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All through the sixteenth century the South Seas were regarded as amysterious wonderworld, whence Spain drew unlimited wealth of gold andsilver bullion, of pearls and precious stones. Spain had declared thePacific 'a closed sea' to the rest of the world. But in 1567 ithappened that Sir John Hawkins, an English mariner, was cruising in theGulf of Mexico, when a terrific squall, as he said, drove his shipslandward to Vera Cruz, and he sent a messenger to the Spanish viceroythere asking permission to dock and repair his battered vessels. Nowon one of the English ships was a young officer, not yet twenty-fiveyears of age, named Francis Drake. Twelve Spanish merchantmen riggedas frigates lay in the harbour, and Drake observed that cargo of smallbulk but ponderous weight, and evidently precious, was being stowed intheir capacious holds. Was this the gold and silver{2}bullion thatwas enriching Spain beyond men's dreams? Whence did it come? CouldEnglish privateers intercept it on the high seas?

Perhaps the English adventurers evinced too great interest in thatprecious cargo; for though the Spanish governor had granted thempermission to repair their ships, the English had barely dismantledwhen Spanish fire-ships came drifting down on their moorings. Acannon-shot knocked a mug of beer from Hawkins's hand, and head overheels he fell into the sea, while a thousand Spaniards began sabringthe English crew ashore. Some friendly hand threw out a rope toHawkins, who was clad in complete armour. In the dark, unseen by theenemy, he pulled himself up the side of a smaller ship, and, cuttinghawsers, scudded for the open sea. There escaped, also, of Hawkins'sfleet another small ship, which was commanded by Francis Drake; andafter much suffering both vessels reached England.

One can imagine the effect on young Drake of the treacherous act and ofthe glimpse of that cargo of gold and silver treasure. The Englishcaptains had but asked a night's lodging from a power supposed to befriendly.{3}They had been met by a pirate raid. Good! YoungFrancis Drake eagerly took up Spain's challenge; he would meet the raidwith counter-raid. Three years later he was cruising the Spanish Main,capturing and plundering ships and forts and towns. In 1572 he led hismen across the Isthmus of Panama, and intercepted and captured aSpanish convoy of treasure coming overland. Near the south side of theisthmus he climbed a tree and had his first glimpse of the Pacific. Itset his blood on the leap. On bended knee he prayed aloud to theAlmighty to be permitted to sail the first English ship on that 'fairesea.' And, having recrossed the isthmus and loaded his ships withplunder, he bore away for England and reached Plymouth in August 1573.

The raid on Panama had brought Drake enormous wealth. At his own costhe built three frigates and two sloops to explore the South Seas, hispurpose being to enter the Pacific through the Strait of Magellan,which no Englishman had yet ventured to pass. These ships he equippedas if for royal tournament. Players of the violin and the harpdiscoursed music at each meal. Rarest wines filled the lockers.Drake, clad in rich velvet,{4}dined on plates of pure gold served byten young noblemen, who never sat or donned hat in his presence; and onhis own ship, thePelican—afterwards called theGolden Hind—hehad a hundred picked marines, men eager for battle and skilful inwielding the cutlass. His men loved him as a dauntless leader; theyfeared him, too, with a fear that commanded obedience on the instant.

Queen Elizabeth was in a quandary how to treat her gallant buccaneerand rover of the high seas. England and Spain were at peace, and shecould not give Drake an open royal commission to raid the commerce of afriendly power; but she did present him with a magnificent sword, tosignify that she would have no objection if he should cut his waythrough the portals leading to the 'closed sea.' The fleet set sail inDecember 1577, and steered by the west coast of Morocco and the CapeVerde Islands. The coast of Brazil was reached in April. Two of theships were abandoned near the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, afterhaving been stripped of provisions. In August the remaining threeships entered the tempestuous seas around Cape Horn. Drake drovebefore the gales with sails close-reefed and hatches battened, and came{5}out with only one of his three ships left, the first English keelto cleave the waters of the Pacific. In honour of the feat Drakerenamed his ship theGolden Hind. Perhaps there was jocose irony inthe suggestion of gold and speed. Certain it is, the crew of theGolden Hind were well content with the possession of both gold andspeed before advancing far up the west coast of South America.

Quite by chance, which seems always to favour the daring, somewhere offthe coast of Chile Drake picked up an Indian fisherman. The natives ofSouth America, for the best of reasons, hated their Spanish masters,who enslaved them, treated them brutally, and forced them to work inthe pearl fisheries and the mines. Drake persuaded the Indian to pilothis ship into the harbour of Valparaiso. Never dreaming that anyforeign vessel had entered the Pacific, Spanish treasure-ships layrocking to the tide in fancied security, and actually dipped colours toDrake. Drake laughed, waved his plumed hat back in salute, dealt outwine to give courage to 'his merrie boys,' and sailed straight amid theanchored treasure-ships. Barely had theGolden Hind taken a positionin the midst of the enemy's fleet, when, selecting one of thestaunchest{6}vessels of the enemy, Drake had grappling-irons thrownout, clamping his ship to her victim. In a trice the English sailorswere on the Spanish deck with swords out and the rallying-cry of 'Godand St George! Down with Spanish dogs!' Dumbfounded and unarmed, downthe hatches, over the bulwarks into the sea, reeled the surprisedSpaniards. Drake clapped hatches down upon those trapped inside, andturned his cannon on the rest of the unguarded Spanish fleet.Literally, not a drop of blood was shed. The treasure-ships werelooted of their cargoes and sent drifting out to sea.

All the other harbours of the Pacific were raided and looted in similarsummary fashion; and, somewhere seaward from Lima, Drake learned of atreasure-ship bearing untold riches—theGlory of the South Seas—thehuge caravel in which the Spaniards sent home to Spain the yearlytribute of bullion. TheGolden Hind, with her sails spread to thewind, sought for theGlory like a harrier for its quarry. One crewof Spaniards on a small ship that was scuttled saved their throats bytelling Drake that the great ship was only two days ahead, and loadedto the water-line with wealth untold. Drake crowded sail, had muskets{7}and swords furbished and thirty cannon loaded, and called on hiscrew to quit themselves like men. And when the wind went down heordered small boats out to tow theGolden Hind. For five days thehunt lasted, never slackening by day or by night; and when, at three inthe afternoon of a day in March, Drake's brother shouted from thecross-trees, 'Sail ho!' every man aboard went mad with impatience tocrowd on the last inch of canvas and overtake the rich prize. TheEnglishmen saw that the Spanish ship was so heavily laden that she wasmaking but slow progress; and so unconscious was the Spanish captain ofdanger, that when he discerned a ship approaching he actually loweredcanvas and awaited what he thought might be fresh orders from theviceroy. TheGolden Hind sped on till she was almost alongside theSpaniard; then Drake let go full blast all thirty cannon, as fast as hecould shift and veer for the cannoneers to take aim. Yards, sails,masts fell shattered and torn from the splendid Spanish ship. TheEnglish clapped their grappling-hooks to her sides, and naked swordsdid the rest. To save their lives, the Spanish crew, after a feebleresistance, surrendered, and bullion to the value in{8}modern moneyof almost a million dollars fell into the hands of the men of theGolden Hind.

Drake's vessel was now loaded deep with treasure, and preparations weremade to sail homeward, but her commander realized that it would bedangerous to attempt to return to England by way of the Spanish Mainwith a ship so heavily laden that she must sail slowly. It was thenthat legends of a North-East Passage came into his mind. He would sailnorthward in search of the strait that was supposed to lead through thecontinent to the Atlantic—the mythical strait of Anian. As the worldknows, there was no such passage; but how far north did Drake sailseeking it? Some accounts say as far as Oregon; others, as far as thenorthern coast of California; but, at all events, as he advancedfarther north he found that the coast sheered farther and farther west.So he gave over his attempt to find the strait of the legends, andturned back and anchored in 'a faire and good bay,' which is now knownas Drake's Bay, a short distance north of San Francisco; and, namingthe region New Albion, he claimed it for Queen Elizabeth. In July 1579he weighed anchor and steered south-west.{9}He reached the MoluccaIslands in November, and arrived at Java in March. In June he roundedthe Cape of Good Hope and then beat his way up the Atlantic to England.In September 1580 theGolden Hind entered the harbour of Plymouth.How Drake became the lion of the hour when he reached England, afterhaving circumnavigated the globe, need not be told. Ballads wererecited in his honour. Queen Elizabeth dined in state on theGoldenHind, and, after the dinner, with the sword which she had given himwhen he set out, she conferred on Drake the honour of knighthood, asthe seal of his country's acclaim.

Drake's conclusions regarding the supposed passage from the Pacific tothe Atlantic were correct, though for two hundred years they wererejected by geographers. His words are worth setting down: 'The Asianand American continents, if they be not fully joined, yet seem they tocome very neere, from whose high and snow-covered mountains, the northand north-west winds send abroad their frozen nimphes to the infectingof the whole air—hence comes it that in the middest of their summer,the snow hardly departeth from these hills at all; hence come thosethicke mists and{10}most stinking fogges, ... for these reasons weconiecture that either there is no passage at all through theseNortherne coasts, which is most likely, or if there be, that it isunnavigable.'

CHAPTER II

VITUS BERING ON THE PACIFIC

Since Drake's day more than a century had rolled on. Russia wasawakening from ages of sleep, as Japan has awakened in our time, andPeter the Great was endeavouring to pilot the ship of state out to thewide seas of a world destiny. Peter, like the German Kaiser of to-day,was ambitious to make his country a world-power. He had seen enough ofEurope to learn that neighbouring nations were increasing theirstrength in three ways—by conquest, by discovery, and by foreigncommerce—and that foreign commerce meant, not only buying and selling,but carrying the traffic of other nations. The East India Company, inwhose dockyards he had worked as a carpenter, was a striking instanceof the strength that could be built up by foreign commerce. Its shipscruised from Nova Zembia to Persia and East India, carrying forth theproducts of English workshops and{12}farms, and bringing back thetreasures of all lands.

By conquest, Peter had extended the bounds of his empire from the UralMountains to the seas of China. By discovery, what remained to bedone? France and England had acquired most of the North Americancontinent. Spain and Portugal claimed South America; and Spain hadactually warned the rest of the world that the Pacific was 'a closedsea.' But there were legends of a vast domain yet undiscovered. Juande Fuca, a Greek pilot, employed, as alleged, by Spanish explorersbetween 1587 and 1592, was reported to have told of a passage from thePacific to the Arctic through a mountainous forested land up in theregion of what is now British Columbia. Whether Juan lied, or mistookhis own fancies for facts, or whether the whole story was invented byhis chronicler Michael Lok, does not much matter. The fact was thatSpanish charts showed extensive unexplored land north of Drake's NewAlbion or California. At this time geographers had placed on theirmaps a vast continent called Gamaland between America and Asia; and, asif in corroboration of this fiction, when Peter's Cossacks struggleddoggedly across{13}Asia, through Siberia, to the Pacific, people onthese far shores told tales of drift-wood coming from America, ofislands leading like steps through the sea to America, of a nation likethemselves, whose walrus-hide boats sometimes drifted to Siberia andKamchatka. If any new and wealthy region of the world remained to bediscovered, Peter felt that it must be in the North Pacific. When itis recalled that Spain was supposed to have found in Peru temples linedwith gold, floors paved with silver, and pearls readily exchanged inbucketfuls for glass beads, it can be realized that the motive fordiscovery was not merely scientific. It was one that actuated princesand merchants alike. And Peter the Great had an additional motive—thedevelopment of his country's merchant shipping. It was this that hadinduced him to establish the capital of his kingdom on the Baltic. So,in 1725, five weeks before his death—one of the most terrible deathsin history, when remorse and ghosts of terrible memories came to plaguehis dying hours till his screams could be heard through the palacehalls—he issued a commission for one of the greatest expeditions ofdiscovery that ever set out for America—a commission to Vitus{14}Bering, the Dane, to explore the Pacific for Russia.

Like Peter the Great, Vitus Bering had served an apprenticeship withthe East India Company. It is more than probable that he first met hisroyal patron while he was in this service. While other expeditions toexplore America had but to cross the sea before beginning their quest,Bering's expedition had to cross the width of Europe, and then thewidth of Asia, before it could reach even the sea. Between StPetersburg and the Pacific lay six thousand miles of mountain andtundra. Caravans, flat-boats, and dog-trains must be provided totransport supplies; and the vessels to be used at the end of the landjourney must be built on the Pacific. The explorers were commissionedto levy tribute for food and fur on Tartar tribes as their caravansworked slowly eastward. Bering's first voyage does not concernAmerica. He set out from Kamchatka on July 9, 1728, with forty-fourmen, and sailed far enough north to prove that Asia and America werenot united by any Gamaland, and that the strait now bearing his nameseparated the two continents; but, like the tribes of Siberia, he sawsigns of a great land area on{15}the other side of the rain-hiddensea. Out of the blanketing fog drifted trees, seaweed, bits of brokenboats. And though Bering, like the English navigator Drake, wasconvinced that no Gamaland existed, he was confronted by the learnedgeographers, who had a Gamaland on their maps and demanded truculently,whence came the signs of land?

In March 1730, within one month of the time he returned to StPetersburg, Bering was again ordered to prepare to carry out the deademperor's command—'to find and set down reliably what was in thePacific.' The explorer had now to take his orders from the authoritiesof the Academy of Sciences, whose bookish inexperience and visionarytheories were to hamper him at every turn. Botanists, artists, sevenmonks, twelve physicians, Cossack soldiers—in all, nearly six hundredmen—were to accompany him; and to transport this small army ofexplorers, four thousand pack-horses were sent winding across thedesert wastes of Siberia, with one thousand exiles as guides andboatmen to work the boats and rafts on the rivers and streams. Greatblaring of trumpets marked the arrival and departure of the caravans atthe Russian forts on the way; and if the savants, whose{16}presencepestered the soul of poor Bering, had been half as keen in overcomingthe difficulties of the daily trail as they were in drinkingpottle-deep to future successes, there would have been less bickeringand delay in reaching the Pacific. Dead horses marked the trail acrosstwo continents. The Cossack soldiers deserted and joined the bandittithat scoured the Tartar plains; and for three winters the travellerswere storm-bound in the mountains of Siberia. But at length theyreached Avacha Bay on the eastern shore of Kamchatka, and the waters ofthe Pacific gladdened the eyes of the weary travellers. AtPetropavlovsk on the bay they built a fort, houses, barracks, a chapel,and two vessels, named theSt Peter and theSt Paul.

Early on the morning of June 4, 1741, the chapel bells were setringing. At dawn prayers were chanted to invoke the blessing of Heavenon the success of the voyage. Monks in solemn procession paraded tothe water's edge, singing. The big, bearded men, who had doggedly,drunkenly, profanely, religiously, marched across deserts and mountainsto reach the sea, gave comrades a last fond embrace, ran down the sand,jumped into the jolly-boats, rowed out, and clambered up{17}theships' ladders. And when the reverberating roll of the fort cannonsignalled the hour of departure, anchors were weighed, and sails,loosened from the creaking yard-arms, fluttered and filled to the wind.While the landsmen were still cheering and waving a farewell, Beringand his followers watched the shores slip away, the waters widen, themountains swim past and back. Then theSt Peter and theSt Paulheaded out proudly to the lazy roll of the ocean.

Now the savants, of whom Bering carried too many with him for his ownpeace of mind, had averred that he had found no Gamaland on his firstvoyage because he had sailed too far north. This time he was to voyagesouthward for that passage named after Juan de Fuca. This would leadhim north of Drake's New Albion in California, and north of the Spanishcruisings about modern Vancouver Island. This was to bring him to themythical Gamaland. Bering knew there was no Gamaland; but in thecaptain's cabin, where the savants bent all day over charts, was themap of Delisle, the geographer of French Canada, showing vast unnamedlands north of the Spanish possessions; and in the expedition was amember of the Delisle family. So{18}Bering must have known orguessed that an empire half the size of Russia lay undiscovered northof Juan de Fuca's passage.

So confident were the members of the expedition of reaching land to theeast at an early date that provisions and water for only a few weekswere carried along. Bering had a crew of seventy-seven on theStPeter, and among the other men of science with him was the famousnaturalist, George W. Steller. Lieutenant Chirikoff sailed theStPaul with seventy-six men, and Delisle de la Croyère was his mostdistinguished passenger. As is usual during early June in thatlatitude, driving rains and dense fogs came rolling down from the northover a choppy sea. The fog turned to snow, and theSt Paul, far inthe lead, came about to signal if they should not keep together toavoid losing each other in the thick weather; but theSt Peter wascareening dangerously, and shipping thunderous seas astern. Bering'slaconic signal in answer was to keep on south 'to Gamaland'; but whenthe fog lifted theSt Peter was in latitude 46°, far below thesupposed location of the strait of Juan de Fuca, and there was in sightneither Gamaland nor the sister ship. The scientists with Bering werein such a peevish mood{19}over the utter disproof of their mythicalcontinent that they insisted on the commander wasting a whole monthpottering back and forth looking for Chirikoff's ship. By this timethe weather had become very warm, the drinking water very rank, and theprovisions stale. Finally, the learned men gave decision that as theother ship could not be found theSt Peter might as well turn north.

