Canada: the Empire of the North Part 24

[Ill.u.s.tration: SIR GUY CARLETON]

An English officer was pa.s.sing near St. Louis Gate when, sometime after two o'clock, he noticed rockets go up from the river beyond Cape Diamond. He at once sounded the alarm. Bugles called to arms, drums rolled, and every bell in the city was set ringing. In less than ten minutes every man of Quebec's eighteen hundred was in place. American soldiers marching through St. Roch, Lower Town, have described how the tolling of the bells rolling through the storm smote cold on their hearts, for they knew their designs had been discovered, and they could not turn back, for a juncture must be effected with Montgomery. A moment later the sham a.s.saults were peppering the rear gates of Quebec, but Guy Carleton was too crafty a campaigner to be tricked by any sham.

He rightly guessed that the real attack {307} would be made on one of the two weaker spots leading up from Lower Town. "Now is the time to show what stuff you are made of," he called to the soldiers, as he ordered more detachments to the place whence came crash of heaviest firing. This was at Sault-au-Matelot Street, a narrow, steep thoroughfare, barely twenty feet from side to side. Up this little tunnel of a street Arnold had rushed his men, surmounting one barricade where they exchanged their own wet muskets for the dry guns of the English deserters, das.h.i.+ng into houses to get possession of windows as vantage points, over, some accounts say, yet another obstruction, till his whole army was cooped up in a canyon of a street directly below the hill front on which had been erected a platform with heavy guns. It was a gallant rush, but it was futile, for now Carleton outgeneraled Arnold. Guessing from the distance of the shots that the attack to the rear was sheer sham, the English general rushed his fighters downhill by another gate to catch Arnold on the rear. Quebec houses are built close and cramped. While these troops were stealing in behind Arnold to close on him like a trap, it was easy trick for another English battalion to scramble over house roofs, over back walls, and up the very stairs of houses where Arnold's troops were guarding the windows.

Then Arnold was carried past his men badly wounded. "We are sold,"

muttered the Congress troops, "caught like rats in a trap." Still they pressed toward in hand to hand scuffle, with shots at such close range the Boston soldiers were {308} shouting, "Quebec men, do not fire on your true friends!" with absurd pitching of each other by the scruff of the neck from the windows. Daylight only served to make plainer the desperate plight of the entrapped raiders. At ten o'clock five hundred Congress soldiers surrendered. It must not for one moment be forgotten that each side was fighting gallantly for what it believed to be right, and each bore the other the respect due a good fighter and upright foe.

In fact, with the exception of two or three episodes mutually regretted, it may be said there were fewer bitter thoughts that New Year's morning than have arisen since from this war. The captured Americans had barely been sent to quarters in convents and hospitals before a Quebec merchant sent them a gift of several hogsheads of porter. When the bodies of Montgomery and his fellow-comrades in death were found under the snowdrifts, they were reverently removed, and interred with the honors of war just inside St. Louis Gate.

Though the invaders were defeated, Quebec continued to be invested till spring, the thud of exploding bombs doing little harm except in the case of one family, during spring, when a sh.e.l.l fell through the roof to a dining-room table, killing a son where he sat at dinner. As the ice cleared from the river in spring, both sides were on the watch for first aid. Would Congress send up more soldiers on transports; or would English frigates be rushed to the aid of Quebec? The Americans were now having trouble collecting food from the habitants, for the French doubted the invaders' success, and Congress paper money would be worthless to the holders. One beautiful clear May moonlight night a vessel was espied between nine and ten at night coming up the river full sail before the wind. Was she friend or foe? Carleton and his officers gazed anxiously from the citadel. Guns were fired as signal.

No answer came from the s.h.i.+p. Again she was hailed, and again; yet she failed to hang out English colors. Carleton then signaled he would sink her, and set the rampart cannon sweeping her bows. In a second she was ablaze, a fire s.h.i.+p sent by the enemy loaded with sh.e.l.ls and grenades and bombs that shot off like a fusillade of rockets. At the same time a boat was seen rowing from the {309} far side of her with terrific speed. Carleton's precaution had prevented the destruction of the harbor fleet. Three days later, at six in the morning, the firing of great guns announced the coming of an English frigate. At once every man, woman, and child of Quebec poured down to the harbor front, half-dressed, mad with joy. By midday, Guy Carleton had led eight hundred soldiers out to the Plains of Abraham to give battle against the Americans; but General Thomas of the Congress army did not wait.

