possibility of insult from the common sailors by having them at his own
table on the ship, taught them the customs of Europeans toward women
and the reasons for those customs, so that the young girls presently
had the respect and friendship of every sailor on board the
_Discovery_. In New Spain he had obtained clothing and delicacies for
them that white women have; and in the Sandwich Islands took
precautions against their death at the hands of Hawaiians for having
been on the ship with strange men, by securing from the Sandwich Island
chief the promise of his protection for them and the gifts of a home
inside the royal enclosure.

April of 1793 saw Vancouver back again on the west coast of America.
In results this year's exploring was largely negative; but the object
of Vancouver's life was a negative one--to prove there was no passage
between Pacific and Atlantic. He had missed the Columbia the previous
year by standing off the coast north of Mendocino. So this year, he
again plied up the same shore to Nootka. No fresh instructions had
{286} come from England or Spain to Nootka; and Vancouver took up the
trail of the sea where he had stopped the year before, carrying forward
survey of island and mainland from Vancouver Island northward to the
modern Sitka or Norfolk Sound. Gray, the American, had been attacked
by Indians here the year before; and Vancouver did not escape the
hostility of these notoriously treacherous tribes. Up Behm Canal the
ships were visited by warriors wearing death-masks, who refused
everything in exchange for their sea-otter except firearms. The canal
here narrowed to a dark canyon overhung by beetling cliffs. Four large
war canoes manned by several hundred savages daubed with war paint
succeeded in surrounding the small launch, and while half the warriors
held the boat to prevent it escaping, the rest had rifled it of
everything they could take, from belaying-pins and sail rope to
firearms, before Vancouver lost patience and gave orders to fire. At
the shot the Indians were over decks and into the sea like water-rats,
while forces ambushed on land began rolling rocks and stones down the
precipices. One gains some idea of Vancouver's thoroughness by his
work up Portland Canal, which was to become famous a hundred years
later as the scene of boundary disputes. Here, so determined was he to
prove none of the passages led to the Atlantic that his small boat
actually cruised seven hund