Pioneers of the Pacific Coast Part 2

The winter was pa.s.sed in trading with the Indians, and spring saw Gray far up the Strait of Juan de Fuca. By May 1 the s.h.i.+ps were loaded with furs and were about to sail. {59} Meanwhile, what had the Spanish viceroy been doing? Strange that the Spaniards should look on complaisantly while English traders from China--Meares and Hanna and Barkley and Douglas--were taking possession of Nootka. The answer came unexpectedly. Just as the 'Bostonnais' were sailing out for a last run up the coast, there glided into Nootka Sound a proud s.h.i.+p--all sails set, twenty cannon pointed, Spanish colours spread to the breeze. The captain of this vessel, Don Joseph Martinez, took a look at the English fortifications and another at the Americans. The Americans were enemies of England. Therefore the pompous don treated them royally, presented them with spices and wines, and allowed them to depart unmolested. When the Americans returned from the run up coast, they found the English fort dismantled, a Spanish fort erected on Hog Island at the entrance of the sound, and Douglas's s.h.i.+p--the companion of Meares's vessel--held captive by the Spaniard. Gray and Kendrick now exchanged s.h.i.+ps, and sailed for China to dispose of their cargoes of furs and receive in exchange cargoes of tea for Boston. The whole city of Boston welcomed the _Columbia_ home in the autumn of 1790. Fifty thousand {60} miles she had ploughed through the seas in three years.

In June 1791 Gray was out again on the _Columbia_. This time he went as far north as the Portland Ca.n.a.l, past the Queen Charlotte Islands, where he met Kendrick on the _Lady Was.h.i.+ngton_. The quarrel at Nootka between the English and the Spaniards was still going on; so this autumn the two 'Bostonnais' anch.o.r.ed for the winter in Clayoquot Sound--a place later to be made famous by tragedy--south of Nootka.

Here they built a stockaded fur-post for themselves, which they named Fort Defence. During the winter they built and launched a little coasting schooner, the _Adventure_.

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

Gray knew that three English vessels which had come from China for furs--Colnett's _Argonaut_, Douglas's _Iphigenia_, and the _Princess Royal_--had been seized by the Spanish at Nootka. Though the fact had not been trumpeted to the world, the Spanish said that their pilots had explored these coasts as early as 1775--at least three years before Cook's landing at Nootka; so that if first exploration counted for possession, Spain had first claim. Whether the Spaniards instigated the raid that now threatened the rival American fort at Clayoquot, the two 'Bostonnais' never knew. The _Columbia_ had been beached and dismantled. Loop-holes punctured the palisades of the fort, and cannon were above the gates. Sentinels kept constant guard; but what was Gray's horror to learn in February 1792 that Indians to the number of two thousand were in ambush round the fort and had bribed a Hawaiian boy to wet the priming of the 'Bostonnais' guns. The fort could not be defended against such a number of enemies, for there were not twenty men within the walls. Gray hastily got the _Columbia_ ready for sea.

Having stowed in the hold {62} enough provisions to carry them home if flight should become necessary, the sailors worked in the dark to their necks in water sc.r.a.ping the hull free of barnacles, and when the high tide came in, she was floated out with all on board. On the morning of the 20th the woods were seen to be alive with Indians. The Indians had not counted on their prey escaping by sea, and an old chief came suavely aboard offering Gray sea-otter skins if the 'Bostonnais' would go ash.o.r.e to trade. Gray slapped the old rascal across the face; the Indian was over the side at a plunge, and the marauders were seen no more.

In spite of the difficulties and dangers it presented, Gray determined to make another effort to find the river which old Bruno Heceta had sighted in 1775. And early in April, after sending his mate north on the little vessel _Adventure_ to trade, Gray sailed away south on the _Columbia_. Let us leave him for the present stealing furtively along the coast from Cape Flattery to Cape Disappointment.