Bering had become very depressed, and so irritable that he could nottolerate approach. If the men of learning had been but wise in thedangers of ocean travel, they would have recognized in their commanderthe symptoms of the common sea-scourge of the age—scurvy. Presently,he was too ill to leave his bed, and Waxel, who hated all interferenceand threatened to put the scientists in irons or throw them overboard,took command. By the middle of July passengers and crew were reducedto half allowance of bad water. Still, there were signs that affordedhope. As the ship worked through the fog-blanket northward, drift-woodand land birds, evidently from a land other than Asia, were seen.

At last came a land wind from the south-east, lifting the fog anddriving it back to the north. And early one morning there were{20}confused cries from the deck hands—then silence—then shouts ofexultant joy! Everybody rushed above-decks, even the sick in theirnight-robes, among them Bering, wan and weak, answering scarce a wordto the happy clamour about him. Before the sailors' astonished gaze,in the very early light of that northern latitude, lay a turquoisesea—a shining sheet of water, milky and metallic like a mountain tarn,with the bright greens and blues of glacial silt; and looming throughthe primrose clouds of the horizon hung a huge opal dome in mid-heaven.At first they hardly realized what it meant. Then shouts wentup—'Land!' 'Mountains!' 'Snow-peaks!' TheSt Peter glided forwardnoiseless as a bird on the wing. Inlets and harbours, turquoise-greenand silent, opened along a jagged, green and alabaster shore. As thevessel approached the land the explorers saw that the white wall of theinner harbour was a rampart of solid ice; but where the shore lineextended out between ice and sea was a meadow of ferns and flowersabloom knee-deep, and grasses waist-high. The spectators shouted andlaughed and cried and embraced one another. Russia, too, had found anew empire. St Elias they named the{21}great peak that hung like atemple dome of marble above the lesser ridges; but Bering only sighed.'We think we have done great things, eh? Well, who knows where thisis? We're almost out of provisions, and not a man of us knows whichway to sail home.'

Steller was down the ship's ladder with the glee of a schoolboy, andoff for the shore with fifteen men in one of the row-boats to explore.They found the dead ashes of a camp-fire on the sands, and someremnants of smoked fish; but any hope that the lost ship's crew hadcamped here was at once dispelled by the print of moccasined feet inthe fine sand. Steller found some rude huts covered with sea-moss, butno human presence. Water-casks were filled; and that relieved apressing need. On July 21, when the wind began to blow freshlyseaward, Bering appeared unexpectedly on deck, ashen of hue andstaggering from weakness, and peremptorily ordered anchors up. Bellswere rung and gongs beaten to call those ashore back to the ship.Steller stormed and swore. Was it for this hurried race ashore that hehad spent years toiling across two continents? He wanted to botanize,to explore, to gather data for science; but the commander had had{22}enough of science. He was sick unto death, in body and in soul, sickwith the knowledge that they were two thousand miles from any knownport, in a tempestuous sea, on a rickety ship manned for the most partby land-lubbers.

As they scudded before the wind, Bering found that the shore wastrending south towards the home harbour. They were following that longline of reefed islands, the Aleutians, which project out from Alaskatowards Asia. A roar of reefs through the fog warned them off theland; but one midnight of August the lead recorded less than three feetof water under the keel. Before there was time for panic, a currentthat rushed between rocks threw the vessel into a deep pool ofbackwash; and there she lay till morning. By this time many of thesailors were down with scurvy. It became necessary to land for freshwater. One man died as he was lifted from the decks to the shore.Bering could not stand unaided. Twenty emaciated sailors were takenout of their berths and propped up on the sand. And the water theytook from this rocky island was brackish, and only increased theravages of the malady.

From the date of this ill-fated landing, a{23}pall—a state ofparalysis, of inaction and fear—seemed to hang over the ship. Thetide-rip was mistaken for earthquake; and when the lurid glare ofvolcanic smoke came through the fog, the sailors huddled panic-strickenbelow-decks and refused to obey orders. Every man became his ownmaster; and if that ever works well on land, it means disaster at sea.Thus it has almost always been with the inefficient and the misfits whohave gone out in ships—land-lubbers trying to be navigators. Justwhen Bering's crew should have braced themselves to resist the greateststress, they collapsed and huddled together with bowed heads, invitingthe worst that fate could do to them. When the tide-rip came throughthe reefs from the north along the line of the Aleutian Islands withthe swiftness of a mill-race, the men had literally to be held to therudder at pistol point and beaten up the masts with the flat of theofficers' swords. But while they skulked, a hurricane rolled up thefog; and the ship could but scud under bare poles before the wind.Rations were now down to mouldy sea-biscuits, and only fifteen casks ofwater remained for three-score men.

Out of the turmoil of waters and wind along{24}the wave-lashed rockscame the hoarse, shrill, strident cry of the sea-lion, the boom andsnort of the great walrus, the roar of the seal rookeries, wheremillions of cubs wallowed, and where bulls lashed themselves in theirrage and fought for mastery of the herd. By November, Waxel alone washolding the vessel up to the wind. No more solemn conferences ofself-important, self-willed scientists filled the commander's cabin!No more solemn conclaves and arguments and counter-arguments to inducethe commander to sail this way and that! Bedlam reigned above andbelow decks. No man had any thought but how to reach home alive.Prayers and vows and offerings went up from the decks of theSt Peterlike smoke. The Russians vowed themselves to holy lives and stoppedswearing.

To the inexpressible delight of all hands the prayers seemed to beheard. On November 4 the storm abated, and land loomed up on thehorizon, dim at first, but taking shape as the vessel approached it andshowing a well-defined, rock-bound harbour. Was this the home harbour?The sick crawled on hands and knees above the hatchway to mumble outtheir thanks to God for escape from doom. A cask of brandy was opened,{25}and tears gave place to gruff, hilarious laughter. Every man wasready to swear that he recognized this headland, that he had known theywere following the right course after all, and that he had never feltany fear at all.

Barely had the grief become joy, when a chill silence fell over theship. The only sounds were the rattling of the rigging against themasts, the groaning of the timbers of the vessel, and the swish of thewaves cut by the prow. These were not Kamchatka shores. This was onlyanother of the endless island reefs they had been chasing since July.The tattered sails flapped and beat dismally against the cordage.Night fell. There was a retributive glee in the whistle of the mockingwind through the rotten rigging, and the ship's timbers groaned to theboom of the heavy tide.

Bering was past caring whether he lived or died. Morning revealed ashore of black basalt, reef upon reef, like sentinels of death saying,'Come in! come in! We are here to see that you never go out'; andthere was a nasty clutch to the backwash of the billows smashing downfrom those rocks.

Waxel called a last council of all hands in{26}the captain's cabin.'We should go on home,' said Bering, rising on his elbow in his berth.'It matters not to me. I am past mending; but even if we have only theforemast left and one keg of water, let us try for the home harbour. Afew days must make it. Having risked so much, let us risk all to win!'As they afterwards found, they were only one week from Kamchatka; butthey were terrified at the prospect of any more deep-sea wanderings,and when one of the officers dared to support Bering's view, they fellon him like wild beasts and threw him from the cabin. To a man theyvoted to land. That vote was fate's seal to the penalty men must payfor their mistakes.

Above the white fret of reefs precipices towered in pinnacles twothousand feet high. Through the reefs the doomed ship stole like ahunted thing. Only one man kept his head clear and his hand to thehelm—the lieutenant whom all the rest had thrown out of the cabin.The island seemed absolutely treeless, covered only with sedge andshingle and grass. The tide began to toss the ship about so that thesick were rolled from their berths. Night came with a ghostlymoonlight silvering the fret of a seething sea that seemed to be{27}reaching up white arms for its puny victims. The lieutenant threw outan anchor. It raked bottom and the cable snapped. The crazed crewbegan throwing the dead overboard as an offering to appease the angerof the sea. TheSt Peter swept stern foremost full on a reef.Quickly the lieutenant and Steller threw out the last anchor. Itgripped between rocks and—held. The tide at midnight had thrown thevessel into a sheltered cove. Steller and the lieutenant at once rowedashore to examine their surroundings and to take steps to makeprovision for the morrow. They were on what is now known as BeringIsland. Fortunately, it was literally swarming with animal life—thegreat manatee or sea-cow in herds on the kelp-beds, blue foxes inthousands, the seal rookeries that were to make the islands famous; butthere was no timber to build houses for wintering in. It was a barrenisland. They could make floors of sand, walls of peat, roofs ofsea-moss; but what shelter was this against northern gales?

By November 8 a rude pit-shelter had been constructed to house theinvalided crew; but the sudden transition from the putrid hold to theopen, frosty air caused the death of many as they were lowered onstretchers. Amid a{28}heavy snow Bering was wrapped in furs andcarried ashore. The dauntless Steller faced the situation withjudgment and courage. He acted as doctor, nurse, and hunter, and dailybrought in meat for the hungry and furs to cover the dying. Five pitssheltered the castaways. When examined in 1885 the walls of the pitswere still intact—three feet of solid peat. Clothing of sea-otterskins of priceless value, which afterwards proved a fortune to thosewho survived, and food of the flesh of the great sea-cow, saved aremnant of the wretched crew. During most of the month of November theSt Peter rode safely at anchor while storms thundered around herretreat; but on the 28th her cable snapped beneath a hurricane, and shewas driven high and dry on the shore, a broken wreck. In allthirty-one men had perished of scurvy by January 1742. Among these wasthe poor old commander. On the morning of December 8, as the wind wentmoaning round their shelter, Steller heard the Dane praying in a lowvoice. And just at daybreak he passed into that great, quiet UnknownWorld whence no traveller has returned.

How the consort ship, theSt Paul, found{29}her way back toKamchatka, and how Bering's castaways in the spring built themselves araft and mustered their courage to essay the voyage home which theyought to have attempted in the autumn, are matters for more detailedhistory. But just as Cartier's discovery of the St Lawrence led to thepursuit of the little beaver across a continent, so the Russians'discovery of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands led to the pursuit of thesea-otter up and down the North Pacific; led the way, indeed, to thatcontest for world supremacy on the Pacific in which the great powers ofthree continents are to-day engaged.

CHAPTER III

THE OUTLAW HUNTERS

Chirikoff's crew on theSt Paul had long since returned in safety toKamchatka, and the garrison of the fort on Avacha Bay had given upBering's men as lost for ever, when one August morning the sentinel onguard along the shore front of Petropavlovsk descried a strangeapparition approaching across the silver surface of an unruffled sea.It was like a huge whale, racing, galloping, coming in leaps and boundsof flying fins over the water towards the fort. The soldier telescopedhis eyes with his hands and looked again. This was no whale. Therewas a mast pole with a limp skin-thing for sail. It was a big, clumsy,raft-shaped flat-boat. The oarsmen were rowing like pursued maniacs,rising and falling bodily as they pulled. It was this that gave thecraft the appearance of galloping over the water. The soldier calleddown others to look. Some one ran for the commander of the{31}fort.What puzzled the onlookers was the appearance of the rowers. They didnot look like human beings; their hair was long; their beards wereunkempt. They were literally naked except for breech-clouts andshoulder-pieces of fur. Then somebody shouted the unexpected tidingsthat they were the castaways of Bering's crew.

Bugles rang; the fort drum rumbled a muster; the chapel bells pealedforth; and the whole population of the fort rushed to thewater-side—shouting, gesticulating, laughing, crying—and welcomedwith wild embraces the returning castaways. And while men looked forthis one and that among the two-score coming ashore from the raft, andwomen wept for those they did not find, on the outskirts of the crowdstood silent observers—Chinese traders and pedlars from Manchuria, whoyearly visited Kamchatka to gather pelts for the annual great fur fairsheld in China. The Chinese merchants looked hard; then noddedknowingly to each other, and came furtively down amid the groups alongthe shore front and timidly fingered the matted pelts worn by thehalf-naked men. It was incredible. Each penniless castaway waswearing the fur of the sea-otter, or what the Russians called{32}thesea-beaver, more valuable than seal, and, even at that day, rarer thansilver fox. Never suspecting their value, the castaways had broughtback a great number of the pelts of these animals; and when the Chinesemerchants paid over the value of these furs in gold, the Russiansawakened to a realization that while Bering had not found a Gamaland,he might have stumbled on as great a source of wealth as the furs ofFrench Canada or the gold-lined temples of Peru.

The story Bering's men told was that, while searching ravenously forfood on the barren island where they had been cast, they had found vastkelp-beds and seaweed marshes, where pastured the great manatee knownas the sea-cow. Its flesh had saved their lives. While hunting thesea-cow in the kelp-beds and sea-marshes the men had noticed thatwhenever a swashing sea or tide drove the shattering spray up therocks, there would come riding in on the storm whole herds of anothersea denizen—thousands upon thousands of them, so tame that they didnot know the fear of man, burying their heads in the sea-kelp while thestorm raged, lifting them only to breathe at intervals. This creaturewas six feet long from the tip of its round,{33}cat-shaped nose tothe end of its stumpy, beaver-shaped tail, with fur the colour of ebonyon the surface, soft seal-colour and grey below, and deep as sable.Quite unconscious of the worth of the fur, the castaway sailors fell onthese visitors to the kelp-beds and clubbed right and left, for skinsto protect their nakedness from the biting winter winds.

It was the news of the sea wealth brought to Kamchatka by Bering's menthat sent traders scurrying to the Aleutian Islands and Alaskan shores.Henceforth Siberian merchants were to vie with each other in outfittinghunters—criminals, political exiles, refugees, destitute sailors—toscour the coasts of America for sea-otter. Throughout the long line ofthe Aleutian Islands and the neighbouring coasts of North America, forover a century, hunters' boats—little cockle-shell skiffs made ofoiled walrus-skin stretched on whalebone frames, narrow as a canoe,light as cork—rode the wildest seas in the wildest storms in pursuitof the sea-otter. Sea-otter became to the Pacific coast what beaverwas to the Atlantic—the magnet that drew traders to the north-westseas, and ultimately led to the settlement of the north-west coast.

It was, to be sure, dangerous work hunting{34}in wild northern galeson rocks slippery with ice and through spray that wiped out everyoutline of precipice edge or reef; but it offered variety to exiles inSiberia; and it offered more—a chance of wealth if they survived.Iron for bolts of boats must be brought all the way from Europe; so theoutlaw hunters did without iron, and fastened planks together as bestthey could with deer thongs in place of nails, and moss and tallow inplace of tar. In the crazy vessels so constructed they ventured outfrom Kamchatka two thousand miles across unknown boisterous seas. Oncethey had reached the Aleutians, natives were engaged to do the actualhunting under their direction. Exiles and criminals could not beexpected to use gentle methods to attain their ends. 'God is high inthe heavens and the Czar is far away,' they said. The object wasquick profit, and plundering was the easiest way to attain it. Howwere the Aleutian Indians paid? At first they were not paid at all.They were drugged into service with vodka, a liquor that put them in afrenzy; and bayoneted and bludgeoned into obedience. These methodsfailing, wives and children were seized by the Russians and held incamp as hostages to guarantee a big hunt. The{35}Aleuts' one objectin meeting the Russian hunter at all was to get possession of firearms.From the time Bering's crew and Chirikoff's men had first fired riflesin the presence of these poor savages of the North, the Indians hadrealized that 'the stick that thundered' was a weapon they mustpossess, or see their tribe exterminated.

The brigades of sea-otter hunters far exceeded in size and wild daringthe platoons of beaver hunters, who ranged by pack-horse and canoe fromHudson Bay to the Rocky Mountains. The Russian ship, provisioned fortwo or three years, would moor and draw up ashore for the winter on oneof the eleven hundred Aleutian Islands. Huts would be constructed ofdrift-wood, roofed with sea-moss; and as time went on even rude fortswere erected on two or three of the islands—like Oonalaska orKadiak—where the kelp-beds were extensive and the hunting was goodenough to last for several years. The Indians would then be attractedto the camp by presents of brandy and glass beads and gay trinkets andfirearms. Perhaps one thousand Aleut hunters would be assembled. Twotypes of hunting boats were used—the big 'bidarkie,' carrying twentyor thirty men, and the little kayak, a{36}mere cockle-shell. Oiledwalrus-skin, stretched taut as a drum-head, served as a covering forthe kayak against the seas, a manhole being left in the centre for thepaddler to ensconce himself waist-deep, with oilskin round his waist tokeep the water out. Clothing was worn fur side in, oiled side out; andthe soles of all moccasins were padded with moss to protect the feetfrom the sharp rocks. Armed with clubs, spears, steel gaffs andrifles, the hunters would paddle out into the storm.

