HISTORICAL ENTRY — PACIFIC NORTHWEST — ORDUS FOUNDING DOCUMENT
On the Founding of Astoria
Being an Account of the Pacific Fur Company Expedition of 1810–1811, and Certain Additional Proceedings
Primary source: Ordus Pacific Coast Archive, Box 1, Folder 1 · Classification: Restricted (Senior Agent and above)
The following account has been compiled from the expedition logs of the ship Tonquin, from the private correspondence of John Jacob Astor, from two letters of Thomas Jefferson held in the Ordus archive at Monticello, and from the personal journal of N. Pennington, Esq., purser and surveyor, subsequently known as the Pacific Lodge Record. Where these sources diverge, Pennington’s journal is considered authoritative. Where it is silent, silence is the record.
I. The Commission
In the city of New York, in the autumn of 1810, two men sat together in the house of John Jacob Astor on Broadway and discussed the shape of the continent. Astor was, by that point, the wealthiest man in America — a fur trader of extraordinary commercial instinct who had built an empire from beaver pelts and who understood, with the clarity that comes from moving goods across great distances, that the Pacific Coast of North America was the next frontier of American commercial ambition. The trade routes of the Pacific world — Canton, the Sandwich Islands, the Russian settlements of Alaska — were accessible to whoever established the first American port on the western ocean. Astor intended to be that person.
His companion that evening was Thomas Jefferson, former President of the United States, author of the Declaration of Independence, and — a fact that would surprise no one who had read his correspondence with sufficient attention — a High Magus of the Ordus Magistora Illuminati, holding the rank he had achieved through thirty years of philosophical inquiry, careful practice, and the particular kind of intellectual courage that is required to follow evidence wherever it leads, including into territories that the epistemology of the Enlightenment was not designed to accommodate.
Jefferson had, a decade earlier, sent Lewis and Clark west. The official purpose of that expedition was geographical and commercial survey. The Ordus purpose — approved by Jefferson in his capacity as High Magus and conducted without the knowledge of the expedition's mundane members — was the assessment of the Pacific Coast and Columbia River watershed for sensitivity nodes of significance. Clark's journals contain certain passages, marked in a private cipher that Jefferson had taught him before departure, that are not geographical observations. The Ordus holds the deciphered versions. They were the foundation of the evening's discussion.
Jefferson poured two glasses of Madeira, spread the Clark maps across the table, and said: here. And here. And here. And Astor, who was not a sensitive but was a man who understood that certain investments require advisors whose expertise exceeds the commercial, said: how much will it cost and how long will it take.
The answer, agreed upon over the course of that evening and the two that followed: one Great Enterprise. Two expeditions — one overland following the Lewis and Clark route, one by sea. A hundred men for the maritime venture. Sufficient capital to build not a trading post, not a seasonal settlement, but a city — the first American city on the Pacific coast of the continent. And, conducted privately and separately from the commercial proceedings, the founding rites. The relics assembled. The charter written. The proceedings blessed by a man who understood, in the precise technical sense that the Ordus uses that phrase, what blessing the proceedings of a founding actually accomplishes in a location with the sensitivity profile of the Columbia River mouth.
The man selected to carry out the Ordus component of the enterprise was Jefferson's friend and lieutenant, a former gentleman of Oxfordshire, England, who had been in Jefferson's circle since Jefferson's years in Paris and who held a rank in the Ordus that Jefferson described, in his private correspondence, as "indeterminate by design and considerable in fact." His name was Nigel Pennington. His official role on the expedition: purser.
On Thomas Jefferson and the Ordus
Jefferson's membership in the Ordus is not a matter the organization has confirmed publicly, for the obvious reason that the organization does not confirm anything publicly. Within the Ordus's internal records, Jefferson's rank of High Magus is documented from approximately 1790 onward, achieved through a combination of his natural philosophical aptitude, his extensive personal library of esoteric texts (the core of which is now held at the University of Virginia's special collections, with the most significant volumes held separately in the Ordus archive at Monticello), and a period of direct study that the records describe only as "the Paris years."