It was the spring of 1792. The Spaniard Elisa of Nootka had for a year kept his pilot Narvaez, in a crazy little schooner crowded {63} with thirty sailors, charting north-east past the harbour of Victoria, through Haro Strait, following very much the same channel that steamers follow to-day as they ply between Victoria and Vancouver. East of a high island, where holiday folk now have their summer camps, Pilot Narvaez came on the estuary of a great river, which he called Boca de Florida Blanca. This could not be Bruno Heceta's river, for this was farther north and inland. It was a new river, with wonderful purple water--the purple of river silt blending with ocean blue. The banks were wooded to the very water's edge with huge-girthed and mossed trees, such as we to-day see in Stanley Park, Vancouver. The river swept down behind a deep harbour, with forested heights between river-mouth and roadstead, as if nature had purposely interposed to guard this harbour against the deposit of silt borne down by the mighty stream. To-day a boulevard rises from the land-locked harbour and goes over the heights to the river-mouth like the arc of a bow; the finest residences of the Canadian Pacific coast stand there; and the river is lined with mile upon mile of lumber-yards and saw-mills. Where the rock projects like a hand into the turbid waters stands {64} a crowded city, built like New York on what is almost an island. Where the opposite sh.o.r.es slope down in a natural park are rising the buildings of a great university. The ragged starveling crew of Pilot Narvaez had found what are now known as Burrard Inlet, Vancouver City, Point Grey, Shaughnessy Heights, and the Fraser River. The crew were presently all ill of scurvy, possibly because of the unsanitary crowding, and the schooner, almost falling to pieces, came crawling back to Nootka. The poor Mexicans were utterly unaware that they had discovered a gateway for northern empire. Narvaez himself lay almost unconscious in his berth. Elisa sent them all home to Mexico on furlough; and, on hearing their report, the viceroy of Mexico ordered out two s.h.i.+ps, the _Sutil_ and the _Mexicana_, Don Galiano and Don Valdes in command, to follow up the charting of the coast northward from Vancouver Island to the Russian settlements.

Small ringing of bells, no blaring of trumpets at all, prayers a-plenty, but little ammunition and less food, accompanied the deep-sea voyagings of these poor Spanish pilots. When Bering set out, he had the 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 when the poor Mexican peons set out, they had nothing behind them but the branding iron, or slavery in the mines, if they failed. Yet they sang as they sailed their rickety death-traps, and they laughed as they rowed; and when the tide-rip caught them, they sank without a cry to any but the Virgin. Look at a map of the west coast of the Pacific from the Horn to Sitka. First were the Spaniards at every harbour gate; and yet to-day, of all their deep-sea findings on that coast, not a rod, not a foot, does Spain own. It was, of course, Spain's insane policy of keeping the Pacific 'a closed sea' that concealed the achievements of the Mexican pilots and buried them in oblivion. But if actual accomplishments count, these pilots with their ragged peon crews, half-bloods of Aztec woman and Spanish adventurer, deserve higher rank in the roll of Pacific coast exploration than history has yet accorded them.

England, it may be believed, did not calmly submit to seeing the s.h.i.+ps and forts of her traders seized at Nootka. It was not that England cared for the value of three vessels engaged in foreign trade. Still less did she {66} care for the log-huts dignified by the name of a fort. But she was mistress of the seas, and had been since the destruction of the Armada. And as mistress of the seas, she could not tolerate as much as the seizure of a fis.h.i.+ng-smack. For some time there were mutterings of war, but at length diplomacy prevailed.

England demanded, among other things, the restoration of the buildings and the land, and full reparation for all losses. Spain decided to submit, and accordingly the Nootka Convention was signed by the two powers in October 1790. Two s.h.i.+ps, the _Discovery_ and the _Chatham_, were then fitted out by the British Admiralty for an expedition to the Pacific to receive formal surrender of the property from Spain, and also to chart the whole coast of the Pacific from Drake's New Albion to the Russian possessions at Sitka. This expedition was commanded by Captain George Vancouver, who had been on the Pacific with Cook. It was April 1792 when Vancouver came up abreast of Cape Disappointment.

Was it chance, or fate, that a gale drove him off-sh.o.r.e just two weeks before a rival explorer entered the mouth of the great unknown river that lay on his vessel's starboard bow? But for this mishap Vancouver might have discovered {67} the Columbia, and England might have made good her claim to the territory which is now Oregon and Was.h.i.+ngton and Idaho. Vancouver's s.h.i.+ps were gliding into the Strait of Juan de Fuca when they met a square-hulled, trim little trader under the flag of the United States. It was the _Columbia_, commanded by Robert Gray. The American told an astounding story. He had found Bruno Heceta's River of the West. Vancouver refused to credit the news; yet there was the s.h.i.+p's log; there were the details--landmarks, soundings, anchorages for 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 Pacific again.

