eft England in midsummer of 1776. He sighted the Pacific
coast, northward of what is now San Francisco, in the spring of 1778.
Ledyard was the first American to see the land that lay beyond the
Rockies. It was not a narrow strip as men had thought, but a broad
belt a thousand miles long by a thousand broad, an unclaimed world; for
storms drove Cook offshore here; and the English discoverer did not
land till abreast of British America.

At Nootka thousands of Indians flocked round the two vessels to trade.
For some trinkets of glass beads and iron, Ledyard obtained one
thousand five hundred skins for Cook. Among the Indians, too, he saw
brass trinkets, that must have come all the way from New Spain on the
south, or from the Hudson's Bay Fur Company on the east. What were the
merchants of New York and Philadelphia doing, that their ships were not
here reaping a harvest of wealth in furs? If this were the outermost
bound of Louisiana, Louisiana might some day be a part of the colonies
now struggling for their liberties; and Ledyard's imagination took one
of those leaps that win a man the reputation of a fool among his
contemporaries, a hero to future generations. "If it was necessary
that a European should discover the existence of the continent," he
afterward wrote, "in the name of Amor Patriae let a native explore its
resources and boundaries. . . It is my wish to be the man."

Cook's ships passed north to Oonalaska. Only {249} twenty-five years
before, the Indians of Oonalaska had massacred every white settlement
on the island. Cook wished to send a message to the Russian fur
traders. Not many men could be risked from the ship. Fired with the
ambition to know more of the coast which he had determined to explore,
Ledyard volunteered to go for the Russians with two Indian guides. The
pace was set at an ambling run over rocks that had cut Ledyard's boots
to tatters before nightfall. He was quite unarmed; and just at dark
the way seemed to end at a sandy shore, where the waves were already
chopping over on the rising tide, and spiral columns of smoke betrayed
the underground mud huts of those very Indian villages that had
massacred the Russians a quarter of a century before. The guides had
dived somewhere underground and, while Ledyard stood nonplussed, came
running back carrying a light skin boat which they launched. It was
made of oiled walrus hide stretched like a drum completely round
whalebones, except