Such swift flight was taken that artillery, stores, tents, uneaten dinners cooked and on the table, were abandoned to Carleton's men.

General Thomas himself died of smallpox at Sorel. At Montreal all was confusion. The city had been but marking time, pending the swing of victory at Quebec. In the spring of 1776 Congress had sent three commissioners to Montreal to win Canada for the new republic. One was the famous Benjamin Franklin, another a prominent Catholic; but the French Canadian clergy refused to forget the attack of Congress on the Quebec Act, and remained loyal to England.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BENEDICT ARNOLD]

For almost a year, in desultory fas.h.i.+on, the campaign against Canada dragged on, Carleton reoccupying and fortifying Montreal, Three Rivers, St. John's, and Chamby, then pus.h.i.+ng up Champlain Lake in October of 1776, with three large vessels and ninety small ones. Between Valcour Island and the mainland he caught Benedict Arnold with the Congress boats on October 11, and succeeded in battering them to pieces before {310} Arnold could extricate them. As the boats sank, the American crews escaped ash.o.r.e; but the English went no farther south than Crown Point this year. If Carleton had failed at Quebec, there can be no doubt Canada would have been permanently lost to England; for the following year France openly espoused the cause of Congress, and proclamations were secretly smuggled all through Canada to be posted on church doors, calling on Canadians to remain loyal to France.

Curiously enough, it was Was.h.i.+ngton, the leader of the Americans, who checkmated this move. With a wisdom almost prophetic, he foresaw that if France helped the United States, and then demanded Canada as her reward, the old border warfare would be renewed with tenfold more terror. No longer would it be bushrover pitted against frontiersmen.

It would be France against Congress, and Was.h.i.+ngton refused to give the aid of Congress to the scheme of France embroiling America in European wars. The story of how Clark, the American, won the Mississippi forts for Congress is not part of Canada's history, nor are the terrible border raids of Butler and Brant, the Mohawk, who sided with the English, and left the Wyoming valley south of the Iroquois Confederacy a blackened wilderness, and the homes of a thousand settlers smoking ruins. It is this last raid which gave the poet Campbell his theme in "Gertrude of Wyoming." By the Treaty of Versailles, in 1783, England acknowledged the independence of the United States, and Canada's area was shorn of her fairest territory by one fell swath. Instead of the Ohio being the southern boundary, the middle line of the Great Lakes divided Canada from her southern neighbor. The River Ste. Croix was to separate Maine from New Brunswick. The sole explanation of this loss to Canada was that the American commissioners knew their business and the value of the ceded territory, and the English commissioners did not. It is one of the many conspicuous examples of what loyalty has cost Canada. England is to give up the western posts to the United States, from Miami to Detroit and Michilimackinac and Grand Portage.

In return the United States federal government is to recommend to the States {311} Governments that all property confiscated from Royalists during the war be restored.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GENERAL HALDIMAND]

General Haldimand, a Swiss who has served in the Seven Years' War, succeeds Carleton as governor in 1778. The times are troublous. There is still a party in favor of Congress. The great unrest, which ends in the French Revolution, disturbs habitants' life. Then that provision of the Quebec Act, by which legislative councilors were to be nominated by the crown, works badly. Councilors, judges, crown attorneys, even bailiffs are appointed by the colonial office of London, and find it more to their interests to stay currying favor in London than to attend to their duties in Canada. The country is cursed by the evil of absent officeholders, who draw salaries and appoint incompetent deputies to do the work. As for the social unrest that fills the air, Haldimand claps the malcontents in jail till the storm blows over; but the tricks of speculators, who have flocked to Canada, give trouble of another sort.