Vancouver now headed his s.h.i.+ps inland and proceeded to explore Puget Sound. Never before had white men's boats cruised the waters of that spider-shaped sea. Every inlet of the tortuous coasts was penetrated and surveyed, to make certain that no pa.s.sage to the north-east lay through these waters. In June the explorers pa.s.sed up the Strait of Georgia. A thick fog hid from them what would have proved an important discovery--the mouth of the Fraser river. Some distance north of Burrard Inlet the explorers met the two {68} Spanish s.h.i.+ps which the viceroy of Mexico had sent out, the _Sutil_ and the _Mexicana_, commanded respectively by Don Galiano and Don Valdes. From them Vancouver learned that Don Quadra, the Spanish representative, was awaiting him at Nootka, prepared to restore the forts and property as agreed in the Nootka Convention. The vessels continued their journey northward and entered Queen Charlotte Sound in August. Then, steering into the open sea, Vancouver sailed for Nootka to meet Spain's official messenger. He had circ.u.mnavigated Vancouver Island.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Callic.u.m and Maquinna, Chiefs of Nootka Sound. From Meares's _Voyages_.]

The Nootka controversy had almost caused a European war. Now it ended in what has a resemblance to a comic opera. Vancouver found the Spaniards occupying a fort on an island at the mouth of the harbour.

On the main sh.o.r.e stood the Indian village of Chief Maquinna. A Spanish pilot guided the English s.h.i.+p to mooring. The Spanish frigates fairly bristled with cannon. An English officer dressed in regimentals marched to the Spanish fort and presented Captain Vancouver's compliments to Don Quadra. Spanish cannon thundered a welcome that shook the hills, and English guns made answer. A curious fas.h.i.+on, to waste good powder {69} without taking aim at each other, thought Chief Maquinna. Don Quadra breakfasted Captain Vancouver. Captain Vancouver wined and dined Don Quadra; and Maquinna, lord of the wilds, attended the feast dressed Indian fas.h.i.+on. But when the Spanish don and the English officer took breath from flow of compliments and wine, they did not seem to arrive anywhere in their negotiations. Vancouver held that Spain must relinquish the site of Meares's fort and the territory surrounding it and Port c.o.x. Don Quadra held that he had been instructed to relinquish only the land on which the fort stood--according to Vancouver, 'but little more than one hundred yards in extent any way.' No understanding could be arrived at, and Quadra at the end of September took his departure for Monterey, leaving Vancouver to follow a few days later.

Vancouver was anxious to be off on further exploration. He was eager to verify the existence of the river which Gray had reported. He spent most of October exploring this river. Explorers in that day, as in this, were not fair judges of each other's feats. Vancouver took possession of the Columbia river region for England, setting down in his narrative that {70} 'no other civilized nation or state had ever entered this river before ... it does not appear that Mr Gray either saw or was ever within five leagues of the entrance.'

Vancouver then visited the presidio at San Francisco, and thence proceeded to Monterey, where Quadra awaited him. His lieutenant, Broughton, who had been in charge of the boats that explored the Columbia, here left him and accompanied Quadra to San Blas, whence he went overland to the Atlantic and sailed for England, bearing dispatches to the government. Vancouver spent yet another year on the North Pacific, corroborating his first year's charting and proving that no north-east pa.s.sage through the continent existed. Portland Ca.n.a.l, Jervis Inlet, Cook Inlet, Prince William Sound, Lynn Ca.n.a.l--all were traced to head-waters by Vancouver.

[Ill.u.s.tration: George Vancouver. From a painting in the National Portrait Gallery, London.]

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

{71}

CHAPTER V

'ALEXANDER MACKENZIE, FROM CANADA, BY LAND'