His friendship with Benjamin Franklin, who held the rank of Grand Magus and is the reason the Ordus has always had a stronger presence in Philadelphia than in any other American city, was formative. Franklin's influence on Jefferson's development as a practitioner is documented in their correspondence, encoded in the same cipher that Jefferson later taught to William Clark.
Jefferson's specific contributions to the Ordus's Pacific project: the Lewis and Clark sensitivity assessment, the identification of the Columbia mouth as a primary founding site, the selection of Pennington as expedition purser and lodge charter bearer, and the performance of the founding rites in New York before the expedition departed. He never visited the Pacific Coast personally. He did not need to. He had Pennington.
II. The Voyage of the Tonquin
The maritime expedition departed New York in late 1810 aboard several ships, principal among them the Tonquin, under the command of Captain Jonathan Thorn — a naval officer of competence and temperament whose subsequent history would not be entirely unconnected to his inability to take seriously the advice of the man he knew only as his purser.
The voyage south was swift. The ships made the Strait of Magellan in conditions that the Tonquin's log describes as remarkably favorable — clear weather, steady winds, none of the storms that could hold a ship in the strait for weeks. The log's entry for the transit is brief and professional. Pennington's journal entry for the same period is also brief, and notes only that the work held, which his journal's readers will understand as a reference to something other than the rigging.
From the Pacific they ran north and west, resupplying at the Sandwich Islands — the archipelago that would become Hawaii, already frequented by American trading vessels and offering the provisions and fresh water that a long Pacific crossing required. Pennington's journal entries from this period are longer, and contain observations about the Islands' sensitivity profile that are not relevant to the Columbia expedition but that the Ordus's Pacific archive has flagged for separate assessment. He was, apparently, incapable of visiting a location of paranormal significance without taking notes.
From the Sandwich Islands they tacked northeast, caught the North Pacific Current, and let it carry them toward the Oregon coast.
The mouth of the Columbia River is one of the most dangerous navigational hazards on the Pacific coast. The river carries, at its mouth, the entire drainage of a watershed that extends from the Canadian Rockies to the Nevada desert — a volume of freshwater that meets the Pacific not as a gentle estuary but as a sustained hydraulic contest, the river's momentum driving against the ocean's surge in standing waves and shifting sandbars and tidal currents that change character with every season and every storm. The bar at the Columbia's mouth has claimed more ships than any comparable stretch of American coastline. It is called, with the straightforward naming instinct of people who have experienced it, the Graveyard of the Pacific.
The Tonquin made it across.
The log records this in the matter-of-fact language of professional seamanship: sea conditions, wind direction, depth soundings, the negotiation of the cape on the northern shore that charts would later name Cape Disappointment in honor of the expeditions that had not succeeded where the Tonquin did. The log does not explain why the Tonquin succeeded where others had failed. Pennington's journal is similarly uninformative on this point — a single line: the crossing was made without incident, for which give thanks where thanks are due.
The sensitive community of the Pacific Northwest, two centuries later, is aware that the Columbia bar has a character. The river has a character. The meeting of the Columbia and the Pacific is not only a geographical feature. It is a sustained argument between two enormously powerful presences — the river that moves more water than any other in the continent west of the Mississippi, and the ocean that receives it — conducted continuously in the medium of water and weather and the particular kind of force that does not have a name because it does not need one. It simply is.
The Ordus's current assessment of the bar's sensitivity profile is filed under the same classification as the Hoh entry, for reasons that will be apparent to any agent who has read both. What can be said at the accessible level: the bar's behavior is not entirely explicable by meteorology and hydrography. It has moods. It has preferences. On certain days, in certain seasons, under certain conditions, ships that should not make it across do. On other days, under conditions that appear favorable, ships that should make it across do not. The Tonquin crossed on a day the bar was willing to be crossed. Pennington almost certainly had something to do with that. The journal does not say so explicitly. The journal does not need to.
There is a moment at the bar — every sailor who has crossed it knows the moment, and those who survive speak of it afterward with the particular reticence of people describing something they do not have adequate language for — when the river and the ocean both seem to pause. As if they are noticing something. As if the decision about what happens next is being made by something other than the weather.