Naturally the ring of English speculators, rather than the impoverished French, became ascendant in foreign trade, and during the American war the ring got such complete control of the wheat supply that bread jumped to famine price. Just as he had dealt with the malcontents soldier fas.h.i.+on, so Haldimand now had a law pa.s.sed forbidding tricks with the price of wheat. Like Carleton, {312} Haldimand too came down hard on the land-jobbers, who tried to jockey poor French peasants out of their farms for bailiff's fees. It may be guessed that Haldimand was not a popular governor with the English clique. Nevertheless, he kept sumptuous bachelor quarters at his mansion near Montmorency Falls, was a prime favorite with the poor and with the soldiers, and sometimes deigned to take lessons in pickle making and home keeping from the grand dames of Quebec. In 1786 Carleton comes back as Lord Dorchester.

Congress had promised to protect the property of those Royalists who had fought on the losing side in the American Revolution, but for reasons beyond the control of Congress, that promise could not be carried out. It was not Congress but the local governments of each individual state that controlled property rights. In vain Congress recommended the States Governments to restore the property confiscated from the Royalists. The States Governments were in a condition of chaos, packed by jobbers and land-grabbers and the riffraff that always infest the beginnings of a nation. Instead of protecting the Royalists, the States Governments pa.s.sed laws confiscating more property and depriving those who had fought for England of even holding office. It was easy for the tricksters who had got possession of the loyalists' lands to create a social ostracism that endangered the very lives of the beaten Royalists, and there set towards Canada the great emigration of the United Empire Loyalists. To Nova Scotia, to New Brunswick, to Prince Edward Island, to Ontario, they came from Virginia and Pennsylvania and New York and Ma.s.sachusetts and Vermont, in thousands upon thousands. The story of their sufferings and far wanderings has never been told and probably never will, for there is little official record of it; but it can be likened only to the expulsion of the Acadians multiplied a hundredfold. To the Maritime Provinces alone came more than thirty thousand people. To the eastern towns.h.i.+ps of Quebec, to the regions of Kingston and Niagara and Toronto in Ontario came some twenty thousand more. It needs no {313} trick of fancy to call up the scene, and one marvels that neither poet nor novelist has yet made use of it. Here were fine old Royalist officers of New York reduced from opulence to penury, from wealth to such absolute dest.i.tution they had neither clothing nor food, nor money to pay s.h.i.+p's pa.s.sage away, now crowded with their families, and such wrecks of household goods as had escaped raid and fire, on some cheap government transport or fis.h.i.+ng schooner bound from New York Harbor to Halifax or Fundy Bay. Of the thirteen thousand people bound for Halifax there can scarcely be a family that has not lost brothers or sons in the war. Family plate, old laces, heirlooms, even the father's sword in some cases, have long ago been p.a.w.ned for food. If one finds, as one does find all through Nova Scotia, fine old mahogany and walnut furniture brought across by the Loyalists, it is only because walnut and mahogany were not valued at the time of the Revolution as they are to-day. And instead of welcome at Halifax, the refugees met with absolute consternation! What is a town of five thousand people to do with so many hungry visitants? They are quartered about in churches, in barracks, in halls knocked up, till they can be sent to farms. And these are not common immigrants coming fresh from toil in the fields of Europe; they are gently nurtured men and women, representing the aristocracy and wealth and conservatism of New York. This explains why one finds among the prominent families of Nova Scotia the same names as among the most prominent families of Ma.s.sachusetts and New York. To the officers and heads of families the English government granted from two thousand to five thousand acres each, and to sons and daughters of Loyalists two hundred acres each, besides 3,000,000 pounds in cash, as necessity for it arose.

On the north side of Fundy Bay hards.h.i.+ps were even greater, for the Loyalists landed from their s.h.i.+ps on the homeless sh.o.r.es of the wildwood wilderness. Rude log cabins of thatch roof and plaster walls were knocked up, and there began round the log cabin that tiny clearing which was to expand into the farm. The coming of the Loyalists really peopled both New Brunswick {314} and Prince Edward Island: the former becoming a separate province in 1784, named after the ruling house of England; the latter named after the Duke of Kent, who was in command of the garrison at Charlottetown.