There were three types of hunting—long distance rifle-shooting, whichthe Russians taught the Aleuts; still hunting in a calm sea; stormhunting on the kelp-beds and rocks as the wild tide rode in with itsmyriad swimmers. Rifles could be used only when the wind was away fromthe sea-otter beds and the rocks offered good hiding above thesea-swamps. This method was sea-otter huntingde luxe. Stillhunting could only be followed when the sea was smooth as glass. TheRussian schooner would launch out a brigade of cockle-shell kayaks onan unruffled stretch of sea, which the sea-otter traversed going to andfrom the kelp-beds. While the sea-otter is a marine denizen, it mustcome up to breathe; and if it does not come up frequently of its{37}own volition, the gases forming in its body bring it to the surface.The little kayaks would circle out silent as shadows over the silversurface of the sea. A round head would bob up, or a bubble show wherea swimmer was moving below the surface. The kayaks would narrow theirsurrounding circle. Presently a head would appear. The hunter nearestwould deal the death-stroke with his steel gaff, and the quarry wouldbe drawn in. But it was in the storm hunt over the kelp-beds that thewildest work went on. Through the fiercest storm scudded bidarkies andkayaks, meeting the herds of sea-otter as they drove before the gale.To be sure, the bidarkies filled and foundered; the kayaks were rippedon the teeth of the rock reefs. But the sea took no account of itsdead; neither did the Russians. Only the Aleut women and children weptfor the loss of the hunters who never returned; and sea-otter huntingdecreased the population of the Aleutian Islands by thousands. It wasas fatal to the Indian as to the sea-otter. Two hundred thousandsea-otters were taken by the Russians in half a century. Kadiakyielded as many as 6000 pelts in a single year; Oonalaska, 3000; thePribylovs, 5000; Sitka used to yield 15,000 a{38}year. To-day thereare barely 200 a year found from the Commander Islands to Sitka.

It may be imagined that Russian criminals were not easy masters to thesimple Aleut women and children who were held as hostages in camp toguarantee a good hunt. Brandy flowed like water, the Czar was faraway, and it was a land with no law but force. The Russian hunterscast conscience and fear to the winds. Who could know? God did notseem to see; and it was two thousand miles to the home fort inKamchatka. When the hunt was poor, children were brained with clubbedrifles, women knouted to death before the eyes of husbands and fathers.In 1745 a whole village of Aleuts had poison put in their food by theRussians. The men were to eat first, and when they perished the womenand children would be left as slaves to the Russians. A Cossack,Pushkareff, brought a ship out for the merchant Betshevin in 1762, and,in punishment for the murder of several brutal members of the crew bythe Aleuts, he kidnapped twenty-five of their women. Then, as stormdrove him towards Kamchatka, he feared to enter the home port with sucha damning human cargo. So he promptly marooned fourteen victims on arocky coast,{39}and binding the others hand and foot, threw them intothe sea. The merchant and the Cossack were both finally punished bythe Russian government for the crimes of this voyage; but this did notsilence the blood of the murdered women crying to Heaven for vengeance.In September 1762 the criminal ship came back to Avacha Bay. Incomplete ignorance of the Cossack's diabolical conduct, four Russianships sailed that very month for the Aleutian Islands. Since 1741,when Bering's sailors had found the kelp-beds, Aleuts had hunted thesea-otter and Russians had hunted the Aleuts. For three years fatereversed the wheel. It was to be a man-hunt of fugitive Russians.

Just before the snow fell in the autumn of 1763 Alexis Druseninanchored his ship on the north-east corner of Oonalaska, where therocks sprawl out in the sea in five great spurs like the fingers of ahand. The spurs are separated by tempestuous reef-ribbed seas. TheIndians were so very friendly that they voluntarily placed hostages ofgood conduct in the Russians' hands. Two or three thousand Aleuthunters came flocking over the sea in their kayaks to join thesea-otter brigades. On the spur opposite to Drusenin's{40}anchoragestood an Aleut village of forty houses; on the next spur, ten milesaway across the sea, was another village of seventy people. TheRussian captain divided his crew, and placed from nine to twelve men ineach of the villages. With ample firearms and enough brandy half adozen Russians could control a thousand Aleuts. Swaggering andbullying and loud-voiced and pot-valiant, Drusenin and two Cossacksstooped to enter a low-thatched Aleut hut. The entrance step pitcheddown into a sort of pit; and as Drusenin stumbled in face foremost acudgel clubbed down on his skull. The Cossack behind stumbled headlongover the prostrate form of his officer; and in the dark there was aflash of long knives—such knives as the hunters used in skinning theirprey. Both bodies were cut to fragments. The third man seized an axeas the murderers crowded round him and beat them back; he then soughtsafety in flight. There was a hiss of hurtling spears thrown after himwith terrible deftness. With his back pierced in a dozen places,drenched in his own blood, the Cossack almost tumbled over theprostrate body of a sentinel who had been on guard at a house down bythe ship, and had been wounded by the flying{41}spears. A sailordashed out, a yard-long bear-knife in his grasp, and dragged the twomen inside. Of the dozen Russians stationed here only four survived;and their hut was beset by a rabble of Aleuts drunk with vodka, drunkwith blood, drunk with a frenzy of revenge.

Cooped up in the hut, the Russians kept guard by twos till nightfall,when, dragging a bidarkie down to the water, they loaded it withprovisions and firearms, and pushed out in the dark to the moan andheave of an unquiet sea. Though weakened from loss of blood, thefugitives rowed with fury for the next spur of rock, ten miles away,where they hoped to find help. The tide-rip came out of the north withangry threat and broke against the rocks, but no blink of light shonethrough the dark from the Russian huts ashore. The men were afraid toland, and afraid not to land. Wind and sea would presently crush theirfrail craft to kindling-wood against the rocky shore.

The Russians sprang out, waded ashore, uttered a shout! Instantlylances and spears fell about them like rain. They joined hands and ranfor the cove where the big schooner had been moored. Breathlessly theywaited for the dawn to discover where their ship lay;{42}but daylightrevealed only the broken wreckage of the vessel along the shore, whileall about were blood-stains and pieces of clothing and mutilatedbodies, which told but too plainly that the crew had been hacked topieces. There was not a moment to be lost. Before the mist couldlift, the fugitives gathered up some provisions scattered on the shoreand ran for their lives to the high mountains farther inland. And whendaylight came they scooped a hole in the sand, drew a piece ofsail-cloth over this, and lay in hiding till night.

From early December to early February the Russians hid in the caves ofthe Oonalaska mountains. Clams, shell-fish, sea-birds stayed theirhunger. It is supposed that they must have found shelter in one of thecaves where there are medicinal hot springs; otherwise, they would haveperished of cold. In February they succeeded in making a rude boat,and in this they set out by night to seek the ships of other Russianhunters. For a week they rowed out only at night. Then they began torow by day. They were seen by Indians, and once more sought safety inthe caves of the mountains, where they remained in hiding for fiveweeks, venturing{43}out only at night in search of food. Here,snow-water and shell-fish were all they had to sustain them; and againthey must build a rude raft to escape. Towards the end of March theydescried a Russian vessel in the offing, and at last succeeded inreaching friends.

Almost the same story could be told of the crews of each of the shipsthat had sailed from Avacha Bay in September 1762. One ship foundered.The castaways were stabbed where they lay in exhausted sleep. Everymember of the crew on a third ship had been slain round a bath-house,such as Russian hunters built in that climate to enable them to wardoff rheumatism by vapour plunges. One ship only escaped the generalbutchery and carried the refugees home.

Of course, Cossack and hunter exacted terrible vengeance for thismassacre. Whole villages were burned to the ground and everyinhabitant sabred. On one occasion, as many as three hundred victimswere tied in line and shot. The result was that the Cossacks' outragesand the Aleuts' vengeance drew the attention of the Russian governmentto this lucrative fur trade in the far new land. The disorders put anend to free, unrestricted trade.{44}Henceforth a hunter must have alicence; and a licence implied the favour of the court. The court sawto it that a governor took up his residence in the region to enforcejustice and to compel the hunters to make honest returns. Like theHudson's Bay men, the Russian fur traders had to report direct to thecrown. Thus was inaugurated on the west coast of America the Russianrégime, which ended only in 1867, when Alaska was ceded to the UnitedStates.

CHAPTER IV

COOK AND VANCOUVER

It was the quest for a passage to the Atlantic that brought CaptainJames Cook to the Pacific. Before joining the Royal Navy, Cook hadbeen engaged as a captain in the Baltic trade; and from Russianmerchantmen he had learned all about Bering's voyage in the NorthPacific, which was being quoted by the geographers in proof of an openpassage north of Alaska. In the Baltic, too, Cook had heard about thestrait of Juan de Fuca, which was supposed to lead through thecontinent to the Atlantic. At this time all England was agog withdemands that the Hudson's Bay Company should find a North-West Passageor surrender its charter. Parliament had offered a reward of £20,000to any one discovering a passage-way to the Pacific, and Samuel Hearnehad been sent tramping inland to explore the north by land. Curiouslyenough, Cook had been born in 1728, the very{46}year that Bering hadset out on his first expedition; and he was in the Baltic when newscame back to St Petersburg of Bering's death. The year 1759 found himat Quebec with Wolfe. During the next ten years he explored andcharted northern and southern seas; and when the British parliamentdetermined to set at rest for ever the myth of a passage, Cook waschosen to conduct the expedition. He was granted two ships—theResolution and theDiscovery; and among the crews was a youngmidshipman named Vancouver. The vessels left England in the summer of1776, and sailed from the Sandwich Islands in 1778 for Drake's NewAlbion. The orders were to proceed from New Albion up to 65° northlatitude and search for a passage to Hudson Bay.

On March 7, 1778—two hundred years after Drake's famous voyage—Cook'sships descried thin, sharp lines of land in the offing. As the vesselsdrew nearer the coast towering mountains met the gaze of the explorers.Cook had orders to keep a sharp look-out in this region for the straitof Juan de Fuca; but storm drove him off-shore, and, although hediscovered and named Cape Flattery at the entrance to the strait thatnow bears the name{47}of the old Greek pilot, he did not catch asmuch as a glimpse of the great bay opening inland. In fact, he setdown that in this latitude there was no possibility of Juan de Fuca'sstrait existing. Landing was made on Vancouver Island at the famousharbour now known as Nootka; and Indians swarmed the sea in gailypainted dug-outs with prows carved like totem-poles. Women andchildren were in the canoes. That signified peace; and though cannonwere manned in readiness, an active and friendly trade at once openedbetween the crews and the natives. Fifteen hundred beaver andsea-otter pelts were exchanged for a handful of old nails. At leasttwo thousand natives gathered round the two ships. Some of the menwore masks and had evidently just returned from a raid, for theyoffered Cook human skulls from which the flesh had not been removed,and pointed to slave captives.

Any one who knows Vancouver Island in spring needs no description ofthe inspiring scene surveyed by the sea-weary crews. Snow rested onthe coastal mountains. The huge opal dome now known as Mount Bakerloomed up through the clouds of dawn and dusk on the southern sky-line.In fair{48}weather the long pink ridge of the Olympics could be seentowards Puget Sound. Inland from Nootka were vast mountain ridgesheavily forested to the very clouds with fir trees and spruce ofincredible size. Lower down grew cypress, with gnarled red rootsentangling the rocks to the very water's edge, Spanish moss swingingfrom branch to branch, and partridge drumming in the underbrush. For amonth the deep-sea travellers enjoyed a welcome furlough on shore. Onenight the underbrush surrounding the encampment was found to beliterally alive with painted warriors. Cook demanded an explanation ofthe grand 'tyee' or chief. The Indian explained that these were guardsto protect the encampment. However that might be, Cook deemed it wellto be off.

On May 1 the ships were skirting the Sitka coast, which Chirikoff andBering had explored a quarter of a century previously. St Elias,Bering's landfall, was sighted. So was the spider-shaped bay now knownas Prince William Sound. The Indians here resembled the Eskimos ofGreenland so strongly that the hopes of the explorers began to rise.So keen were they to prove the existence of a passage to the Atlanticthat when swords,{49}beads, powder, evidently obtained from whitetraders, were observed among the Indians, the Englishmen tried topersuade themselves that these Indians must be in communication withthe Indians of the domain of the Hudson's Bay Company, forgetting thatRussians had been on the ground for forty years. Cook sailed round thecoast, past Cape Prince of Wales and through Bering Strait, keeping hisprows northward until an impassable wall of ice barred his way. Havingnow thoroughly explored the coast, Cook was satisfied that Drake andBering had been right. There was no passage east. He then crossed toSiberia, sailed down the Asiatic coast, and visited the AleutianIslands. The Russians of Oonalaska and Kamchatka resented the Englishintrusion on their hunting-ground, while the English refused toacknowledge that they were invading Russian territory.

It was planned to winter and repair the ships at the Sandwich Islands.This part of Cook's voyage does not concern Canada. It was somethinglike a repetition of the transgressions of the Russian outlaw hunters,and was followed by the penalty that transgressors pay. The islandershad welcomed the white men as demi-gods, but the gods{50}proved tohave feet of clay. To the islanders a sacred 'taboo' always existedround the burial-graves. Cook permitted his sailors to violate this'taboo' in order to take timber for the repair of his ships. Perhapsit was a reaction from almost three years of navy discipline; perhapsit was the influence of those seductive southern seas; however that maybe, the sailors apparently gave themselves up to riotous debauch. Thebest of the islanders withdrew disillusioned, sad, sullen, resentfulover the violation of their sacred burial-places. Only the riff-raffof the natives forgathered with the riotous crew. When the ships atlength set sail with a crew sore-headed from dissipation, by way of aclimax to the debauch, a number of women and children were carriedalong.

Retribution came swift as sword-stroke. The women set up such awailing that Cook stopped the ships to set them ashore. In the delayof rowing the boats to land a fierce gale sprang up. The wind snappedoff the foremast of theResolution clean to the decks. The two shipshad to put back to the harbour for repairs. Not a canoe, not a man,not a voice, welcomed them. The sailors were sullen; Cook was angry;and when the white{51}men wanted to trade for fresh food, theislanders would take only daggers and knives in barter. The white menhad stolen from their burial-graves. The savages now tried to stealfrom the ships, and on Sunday, February 14, they succeeded in carryingoff the large row-boat of theDiscovery.

Cook landed with a strong bodyguard to demand hostages for the returnof the lost boat. The islanders remembered the kidnapping of thewomen, and refused. Cook was foolhardy enough to order his men to fireon any canoe trying to escape from the harbour. The rest of theepisode is so familiar that it scarcely needs telling. A chiefcrossing the harbour in a skiff was shot. The women were at oncehurried off to the hills. The men donned their spears and war-mats. Astone hurled from the rabble running down to the shore struck Cook.Enraged out of all self-control, he shot the culprit dead. In defenceof their commander some marines rowing ashore at once fired a musketryvolley into the horde of islanders. Cook turned his back to thethronging savages, now frenzied to a delirium, and signalled themarines to cease firing. As he did so, a dagger was plunged beneathhis shoulder-blade. He was{52}hacked to pieces under the eyes of hispowerless men; and four soldiers also fell beneath the furiousonslaught.

What need to tell of the wild scramble for the sea; of the war-hornsblowing all night in the dark; of the camp-fires glimmering from thewomen's retreat in the hills? By dint of threat and show of arms andpromises, Captain Charles Clerke, who was now in command, induced theislanders to deliver the remnants of Cook's body. In an impressivesilence, on Sunday the 21st of February 1779, the coffin containing thegreat commander's bones was committed to the deep.

The sensational nature of Cook's death, within half a century ofBering's equally tragic fate, while exploring the same unknown seas,spread round the world the fame of the exploits of both. It wasrecalled that Drake had claimed New Albion for England two centuriesbefore. Then rumours came that the Spanish viceroy in Mexico had beenfollowing up the discoveries of both Drake and Bering. One BrunoHeceta from Monterey made report that there were signs of a greatturbid river cutting the coast-line north of Drake's New Albion. Inspite of Cook's{53}adverse report, the questions were again mooted:Where was Juan de Fuca's strait? Did it lead to Hudson Bay? Where wasthis Great River of which both the inland savages and the Spanishexplorers spoke? Quebec had fallen. Scottish fur merchants ofMontreal had formed the North-West Company in opposition to theHudson's Bay Company, and were pushing their traders far west towardsthe Rockies, far north towards the Arctic Circle. Who would be firstto find the great unknown river, to fathom the mysteries of Juan deFuca's strait? Dreaming of these things up in the Athabaska country,Alexander Mackenzie, a trader for the Nor'westers, was preparing topush his canoes down to the Arctic as a preliminary to his greaterjourney to the Pacific. If Bering's crew, if Cook's crew, both soldhalf-rotted cargoes of furs for thousands of pounds, how much moreeasily could trading vessels properly equipped reap fortune from thenew El Dorado!

Inland by canoe from Montreal, overland by flat-boat and pack-horsefrom the Missouri, across the continent from Hudson Bay, round theworld by the Cape and the Horn, across the ocean from China—it nowbecame a race to the Pacific. Greater wealth seemed there{54}in fursthan had been found in gold in the temples of Peru, or in silver in themines of Mexico. The struggle for control of the Pacific, which hasculminated in our own day, now began. Spain, Russia, England, Canada,and the new-born United States were the contestants in the arena. Whathas reached its climax in the sluicing of two oceans together at Panamabegan in the pursuit of sea-otter and seal after the voyages of Beringand of Cook.