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

Up in the Athabaska country, eating his heart out with chagrin because his a.s.sociates in the North-West Company of Montreal had {72} ignored his voyage of discovery down the Mackenzie river to the Arctic in 1789,[1] the young trader Alexander Mackenzie heard these rumours of new wealth in furs on the Pacific. Who would be the first overland to that western sea? If Spaniard and Russian had tapped the source of wealth from the ocean side, why could not the Nor'westers cross the mountains and secure the furs from the land side? Mackenzie had heard, too, of the fabled great River of the West. Could he but catch the swish of its upper current, what would hinder him floating down it to the sea? Mackenzie thought and thought, and paced his quarters up at Fort Chipewyan, on Lake Athabaska, till his mind became so filled with the idea of an overland journey to the Pacific that he could not sleep or rest. He had felt himself handicapped by lack of knowledge of astronomy and surveying when on the voyage to the Arctic, so he asked leave of absence from his company, came down by canoe to Montreal, and sailed for England to spend the winter studying in London. Here, everything was in a ferment over the voyages of Cook and Hanna and Meares, over the {73} seizure of British trading-s.h.i.+ps by the viceroy of Mexico, over the Admiralty's plans to send Vancouver out to complete Cook's explorations. The rumours were as fuel to the flame that burned in Mackenzie. The spring of 1792 saw him hurrying back to Fort Chipewyan 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 six miles above the forks formed by its junction with the Smoky, he built a rude palisaded fur-post and spent the winter there.

Spring came and found Mackenzie ready to go forward into the unknown regions of the west, regions as yet untrodden by the feet of white men.

Alexander Mackay, one of the most resolute and capable traders in the service of the North-West Company, was to be his companion on the journey; and with them were to go six picked French-Canadian voyageurs and two Indians as guides. They had built a birch-bark canoe of exceptional strength and lightness. It was twenty-five feet long, some four feet in beam, twenty-six inches deep, and had a carrying capacity of three thousand pounds. Explorers and {74} men stepped into their light craft on the evening of May 9, 1793. The fort fired guns and waved farewell; the paddlers struck up a voyageurs' song; and the blades dipped in rhythmic time. Mackenzie waved his hat back to the group in front of the fort gate; and then with set face headed his canoe westward for the Pacific.

Recall what was happening now out on the Pacific! Robert Gray was heading home to Boston with news of the discovery of the great river.

Vancouver was back from San Francisco carefully charting the inner channel of the coast. Baranoff, the little czar of the Russian traders, was coasting at the head of fifteen hundred 'bidarkies'

between the Aleutians and Sitka; and Spain was still sending out ragged pilots to chart the seas which she had not the marine to hold.

The big canoe went on, up the Peace river. Spring thaw brought the waters down from the mountains in turbulent floods, and the precipices narrowed on each side till the current became a foaming cascade. It was one thing to float down-stream with brigades of singing voyageurs and cargoes of furs in spring; it was a different matter to breast the full force of these torrents with only ten men {75} to paddle. In the big brigades the men paddled in relays. In this canoe each man was expected to pole and paddle continuously and fiercely against a current that was like a mill-race. Mackenzie listened to the grumblers over the night camp-fire, and explained how much safer it was to ascend an unknown stream with bad rapids than to run down it. The danger could always be seen before running into it. He cheered the drooping spirits of 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 banks were such sheer rock-wall that it was almost impossible to land. They had 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 get foothold or handhold on the sh.o.r.e, huge boulders and land-slides of loose earth slithered down, threatening to smash canoe and canoemen.

Mackenzie got out a tow-line eighty feet long. This he tied to the port thwart of the canoe. With the tow-line round his shoulders, while the torrent roared {76} past and filled the canyon with the 'voice of many waters,' Mackenzie leaped to the dangerous slope, cut foothold and handhold on the face of the cliff with an axe, and scrambled up to a table of level rock. Then he shouted and signalled for his men to come up. If the voyageurs had not been hemmed in by a boiling maelstrom on both sides, they would have deserted on the spot. Mackenzie saw them begin to strip as if to swim; then, clothes on back and barefoot, they scrambled up the treacherous sh.o.r.e. He reached over, and a.s.sisted them to the level ground above. The tow-line was drawn taut round trees and the 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 in mid-air. The terrified men looking over the edge of the precipice saw their craft sidle as if to swamp; but, on the instant, another mighty wave flung her ash.o.r.e, and they were able to haul her out of danger.

Mackay went ahead to see how far the rapids extended. He found that they were at least nine miles in length. On his return the men were declaring that they would not ascend such waters another rod.