More strenuous still was the migration of the United Empire Loyalists from the south. Rich old planters of Virginia and Maryland, who had had their colored servants by the score, now came with their families in rude tented wagons, fine chippendales jumbled with heavy mahogany furnis.h.i.+ngs, up the old c.u.mberland army road to the Ohio, and across from the Ohio to the southern towns.h.i.+ps of Quebec, to the backwoods of Niagara and Kingston and Toronto and modern Hamilton, and west as far as what is now known as London. I have heard descendants of these old southern Loyalists tell how hopelessly helpless were these planters'

families, used to hundreds of negro servants and now bereft of help in a backwoods wilderness. It took but a year or so to wear out the fine laces and pompous ruffles of their aristocratic clothing, and men and women alike were reduced to the backwoods costume of c.o.o.n cap, homespun garments, and Indian moccasins. Often one could witness such anomalies in their log cabins as gilt mirrors and spindly gla.s.s cabinets ranged in the same apartment as stove and cooking utensils. If the health of the father failed or the war had left him crippled, there was nothing for it but for the mother to take the helm; and many a Canadian can trace lineage back to a United Empire Loyalist woman who planted the first crop by hand with a hoe and reaped the first crop by hand with a sickle. Sometimes the jovial habits of the planter life came with the Loyalists to Canada, and winter witnessed a furbis.h.i.+ng up of old flounces and laces to celebrate all-night dance in log houses where part.i.tions were carpets and tapestries hung up as walls. Sometimes, too,--at least I have heard descendants of the eastern towns.h.i.+p people tell the story,--the jovial habits kept the father tippling and card playing at the village inn while the lonely mother kept watch and ward in the cabin of the snow-padded forests. Of necessity the Loyalists banded together to {315} help one another. There were "sugarings off"

in the maple woods every spring for the year's supply of homemade sugar,--glorious nights and days in the spring forests with the sap trickling from the trees to the scooped-out troughs; with the grown-ups working over the huge kettle where the mola.s.ses was being boiled to sugar; with the young of heart, big and little, gathering round the huge bonfires at night in the woods for the sport of a taffy pull, with mola.s.ses dripping on sticks and huge wooden spoons taken from the pot.

There were thres.h.i.+ngs when the neighbors gathered together to help one another beat out their grain from the straw with a flail. There were "harvest homes" and "quilting bees" and "loggings" and "barn raisings."

Clothes were homemade. Sugar was homemade. Soap was homemade. And for years and years the only tea known was made from steeping dry leaves gathered in the woods; the only coffee made from burnt peas ground up. Such were the United Empire Loyalists, whose lives some unheralded poet will yet sing,--not an unfit stock for a nation's empire builders.

At the same time that the Loyalists came to Canada, came Joseph Brant,--Thayendanegea, the Mohawk,--with the remnant of his tribe, who had fought for the English. To them the government granted some 700,000 acres in Ontario.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOSEPH BRANT]

{316} It is not surprising that the United Empire Loyalists objected to living under the French laws of the Quebec Act. They had fought for England against Congress, but they wanted representative government, and the Const.i.tutional Act was pa.s.sed in 1791 dividing the country into Upper and Lower Canada, each to have its own parliament consisting of a governor, a legislative council appointed by the crown, and an a.s.sembly elected by the people. There was to be no religious test. Naturally old French laws would prevail in Quebec, English laws in Ontario or Upper Canada. By this act, too, land known as the Clergy Reserves was set apart for the Protestant Church. The first parliament in Quebec met in the bishop's palace in December of 1792; the first parliament of Ontario in Newark or Niagara in September of the same year, the most of the newly elected members coming by canoe and dugout, and, as the Indian summer of that autumn proved hot, holding many of the sessions in s.h.i.+rt sleeves out under the trees, Lieutenant Governor Simcoe reporting that the electors seem to have favored "men of the lower order, who kept but one table and ate with their servants." The earliest sessions of the Ontario House were marked by acts to remove the capital from the boundary across to Toronto, and to legalize marriages by Protestant clergymen other than of the English church. It is amusing to read how Governor Simcoe regarded the marriage bill as an opening of the flood gates to {317} republicanism; but for all their s.h.i.+rt sleeves, the legislators enjoyed themselves and danced till morning in Navy Hall, the Governor's residence, "Mad Tom Talbot," the Governor's aid-de-camp, losing his heart to the fine eyes of Brant's Indian niece, daughter of Sir William Johnson of the old Lake George battle.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR SIMCOE]

Down at Quebec things were managed with more pomp, and no social event was complete without the presence of the Duke of Kent, military commandant, now living in Haldimand's old house at Montmorency. Nova Scotia had held parliaments since 1758, when Halifax elected her first members.