The United States had an added motive. On the principle of protectingnative shipping, American ports discriminated against British ships,and British ports discriminated against American ships. It wasabsolutely necessary to their existence as a nation that the UnitedStates should build up a merchant fleet. Under fostering laws, withthe advantages of cheap labour and abundant timber, a wonderful clipperfleet had been constructed in Massachusetts and Maryland and Virginiaship-yards, consisting of swift sailing-vessels suitable for beltingthe seas in promoting commerce and in war. The ship-yards built onshares with the merchants, who outfitted the cargo. Builders andmerchants would then divide the profits. Under these conditionsAmerican traders were penetrating{55}almost every sea in the world;and the cargoes brought back built up the substantial fortunes of manyold Boston families. 'Bostonnais' these swift new traders were calledfrom the Baltic to China. It can be readily believed that what theyheard of Cook and Bering interested the Boston men mightily. At allevents, they fitted out two ships for the Pacific trade—ships thatwere to range the seas for the United States as Drake's and Cook's haddrawn a circle round the world for England. Captain John Kendrickcommanded theColumbia, Captain Robert Gray theLady Washington,and on one of the vessels was a sailor who had been to the North-Westcoast with Cook. In order to secure Spain's goodwill, letters wereobtained to the viceroy of Mexico; and when, in the course of thevoyage, these letters were presented to the viceroy of Mexico at SanBlas, he honoured them by at once issuing orders to the presidios ofMonterey and Santa Barbara and San Francisco to arrest both officersand crew if the Americans touched at any Spanish port. Spain was stilldreaming of the Pacific being 'a closed sea.' She took cognizance ofBering's exploits to the north, but she at once strove to checkmate anadvance south from{56}the north, by herself advancing north from thesouth. It was in 1775 that Heceta had observed the turbid entrance toa great river and the opening to a strait that might be that of Juan deFuca. However, on Monday, October 1, 1787, the two American vesselssailed away from Boston. It was August of 1788 before they were offDrake's New Albion; and in the stormy weather encountered all the wayup the Pacific, the little sloopLady Washington had proved a faster,better sailer than the heavier cargo vessel, theColumbia. Signs ofa river were observed; and a pause was made at one of the harbours onthe coast—either Tillamook or Gray's Harbour. Here the Indians,indignant at a recent outrage committed against them by whites,attacked the Americans and drove them off before they could search foran entrance to the Great River. It now became apparent that the smallsloop had the advantage, not only in speed, but because it could go incloser to the coast. Towards the end of August Gray's crew distinctlyobserved the Olympic mountains and set down record of Cape Flattery.'I am of opinion,' notes the mate, 'that the Straits of Juan de Fucado exist; for the coast takes a great bend here.'

At Nootka surprise awaited the Americans. John Meares and WilliamDouglas, English captains, were there in a palisaded fort and with twovessels; a little trading schooner of thirty tons named theNorth-WestAmerica had just been built—the first ship built on the North-Westcoast—and was being launched amid thunder of cannon and clinking ofglasses, and September 19 was observed as a holiday—the first publicholiday in what is now British Columbia. Meares and Douglasentertained Gray at dinner, and over brimming wine-glasses gave him thenews of recent happenings on the coast. Captain Barkley, anotherEnglish trader, had looked into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and placedit on his chart. Meares had sought in vain for the River of the West,and did not believe that it existed. In fact, he had named theheadland that hid it Cape Disappointment. And, of course, no fursexisted on the Pacific coast. When did a fur trader ever acknowledgeto a rival that there were furs? Meares reported that he, too, hadbeen down at Tillamook Bay; and Gray guessed that it had been Meares'sinjustice to the Indians that provoked the raid on himself. Meares wasshort of provisions, and theLady Washington needed{58}repairs.The American gave the Englishman provisions to reach China, and theEnglishman repaired the American's ship. Meares declared that he hadbought all Nootka from the Indians. He did not relate that he had paidonly two pocket-pistols and some copper for it. Towards the end ofSeptember came Kendrick on the belatedColumbia. Both Americans weresurprised to learn that half a dozen navigators had already gone as farnorth as Nootka Sound. Perez, Heceta, Quadra—all had coastedVancouver Island for Spain from 1774 to 1779, and so had La Pérouse,the French explorer, in 1787. Hanna had come out from China for fursin 1785. In 1787 Portlock and Dixon had secured almost two thousandsea-otter skins as far north as the Queen Charlotte Islands. Thesewere things Meares did not tell the Americans. It would have been toacknowledge that an abundance of furs was there to draw so manytrading-ships. But during the winter at Nootka the men from Bostonlearned these facts from the Indians.

The winter was passed in trading with the Indians, and spring saw Grayfar up the Strait of Juan de Fuca. By May 1 the ships were loaded withfurs and were about to sail.{59}Meanwhile, what had the Spanishviceroy been doing? Strange that the Spaniards should look oncomplaisantly while English traders from China—Meares and Hanna andBarkley and Douglas—were taking possession of Nootka. The answer cameunexpectedly. Just as the 'Bostonnais' were sailing out for a last runup the coast, there glided into Nootka Sound a proud ship—all sailsset, twenty cannon pointed, Spanish colours spread to the breeze. Thecaptain of this vessel, Don Joseph Martinez, took a look at the Englishfortifications and another at the Americans. The Americans wereenemies of England. Therefore the pompous don treated them royally,presented them with spices and wines, and allowed them to departunmolested. When the Americans returned from the run up coast, theyfound the English fort dismantled, a Spanish fort erected on Hog Islandat the entrance of the sound, and Douglas's ship—the companion ofMeares's vessel—held captive by the Spaniard. Gray and Kendrick nowexchanged ships, and sailed for China to dispose of their cargoes offurs and receive in exchange cargoes of tea for Boston. The whole cityof Boston welcomed theColumbia home in the autumn of 1790. Fiftythousand{60}miles she had ploughed through the seas in three years.

In June 1791 Gray was out again on theColumbia. This time he wentas far north as the Portland Canal, past the Queen Charlotte Islands,where he met Kendrick on theLady Washington. The quarrel at Nootkabetween the English and the Spaniards was still going on; so thisautumn the two 'Bostonnais' anchored for the winter in ClayoquotSound—a place later to be made famous by tragedy—south of Nootka.Here they built a stockaded fur-post for themselves, which they namedFort Defence. During the winter they built and launched a littlecoasting schooner, theAdventure.

Up at Nootka the Spaniard Gonzales de Haro had replaced Martinez; andhis countrymen Quimper and Elisa were daily exploring on the east sideof Vancouver Island, where to this day Spanish names tell of theircharting. Some of the names, however, were afterwards changed. Whatis to-day known as Esquimalt, Quimper called Valdes, and Victoria henamed Cordoba. Amid much firing of muskets and drinking of wineQuimper took solemn possession of all this territory for Spain. Then,early in August{61}of 1791, he sailed away for Monterey, while Elisaremained at Nootka.

Gray knew that three English vessels which had come from China forfurs—Colnett'sArgonaut, Douglas'sIphigenia, and thePrincessRoyal—had been seized by the Spanish at Nootka. Though the fact hadnot been trumpeted to the world, the Spanish said that their pilots hadexplored these coasts as early as 1775—at least three years beforeCook's landing at Nootka; so that if first exploration counted forpossession, Spain had first claim. Whether the Spaniards instigatedthe raid that now threatened the rival American fort at Clayoquot, thetwo 'Bostonnais' never knew. TheColumbia had been beached anddismantled. Loop-holes punctured the palisades of the fort, and cannonwere above the gates. Sentinels kept constant guard; but what wasGray's horror to learn in February 1792 that Indians to the number oftwo thousand were in ambush round the fort and had bribed a Hawaiianboy to wet the priming of the 'Bostonnais' guns. The fort could not bedefended against such a number of enemies, for there were not twentymen within the walls. Gray hastily got theColumbia ready for sea.Having stowed in the hold{62}enough provisions to carry them home ifflight should become necessary, the sailors worked in the dark to theirnecks in water scraping the hull free of barnacles, and when the hightide came in, she was floated out with all on board. On the morning ofthe 20th the woods were seen to be alive with Indians. The Indians hadnot counted on their prey escaping by sea, and an old chief camesuavely aboard offering Gray sea-otter skins if the 'Bostonnais' wouldgo ashore to trade. Gray slapped the old rascal across the face; theIndian was over the side at a plunge, and the marauders were seen nomore.

In spite of the difficulties and dangers it presented, Gray determinedto make another effort to find the river which old Bruno Heceta hadsighted in 1775. And early in April, after sending his mate north onthe little vesselAdventure to trade, Gray sailed away south on theColumbia. Let us leave him for the present stealing furtively alongthe coast from Cape Flattery to Cape Disappointment.

It was the spring of 1792. The Spaniard Elisa of Nootka had for a yearkept his pilot Narvaez, in a crazy little schooner crowded{63}withthirty sailors, charting north-east past the harbour of Victoria,through Haro Strait, following very much the same channel that steamersfollow to-day as they ply between Victoria and Vancouver. East of ahigh island, where holiday folk now have their summer camps, PilotNarvaez came on the estuary of a great river, which he called Boca deFlorida Blanca. This could not be Bruno Heceta's river, for this wasfarther north and inland. It was a new river, with wonderful purplewater—the purple of river silt blending with ocean blue. The bankswere wooded to the very water's edge with huge-girthed and mossedtrees, such as we to-day see in Stanley Park, Vancouver. The riverswept down behind a deep harbour, with forested heights betweenriver-mouth and roadstead, as if nature had purposely interposed toguard this harbour against the deposit of silt borne down by the mightystream. To-day a boulevard rises from the land-locked harbour and goesover the heights to the river-mouth like the arc of a bow; the finestresidences of the Canadian Pacific coast stand there; and the river islined with mile upon mile of lumber-yards and saw-mills. Where therock projects like a hand into the turbid waters stands{64}a crowdedcity, built like New York on what is almost an island. Where theopposite shores slope down in a natural park are rising the buildingsof a great university. The ragged starveling crew of Pilot Narvaez hadfound what are now known as Burrard Inlet, Vancouver City, Point Grey,Shaughnessy Heights, and the Fraser River. The crew were presently allill of scurvy, possibly because of the unsanitary crowding, and theschooner, almost falling to pieces, came crawling back to Nootka. Thepoor Mexicans were utterly unaware that they had discovered a gatewayfor northern empire. Narvaez himself lay almost unconscious in hisberth. Elisa sent them all home to Mexico on furlough; and, on hearingtheir report, the viceroy of Mexico ordered out two ships, theSutiland theMexicana, Don Galiano and Don Valdes in command, to follow upthe charting of the coast northward from Vancouver Island to theRussian settlements.

Small ringing of bells, no blaring of trumpets at all, prayersa-plenty, but little ammunition and less food, accompanied the deep-seavoyagings of these poor Spanish pilots. When Bering set out, he hadthe power of the whole Russian empire behind him. When Cook set{65}out, he had the power of the whole British Navy behind him. But whenthe poor Mexican peons set out, they had nothing behind them but thebranding iron, or slavery in the mines, if they failed. Yet they sangas they sailed their rickety death-traps, and they laughed as theyrowed; and when the tide-rip caught them, they sank without a cry toany but the Virgin. Look at a map of the west coast of the Pacificfrom the Horn to Sitka. First were the Spaniards at every harbourgate; and yet to-day, of all their deep-sea findings on that coast, nota rod, not a foot, does Spain own. It was, of course, Spain's insanepolicy of keeping the Pacific 'a closed sea' that concealed theachievements of the Mexican pilots and buried them in oblivion. But ifactual accomplishments count, these pilots with their ragged peoncrews, half-bloods of Aztec woman and Spanish adventurer, deservehigher rank in the roll of Pacific coast exploration than history hasyet accorded them.

England, it may be believed, did not calmly submit to seeing the shipsand forts of her traders seized at Nootka. It was not that Englandcared for the value of three vessels engaged in foreign trade. Stillless did she{66}care for the log-huts dignified by the name of afort. But she was mistress of the seas, and had been since thedestruction of the Armada. And as mistress of the seas, she could nottolerate as much as the seizure of a fishing-smack. For some timethere were mutterings of war, but at length diplomacy prevailed.England demanded, among other things, the restoration of the buildingsand the land, and full reparation for all losses. Spain decided tosubmit, and accordingly the Nootka Convention was signed by the twopowers in October 1790. Two ships, theDiscovery and theChatham,were then fitted out by the British Admiralty for an expedition to thePacific to receive formal surrender of the property from Spain, andalso to chart the whole coast of the Pacific from Drake's New Albion tothe Russian possessions at Sitka. This expedition was commanded byCaptain George Vancouver, who had been on the Pacific with Cook. Itwas April 1792 when Vancouver came up abreast of Cape Disappointment.Was it chance, or fate, that a gale drove him off-shore just two weeksbefore a rival explorer entered the mouth of the great unknown riverthat lay on his vessel's starboard bow? But for this mishap Vancouvermight have discovered{67}the Columbia, and England might have madegood her claim to the territory which is now Oregon and Washington andIdaho. Vancouver's ships were gliding into the Strait of Juan de Fucawhen they met a square-hulled, trim little trader under the flag of theUnited States. It was theColumbia, commanded by Robert Gray. TheAmerican told an astounding story. He had found Bruno Heceta's Riverof the West. Vancouver refused to credit the news; yet there was theship's log; there were the details—landmarks, soundings, anchoragesfor twenty miles up the Columbia from its mouth. Gray had, indeed,been up the river, and had crossed the bar and come out on the Pacificagain.

Vancouver now headed his ships inland and proceeded to explore PugetSound. Never before had white men's boats cruised the waters of thatspider-shaped sea. Every inlet of the tortuous coasts was penetratedand surveyed, to make certain that no passage to the north-east laythrough these waters. In June the explorers passed up the Strait ofGeorgia. A thick fog hid from them what would have proved an importantdiscovery—the mouth of the Fraser river. Some distance north ofBurrard Inlet the explorers met the two{68}Spanish ships which theviceroy of Mexico had sent out, theSutil and theMexicana,commanded respectively by Don Galiano and Don Valdes. From themVancouver learned that Don Quadra, the Spanish representative, wasawaiting him at Nootka, prepared to restore the forts and property asagreed in the Nootka Convention. The vessels continued their journeynorthward and entered Queen Charlotte Sound in August. Then, steeringinto the open sea, Vancouver sailed for Nootka to meet Spain's officialmessenger. He had circumnavigated Vancouver Island.

The Nootka controversy had almost caused a European war. Now it endedin what has a resemblance to a comic opera. Vancouver found theSpaniards occupying a fort on an island at the mouth of the harbour.On the main shore stood the Indian village of Chief Maquinna. ASpanish pilot guided the English ship to mooring. The Spanish frigatesfairly bristled with cannon. An English officer dressed in regimentalsmarched to the Spanish fort and presented Captain Vancouver'scompliments to Don Quadra. Spanish cannon thundered a welcome thatshook the hills, and English guns made answer. A curious fashion, towaste good powder{69}without taking aim at each other, thought ChiefMaquinna. Don Quadra breakfasted Captain Vancouver. Captain Vancouverwined and dined Don Quadra; and Maquinna, lord of the wilds, attendedthe feast dressed Indian fashion. But when the Spanish don and theEnglish officer took breath from flow of compliments and wine, they didnot seem to arrive anywhere in their negotiations. Vancouver held thatSpain must relinquish the site of Meares's fort and the territorysurrounding it and Port Cox. Don Quadra held that he had beeninstructed to relinquish only the land on which the fortstood—according to Vancouver, 'but little more than one hundred yardsin extent any way.' No understanding could be arrived at, and Quadraat the end of September took his departure for Monterey, leavingVancouver to follow a few days later.

Vancouver was anxious to be off on further exploration. He was eagerto verify the existence of the river which Gray had reported. He spentmost of October exploring this river. Explorers in that day, as inthis, were not fair judges of each other's feats. Vancouver tookpossession of the Columbia river region for England, setting down inhis narrative that{70}'no other civilized nation or state had everentered this river before ... it does not appear that Mr Gray eithersaw or was ever within five leagues of the entrance.'

Vancouver then visited the presidio at San Francisco, and thenceproceeded to Monterey, where Quadra awaited him. His lieutenant,Broughton, who had been in charge of the boats that explored theColumbia, here left him and accompanied Quadra to San Blas, whence hewent overland to the Atlantic and sailed for England, bearingdispatches to the government. Vancouver spent yet another year on theNorth Pacific, corroborating his first year's charting and proving thatno north-east passage through the continent existed. Portland Canal,Jervis Inlet, Cook Inlet, Prince William Sound, Lynn Canal—all weretraced to head-waters by Vancouver.

The curtain then drops on the exploration of the North Pacific, withSpain jealously holding all south of the Columbia, Russia jealouslyholding all north of Sitka, and England and the United States advancingcounter-claims for all the territory between.

CHAPTER V

'ALEXANDER MACKENZIE, FROM CANADA, BY LAND'

The movement of the fur traders towards the Pacific now became afevered race for the wealth of a new El Dorado. Astor's traders in NewYork, the Scottish and English merchants of the North-West Company inMontreal, the Spanish traders of the South-West, even the directors ofthe sleepy old Hudson's Bay Company—all turned longing eyes to thatPacific north-west coast whence came sea-otter skins in trade, each fora few pennies' worth of beads, powder, or old iron. Rumours, too, wererife of the great wealth of the seal rookeries, and the seal proved aspowerful a magnet to draw the fur traders as the little beaver, thepursuit of which had led them into frozen wilds.