The Tonquin anchored in Young's Bay, on the south shore of the Columbia's lower reach, in the spring of 1811. The land was, in the assessment of the expedition's officers, excellent: sheltered water, deep enough for ocean-going vessels, with timber of exceptional quality close at hand and soil that promised productive cultivation. The river behind them was the highway to the continental interior. The ocean before them was the highway to the Pacific trade. Everything that a city needed to be a city was present, waiting to be used.
The hundred men went to work. Farms were cleared and planted. Houses went up — timber-framed, solid, built to last rather than to serve a season. A smithy. A fishery that took immediate advantage of the Columbia's salmon runs, which were, in 1811, of a richness that would take another century of commercial exploitation to reduce to their current diminished state. A fort, with the squared-log construction that the era required. A public square, because Jefferson had insisted that a city begins with the place where its people gather rather than with its defenses. And a hotel, built with rather more ambition than the settlement's current size warranted, on the grounds that the settlement would not remain its current size for long. The hotel would eventually be called the Grand Astoria, after the man who funded most of it, and the city that grew up around it would carry the same name.
Pennington worked alongside the men but separately from them. He surveyed. He planned. He organized supply chains with a competence that the expedition's officers found remarkable in a purser and that reflected, in fact, the experience of someone who had been organizing supply chains for enterprises considerably more complex than a colonial settlement for considerably longer than his apparent age suggested was possible. He also built his own place.
The structure was modest by the standards of the settlement's more ambitious constructions — a single-story timber building, well-made, set slightly apart from the main cluster of the settlement's buildings on a lot that Pennington had surveyed himself and selected with a care that the other settlers attributed to personal preference and that was, in fact, the result of a sensitivity assessment he had conducted during the first week ashore.
The interior was organized around a central table of heavy Douglas fir — the first significant use of that timber species in a building in American Astoria, a detail that no one noticed at the time but that the Ordus's historical researchers have found to be characteristic of Pennington's founding sites across his long career, for reasons they attribute to the wood's specific resonance properties and that Pennington himself, in his journal, never explains. On the table, and on the shelves he built along the walls, he arranged what he had brought from New York:
Mathematical instruments: a sextant, a theodolite, a surveying chain, a set of calibrated weights and measures in both English and metric units, a collection of compasses including two that the inventory describes as "adjusted" in ways the standard instrument trade would not recognize.
A special astrolabe — the journal's description of this instrument occupies three pages and has been assessed by the Ordus's instrument scholars as a description of a device that does not appear in any standard catalogue of navigational or astronomical instruments of the period. Its current location is unknown. It is listed in the Pacific Lodge inventory of 1811 and is absent from the inventory of 1815. It is not listed as lost, sold, or transferred. It is simply absent.
Volumes on flora, fauna, medicine, and alchemy — the last term used in its technical sense, encompassing both the practical chemistry of the period and the broader tradition of natural philosophy that the Ordus used as its primary intellectual framework in the early nineteenth century.
Notes transcribed from the manuscripts of Sir Isaac Newton — not the published works, which were available to any educated man, but the unpublished manuscripts, the ones Newton had written in the last decades of his life that concerned themselves with questions that the published record of his thought carefully excludes. The Ordus holds the originals. Pennington had made copies in his own hand. What those copies contained is addressed in the GM section of this document.
And last: a charter. Handwritten, on paper of a quality that the Ordus archive has confirmed was manufactured specifically for the purpose, in an ink that contains components that are not standard to the period's commercial ink production. Signed at the bottom by Jefferson, Astor, and Pennington himself, in an order that reflects their respective ranks in the Ordus rather than their social precedence. The document establishing the first Lodge of the Ordus Illuminatus on the Pacific Coast of the Americas.
The founding ceremony was conducted on the first day of May, 1811, which Pennington's journal notes as chosen with deliberate care for its position in the calendar. The details of the ceremony are in the restricted section of the Pacific Lodge Record. What the journal records in its accessible portions: it took the better part of a day, it involved the settlement's surveyed boundaries in a way that the settlers observed as Pennington walking the perimeter with unusual deliberateness, and when it was concluded he sat for a long time in the doorway of his building facing the river, and wrote in his journal that the land had received it.
