338-47.  An interesting woman.