Up in the Athabaska country, eating his heart out with chagrin becausehis associates in the North-West Company of Montreal had{72}ignoredhis voyage of discovery down the Mackenzie river to the Arctic in1789,[1] the young trader Alexander Mackenzie heard these rumours ofnew wealth in furs on the Pacific. Who would be the first overland tothat western sea? If Spaniard and Russian had tapped the source ofwealth from the ocean side, why could not the Nor'westers cross themountains and secure the furs from the land side? Mackenzie had heard,too, of the fabled great River of the West. Could he but catch theswish of its upper current, what would hinder him floating down it tothe sea? Mackenzie thought and thought, and paced his quarters up atFort Chipewyan, on Lake Athabaska, till his mind became so filled withthe idea of an overland journey to the Pacific that he could not sleepor rest. He had felt himself handicapped by lack of knowledge ofastronomy and surveying when on the voyage to the Arctic, so he askedleave of absence from his company, came down by canoe to Montreal, andsailed for England to spend the winter studying in London. Here,everything was in a ferment over the voyages of Cook and Hanna andMeares, over the{73}seizure of British trading-ships by the viceroyof Mexico, over the Admiralty's plans to send Vancouver out to completeCook's explorations. The rumours were as fuel to the flame that burnedin Mackenzie. The spring of 1792 saw him hurrying back to FortChipewyan to prepare for the expedition on which he had set his heart.When October came he launched his canoes, fully manned and provisioned,on Lake Athabaska, and, ascending the Peace river to a point about sixmiles above the forks formed by its junction with the Smoky, he built arude palisaded fur-post and spent the winter there.

Spring came and found Mackenzie ready to go forward into the unknownregions of the west, regions as yet untrodden by the feet of white men.Alexander Mackay, one of the most resolute and capable traders in theservice of the North-West Company, was to be his companion on thejourney; and with them were to go six picked French-Canadian voyageursand two Indians as guides. They had built a birch-bark canoe ofexceptional strength and lightness. It was twenty-five feet long, somefour feet in beam, twenty-six inches deep, and had a carrying capacityof three thousand pounds. Explorers and{74}men stepped into theirlight craft on the evening of May 9, 1793. The fort fired guns andwaved farewell; the paddlers struck up a voyageurs' song; and theblades dipped in rhythmic time. Mackenzie waved his hat back to thegroup in front of the fort gate; and then with set face headed hiscanoe westward for the Pacific.

Recall what was happening now out on the Pacific! Robert Gray washeading home to Boston with news of the discovery of the great river.Vancouver was back from San Francisco carefully charting the innerchannel of the coast. Baranoff, the little czar of the Russiantraders, was coasting at the head of fifteen hundred 'bidarkies'between the Aleutians and Sitka; and Spain was still sending out raggedpilots to chart the seas which she had not the marine to hold.

The big canoe went on, up the Peace river. Spring thaw brought thewaters down from the mountains in turbulent floods, and the precipicesnarrowed on each side till the current became a foaming cascade. Itwas one thing to float down-stream with brigades of singing voyageursand cargoes of furs in spring; it was a different matter to breast thefull force of these torrents with only ten men{75}to paddle. In thebig brigades the men paddled in relays. In this canoe each man wasexpected to pole and paddle continuously and fiercely against a currentthat was like a mill-race. Mackenzie listened to the grumblers overthe night camp-fire, and explained how much safer it was to ascend anunknown stream with bad rapids than to run down it. The danger couldalways be seen before running into it. He cheered the drooping spiritsof his band, and inspired them with some of his own indomitable courage.

By May 16 the river had narrowed to a foaming cataract; and the bankswere such sheer rock-wall that it was almost impossible to land. Theyhad arrived at the Rocky Mountain Portage, as it was afterwards called.It was clear that the current could not be stemmed by pole or paddle;the canoe must be towed or carried. When Mackenzie tried to getfoothold or handhold on the shore, huge boulders and land-slides ofloose earth slithered down, threatening to smash canoe and canoemen.Mackenzie got out a tow-line eighty feet long. This he tied to theport thwart of the canoe. With the tow-line round his shoulders, whilethe torrent roared{76}past and filled the canyon with the 'voice ofmany waters,' Mackenzie leaped to the dangerous slope, cut foothold andhandhold on the face of the cliff with an axe, and scrambled up to atable of level rock. Then he shouted and signalled for his men to comeup. If the voyageurs had not been hemmed in by a boiling maelstrom onboth sides, they would have deserted on the spot. Mackenzie saw thembegin to strip as if to swim; then, clothes on back and barefoot, theyscrambled up the treacherous shore. He reached over, and assisted themto the level ground above. The tow-line was drawn taut round trees andthe canoe tracked up the raging current. But the rapids became wilder.A great wave struck the bow of the canoe and the tow-line snapped inmid-air. The terrified men looking over the edge of the precipice sawtheir craft sidle as if to swamp; but, on the instant, another mightywave flung her ashore, and they were able to haul her out of danger.

Mackay went ahead to see how far the rapids extended. He found thatthey were at least nine miles in length. On his return the men weredeclaring that they would not ascend such waters another rod.Mackenzie, to humour them, left them to a regale of rum{77}andpemmican, and axe in hand went up the precipitous slope, and began tomake a rough path through the forest. Up the rude incline the menhauled the empty canoe, cutting their way as they advanced. Then theycarried up the provisions in ninety-pound bundles. By nightfall of thefirst day they had advanced but one mile. Next morning the journey wascontinued; the progress was exactly three miles the second day, and themen fell in their tracks with exhaustion, and slept that night wherethey lay. But at length they had passed the rapids; the toilsomeportage was over, and the canoe was again launched on the stream. Theair was icy from the snows of the mountain-peaks, and in spite of theirsevere exercise the men had to wear heavy clothing.

On May 31 they arrived at the confluence where the rivers now known asthe Finlay and the Parsnip, flowing together, form the Peace. TheIndians of this region told Mackenzie of a great river beyond the bigmountains, a river that flowed towards the noonday sun; and of 'CarrierIndians'[2] inland, who acted as{78}middlemen and traders between thecoast and the mountain tribes. They said that the Carriers toldlegends of 'white men on the coast, who wore armour from head toheel'—undoubtedly the Spanish dons—and of 'huge canoes with sailslike clouds' that plied up and down 'the stinking waters'—meaning thesea.

Mackenzie was uncertain which of the two confluents to follow—whetherto ascend the Finlay, flowing from the north-west, or the Parsnip,flowing from the south-east. He consulted his Indian guides, one ofwhom advised him to take the southern branch. This would lead, theguide said, to a lake from which they could portage to another stream,and so reach the great river leading to the sea. Mackenzie decided tofollow this advice, and ordered his men to proceed up the Parsnip.Their hearts sank. They had toiled up one terrible river; directlybefore them was another, equally precipitous and dangerous.Nevertheless, they began the ascent. For a week the rush of avalanchesfrom the mountain-peaks could be heard like artillery fire. Far upabove the cloud-line they could see the snow tumbling over an upperprecipice in powdery wind-blown cataracts; a minute later would comethe thunderous{79}rumble of the falling masses. With heroicfortitude the voyageurs held their way against the fierce current,sometimes paddling, sometimes towing the canoe along the river-bank.Once, however, when Mackenzie and Mackay had gone ahead on foot toreconnoitre, ordering the canoemen to paddle along behind, the canoefailed to follow. Mackay went back and found the voyageurs disputingashore. They pretended that a leak had delayed them. From Indians metby the way, Mackenzie learned that he was indeed approaching a portageover the height-of-land to the waters that flowed towards the Pacific.One of these Indians was induced to go with Mackenzie as guide. Theytramped ahead through a thicket of brush, and came suddenly out on ablue tarn. This was the source of the Parsnip, the southern branch ofthe Peace. The whole party arrived on June 12. A portage of 817 pacesover a rocky ridge brought them to a second mountain lake drained by ariver that flowed towards the west. Mackenzie had crossed thewatershed, the Great Divide, and had reached the waters which emptyinto the Pacific.

The river which the explorers now entered was a small tributary of theFraser. Some{80}years later it was named by Simon Fraser the BadRiver, and it deserved the name. Mackenzie launched his canoedown-stream. The men's spirits rose. This was working with thecurrent, not against it; but the danger of going with an unknowncurrent became at once apparent. The banks began to skim past, thewaters to rise in oily corrugations; and before the voyageurs realizedit, they were caught by a current they could not stem and were hurriedsidling down-stream. The men sprang out to swim, but the currentprevented them from reaching land, and they clung in terror to thesides of the canoe till an eddy sent them on a sand-bar in the midst ofthe rapids. With great difficulty the craft was rescued and broughtashore. The stern had been torn out of the canoe, half the powder andbullets lost, and the entire cargo drenched.

The men were panic-stricken and on the verge of mutiny; but Mackenziewas undaunted and determined to go forward. He spread the provisionsout to dry and set his crew to work patching up the stern of the brokencanoe with resin and oilcloth and new cedar lining. That night themountain Indian who had acted as guide across the portage gaveMackenzie the slip and escaped in the{81}woods. For several daysafter this most of the party trudged on foot carrying the cargo, whilefour of the most experienced canoemen brought the empty canoe down therapids. But on June 17 they found further progress by water impossibleowing to masses of driftwood in the stream. They were now, however,less than a mile from the south fork of the Fraser; the men carried thecanoe on their shoulders across the intervening neck of swamp, and atlast the explorers 'enjoyed the inexpressible satisfaction' of findingthemselves on the banks of a broad, navigable river, on the west sideof the Great Divide.

The point where they embarked, on the morning of June 18, was aboutthirty-five miles above the Nechaco, or north fork of the Fraser, justat the upper end of the great bend where the south fork, flowing to thenorth-west, sweeps round in a semicircle, joins its confluent, andpours southward to the sea. This trend of the river to the south wasnot what Mackenzie expected. He wanted to follow a stream leadingwest. Without noticing it, he had passed the north fork, the Nechaco,and was sweeping down the main stream of the Fraser, where toweringmountains cut off the view ahead, and the powerful{82}rush of thewaters foreboded hard going, if not more rapids and cataracts.Mackenzie must have a new guide. The Carrier Indians dwelt along thisriver, but they appeared to be truculently hostile. On June 21 a partyof these Indians stood on one of the banks and shot arrows at theexplorers and rolled stones from the precipices. Mackenzie landed onthe opposite bank, after sending a hunter by a wide detour through thewoods behind the Indians on the other shore, with orders to shootinstantly if the savages threatened either the canoe or himself. Infull sight of the Indians Mackenzie threw trinkets in profusion on theground, laid down his musket and pistol, and held up his arms in tokenof friendship. The savages understood the meaning of his actions. Twoof them jumped into a dug-out and came poling across to him.Suspiciously and very timidly they landed. Mackenzie threw himself onthe ground, and on the sands traced his path through the 'shiningmountains.' By Indian sign-language he told them he wanted to go tothe sea; and, disarmed of all suspicion, the Indians were presently onthe ground beside him, drawing the trail to the sea. Terrible rapids(they imitated the noise of the cataracts) barred his way by thisriver.{83}He must turn back to where another river (the Blackwater)came in on the west, and ascend that stream to a portage which wouldlead over to the sea.

The post of Alexandria on the Cariboo Road marks Mackenzie's farthestsouth on the Fraser. At this point, after learning all he could of theroute from the Indians, he turned the prow of his canoe up the river.The Carrier Indians provided him with a guide. On July 4, nearly twomonths from the time of leaving the fort on the Peace river, theportage on the Blackwater was reached; the canoe was abandoned, someprovisions were cached, and each man set off afoot with a ninety-poundpack on his back. Heavy mist lay on the thick forest. The Indiantrail was but a dimly defined track over forest mould. The drippingunderbrush that skirted the path soaked the men to the skin. The guidehad shown an inclination to desert, and Mackenzie slept beside him,ready to seize and hold him on the slightest movement. Totemcedar-poles in front of the Indian villages told the explorers thatthey were approaching the home of the coastal tribes. The men'sclothing was by this time torn to shreds. They were barefooted,bareheaded,{84}almost naked. For nearly two weeks they journeyed onfoot; then, having forded the Dean river, they embarked for the sea onthe Bella Coola in cedar dug-outs which they procured from Indians ofone of the coastal tribes. Daily now Mackenzie saw signs of whitetraders. The Indians possessed beads and trinkets. One Indian had aSpanish or Russian lance. Fishing weirs were passed. There was awhiff of salt water in the air; then far out between the hills lay agap of illimitable blue. At eight o'clock in the morning of Saturday,July 20, 1793, Mackenzie reached the mouth of the river and foundhimself on the sea. The next day he went down North Bentinck Arm, and,passing the entrance to the south arm, landed at the cape on theopposite shore. He then proceeded down Burke Channel. It was near themouth of this inlet that he inscribed, in red letters on a large rock,the memorable words: 'Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, thetwenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three.Lat. 52° 20' 48" N.'

Barely two months previously Vancouver had explored and named thesevery waters and headlands. A hostile old Indian explained bellicoselythat the white sailors had fired{85}upon him. For this outrage hedemanded satisfaction in gifts from Mackenzie. Few gifts had Mackenziefor the aggressive old chief. There were exactly twenty pounds ofpemmican—two pounds a man for a three months' trip back. Thereremained also fifteen pounds of rice—the mainstay of thevoyageurs—and six pounds of mouldy flour. The Indians proved sovociferously hostile that two voyageurs had to stand guard while theothers slept on the bare rocks. On one occasion savages in dug-outsbegan hurling spears. But no harm resulted from these unfriendlydemonstrations, and the party of explorers presently set out on theirhomeward journey.

Mackenzie had accomplished his object. In the race to the Pacificoverland he was the first of the explorers of North America to crossthe continent and reach the ocean. Late in August the voyageurs wereback at the little fort on the Peace river. Mackenzie shortlyafterwards quitted the fur country and retired to Scotland, where hewrote the story of his explorations. His book appeared in 1801, and inthe following year he was knighted by the king for his greatachievements.

[2] The Takulli. This tribe cremated the dead, and the widowscollected the ashes of their dead husbands and carried them during aperiod of three years: hence the name 'Carriers.'

CHAPTER VI

THE DESCENT OF THE FRASER RIVER

American traders were not slow to follow up the discovery of RobertGray on the Pacific. Spain, the pioneer pathfinder, had cededLouisiana to France; and France, by way of checkmating British advancein North America, had sold Louisiana to the United States for fifteenmillion dollars. What did Louisiana include? Certainly, from NewOrleans to the Missouri. Did it also include from the Missouri toGray's river, the Columbia? The United States had sent MeriwetherLewis and William Clark overland from the Missouri to the Columbia,ostensibly on a scientific expedition, but in reality to lay claim tothe new territory for the United States. This brings the explorationof the Pacific down to 1806.

Take a look at the map! Mackenzie had crossed overland from the Peaceriver to Bella Coola. Who was to own the great belt of{87}empire—athird larger than Germany—between Mackenzie's trail westward and Lewisand Clark's trail to the mouth of the Columbia? In 1805 Simon Fraser,who as a child had come from the United States to Canada with hiswidowed mother in the Loyalist migration, and now in his thirtieth yearwas a partner in the North-West Company of Montreal, had crossed theRockies by way of the Peace river. He had followed Mackenzie's trailover the terrible nine-mile carrying-place and had built there afur-post—Rocky Mountain Portage. He had ascended that same Parsnipriver, which Mackenzie had found so appalling, to a little emerald lakeset like a jewel in the mountains. There he had built anotherfur-trading post, and named it after his friend, Archibald NormanM'Leod. This was the first fur-post known to have been erected in theinterior of New Caledonia, now British Columbia. The new fort had beenleft in charge of James M'Dougall; and during the winter of 1806M'Dougall had crossed the heavily drifted carrying-place and descendedthe Bad River as far as the south fork of the Fraser, which all tradersat that time mistook for the upper reaches of Gray's Columbia. Insteadof going down the main stream of the{88}Fraser, M'Dougall ascendedboth the Nechaco and the Stuart; and if he did not actually behold thebeautiful alpine tarns since known as Fraser Lake and Stuart Lake, hewas at least the first white man to hear of them.

In May of 1806, after sending the year's furs from Rocky MountainPortage east to Fort Chipewyan, Simon Fraser set out to explore thisinland empire concerning which M'Dougall had reported. John Stuartaccompanied Fraser as lieutenant. They crossed from the head-waters ofthe Parsnip to the south fork of the Fraser, and on June 10 camped atthe mouth of the Nechaco. Towards the end of July the Carriers campedon Stuart Lake were amazed to see advancing across the waters, withrhythmic gallop of paddles, two enormous birch canoes. When the canoesreached the land Fraser and Stuart stepped ashore, and a volley wasfired to celebrate the formal taking possession of a new inland empire.What to do with the white men's offerings of tobacco the Carriers didnot know. They thought the white men in smoking were emitting spiritswith each breath. When the traders offered soap to the squaws, thewomen at once began to devour it. The result was a frothing at the{89}mouth as amazing to them as the smoke from the men. History doesnot record whether the women became as addicted to soap as the men tothe fragrant weed.

Active trading with the Indians began at once. The lake was namedStuart in honour of Fraser's companion, and the ground was cleared fora palisaded fort, which, when erected, they named Fort St James. Thescene was enchanting. The lake wound for a distance of fifty milesamid the foot-hills of the mighty forested mountains. It was four orfive miles wide, and was gemmed with green islets; and all round,appearing through the clouds in jagged outline, were the opal summitsof the snowy peaks. No wonder the two Scotsmen named the new inlandempire New Caledonia—after their native land.