The land had received it. After so long without formal acknowledgment on this coast, the land received it with something I can only describe as relief. As though it had been waiting for someone to notice it properly. I told it: we noticed. We are here. We will maintain the watch.
The Charter: Text of the Founding Clause
"Be it known to all who hold the bonds of the Ordus Magistora Illuminatus, that on this first day of May, in the year eighteen hundred and eleven, in the city of Astoria on the Columbia River, on the Pacific Coast of the Americas, there is hereby established the first Lodge of the Order on this coast, to be known as the Pacific Lodge, Columbia Chapter, under the authority vested in the undersigned by the Grand Council of the Order, and to be maintained in perpetuity for the purposes of the Order's work in this territory: the observation, the maintenance, and where necessary, the intervention, in accordance with the Protocols and in service to the charge that has been the Order's since its founding, which charge is: to stand between the world that is known and the world that is not, and to ensure, to the best of our ability and knowledge, that the former endures.
Signed this day: T. Jefferson, High Magus. J.J. Astor, Senior Fellow. N. Pennington, Warden of the Pacific Shore."
The commercial result of the Astoria expedition is a matter of public historical record: the founding of the first American settlement on the Pacific coast, the establishment of the fur trade network that Astor had envisioned, and the assertion of American presence in the Oregon Territory that would eventually anchor the U.S. claim to the Pacific Northwest against British and Russian competition. The city of Astoria, Oregon, exists today as the direct consequence of Astor's commercial ambition and the hundred men who built it in 1811.
The Ordus result is less well documented in the public record and considerably more significant in the long run.
The founding ceremony of May 1, 1811, accomplished three things that Pennington's journal describes in the careful, technical language that Ordus practitioners use for precise work:
First: it acknowledged the sensitivity network of the Pacific Northwest in the formal Ordus sense of that word. The Columbia bar, the river, the deep site at what would become Seattle, the Hoh's presence on the peninsula to the north, the sacred geography of the Coast Range to the south — all of it received formal acknowledgment from the Order as a constituted body. This matters in the specific way that the Order's protocols treat all formal acknowledgments of significant sites: it creates a record, in whatever medium such records are maintained, that the Order is present and aware and has accepted the responsibilities of that awareness.
Second: it established a charter territory. The Pacific Lodge, Columbia Chapter, claimed the Pacific Coast of North America as the Order's operational domain, subject to the standard protocols and authorities of the Grand Council. This is not a political claim. It is a jurisdictional claim within the Order's internal structure, establishing which lodge has primary responsibility for the sites and phenomena of the region. Two hundred years later, that jurisdiction remains in force. The investigators' work in the Pacific Northwest is, in the Order's internal accounting, conducted under the authority of the Pacific Lodge that Pennington founded in a timber building in Young's Bay in 1811.
Third: it planted something. The founding rites of an Ordus lodge are not ceremonial in the empty sense. They are operational. What is planted in the ground of a founding site — not physically, or not only physically — persists. The Pacific Lodge's founding in Astoria created a root that has been growing into the sensitivity network of the Pacific Northwest for two hundred years. The Dojo at Pioneer Square in Seattle is not coincidentally located at a Ways access point above the Undercity. The Pacific Lodge chose that location. The Pacific Lodge has been choosing its locations since Pennington first surveyed Young's Bay and noted, in the margin of his survey notes, in a handwriting smaller than his usual: the land is listening.
The investigators will have noticed, at some point in their work for Nigel Pennington, that certain questions about him do not produce satisfying answers. How old is he? The piercings and the remnant Mohawk and the Manchester hooligan affect suggest mid-thirties, or a well-preserved forty. The depth of his knowledge, the range of his contacts, the way he occasionally refers to events that happened before living memory as things he recalls rather than things he has read — these suggest something else entirely.
