282} ensign came
aboard the _Discovery_ for breakfast, pointing out to Vancouver the
best anchorage for both wood and water. While the sailors went
shooting quail on the hills, or amused themselves watching the Indians
floating over the harbor on rafts made of dry rushes and grass, the
good Spanish padre conducted Vancouver ashore to the presidio, or house
of the commandant, back from the landing on a little knoll surrounded
by hills. The fort was a square area of adobe walls fourteen feet high
and five deep, the outer beams filled in between with a plaster of
solid mortar, houses and walls whitewashed from lime made of
sea-shells. A small brass cannon gathered rust above one dilapidated
carriage, and another old gun was mounted by being lashed to a rotten
log. A single gate led into the fort, which was inhabited by the
commandant, the guard of thirty-five soldiers, and their families. The
windows of the houses were very small and without glass, the
commandant's house being a rude structure thirty by fourteen feet,
whitewashed inside and out, the floor sand and rushes, the furnishings
of the roughest handicraft. The mission proper was three miles from
the fort, with a guard of five soldiers and a corporal. Such was the
beginning of the largest city on the Pacific coast to-day.

Broughton was now sent overland to England for instructions about the
transfer of Nootka. Puget became commander of the _Chatham_. The
store ship _Daedalus_ was sent to the South Seas, and touching only
{283} at Monterey, Vancouver sailed to winter in the Sandwich Islands.
Here two duties awaited the explorer, which he carried out in a way
that left a streak both of glory and of shame across his escutcheon.
The Sandwich Islands had become the halfway house of the Pacific for
the fur traders. How fur traders--riff-raff adventurers from earth's
ends beyond the reach of law--may have acted among these simple people
may be guessed from the conduct of Cook's crews; and Cook was a strict
disciplinarian. Those who sow to the wind, need not be surprised if
they reap the whirlwind. White men, welcomed by these Indians as gods,
repaid the native hospitality by impressing natives as crews to a
northern climate where the transition from semitropics meant almost
certain death. For a fur trader to slip into Hawaii, entice women
aboard, then scud off to America where the victims might rot unburied
for all the traders cared--was considered a joke.