It will be remembered that M'Dougall had heard of another mountaintarn. This was forty miles south of Stuart Lake, at the headwaters ofthe Nechaco, the north fork of the Fraser. Stuart went overland southto spy out the southern lake; and his report was of such an entrancingregion—heavily forested, with an abundance of game and fish—thatFraser glided down the Stuart river and poled up the Nechaco to thelake which Stuart had{90}already named after his chief. Again a fortwas erected and named Fort Fraser, making three forts in the interiorof New Caledonia.

Fraser had sent a request to the directors of the North-West Company tobe permitted to fit out an expedition down the great river, which hethought was the Columbia; and in the spring of 1807 two canoes underJules Quesnel were sent out with goods. Quesnel arrived at Fort StJames in the autumn, bringing from the east the alarming word thatLewis and Clark had gone overland and taken possession of all theterritory between the Missouri and the mouth of the Columbia. No timewas to be lost by Fraser in establishing a claim to the region to thewest of the Rockies between the Peace and the Columbia. Fraser wentdown the river and strengthened British possession by building a fourthfort—Fort George at the mouth of the Nechaco. This was to be thestarting-point of the expedition to the Pacific. Then, towards the endof May 1808, he set out down the great river with four canoes, nineteenvoyageurs, and Stuart and Quesnel as first assistants.

Fifteen miles below the fort the river walls narrowed and the canoesswept into the roaring cataract of Fort George canyon.{91}The nextday they shot through the Cottonwood canyon, and paused at the pointthenceforth to be known as Quesnel. On the third day they passedMackenzie's farthest south—the site of the present Alexandria. Belowthis the river was unexplored and unknown. Suddenly the enormousflood-waters swollen by melting mountain snows contracted to a width ofonly forty yards, and with a fearful roar swept into a rock-walledgorge. In sublime unconsciousness of heroism Fraser records:

As it was impossible to carry the canoes across the land owing to theheight of the steep hills, we resolved to venture down. I ordered thefive best men of the crews into a canoe lightly loaded; and in a momentit was under way. After passing the first cascade she lost her headand was drawn into an eddy, where she was whirled about, in suspensewhether to sink or swim. However, she took a turn from this vortex,flying from one danger to another; but, in spite of every effort, thewhirlpool forced her against a low rock. Upon this the men scrambledout, saving their lives; but the greatest difficulty was{92}stillahead. To continue by water would be certain destruction. During thisdistressing scene we were on shore looking on; but the situationrendered our approach perilous. The bank was high and steep. We hadto plunge our daggers into the ground to avoid sliding into the river.We cut steps, fastened a line to the front of the canoe, and hauled itup. Our lives hung upon a thread, as one false step might have hurledus into eternity. However, we cleared the bank before dark. The menhad to ascend the immense hills with heavy loads on their backs.

Indians warned the white men to desist from their undertaking. Better,they advised, go overland eastward to a great peaceful river anddescend that to the sea. Fraser, of course, did not know that thepeaceful river they spoke of was really the Columbia. He thought theriver he was following was the Columbia. With the help of Indians thecanoes were pulled up-hill, and horses were hired from them to carrythe provisions overland. Below this portage, as they continued thedescent, an enormous crag spread{93}across the river, appearing atfirst to bar the passage ahead. This was Bar Rock. Beyond it severalminor rapids were passed without difficulty; and then they came upon aseries of great whirlpools which seemed impassable. But the menunloaded the canoes and—'a desperate undertaking'—ran them down therapids with light ballast. They then came back overland for the packs.

This task [says Fraser] was as dangerous as going by water. The menpassed and repassed a declivity, on loose stones and gravel, whichconstantly gave way under foot. One man, who lost the path, got in amost intricate and perilous position. With a large package on hisback, he got so wedged amid the rocks that he could move neitherforward nor backward, nor yet unload himself. I crawled, not withoutgreat risk, to his assistance, and saved his life by cutting his packso [that] it dropped back in the river. On this carrying-place, whichwas two miles long, our shoes became shattered.

For several days after this the advance was by a succession of rapidsand portages. On June 9 the stream again narrowed to forty{94}yardsand swept violently between two overhanging precipices.

The water, which rolls down this passage in tumultuous waves and withgreat velocity, had a frightful appearance. However, it beingabsolutely impossible to carry canoes by land, all hands withouthesitation embarked on the mercy of the awful tide. Once on the water,the die was cast; and the difficulty consisted in keeping the canoesclear of the precipice on one side and clear of the gulfs formed by thewaves on the other. Thus skimming along as fast as lightning, thecrews, cool and determined, followed each other in awful silence; andwhen we arrived at the end, we stood gazing at each other in silentcongratulation on our narrow escape from total destruction. Afterbreathing a little, we continued our course to the point where theIndians camped.

The natives here warned Fraser that it would be madness to go forward.At the same time they furnished him with a guide. The same evening theparty reached the place described by Fraser as 'a continual series ofcascades cut by rocks and bounded by precipices that{95}seemed tohave no end.' Never had he seen 'anything so dreary and dangerous.'Towering above were 'mountains upon mountains whose summits are coveredwith eternal snow.' An examination of the river for some distancebelow convinced Fraser that it was impossible of navigation, and hedecided to make the remainder of the journey on foot. After building ascaffold, on which the canoes and some provisions were placed andcovered with underbrush and moss, the party, on June 11, began theirtramp down the river-bank. Each man carried on his back a ninety-poundpack, supported by a strap across the forehead. Again and again on thejourney Indians confronted Fraser with hostile show of weapons, but theintrepid trader disarmed hostility by gifts. The Indians declared thatthe sea lay only ten 'sleeps' distant. One of the chiefs said that hehad himself seen white men, who were great 'tyees,' because 'they werewell dressed and very proud and went about this way'—clapping hishands to his hips and strutting about with an air of vast importance.The Indians told Fraser of another great river that came in from theeast and joined this one some distance below. He had passed the siteof the present Lillooet and was{96}approaching the confluence of theThompson with the Fraser. Farther down European articles were seenamong the Indians. It was the fishing season, and the tribes hadassembled in great hordes. Here the river was navigable, and threewooden dug-outs were obtained from the natives for the descent to thesea. The voyageurs again embarked, and swept down the narrow bends ofthe turbulent floods at what are now Lytton, Yale, and Hope. Therewere passes where the river was such a raging torrent that the dug-outshad to be carried overland. There were places where Fraser's voyageurshad to climb precipices by means of frail ladders, made of poles andwithes, that swayed to their tread and threatened to precipitate theminto the torrent beneath.

When the river turned sharply west, Fraser could not help noticing thatthe Indians became more violently hostile. Far south could be seen theopal dome of Mount Baker, named by Vancouver after one of hislieutenants. As they advanced, the banks lowered to reedy swamps andmosquitoes appeared in clouds. What troubled Fraser most was the factthat the river lay many miles north of the known latitude of theColumbia. It daily grew on him{97}that this could not possibly be theColumbia. The tide rose and fell in the river. The Indian guidebegged the white men not to go on; he was afraid, he said, of theIndians of the sea-coast. The river channel divided. Natives alongthe shore began singing war-songs and beating the war-drum; then theycircled out threateningly round the white men's boats. Signs were seenof the sea ahead; but the Indians were 'howling like wolves andbrandishing war-clubs,' and Fraser concluded that it would be unwise todelay longer amid such dangers. To his intense disappointment he hadestablished the latitude as 49°, whereas the Columbia was in latitude46° 20'. 'This river is thereforenot the Columbia,' he declared.'If I had been convinced of this when I left my canoes, I wouldcertainly have returned.'

The return journey was fraught with danger. Always one man stood guardwhile the others slept; and again and again the little party wassurrounded by ferociously hostile bands. Between apprehension of thedangers of the wild trail of the Fraser canyons and fear of hostilenatives, the men became so panic-stricken that they threw down theirpaddles and declared their intention of trying to escape{98}overlandthrough the mountains. Fraser reasoned and remonstrated, and finallythreatened. After so much heroism he would not permit cowardlydesertion. Then he forced each voyageur to swear on the Cross: 'I dosolemnly swear that I will sooner perish than forsake in distress anyof our crew during the present voyage.' With renewed self-respect theythen paddled off, singing voyageurs' songs to keep up their courage.Imagine, for a moment, the scene! The turbid, mad waters of the Fraserhemmed in between rock walls, carving a living way through the adamant;banks from which red savages threw down rocks wherever the wild currentdrove the dug-out inshore; and, tossed by the waves—a chip-like craftcontaining nineteen ragged men singing like schoolboys! Once away fromthe coastal tribes, however, the white men were aided by the inlandCarriers. They found the canoes and supplies in perfect condition andunmolested, though hundreds of Carrier Indians must have passed wherelay the belongings of the white strangers. On August 5, to theinexpressible relief of Fort George, the little band once more were attheir headquarters in New Caledonia.

CHAPTER VII

THOMPSON AND THE ASTORIANS

While Fraser was working down the wild canyons of the great river whichnow bears his name, other fur traders were looking towards the Pacificocean. In 1810 John Jacob Astor, a New York merchant, who bought fursfrom the Nor'westers in Montreal for shipment to Germany, formed thePacific Fur Company, and took into its service a number of the partnersand servants of the North-West Company. Some of these men weredispatched round the Horn in theTonquin to the mouth of theColumbia; while another party went overland from Mackinaw and St Louis,following the trail of Lewis and Clark. One of the Nor'westers whoentered Astor's service was Alexander Mackay, Mackenzie's companion onthe journey to the coast; another was a brother of the Stuart who hadaccompanied Fraser through New Caledonia; and a third was a{100}brother of the M'Dougall who commanded Fort M'Leod, the first fortbuilt by the Nor'westers in New Caledonia.

In the light of subsequent developments, it is a matter for speculationwhether these Nor'westers joined Astor purposely to overthrow hisscheme in the interests of their old company; or were later bribed todesert him; or, as is most likely, simply grew dissatisfied with theinexperienced, blundering mismanagement of Astor's company, andreverted gladly to their old service. However that may have been, itis certain that the North-West Company did not fail to take notice ofthe plans that Astor had set afoot for the Pacific fur trade; for in asecret session of the partners, at Fort William on Lake Superior, 'itwas decided in council that the Company should send to Columbia River,where the Americans had established Astoria, and that a party shouldproceed overland to the coast.'

It puzzled the Nor'westers to learn that the river Fraser had exploredin 1808 was not the Columbia. Where, then, were the upper reaches ofthe great River of the West which Gray and Vancouver had reported? Thecompany issued urgent instructions to its traders in the Far West tokeep pushing up{101}the North and South Saskatchewan, up the RedDeer, up the Bow, up the Athabaska, up the Smoky, up the Pembina, andto press over the mountains wherever any river led oceanwards throughthe passes. This duty of finding new passable ways to the sea wasespecially incumbent on the company's surveyor and astronomer, DavidThompson. He was formerly of the Hudson's Bay Company, but had comeover to the Nor'westers, and in their service had surveyed from theAssiniboine to the Missouri and from Lake Superior to the Saskatchewan.

Towards the spring of 1799 Thompson had been on the North Saskatchewanand had moved round the region of Lesser Slave Lake. That year, atGrand Portage, at the annual meeting of the traders of the North-WestCompany, he was ordered to begin a thorough exploration of themountains; and the spring of 1800 saw him at Rocky Mountain House[1] onthe upper reaches of the North Saskatchewan above the junction of theClearwater. Hitherto the Nor'westers had crossed the{102}mountainsby way of the Peace river. But Thompson was to explore a dozen newtrails across the Great Divide. While four of his men crossed over tothe Red Deer river and rafted or canoed down the South Saskatchewan,Thompson himself, with five French Canadians and two Indian guides,crossed the mountains to the Kootenay country. The Kootenay Indianswere encamped on the Kootenay plains preparatory to their winter'shunt, and Thompson persuaded some of them to accompany him back overthe mountains to Rocky Mountain House on the North Saskatchewan. Thiswas the beginning of the trade between the Kootenays and white men.Probably from these Indians Thompson learned of the entrance to theRockies by the beautiful clear mountain-stream now named the Bow; andDuncan M'Gillivray, a leading partner, accompanied him south from RockyMountain House to the spot on the Bow where to-day the city of Calgarystands. It was on this trip that Nor'westers first met the PieganIndians. From these horsemen of the plains the explorers learned thatit was only a ten-day journey overland to the Missouri. Snow wasfalling when the traders entered the Rockies at what is now the Gap, onthe{103}Canadian Pacific Railway. Inside the gateway to the ruggeddefile of forest and mountain the traders revelled in the sublimescenery of the Banff valley. At Banff, eastward of Cascade mountain,on the sheltered plain where Kootenays and Stonies used to camp, onecan still find the circular mounds that mark a trading-station of thisera. Whether the white men discovered the beautiful blue tarn nowknown as Devil's Lake, or saw the Bow river falls, where touriststo-day fish away long summer afternoons, or dipped in the famous hotsprings on the slope of Sulphur mountain, we do not know. They couldhardly have met and conversed with the Kootenays and Stonies withouthearing about these attractions, which yearly drew Indian families tocamp in the encircling mountains, while the men ranged afield to hunt.

Thompson and M'Gillivray were back at Rocky Mountain House on theSaskatchewan for Christmas. Some time during 1800 theirFrench-Canadian voyageurs are known to have crossed Howse Pass, thesource of the North Saskatchewan, which was discovered by DuncanM'Gillivray and named after Joseph Howse of the North-West Company.

For several years after this Thompson was{104}engaged in makingsurveys for the North-West Company in the valley of the Peace river andbetween the Saskatchewan and the Churchill. In 1806 we find him in thecountry south of the Peace, which was then in charge of that JulesQuesnel who was to accompany Fraser in 1808. Fraser, as we have seen,was already busy exploring the region between M'Leod Lake and StuartLake, and had laid his plans to descend the great river which hethought was Gray's Columbia. Now, while Thompson spent the winter of1806-7 between the Peace and the North Saskatchewan, trading andexploring, he doubtless learned of Fraser's explorations west of theRockies and of the vast extent of New Caledonia; and June 1807 saw himover the mountains on the Kootenay plains, where to his infinitedelight he came upon a turbulent river, whose swollen current flowedtowards the Pacific. 'May God give me to see where its waters flowinto the ocean,' he ejaculated. This was, however, but a tributary ofthe long-sought Columbia. It was the river now called the Blaeberry.Thompson followed down the banks of this stream by a well-known Indiantrail, and on June 30 he came to the Columbia itself. Although theriver here flowed to the north,{105}he must have known, from thedeposits of blue silt and the turgidity of the current, that he hadfound at least an upper reach of the River of the West; but he couldhardly guess that its winding course would lead him a dance of elevenhundred miles before he should reach the sea.

The party camped and built the boats they needed, and a fortnight laterthey were poling up-stream to the lake we to-day know as Windermere,where Thompson built a fort which he called 'Kootenai.' Here he spentthe winter trading, and when the warm Chinook winds cleared away thesnows, in April 1808, about the time Fraser was preparing to descendthe Fraser river, he paddled up-stream to where the Columbia river hasits source in Upper Columbia Lake. A portage of about a mile and ahalf brought him to another large river, which flowed southward. Thisstream—the Kootenay—led him south into the country of the Flatheads,then made a great bend and swept to the north. This was disappointing.Thompson returned to his fort on Windermere Lake, packed the furs hismen had gathered, and retraced his trail of the previous year to RockyMountain House. He had undoubtedly found the River{106}of the West,but he had learned nothing of its course to the sea.

During nearly all of 1809 Thompson was exploring the Kootenay river andits branches through Idaho and Montana. Still no path had he found tothe sea. In 1810 he seems to have gone east for instructions from hiscompany. What the instructions were we may conjecture from subsequentdevelopments. Astor of New York, as we have seen, was busy launchinghis fur traders for operations on the Pacific. Piegan warriors blockedthe passage into the Rockies by the North Saskatchewan; so Thompson inthe autumn of this year ascended the Athabaska. Winter came early.The passes were filled with snow and beset by warriors. He failed toget provisions down from Rocky Mountain House; and his men, cut off byhostile savages from all help from outside posts, had literally to cutand shovel their way through Athabaska Pass while subsisting on shortrations. The men built huts in the pass; some hunted, while othersmade snow-shoes and sleighs. They were down to rations of dog-meat andmoccasins, and hardly knew whether to expect death at the hands ofraiding Piegans or from starvation. On New Year's Day of 1811,{107}when the thermometer dropped to 24° below zero, with a biting wind,Thompson was packing four broken-down horses and two dogs over the passto the west side of the Great Divide. The mountains rose precipitouslyon each side; but when the trail began dropping down westward, theweather moderated, though the snow grew deeper; and in the third weekof January Thompson came on the baffling current of the Columbia. Hecamped there for the remainder of the winter, near the entrance of theCanoe River. Why he went up the Columbia in the spring, tracing itback to its source, and thence south again into Idaho, instead ofrounding the bend and going down the river, we do not know. He wasevidently puzzled by the contrary directions in which the great riverseemed to flow. At all events, by a route which is not clearly known,Thompson struck the Spokane river in June 1811, near the site of thepresent city of Spokane; and following down the Spokane, he again foundthe elusive Columbia and embarked on its waters. At the mouth of theSnake River, on July 9, he erected a pole, on which he hoisted a flagand attached a sheet of paper claiming possession of the country forGreat Britain and the North-West{108}Company. A month later, whenAstor's traders came up-stream from the mouth of the Columbia, theywere amazed to find a British flag 'waving triumphantly' at this spot.Unfortunately, Thompson's claim ignored the fact that both Lewis andClark and the Astorians had already passed this way on their overlandroute to the Pacific.