Nigel Pennington, Purser of the Tonquin, Warden of the Pacific Shore, is the same Nigel Pennington who offered the player group's predecessors in the Ghost Hunters investigation their employment contracts. He was present at the founding of Astoria in 1811. He was present, as the investigators who pursued the Casa Grande temporal investigation discovered, in eighteenth-century Boston, where a young Benjamin Franklin introduced him to a group of time-displaced investigators he had apparently been expecting.
He does not age. Or more precisely: he ages very slowly, and the aging is not linear, and it appears to be at least partially within his control. The mechanism is not documented in any Ordus file that is accessible below Grand Master classification. The fact of it is noted in the accessible record with the institutional understatement the Ordus applies to things it considers operationally significant and theoretically unresolved: Warden Pennington's tenure in the position is of extended duration.
Extended duration. Since 1811, at minimum. Possibly longer. The first reference to a N. Pennington in the Ordus's records predates the Astoria expedition by decades — a mention in a 1780s London lodge record, describing a new associate from Oxfordshire of considerable ability and indeterminate age. The record is not definitive. The Ordus's historical researchers have not been able to establish a first appearance date with confidence, which is itself a datum.
Two hundred years as the Order's Warden of the Pacific Shore, in active operational engagement with the sensitivity network of one of the most paranormally significant regions on the continent, in a period that includes the contact-era plague, the founding of every major city in the Pacific Northwest, both World Wars, and the full history of the Order's Pacific Lodge from its first charter to its current form: Nigel Pennington knows things.
He does not share what he knows freely. He shares what is operationally necessary. He does this not because he is concealing information from the investigators for strategic reasons — or not only for strategic reasons — but because he has spent two centuries learning that the difference between knowing something and being ready to know something is the difference between receiving an education and receiving a wound. He is, in his own estimation, a careful teacher. The investigators may sometimes find his care frustrating. That is, also in his estimation, part of the curriculum.
He has been to the Hoh. He has sat in the Valley of the Giants at every equinox and solstice for which his schedule allowed, which is most of them over two hundred years. He has walked the Ways of Seattle since before Seattle was Seattle. He was present when the Grey first settled into its current form, in the decades after the contact-era dying, and he has been watching its rhythm change for the last twenty years with an expression that those who know him well describe as the expression of a man who has been expecting something and is watching it arrive.
He has not told the investigators what he is watching for. They are not yet ready to ask the right question. He is patient. He has been patient for a long time.
Pennington's Building: Current Status
The original timber building that Pennington constructed in Astoria in 1811 burned in 1922, along with a significant portion of old Astoria's waterfront district, in a fire whose cause the official record attributes to an overturned lantern and that the Pacific Lodge's internal record attributes to something the lodge notation describes only as "an intervention that was not ours and was not anticipated."
The lot on which it stood was purchased by the Pacific Lodge through a series of intermediary entities in 1923 and has remained in Lodge ownership since. The building currently on the lot is a two-story structure of no particular architectural distinction, occupied by a small maritime heritage organization whose board members are, without exception, Pacific Lodge members or associates. The basement of the building contains the Pacific Lodge archive for the Astoria district, including the original charter — the paper survived the fire in a manner the archive notes describe as "the document was found in the street outside the building, undamaged, having apparently come to rest there during the fire by means not established" — and Pennington's personal journal for the founding period.
The special astrolabe is not in the archive. It has not been in the archive since 1815. No one who has been asked about this has provided a satisfying answer. Pennington, when asked directly, says only that it is where it needs to be.
GM Information — The Founding of Astoria
The following section contains the deeper truth of the founding and of Pennington's nature. Distribute as revelations earned through sustained relationship with Pennington, through engagement with the Astoria archive, or through the investigators' own research into the Pacific Lodge's history. These are not secrets in the sense of information being concealed. They are truths that require the right context before they become receivable.
The notes transcribed from Newton's unpublished manuscripts that Pennington brought to Astoria contain material that Newton produced in the last twenty years of his life, after he had largely withdrawn from the public intellectual world and turned his attention to questions that his published work had carefully not addressed.
