Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 23.djvu/328

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278 F. W. HOWAY

scattered allusions to Kendrick and his work. With their aid we can piece out the printed sources, Meares, Vancouver, Delano, Marchand, and Boit's Log of the Columbia, and thus compile a somewhat connected story of this interesting man from 1787 until his death in 1794.

At the outset a few words may be said about his family. The name first appears as "Kenwrick"; later it broke into two forms: "Kenwick" and "Kendrick." The founder of the family, Edward Kenwrick, emigrated, we are told, from the "west of England," probably to- wards the end of the seventeenth century. His first home is believed to have been in New Hampshire. In 1704 he is found settled at Harwich in the Cape Cod region. His eldest son, Solomon Kenwick, born in 1706, was the father of our Captain John Kendrick. The date of the birth of our John Kendrick has not been positively ascertained, but it is supposed to be about 1740; in that event he would be forty-seven years of age (an old man in those days) when he took command of the expedition of the Columbia and the Washington.

At about twenty years of age we find John Kendrick as one of the crew of a whaler on a voyage to the St. Lawrence. Later he saw service in the tented field dur- ing the French and Indian war. He married in 1767 and, returning to the sea, became the master of vessels sailing out of Boston. 1 During the war of independence he commanded several ships preying on the commerce of the mother land. In this connection the records show that in 1780 he was the master of the Rhode Island bri- gantine, Marianne, carrying sixteen guns and a crew of sixty-five men. Letters of marque were issued to her on December 16, 1780, upon the bond of Captain John Kendrick of Wareham and Silas Casey of East Green- wich; the owner was John Williams of Worcester, Mas-

1 The biographical information in this and the preceding paragraph is culled from Library of Cape Cod History and Genealogy, No. 35, Edward Kenwrick; C. W. Swift, Yarmouthport, Mass. 1915.