From this point Thompson evidently raced for the Pacific. Within aweek he had passed the Dalles, passed the mouth of the Willamette,passed what was to become the site of the Hudson's Bay Company's postof Fort Vancouver; and at midday of Monday, July 15, he swept round abend of the mighty stream and came within sight of the sea. Crouchedbetween the dank, heavy forests and the heaving river floods, stood alittle palisaded and fresh-hewn log fur-post—Astoria. Thompson wastwo months too late to claim the region of the lower Columbia for theNor'westers. One can imagine the wild halloo with which the tiredvoyageurs greeted Astoria when their comrades of old from Athabaskacame tumbling hilariously from the fort gates—M'Dougall of RockyMountain House, Stuart of Chipewyan, and John Clarke, whom Thompson hadknown at Isle à la{109}Crosse. But where was Alexander Mackay, whohad gone overland with Mackenzie in 1793? The men fell into oneanother's arms with gruff, profane embraces. Thompson was haled in toa sumptuous midday dinner of river salmon, duck and partridge, andwines brought round the world. The absence of Mackay was the onlything that took from the pleasure of the occasion.

A party of the Astorians, as we have seen, had sailed round the Horn ontheTonquin; another party had gone overland from Mackinaw and StLouis. On theTonquin were twenty sailors, four partners, twelveclerks, and thirteen voyageurs. She sailed from New York in September1810. Jonathan Thorn, the captain, was a retired naval officer, whoresented the easy familiarity of the fur traders with their servants,and ridiculed the seasickness of the fresh-water voyageurs. TheTonquin had barely rounded the Horn before the partners and thecommander were at sixes and sevens. A landing was made at the mouth ofthe Columbia in March 1811, and eight lives were lost in an attempt tohead small boats up against the tide-rip of river and sea. Afterendless jangling about where to{110}land, where to build, how tobuild, the rude fort which Thompson saw had been knocked together. TheTonquin sailed up the coast of Vancouver Island to trade. On thevessel went Alexander Mackay to help in the trade with the coastalIndians, whom he was supposed to know. In spite of Mackay's warningthat the Nootka tribes were notoriously treacherous and resentfultowards white traders, Captain Thorn with lordly indifference permittedthem to swarm aboard his vessel. Once when Mackay had gone ashore atClayoquot, where Gray had wintered twenty years before, Thorn,forgetting that his ship was not a training-school, struck an old chiefacross the face and threw him over the rail. When Mackay heard whathad happened, instead of applauding the captain's valour, he showed theutmost alarm, and begged Thorn to put out for the open sea. Thecaptain smiled in scorn. Twenty Indians were welcomed on the deck thevery next day. More came. At the same time the vessel was completelysurrounded by a fleet of canoes. As if to throw the white men off allsuspicion, the squaws came paddling out, laughing and chatting. Mackayin horror noticed that in the barter all the Indians were taking knives{111}for their furs, and that groups were casually stationingthemselves at points of vantage on the deck—at the hatches, at thecabin door, along the taffrail. Mackay hurried to the captain. Thornaffected to ignore any danger, but he nevertheless ordered the anchorsup. Seeing so many Indians still on board, the sailors hesitated.Thorn lost his head and uttered a shout. This served as a signal forthe savages, who shrieked with derisive glee and fell upon the crewwith knives, hatchets, and clubs. Down the companionway tumbled theship's clerk, Lewis, stabbed in the back. Over the taffrail headlongfell Mackay, clubbed by the Indians aboard, caught on the knives of thesquaws below. The captain was so unprepared for the attack that he hadno weapon but his pocket-knife. He was stunned by a club, pitchedoverboard, and literally cut to pieces by the squaws. In a moment theTonquin was a shambles. All on deck were slaughtered but four, whogained the main cabin, and with muskets aimed through windows scatteredthe yelling horde. The Indians sprang from the ship and drew off,while the four white survivors escaped in a boat, and theTonquin'ssails flapped idly in the wind. Next morning the Indians paddled{112}out to plunder what seemed to be a deserted ship. A wounded white manappeared above the hatches and waved them to come on board and trade.They came in hosts, in hordes, in flocks, like carrion-birds or antsoverrunning a half-dead thing. Suddenly earth and air at Clayoquotharbour were rent with a terrific explosion, and the sea was drenchedwith the blood of the slaughtered savages. The only remaining whiteman, the wounded Lewis, had blown up the powder magazine. He perishedhimself in order to punish the marauders.

Had this story been known at Astoria when Thompson arrived, he wouldhave found the Astorians in a thoroughly dejected condition. As itwas, murmurs of discontent were heard. Here they had been marooned onthe Columbia for three months without a ship, waiting for thecontingent of the Astorians who were toiling across the continent.[2]Not thus did Nor'westers conduct expeditions. What Thompson thought ofthe situation we do not know. All we do know is that he remained onlya week. On July 22, fully provisioned by M'Dougall, he went back upthe Columbia post-haste.

One year later we find Thompson at Fort William reporting the resultsof his expedition to the assembled directors of the North-West Company.He had surveyed every part of the Columbia from its source to itsmouth. And he was the first white man on its upper waters.

The War of 1812 had begun, and a British warship was on its way tocapture Astoria. At the same time the Nor'westers dispatched anoverland expedition to the Columbia. Among their emissaries went themen of New Caledonia, Alexander Henry (the younger) of Rocky MountainHouse, Donald M'Tavish, and a dozen others who were former comrades ofthe leading Astorians. They succeeded in their mission, and in themonth of October 1813 Astor's fort was sold to the North-West Companyand renamed Fort George.

The methods of fur traders have been the same the world over: tofrighten a rival off the ground if possible; if not, then to buy himoff. It is not all surmise to suppose that when Thompson was sent tothe Pacific there was in view some other purpose than merely to surveyan unknown river. But exploration and the fur trade went hand in hand;and whatever the motives may have been, the{114}result was that,after more than four years of arduous toil, Thompson had given tocommerce a great waterway. His exploration of the Columbia closes theperiod of discovery on the Pacific coast.

[1] To explain what may appear like a confusion of names, it may bestated that in the history of the fur trade from 1800 to 1850 therewere at various stages as many as sixteen differently situatedfur-posts under the name of Rocky Mountain House.

[2] The overland party suffered the greatest hardship and some loss oflife, and did not arrive at Astoria till January 1812.

CHAPTER VIII

THE PASSING OF THE FUR LORDS

When Astoria passed to the Nor'westers, with it came, as we shall see,an opportunity of acquiring for Great Britain the whole of the vastregion west of the Rockies, including California and Alaska. Gray'sfeat in finding the mouth of the Columbia, and the explorations ofLewis and Clark overland to the same river, gave the United Statespossession of a part of this territory by right of discovery; but thispossession was practically superseded by the transfer of Astor's fortto the British-Canadian Company. Yet, to-day, we find Britain not inpossession of California, not in possession of the region round themouth of the Columbia, not in possession of Alaska. The reason forthis will appear presently.

The Treaty of Ghent which closed the War of 1812 made no mention of theboundaries of Oregon, but it provided that any territory captured byeither nation in the course of the{116}war should be restored to theoriginal owner. The question then arose: did this clause in the treatyapply to Astoria? Was the taking over of the fur-post by the Britishcompany in reality an act of war? The United States said Yes; GreatBritain said No; and both nations claimed sovereignty over Oregon. In1818 a provisional agreement was reached, under which either nationmight trade and establish settlements in the disputed territory. Butit was now utterly impossible for Astor to prosecute the fur trade onthe Pacific. The 'Bostonnais' had lost prestige with the Indians whentheTonquin sank off Clayoquot, and the more experienced British andCanadian traders were in control of the field. At this time theHudson's Bay Company and the Nor'westers were waging the trade war thatterminated in their union in 1820-1821; and when the united companiescame to assign officers to the different districts, John M'Loughlin,who had been a partner in the North-West Company, was sent overland torule Oregon.

What did Oregon comprise? At that time no man knew; but within tenyears after his arrival in 1824 M'Loughlin had sent out huntingbrigades, consisting of two or{117}three hundred horsemen, in alldirections: east, under Alexander Ross, as far as Montana and Idaho;south, under Peter Skene Ogden, as far as Utah and Nevada andCalifornia; along the coast south as far as Monterey, under Tom Mackay,whose father had been murdered on theTonquin and whose widowedmother had married M'Loughlin; north, through New Caledonia, underJames Douglas—'Black Douglas' they called the dignified, swarthy youngScotsman who later held supreme rule on the North Pacific as Sir JamesDouglas, the first governor of British Columbia. If one were to take amap of M'Loughlin's transmontane empire and lay it across the face of amap of Europe, it would cover the continent from St Petersburg toMadrid.

The ruler of this vast domain was one of the noblest men in the annalsof the fur trade. John M'Loughlin was a Canadian, born at Rivière duLoup, and he had studied medicine in Edinburgh. The Indians called him'White Eagle,' from his long, snow-white hair and aquiline features.When M'Loughlin reached Oregon—by canoe two thousand miles to theRockies, by pack-horse and canoe another seven hundred miles{118}south to the Columbia—two of the first things he saw were thatAstoria, or Fort George, was too near the rum of trading schooners forthe well-being of the Indians, and that it would be quite possible toraise food for his men on the spot, instead of transporting it over twowatersheds and across the width of a continent. He at once moved theheadquarters of the company from Astoria to a point on the north bankof the Columbia near the Willamette, where he erected Fort Vancouver.Then he sent his men overland to the Spaniards of Lower California topurchase seed-wheat and stock to begin farming in Oregon in order toprovision the company's posts and brigades. It was about the time thathis wheat-fields and orchards began to yield that some passing oceantraveller asked him: 'Do you think this country will ever be settled?''Sir,' answered M'Loughlin, emphasizing his words by thumping hisgold-headed cane on the floor, 'wherever wheat grows, men will go, andcolonies will grow.' Afterwards, when he had to choose between loyaltyto his company and saving the lives of thousands of American settlerswho had come over the mountains destitute, these words of his werequoted against him. He{119}had, according to the directors of thecompany, favoured settlement rather than the fur trade.

Meanwhile, M'Loughlin ruled in a sort of rude baronial splendour on thebanks of the Columbia. The 'Big House,' as the Indians always calledthe governor's mansion, stood in the centre of a spacious courtyardsurrounded by palisades twenty feet high, with huge brass padlocks onthe entrance-gates. Directly in front of the house two cannon werestationed, and piled up behind them ready for instant use were twopyramids of balls. Only officers of some rank dined in the Hall; andif visitors were present from coastal ships that ascended the river,Highland kilties stood behind the governor's chair playing thebagpipes. Towards autumn the southern and eastern brigades set out ontheir annual hunt in California, Nevada, Montana, and Idaho. Towardsspring, when the upper rivers had cleared of ice, the northern brigadesset out for the interior of New Caledonia. Nothing more picturesquewas ever seen in the fur trade than these Oregon brigades.French-Canadian hunters with their Indian wives would be gathered tothe number of two hundred. Indian ponies fattened during the{120}summer on the deep pasturage of the Willamette or the plains of WallaWalla would be brought in to the fort and furbished forth in gayest oftrappings. Provisions would then be packed on their backs. An eagercrowd of wives and sweethearts and children would dash out for a lastgood-bye. The governor would personally shake hands with everydeparting hunter. Then to bugle-call the riders mounted their restiveponies, and the captain—Tom Mackay or Ogden or Ross—would lead thewinding cavalcade into the defiles of mountain and forest, whenceperhaps they would not emerge for a year and a half. Though thebrigades numbered as many as two hundred men, they had to depend forfood on the rifles of the hunters, except for flour and tobacco andbacon supplied at the fort. Once the brigade passed out of sight ofthe fort, the hunters usually dashed ahead to anticipate the stampedingof game by the long, noisy, slow-moving line. Next to the hunterswould come the old bell-mare, her bell tinkling through the lonelysilences. Far in the rear came the squaws and trappers. Going south,the aim was to reach the traverse of the deserts during winter, so thatsnow would be available for water. Going east, the{121}aim was tocross the mountain passes before snow-fall. Going north, the canoesmust ascend the upper rivers before ice formed. But times withoutnumber trappers and hunters were caught in the desert without snow forwater; or were blocked in the mountain passes by blizzards; or werewrecked by the ice cutting their canoes on the upper rivers.Innumerable place-names commemorate the presence of humble trapper andhunter coursing the wilderness in the Oregon brigades. For example:Sublette's River, Payette's River, John Day's River, the Des Chutes,and many others. Indeed, many of the place-names commemorate thedeaths of lonely hunters in the desert. Crow and Blackfoot and SiouxIndians often raided the brigades when on the home trip loaded withpeltry. One can readily believe that rival traders from the Missouriinstigated some of these raids. There were years when, of two hundredhunters setting out, only forty or fifty returned; there were yearswhen the Hudson's Bay brigades found snow-bound, storm-bound, starvingAmerican hunters, and as a price for food exacted every peltry in thepacks; and there were years when rival American traders bribed everyman in Ogden's brigade to desert.

The New Caledonia brigades set out by canoe—huge, long, cedar-linedcraft manned by fifty or even ninety men. These brigades were deckedout gayest of all. Flags flew at the prow of each craft. Voyageursadorned themselves with coloured sashes and headbands, with tinklingbells attached to the buckskin fringe of trouser-leg. Where the riversnarrowed to dark and shadowy canyons, the bagpipes would skirl out someHighland air, or the French voyageurs would strike up some song of thehabitant, paddling and chanting in perfect rhythm, and sometimesbeating time with their paddles on the gunwales. Leaders of the canoebrigades understood well the art of never permitting fear to enter thesouls of their voyageurs. Where the route might be exposed to Indianraid, a regale of rum would be dealt out; and the captain would keepthe men paddling so hard there was no time for thought of danger.

In course of time the northern brigades no longer attempted to ascendthe entire way to the interior of New Caledonia by boat. Boats andcanoes would be left on the Columbia at Fort Colville or at FortOkanagan (both south of the present international boundary), and therest of the trail would be pursued by{123}pack-horse. Kamloopsbecame the great half-way house of these north-bound brigades; andhorses were left there to pasture on the high, dry plains, while freshhorses were taken to ascend the mountain trails. Fort St James onStuart Lake became the chief post of New Caledonia. Here ruled youngJames Douglas, who had married the daughter of the chief factor WilliamConnolly. Ordinarily, the fort on the blue alpine lake lay asleep likean August day; but on the occasion of a visit by the governor or theapproach of a brigade, the drowsy post became a thing of life. Boom ofcannon, firing of rifles, and skirling of bagpipes welcomed the longcavalcade. The captain of the brigade as he entered the fort usuallywore a high and pompous beaver hat, a velvet cloak lined with red silk,and knee-breeches with elaborate Spanish embossed-leather leggings.All this show was, of course, for the purpose of impressing theIndians. Whether impressed or not, the Indians always counted the daysto the wild riot of feasting and boat-races and dog-races andhorse-races that marked the arrival or departure of a brigade.

New Caledonia, as we know, is now a part of Canada; but why does notthe Union Jack float over the great region beyond the Rockies{124}tothe south—south of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the 49th parallel?Over all this territory British fur lords once held sway. Californiawas in the limp fingers of Mexico, but the British traders wereoperating there, and had ample opportunity to secure it by purchaselong before it passed to the United States in 1848. Sir GeorgeSimpson, the resident governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, advised thecompany to purchase it, but the directors in London could not see fursin the suggestion. Simpson would have gone further, and reached outthe company's long arm to the islands of the Pacific and negotiatedwith the natives for permission to build a fort in Hawaii. JamesDouglas was for buying all Alaska from the Russians; but to thedirectors of the Hudson's Bay Company Alaska seemed as remote and asworthless as Siberia, so they contented themselves with leasing anarrow strip along the shore. Thus California, Alaska, and Hawaiimight easily have become British territory; but the opportunity waslost, and they went to the United States. So, too, did the fineterritory of Oregon, out of which three states were afterwards added tothe American Union. But the history of Oregon is confused in a maze of{125}politics, into which we cannot enter here. As we have seen,Bruno Heceta, acting for Spain, was the first mariner to sight theColumbia, and the American, Robert Gray, was the first to enter itsmouth, thus proving Heceta's conjecture of a great river. Then forGreat Britain came Vancouver and Broughton; then the Americans, Lewisand Clark and the Astorians; and finally Thompson, the BritishNor'wester and the first man to explore the great river from its sourceto the sea. Then during the War of 1812 the American post on theColumbia passed to the North-West Company of Montreal; and if it hadnot been for the 'joint occupancy' agreement between Great Britain andthe United States in 1818, Oregon would undoubtedly have remainedBritish. But with the 'joint occupancy' arrangement leavingsovereignty in dispute, M'Loughlin of Oregon knew well that in the endsovereignty would be established, as always, by settlement.