Newton was a member of the Ordus. This is documented in the Ordus's internal records and is not a surprise to anyone who has read his private notebooks with attention: his alchemical writings, his biblical chronology, his extensive work on what he called the prisca sapientia — the ancient wisdom that he believed underlay all genuine knowledge — are the work of a man who knew that the material world was not the whole of the world and who applied to the non-material world the same methodological rigor he applied to the motion of the planets.
What the unpublished manuscripts contain, that the published work does not: Newton's account of the mechanism by which certain locations accumulate what he called "persistent impressed force" — what the Ordus now calls ambient sensitivity, what the sensitive community calls presence, what the Hoh simply is. His model is wrong in several significant details. It was produced in the early eighteenth century with the tools available to natural philosophy at the time. But its core insight — that certain locations develop a sustained relationship with the accumulated experience of what has happened in them, and that this relationship is not metaphysical but physical, operating through mechanisms that are in principle discoverable — is correct, and has not been superseded by any subsequent Ordus theoretical work.
Pennington brought those notes to Astoria because the Pacific Northwest, according to the sensitivity assessment Lewis and Clark had conducted under Jefferson's direction, was the highest-concentration persistent-force environment on the continent. Newton's model, applied to the Pacific Northwest data, produced predictions that Pennington intended to test. Two centuries of subsequent observation have confirmed most of them. The ones that have not been confirmed are the ones that Newton himself flagged as uncertain, with his characteristic combination of intellectual honesty and barely suppressed alarm: the predictions about what happens when a high-concentration site has been without formal acknowledgment long enough that its accumulated experience exceeds a certain threshold.
Newton did not specify what happens. He said only: it seeks acknowledgment by other means. The founding ceremony of May 1, 1811 was, among its other purposes, Pennington's answer to this prediction. His journal entry's note that the land received it with relief is not poetic language. It is a data point. The threshold had not yet been reached. The acknowledgment arrived in time.
Whether the current situation — the shortening rhythm the cats track, the original door's two centuries without its keepers, the Grey's changing quality over the last twenty years — represents the threshold being approached again is the question Pennington has been sitting with. He has the Newton notes. He has two centuries of observation. He has not yet told the investigators what he thinks the answer is, which is itself information: it means he is not yet certain, or that he is certain and is still deciding how to deliver a truth of that size to people who have not yet finished their preparation for it.
Nigel Pennington does not age at a normal rate. The mechanism is not what most practitioners who encounter him for the first time assume it is. It is not a longevity working, not a sustained spell, not a bargain with an entity, not a ritual that requires periodic renewal. It is something that happened to him, once, a long time ago, that has not reversed and does not appear reversible.
What happened: in the Paris years, in the circle of Franklin and Jefferson and the other senior Ordus members who were in Paris in the 1780s for reasons that the mundane historical record accounts for and the Ordus record accounts for differently, Pennington undertook a working of a scale that the Ordus's protocols now classify as requiring Grand Council authorization and that was undertaken at the time with the authorization of Franklin, who was in a position to give it and who apparently considered the cost acceptable relative to the need.
The working involved the deep site beneath what was then a Salish settlement on Puget Sound, conducted from Paris at a distance that should have made it impossible and that was made possible by a specific combination of the Newton notes, the astrolabe Pennington later brought to Astoria, and Franklin's own considerable capacity. The purpose of the working: to bind a senior Ordus agent to the Pacific Shore in a formal sense — to create a Warden in the old meaning of the word, a guardian whose connection to the territory is not merely institutional but woven into the fabric of what the territory is.
The consequence: Pennington ages as the Pacific Northwest ages. Which is to say: very slowly, on geological time, marked more by the quality of accumulated experience than by the passage of years. He is not immortal. He can be killed. He can be harmed. He carries two centuries of accumulated loss in the specific way that anyone who has been paying attention to the same place for two hundred years carries loss: as something that is not sorrow exactly, but that has the same weight as sorrow and is not entirely distinguishable from it in the grey months.