Besides the United Empire Loyalists, other settlers were coming to Canada. The Earl of Selkirk, a patriotic young Scotch n.o.bleman, had arranged for the removal of evicted Highlanders to Prince Edward Island in 1803 and to Baldoon on Lake St. Clair. Then "Mad Tom Talbot,"

Governor Simcoe's aid, descendant of the Talbots of Castle Malahide and boon comrade of the young soldier who became the Duke of Wellington, becomes so enamored of wilderness life that he gives up his career in Europe, gains grant of lands between London and Port Dover, and lays foundations of settlements in western Ontario, spite of the fact he remains a bachelor. The man who had danced at royalty's b.a.l.l.s and drunk deep of pleasure at the beck of princes now lived in a log house of three rooms, laughed at difficulties, "baked his own bread, milked his own cows, made his own b.u.t.ter, washed his own clothes, ironed his own linen," and taught colonists who bought his lands "how to do without the rotten refuse of Manchester warehouses,"--the term he applied to the broadcloth of the newcomer.

Under the French regime, Canada had consisted of a string of fur posts isolated in a wilderness. It will be noticed that it now consisted of five distinct provinces of nation builders.

{318}

CHAPTER XIV

FROM 1812 TO 1820

Hearne surrenders--Cook on the west coast--Vancouver on Pacific--Discovery of Mackenzie River--Across to the Pacific--A smash in bad rapids--Down Fraser River--Cause of war--The Chesapeake outrage--War declared--Hull surrenders at Detroit--The fight round Niagara--Soldiers exchange jokes across gorge--The traverse at Queenston--The surrender at Queenston--1813 A dark year--Raid on Ogdensburg--Attack on Toronto--Toronto burned--Vincent's soldiers at Burlington Bay--Ill hap of all the generals--Laura Secord's heroism--Campaign in the west--Moraviantown Disaster--Chrysler's farm--De Salaberry's buglers--The charge at Chippewa--Final action at Lundy's Lane--Great heroism on both sides--a.s.sault at Fort Erie--End of futile war

While Canada waged war for her national existence against her border neighbors to the south, as in the days of the bushrovers' raids of old, afar in the west, in the burnt-wood, iron-rock region of Lake Superior, on the lonely wind-swept prairies, at the foothills where each night's sunset etched the long shadows of the mountain peaks in somber replica across the plains, in the forested solitude of the tumultuous Rockies was the ragged vanguard of empire blazing a path through the wilderness, voyageur and burnt-wood runner, trapper, and explorer, pus.h.i.+ng across the hinterlands of earth's ends from prairie to mountains, and mountains to sea.

It was but as a side clap of the great American Revolution that the last French cannon were pointed against the English forts on Hudson Bay. When France sided with the American colonies a fleet of French frigates was dispatched under the great Admiral La Perouse against the fur posts of the English Company. One sleepy August afternoon in 1782, when Samuel Hearne, governor of Fort Churchill, was sorting furs in the courtyard, gates wide open, cannon unloaded, guards dispersed, the fort was electrified by the sudden apparition of three men-of-war, sails full blown, sides bristling with cannon, plowing over the waves straight for the harbor gate. French colors fluttered from the masthead. Sails rattled down. Anchors were cast, and in a few minutes small boats were out sounding the channel for position to attack the fort. Hearne had barely forty men, and the most of them were decrepits, unfit for the hunting field. As sunset merged into the long white light of northern midnight, four hundred French mariners landed on the sands outside Churchill. {319} Hearne had no alternative. He surrendered without a blow. The fort was looted of furs, the Indians driven out, and a futile attempt made to blow up the ma.s.sive walls.