First came Jedediah Smith, the American fur trader, overland. He wasrobbed to the shirt on his back by Indians at the Umpqua river. Thereand then came the great choice to M'Loughlin—should he save the lifeof rivals, or leave them to be murdered by{126}Indians? He sent TomMackay to the Umpqua, punished the robber Indians, secured the pilferedfurs, and paid the American for them. Then came American missionariesoverland—the Lees and Whitman. Then came Wyeth, the trader andcolonizer from Boston. The company fought Wyeth's trade and bought himout; but when the turbulent Indians crowded round the 'White Eagle,'chief of Fort Vancouver, asking, 'Shall we kill—shall we kill the"Bostonnais"?' M'Loughlin struck the chief plotter down, drove theothers from the fort, and had it noised about among the tribes that ifany one struck the white 'Bostonnais,' M'Loughlin would strike him. Atthe same time, M'Loughlin earnestly desired that the territory shouldremain British. In 1838, at a council of the directors in London, hepersonally urged the sending of a garrison of British soldiers, andthat the government should take control of Oregon in order to establishBritish rights. His suggestions received little consideration. Hadnot the company single-handed held all Rupert's Land for almost twohundred years? Had they not triumphed over all rivals? They would doso here.

But by 1843 immigrants were pouring over{127}the mountains by thethousands. Washington Irving'sAstoria andCaptain Bonneville, andthe political cry of 'Fifty-four forty or fight'—which meant Americanpossession of all south of Alaska—had roused the attention of thepeople of the United States to the merits of Oregon, and caused them tomake extravagant claims. Long before the Oregon Treaty of 1846, whichestablished the 49th parallel as the boundary, M'Loughlin had foreseenwhat was coming. The movement from the east had become a tide. Theimmigrants who came over the Oregon Trail in 1843 were starving, almostnaked, and without a roof. Again the Indians crowded about M'Loughlin.'Shall we kill? Shall we kill?' they asked. M'Loughlin took the roughAmerican overlanders into his fort, fed them, advanced them provisionson credit, and sent them to settle on the Willamette. Some of themshowed their ingratitude later by denouncing M'Loughlin as 'anaristocrat and a tyrant.' The settlers established a provisionalgovernment in 1844, and joined in the rallying-cry of 'Fifty-four fortyor fight.' This, as M'Loughlin well knew, was the beginning of theend. His friends among the colonists begged him to subscribe to theprovisional{128}government in order that they might protect his fortfrom some of their number who threatened to 'burn it about his ears.'He had appealed to the British government for protection, but no answerhad come; and at length, after a hard struggle and many misgivings, hecast in his lot with the Americans. Two years later, in 1846, heretired from the service of the company and went to live among thesettlers. He died at Oregon City on the Willamette in 1857.

As early as June 1842 M'Loughlin had sent Douglas prospecting inVancouver Island, which was north of the immediate zone of dispute, fora site on which to erect a new post. The Indian village of Camosun,the Cordoba of the old Spanish charts, stood on the site of the presentcity of Victoria. Here was fresh water; here was a good harbour; herewas shelter from outside gales. Across the sea lay islands ever greenin a climate always mild and salubrious. Fifteen men left old FortVancouver with Douglas in March 1843 in the company's ship theBeaver, and anchored at Vancouver Island, just outside Camosun Bay.With Douglas went the Jesuit missionary, Father Bolduc, who on March 19{129}celebrated the first Mass ever said on Vancouver Island, andafterwards baptized Indians till he was fairly exhausted. In threedays Douglas had a well dug and timbers squared. For every fortypickets erected by the Indians he gave them a blanket. By Septemberstockades and houses had been completed, and as many as fifty men hadcome to live at the new fort, to which the name Victoria was finallygiven. Victoria became the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company onthe Pacific. It was unique as a fortified post, in that it was builtwithout the driving of a single nail, wooden pegs being used instead.

By 1849 the discovery of gold in California was bringing a rush ofoverlanders. There had been rumours of the discovery of preciousmetals on the Fraser and in East Kootenay. The company became alarmed;and Sir John Pelly, the governor in England, and Sir George Simpson,the governor in America, went to the British government with thedisquieting question: What is to hinder American colonists rollingnorth of the boundary and establishing right of possession there asthey did on the Columbia? By no stretch of its charter could theHudson's Bay Company{130}claim feudal rights west of the Rockies.What, my Lord Grey asks, would the company advise the Britishgovernment to do to avert this danger from a tide of democracy rollingnorth? Why, of course, answers Sir John Pelly, proclaim VancouverIsland a British colony and give the company a grant of the territoryand the company will colonize it with British subjects. The proposalwas laid before parliament. It would be of no profit to follow thedebate that ensued in the House of Commons, which was chiefly 'wordswithout knowledge darkening counsel.' The request was officiallygranted in January 1849; and Richard Blanshard, a barrister of London,was dispatched as governor of the new colony. But as he had neithersalary nor subjects, he went back to England in disgust in 1851, andJames Douglas of the Hudson's Bay Company reigned in his stead.

But fate again played the unexpected part, and rang down the curtain onthe fur lords of the Pacific coast. A few years previously Douglas hadseen M'Loughlin compelled to choose between loyalty to his company andloyalty to humanity. A choice between his country and his company wasnow unexpectedly thrust on the reticent, careful,{131}masterfulDouglas. In 1856 gold was discovered in the form of large nuggets onthe Fraser and the Thompson, and adventurers poured into thecountry—20,000 in a single year. Douglas foresaw that this meantBritish empire on the Pacific and that the supremacy of the fur traderswas about to pass away. The British government bought back VancouverIsland, and proclaimed the new colony of British Columbia on themainland. Douglas retired from the company's service and was appointedgovernor of both colonies. In 1866 they were united under onegovernment.

The stampede of treasure-seekers up the Fraser is another story. Whenthe new colony on the mainland came into being, and the Hudson's BayCompany fell from the rank of a feudal overlord to that of a privatetrader, the pioneer days of the Pacific became a thing of the past.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The bibliography of the Pacific is enormous. There is, indeed, arecord of discovery and exploration on the Pacific coast almost aslarge as that of New France or New England. Only a few of theprincipal books can be mentioned here; but in most of these will befound good bibliographies which will point the reader to originalsources, if he wishes to pursue the subject.

ON DRAKE.Drake and the Tudor Navy, in two volumes, by JulianCorbett (1898);Sir Francis Drake, by the same author (1800), in the'English Men of Action' series;The World Encompassed, by FrancisFletcher (1628). See also the article on Drake in theDictionary ofNational Biography.

ON VITUS BERING AND THE RUSSIANS.Peter the Great, by Williams(1859);Peter the Great, by Motley (1877); Coxe'sDiscoveries of theRussians (1781); Lauridsen'sVitus Bering (1885); Laut'sVikings ofthe Pacific (1905).

ON COOK AND VANCOUVER. Cook'sVoyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784);Ledyard'sJournal of Cook's Last Voyage (1783); Sir Walter Besant'sCaptain Cook (1890), in the 'English Men of Action' series; Kitson'sCaptain James Cook, the Circumnavigator (1907); Vancouver'sVoyageof{133}Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean (1798). See also thearticles on Cook and Vancouver in theDictionary of NationalBiography.

ON THE EXPLORATIONS OF MACKENZIE, FRASER, AND THOMPSON. Mackenzie'sVoyages (1801); Burpee'sSearch for the Western Sea (1908);FurTraders of the Far West, by Alexander Ross (1855); Laut'sConquest ofthe Great Northwest (1908);Canada and its Provinces, vol. iv (1914).

ON THE FUR TRADERS BEYOND THE ROCKIES. Morice'sHistory of theNorthern Interior of British Columbia (1904);Sir James Douglas, byCoats and Gosnell (1908), in the 'Makers of Canada' series;Canada andits Provinces, vol. xxi (1914); Bancroft'sHistory of the NorthwestCoast (1884), and hisHistory of Oregon (1888); Lyman'sHistory ofOregon (1903). For an exhaustive statement of the Oregon BoundaryQuestion, see the article, 'Boundary Disputes and Treaties,' by JamesWhite, inCanada and its Provinces, vol. viii.

INDEX

Aleuts, their hard lot at the hands of Russian fur traders,34-9; taketheir revenge,39-43.

Astoria, the fur-post on the Columbia,108,110; sold to the North-WestCompany,113,115,118.

Bering, Vitus, his first expedition to the North Pacific,13-15; hissecond expedition,15-33,45; his death,28,46,52.

British Columbia, first forts built in,87,89,90; the fear ofAmerican aggression,129,131; proclaimed a British colony,131. SeeNew Caledonia.

Columbia river,53,56,92,97; discovered by Gray,67,86; missed,then claimed, by Vancouver,66,69-70; Astor's mission to,99;descended by Thompson,104-9.

Cook, Captain James, his quest of a north-east passage from thePacific,45-9; his tragic death,49-52.

Douglas, James, his Oregon brigade,117,123,124; governor ofVancouver Island,128-30; of British Columbia,131.

Drake, Sir Francis, with Hawkins at Vera Cruz,1-2; his raid on Panama,3; his raiding expedition to the Pacific,3-8; his attempt to find anorth-east passage,8-10.

Fraser, Simon,80; his explorations in New Caledonia,87,88-90,104;his descent of the Fraser,90-8.

Fraser river,63-4,67; Mackenzie on,81-2; descended by Fraser,90-7;discovery of gold on,129,131.

Gray, Captain Robert, his expedition to the Pacific Coast,55,56,57-60,61-2; discovers the Columbia,67,69-70,74,125.

Great Britain, her interest in the Pacific Coast,53-4,113,115,123-4; the Nootka Affair,65-6; her exploring expeditions under Cookand Vancouver,46,66-7; her 'joint occupancy' agreement with theUnited States,115-16,125,127-8; proclaims colony of BritishColumbia,129-31.

Hudson's Bay Company, the,45,53; interested in the Pacific fur trade,71; its jurisdiction over Oregon,116-123; its short-sighted policy,124,126-8; founds a colony on Vancouver Island,128-31.

Indians of the Pacific Coast, and Cook,47-8; and Gray,56,61-2; andMackenzie,83,84-5; and Fraser,88,96-8; and the Astorians,110-12;and M'Loughlin,117,119,125-6,127; and the Oregon brigades,121,123; and Douglas,128-9. See Aleuts and Carrier Indians.

Juan de Fuca, strait of,12; the search for,17,45,47,53,56;located by Barkley,57.

Kendrick, Captain John, his trading expedition to the Pacific Coast,55,56,57-60.

Mackay, Alexander, with Mackenzie's Pacific expedition,73,76,79;joins the Astorians,99,109; massacred at Clayoquot,110-11.

Mackenzie, Sir Alexander,53,71-2; his Pacific expedition,72-3; hisjourney up the Peace and Fraser,73-82; reaches the Pacific,83-5,86.

M'Loughlin, Dr John, ruler in Oregon,116-19,128; his great choice anddesire,125-128; his death,128.

Nootka, Cook at,47; English and American traders at,57-58; the NootkaAffair,59-60,61,66,68-9,73.

Oregon, extent of under Hudson's Bay Company jurisdiction,116-17;colonization in,118; hunting brigades of,119-23; acquired by UnitedStates,124,125; American immigration into,125-7.

Pacific Ocean, 'a closed sea,'1,55-6,65; Drake's raids on Spanishtreasure-ships on,5-8; regarding a north-east passage from,9-10,48-9. See Pacific Coast.

Quadra, Don Juan Francisco,58; represents Spain in the NootkaConference,68-9,70.

Russia, and the fur trade on the Aleutians,39,43; her interest in thePacific Coast,44,53-4,70. See Cossacks.

Spain, her supremacy in the South Seas and in the Pacific,1,12,53-4,55-6,65,74; her treachery at Vera Cruz,2,55; the Nootka Affair,59-60,66,67-9; her explorations on the Pacific Coast,61,62-65,70,74.

Thompson, David, his search for a river to the Pacific,101-106; hisdescent of the Columbia,104-9,112-13,114,125.

United States, enter the struggle for the control of the Pacific,53-5,67,70,86,124; the Louisiana purchase,86; send an expeditionto the Pacific Coast,86; the 'joint occupancy' agreement with Britain,115-16,125; and Oregon,125-8.

Vancouver, Captain George,46; his exploring expedition to the PacificCoast,66-8,69-70,74,84,96; represents Britain in the NootkaConference,68-9.

Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press

THE CHRONICLES OF CANADA

PART I
THE FIRST EUROPEAN VISITORS

PART II
THE RISE OF NEW FRANCE

PART III
THE ENGLISH INVASION

PART IV
THE BEGINNINGS OF BRITISH CANADA

PART V
THE RED MAN IN CANADA

PART VI
PIONEERS OF THE NORTH AND WEST

PART VII
THE STRUGGLE FOR POLITICAL FREEDOM

PART VIII
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY

PART IX
NATIONAL HIGHWAYS

TORONTO: GLASGOW, BROOK & COMPANY

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PIONEERS OF THE PACIFIC COAST ***

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THE DESCENT OF THE FRASER RIVER, 1808 From a colour drawing by C. W. Jefferys.	Frontispiece
ROUTES OF EXPLORERS ON THE PACIFIC COAST Map by Bartholomew.	Facing page 44
JAMES COOK From the portrait by Dance in the Gallery of Greenwich Hospital.	" " 46
THE LAUNCH OF THE 'NORTH-WEST AMERICA' AT NOOTKA SOUND, 1788 From Meares's 'Voyages.'	" " 58
CALLICUM AND MAQUINNA, CHIEFS OF NOOTKA SOUND From Meares's 'Voyages.'	" " 68
GEORGE VANCOUVER From a painting in the National Portrait Gallery, London.	" " 70
SIMON FRASER After the portrait in the Parliament Buildings, Victoria, B.C.	" " 90

JOHN M'LOUGHLIN Photographed by Savannah from an original painting.	" " 116
FORT VANCOUVER From a print in the John Ross Robertson Collection, Toronto Public Library.	" " 118
THE FORT OF THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY, VICTORIA, B.C. From a photograph by Savannah.	" " 128

		Page
I.	THE VOYAGE OF THE 'GOLDEN HIND'	1
II.	VITUS BERING ON THE PACIFIC	11
III.	THE OUTLAW HUNTERS	30
IV.	COOK AND VANCOUVER	43
V.	'ALEXANDER MACKENZIE, FROM CANADA, BY LAND'	71
VI.	THE DESCENT OF THE FRASER RIVER	86
VII.	THOMPSON AND THE ASTORIANS	99
VIII.	THE PASSING OF THE FUR LORDS	115
	BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE	132
	INDEX	135

Movatterモバイル変換

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofPioneers of the Pacific Coast

The descent of the Fraser River, 1808. From a colour drawing by C. W. Jefferys.

PIONEERS OF THEPACIFIC COAST

A Chronicle of Sea Roversand Fur Hunters

BY

AGNES C. LAUT

TORONTOGLASGOW, BROOK & COMPANY1915

Copyright in all Countries subscribing tothe Berne Convention

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I

THE VOYAGE OF THEGOLDEN HIND

CHAPTER II

VITUS BERING ON THE PACIFIC

CHAPTER III

THE OUTLAW HUNTERS

Routes of Explorers on the Pacific Coast.

CHAPTER IV

COOK AND VANCOUVER

James Cook.From the portrait by Dance in the Gallery of Greenwich Hospital.

The launch of theNorth-West America at Nootka Sound, 1788.From Meares'sVoyages.

Callicum and Maquinna, Chiefs of Nootka Sound.From Meares'sVoyages.

George Vancouver.From a painting in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

CHAPTER V

'ALEXANDER MACKENZIE, FROM CANADA, BY LAND'

CHAPTER VI

THE DESCENT OF THE FRASER RIVER

Simon Fraser.After the portrait in the Parliament Buildings, Victoria, B.C.

CHAPTER VII

THOMPSON AND THE ASTORIANS

CHAPTER VIII

THE PASSING OF THE FUR LORDS

John M'Loughlin.Photographed by Savannah from an original painting.

Fort Vancouver.From a print in the John Ross Robertson Collection, Toronto Public Library.

The fort of the Hudson's Bay Company, Victoria, B.C.From a photograph by Savannah.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

INDEX

Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majestyat the Edinburgh University Press

THE CHRONICLES OF CANADA

PART ITHE FIRST EUROPEAN VISITORS

PART IITHE RISE OF NEW FRANCE

PART IIITHE ENGLISH INVASION

PART IVTHE BEGINNINGS OF BRITISH CANADA

PART VTHE RED MAN IN CANADA

PART VIPIONEERS OF THE NORTH AND WEST

PART VIITHE STRUGGLE FOR POLITICAL FREEDOM

PART VIIITHE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY

PART IXNATIONAL HIGHWAYS

TORONTO: GLASGOW, BROOK & COMPANY

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

PIONEERS OF THE
PACIFIC COAST

A Chronicle of Sea Rovers
and Fur Hunters

TORONTO
GLASGOW, BROOK & COMPANY
1915

Copyright in all Countries subscribing to
the Berne Convention

James Cook.
From the portrait by Dance in the Gallery of Greenwich Hospital.

The launch of theNorth-West America at Nootka Sound, 1788.
From Meares'sVoyages.

Callicum and Maquinna, Chiefs of Nootka Sound.
From Meares'sVoyages.

George Vancouver.
From a painting in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Simon Fraser.
After the portrait in the Parliament Buildings, Victoria, B.C.

John M'Loughlin.
Photographed by Savannah from an original painting.

Fort Vancouver.
From a print in the John Ross Robertson Collection, Toronto Public Library.

The fort of the Hudson's Bay Company, Victoria, B.C.
From a photograph by Savannah.