He is the Pacific Lodge. Not metaphorically. In the same way that the Hoh is the forest — not the administrator of a thing but the continuous thread of identity through which the thing has its coherence — Pennington is the institutional continuity of the Order's presence on the Pacific Coast. What he knows, the Lodge knows. What he has witnessed, the Lodge has witnessed. When he eventually dies, if he eventually dies, what happens to the Lodge's two centuries of accumulated relationship with the Pacific Northwest sensitivity network is the question that the Ordus's Grand Council considers too alarming to address directly and has therefore declined to address at all.
If asked, the answer he'd give would be something like "Well, Mr. Richards hasn't arrived to lop off my head yet. So I'll just keep on for the now."
The special astrolabe that Pennington brought to Astoria and that disappeared from the Pacific Lodge inventory in 1815 is a navigational instrument in the same sense that the Columbia bar is a stretch of water: technically accurate and entirely insufficient as a description.
It was made in London, in the 1770s, by an instrument maker who was also a senior Ordus fellow, to Newton's theoretical specifications, as a physical instantiation of the persistent-force model Newton had developed in his unpublished manuscripts. It does not measure the angle of celestial bodies above the horizon. It measures the angle of sensitivity concentrations below the surface — the depth and orientation of significant nodes in the way that a compass measures magnetic north, providing not just the existence but the geometry of what lies beneath.
Pennington used it to survey the Pacific Northwest during the Astoria expedition, producing a map that is the most accurate sensitivity chart of the region in the Ordus's possession and that is currently held in the Pacific Lodge archive, in a sealed case that requires two senior fellows to open, and that was last consulted in 1967 by a Master whose assessment of the chart, written up as an appendix to a Pacific Northwest review document, concludes with the sentence: "The geometry has changed since this chart was made, and the change is consistent with a single interpretation that I am not prepared to commit to writing at this time."
The astrolabe itself is where Pennington said it is: where it needs to be. It is buried, in a sealed case of the same construction as the one that held the charter, at a depth of three feet, in a location that Pennington's 1815 journal entry describes only as "the place where the geometry is still correct." The investigators may eventually need it. Finding it will require finding the 1815 journal entry, which is in the Astoria archive, in the section that Pennington has not yet authorized for general agent access. He has been waiting for the right time to open that section. He is beginning to think the right time is approaching.
The maritime heritage organization that holds the Astoria lot receives a purchase offer — generous, anonymous, routed through enough corporate layers to be effectively untraceable at first pass. The offer is for the lot and the building, and contains a clause about "any historical materials held on the premises." Pennington wants the investigators to find out who is behind the offer before it is accepted or rejected. The charter is in that building. Someone knows it is there and knows what it is.
Astoria itself is starting to change. Sensitives who visit the city report that the founding's signature — the specific quality of presence that Pennington planted in May of 1811 — is under pressure from something that has moved into the sensitivity network of the lower Columbia. Not a hostile entity in the conventional sense. Something that is, in the Hoh's terms, pre-categorical: older than the founding, older than the city, old enough that the Ordus's founding claim is a very recent event from its perspective. It has not acted. It is aware of the investigators' activity. It is, in the consistent account of the sensitives who have perceived it, curious.
The 1815 journal section opens. Pennington calls the investigators to the Dojo and tells them there is something they need to find, and hands them a photocopy of a journal page with a hand-drawn survey notation and three words in the margin: not yet. Now. The astrolabe has been waiting two hundred years for the geometry to return to the configuration it recorded in 1811. It has returned. The chart will need to be re-read against current conditions. What has changed between the founding geometry and the present one is the question the chart will answer, and Pennington, who has not looked at the chart since 1967, is not certain he is going to like the answer.
A researcher at the Oregon Historical Society has found something in the Astor papers — a letter, misfiled, from Jefferson to Astor dated 1813, that refers to "the third expedition" and to instructions that were "conveyed to Pennington at the founding, to be acted upon at such time as the warden judges necessary." The researcher is entirely mundane and is writing an academic paper. The letter is about to be published. Pennington needs the investigators to determine what the third expedition was — because he received no such instructions at the founding, which means either Jefferson communicated something to him that he has since forgotten, which is unlikely, or the letter is about someone else's Pennington, which is alarming in a different way.
――― End of Entry: On the Founding of Astoria ―――