Hearne and the other officers were carried off captives. Matonabbee, the famous Indian guide, came back from the hunt to find the wooden structures of Churchill in flame. He had thought the English were invulnerable, and his pagan pride could not brook the shame of such ignominious defeat. Withdrawing outside the shattered walls, Matonabbee blew his brains out. A few days later Port Nelson, to the south, had suffered like fate. The English officers were released by La Perouse on reaching Europe. As for the fur company servants, they waited only till the French sails had disappeared over the sea. Then they came from hiding and rebuilt the burnt forts. Such was the last act in the great drama of contest between France and England for supremacy in the north.

For two hundred years explorers had been trying to find a northern pa.s.sage between Europe and Asia by way of America, from east to west.

Now that Canada has fallen into English hands; now, too, that the Russian sea-otter hunters are coasting down the west side of America towards that region which Drake discovered long ago in California, England suddenly awakens to a pa.s.sion for discovery of that mythical Northwest Pa.s.sage. Instead of seeking from east to west she sought from west to east, and sent her navigator round the world to search for opening along the west coast of America. To carry out the exploration there was selected as commander that young officer, James Cook, who helped to sound the St. Lawrence for Wolfe, and had since been cruising the South Seas. On his s.h.i.+ps, the _Resolution_ and the _Discovery_, was a young man whose name was to become a household word in America, Vancouver, a mids.h.i.+pman.

March of 1778 the _Resolution_ and _Discovery_ come rolling over the long swell of the sheeny Pacific towards Drake's land of New Albion, California. Suddenly, one morning, the dim sky line resolved into the clear-cut edges of high land, but by night such a roaring hurricane had burst on the s.h.i.+ps as drove them {320} far out from land, too far to see the opening of Juan de Fuca, leading in from Vancouver Island, though Cook called the cape there "Flattery," because he had hoped for an opening and been deluded. Clearer weather found Cook abreast a coast of sheer mountains with snowy summits jagging through the clouds in tent peaks. A narrow entrance opened into a two-horned cove. Small boats towed the s.h.i.+ps in amid a flotilla of Indian dugouts whose occupants chanted weird welcome to the echo of the surrounding hills.

Women and children were in the canoes. That signified peace. The s.h.i.+ps were moored to trees, and the white men went ash.o.r.e in that harbor to become famous as the rendezvous of Pacific fur traders, Nootka Sound, on the sea side of Vancouver Island.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CAPTAIN COOK]

Presently the waters were literally swarming with Indian canoes, and in a few days Cook's crews had received thousands of dollars' worth of sea-otter skins for such worthless baubles as tin mirrors and bra.s.s rings and bits of red calico. This was the beginning of the fur trade in sea otter with Americans and English. Some of the naked savages were observed wearing metal ornaments of European make. Cook did not think of the Russian fur traders to the north, but easily persuaded himself these objects had come from the English fur traders of Hudson Bay, and so inferred there _must_ be a Northeast Pa.s.sage. By April, Cook's s.h.i.+ps were once more afloat, {321} gliding among the sylvan channels of countless wooded islands up past Sitka harbor, where the Russians later built their fort, round westward beneath the towering opal dome of Mount St. Elias, which Bering had named, to the waters bordering Alaska; but, as the world knows, though the s.h.i.+ps penetrated up the channels of many roily waters, they found no open pa.s.sage. Cook comes down to the Sandwich Islands, New Year of 1779. There the vices of his white crew arouse the enmity of the pagan savages. In a riot over the theft of a rowboat, Cook and a few men are surrounded by an enraged mob. By some mistake the white sailors rowing out from sh.o.r.e fire on the mob surrounding Cook. Instantly a dagger rips under Cook's shoulder blade. In another second Cook and his men are literally hacked to pieces. All night the conch sh.e.l.ls of the savages blow their war challenge through the darkness and the signal fires dance on the mountains. By dint of persuasion and threats the white men compel the natives to restore the mangled remains of the commander. Sunday, February 21, amid a silence as of death over the waters, the body of the dead explorer is committed to the deep.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FORT CHURCHILL, AS IT WAS IN 1777]

[Ill.u.s.tration: TOTEM POLES, BRITISH COLUMBIA]

The chance discovery of the sea-otter trade by Cook's crew at Nootka brings hosts of English and American adventurers to the Pacific Coast of Canada. There is Meares, the English officer from China, who builds a rabbit hutch of a barracks at Nootka and almost involves England and Spain in war because the Spaniards, having discovered this region before Cook, knock the log barracks into kindling wood and forcibly seize an English trading s.h.i.+p. There is Robert Gray, the Boston trader, who pushes the prow of his little s.h.i.+p, _Columbia_, up a s.p.a.cious harbor south of Juan de Fuca in May of 1792 and discovers Columbia River, so giving the United States flag prior claim here.