Mackenzie, to humour them, left them to a regale of rum {77} and pemmican, and axe in hand went up the precipitous slope, and began to make a rough path through the forest. Up the rude incline the men hauled the empty canoe, cutting their way as they advanced. Then they carried up the provisions in ninety-pound bundles. By nightfall of the first day they had advanced but one mile. Next morning the journey was continued; the progress was exactly three miles the second day, and the men fell in their tracks with exhaustion, and slept that night where they lay. But at length they had pa.s.sed the rapids; the toilsome portage was over, and the canoe was again launched on the stream. The air was icy from the snows of the mountain-peaks, and in spite of their severe exercise the men had to wear heavy clothing.

On May 31 they arrived at the confluence where the rivers now known as the Finlay and the Parsnip, flowing together, form the Peace. The Indians of this region told Mackenzie of a great river beyond the big mountains, a river that flowed towards the noonday sun; and of 'Carrier Indians'[2] inland, who acted as {78} middlemen and traders between the coast and the mountain tribes. They said that the Carriers told legends of 'white men on the coast, who wore armour from head to heel'--undoubtedly the Spanish dons--and of 'huge canoes with sails like clouds' that plied up and down 'the stinking waters'--meaning the sea.

Mackenzie was uncertain which of the two confluents to follow--whether to ascend the Finlay, flowing from the north-west, or the Parsnip, flowing from the south-east. He consulted his Indian guides, one of whom advised him to take the southern branch. This would lead, the guide said, to a lake from which they could portage to another stream, and so reach the great river leading to the sea. Mackenzie decided to follow this advice, and ordered his men to proceed up the Parsnip.

Their hearts sank. They had toiled up one terrible river; directly before them was another, equally precipitous and dangerous.

Nevertheless, they began the ascent. For a week the rush of avalanches from the mountain-peaks could be heard like artillery fire. Far up above the cloud-line they could see the snow tumbling over an upper precipice in powdery wind-blown cataracts; a minute later would come the thunderous {79} rumble of the falling ma.s.ses. With heroic fort.i.tude 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 to reconnoitre, ordering the canoemen to paddle along behind, the canoe failed to follow. Mackay went back and found the voyageurs disputing ash.o.r.e. They pretended that a leak had delayed them. From Indians met by the way, Mackenzie learned that he was indeed approaching a portage over the height-of-land to the waters that flowed towards the Pacific.

One of these Indians was induced to go with Mackenzie as guide. They tramped ahead through a thicket of brush, and came suddenly out on a blue tarn. This was the source of the Parsnip, the southern branch of the Peace. The whole party arrived on June 12. A portage of 817 paces over a rocky ridge brought them to a second mountain lake drained by a river that flowed towards the west. Mackenzie had crossed the watershed, the Great Divide, and had reached the waters which empty into the Pacific.

The river which the explorers now entered was a small tributary of the Fraser. Some {80} years later it was named by Simon Fraser the Bad River, and it deserved the name. Mackenzie launched his canoe down-stream. The men's spirits rose. This was working with the current, not against it; but the danger of going with an unknown current became at once apparent. The banks began to skim past, the waters to rise in oily corrugations; and before the voyageurs realized it, they were caught by a current they could not stem and were hurried sidling down-stream. The men sprang out to swim, but the current prevented them from reaching land, and they clung in terror to the sides of the canoe till an eddy sent them on a sand-bar in the midst of the rapids. With great difficulty the craft was rescued and brought ash.o.r.e. The stern had been torn out of the canoe, half the powder and bullets lost, and the entire cargo drenched.

The men were panic-stricken and on the verge of mutiny; but Mackenzie was undaunted and determined to go forward. He spread the provisions out to dry and set his crew to work patching up the stern of the broken canoe with resin and oilcloth and new cedar lining. That night the mountain Indian who had acted as guide across the portage gave Mackenzie the slip and escaped in the {81} woods. For several days after this most of the party trudged on foot carrying the cargo, while four of the most experienced canoemen brought the empty canoe down the rapids. But on June 17 they found further progress by water impossible owing to ma.s.ses of driftwood in the stream. They were now, however, less than a mile from the south fork of the Fraser; the men carried the canoe on their shoulders across the intervening neck of swamp, and at last the explorers 'enjoyed the inexpressible satisfaction' of finding themselves on the banks of a broad, navigable river, on the west side of the Great Divide.