There is George Vancouver, the English commander, sent out by his government in 1791-1793 to receive Nootka formally back from the Spaniards of California and to explore every inlet from Vancouver Island to Alaska. As luck would have it, Vancouver, the Englishman, and Gray, the American, are both hovering off {322} the mouth of the Columbia in April of 1792, but a gale drives the s.h.i.+ps offsh.o.r.e, though turgid water plainly indicates the mouth of a great river somewhere near. Vancouver goes on up north. Gray, the American, comes back, and so Vancouver misses discovering the one great river that remains unmapped in America. Up Puget Sound, named after his lieutenant, up Fuca Straits, round Vancouver Island, past all those inlets like seas on the mainland of British Columbia, coasts Vancouver, rounding south again to Nootka in August. In Nootka lie the Spanish frigates from California, bristling with cannon, the red and yellow flag blowing to the wind above the palisaded fort. In solemn parade, with Maquinna, the Nootka chief, clad in a state of nature, as guest of the festive board, Don Quadra, the Spanish officer, dines and wines Vancouver; but when it comes to business, that is another matter! Vancouver understands that Spain is to surrender _all_ sovereignty north of San Francisco. Don Quadra, with pompous bow, maintains that the international agreement was to surrender rights only north of Juan de Fuca, leaving the rest of the northwest coast free to all nations for trade. Incidentally, it may be mentioned, Don Quadra was right, but the two commanders agree to send home to their respective governments for {323} instructions. Meanwhile Robert Gray, the American, comes rolling into port with news he has discovered Columbia River.

Vancouver is skeptical and chagrined. Having failed to discover the river, he goes down coast to explore it. It may be added, he sends his men higher up the river than Gray has gone, and has England's flag of possession as solemnly planted as though Robert Gray had never entered Columbia's waters. The next two years Vancouver spends exploring every nook and inlet from Columbia River to Lynn Ca.n.a.l. Once and for all and forever he disproves the myth of a Northeast Pa.s.sage. His work was negative, but it established English rights where America's claims ceased and Russia's began, namely between Columbia River and Sitka, or in what is now known as British Columbia.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CAPTAIN GEORGE VANCOUVER]

[Ill.u.s.tration: NOOTKA SOUND (From an engraving in Vancouver's journal)]

As the beaver had lured French bushrovers from the St. Lawrence to the Rockies, so the sea otter led the way to the exploration of the Pacific Coast. Artist's brush and novelist's pen have drawn all the romance and the glamour and the adventure of the beaver hunter's life, but the sea-otter hunter's life is {324} almost an untold tale. Pacific Coast Indians were employed by the white traders for this wildest of hunting.

The sea otter is like neither otter nor beaver, though possessing habits akin to both. In size, when full-grown, it is about the length of a man. Its pelt has the ebony s.h.i.+mmer of seal tipped with silver.

Cradled on the waves, sleeping on their backs in the sea, playful as kittens, the sea otters only come ash.o.r.e when driven by fierce gales; but they must come above to breathe, for the wave wash of storm would smother them. Their favorite sleeping grounds used to be the kelp beds of the Alaskan Islands. Storm or calm, to the kelp beds rode the Indian hunters in their boats of oiled skin light as paper. If heavy surf ran, concealing sight and sound, the hunters stood along sh.o.r.e shouting through the surf and waiting for the wave wash to carry in the dead body; if the sea were calm, the hunters circled in bands of twenty or thirty, spearing the sea otter as it came up to breathe; but the best hunting was when hurricane gales churned sea and air to spray.