The point where they embarked, on the morning of June 18, was about thirty-five miles above the Nechaco, or north fork of the Fraser, just at the upper end of the great bend where the south fork, flowing to the north-west, sweeps round in a semicircle, joins its confluent, and pours southward to the sea. This trend of the river to the south was not what Mackenzie expected. He wanted to follow a stream leading west. Without noticing it, he had pa.s.sed the north fork, the Nechaco, and was sweeping down the main stream of the Fraser, where towering mountains cut off the view ahead, and the powerful {82} rush of the waters foreboded hard going, if not more rapids and cataracts.

Mackenzie must have a new guide. The Carrier Indians dwelt along this river, but they appeared to be truculently hostile. On June 21 a party of these Indians stood on one of the banks and shot arrows at the explorers and rolled stones from the precipices. Mackenzie landed on the opposite bank, after sending a hunter by a wide detour through the woods behind the Indians on the other sh.o.r.e, with orders to shoot instantly if the savages threatened either the canoe or himself. In full sight of the Indians Mackenzie threw trinkets in profusion on the ground, laid down his musket and pistol, and held up his arms in token of friends.h.i.+p. The savages understood the meaning of his actions. Two of them jumped into a dug-out and came poling across to him.

Suspiciously and very timidly they landed. Mackenzie threw himself on the ground, and on the sands traced his path through the 's.h.i.+ning mountains.' By Indian sign-language he told them he wanted to go to the sea; and, disarmed of all suspicion, the Indians were presently on the ground beside him, drawing the trail to the sea. Terrible rapids (they imitated the noise of the cataracts) barred his way by this river. {83} He must turn back to where another river (the Blackwater) came in on the west, and ascend that stream to a portage which would lead over to the sea.

The post of Alexandria on the Cariboo Road marks Mackenzie's farthest south on the Fraser. At this point, after learning all he could of the route 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 two months from the time of leaving the fort on the Peace river, the portage on the Blackwater was reached; the canoe was abandoned, some provisions were cached, and each man set off afoot with a ninety-pound pack on his back. Heavy mist lay on the thick forest. The Indian trail was but a dimly defined track over forest mould. The dripping underbrush that skirted the path soaked the men to the skin. The guide had shown an inclination to desert, and Mackenzie slept beside him, ready to seize and hold him on the slightest movement. Totem cedar-poles in front of the Indian villages told the explorers that they were approaching the home of the coastal tribes. The men's clothing was by this time torn to shreds. They were barefooted, bareheaded, {84} almost naked. For nearly two weeks they journeyed on foot; then, having forded the Dean river, they embarked for the sea on the Bella Coola in cedar dug-outs which they procured from Indians of one of the coastal tribes. Daily now Mackenzie saw signs of white traders. The Indians possessed beads and trinkets. One Indian had a Spanish or Russian lance. Fis.h.i.+ng weirs were pa.s.sed. There was a whiff of salt water in the air; then far out between the hills lay a gap of illimitable blue. At eight o'clock in the morning of Sat.u.r.day, July 20, 1793, Mackenzie reached the mouth of the river and found himself on the sea. The next day he went down North Bentinck Arm, and, pa.s.sing the entrance to the south arm, landed at the cape on the opposite sh.o.r.e. He then proceeded down Burke Channel. It was near the mouth of this inlet that he inscribed, in red letters on a large rock, the memorable words: '_Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three.

Lat. 52 20' 48" N._'

Barely two months previously Vancouver had explored and named these very waters and headlands. A hostile old Indian explained bellicosely that the white sailors had fired {85} upon him. For this outrage he demanded satisfaction in gifts from Mackenzie. Few gifts had Mackenzie for the aggressive old chief. There were exactly twenty pounds of pemmican--two pounds a man for a three months' trip back. There remained also fifteen pounds of rice--the mainstay of the voyageurs--and six pounds of mouldy flour. The Indians proved so vociferously hostile that two voyageurs had to stand guard while the others slept on the bare rocks. On one occasion savages in dug-outs began hurling spears. But no harm resulted from these unfriendly demonstrations, and the party of explorers presently set out on their homeward journey.

Mackenzie had accomplished his object. In the race to the Pacific overland he was the first of the explorers of North America to cross the continent and reach the ocean. Late in August the voyageurs were back at the little fort on the Peace river. Mackenzie shortly afterwards quitted the fur country and retired to Scotland, where he wrote the story of his explorations. His book appeared in 1801, and in the following year he was knighted by the king for his great achievements.

[1] See another volume of this Series, _Adventurers of the Far North_, chap. iii.

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