s
pocket-knife. With this he was trying to fight his way to the firearms
of the cabin, when he was driven, faint from loss of blood, to the
wheel-house. A tomahawk clubbed down, and he, too, was pitched overboard
to the knives of the squaws.

While the officers were falling on the quarter-deck, sailors and
Sandwich Islanders were fighting to the death elsewhere. The seven men
who had been sent up the ratlins to rig sails came shinning down ropes
and masts to gain the cabin. Two were instantly killed. A third fell
down the main hatch fatally wounded; and the other four got into the
cabin, where they broke holes and let fly with musket and rifle. This
sent the savages scattering overboard to the waiting canoes. The
survivors then fired charge after charge from the deck cannon, which
drove the Indians to land with tremendous loss of life.

All day the Indians watched the Tonquin's sails flapping to the wind;
but none of the ship's crew appeared on the deck. The next morning the
Tonquin still lay rocking to the tide; but no white men emerged from
below. Eager to plunder the apparently deserted ship, the Indians
launched their canoes and cautiously paddled near. A white man--one of
those who had fallen down the hatch wounded--staggered up to the deck,
waved for the natives to come on board, and dropped below. Gluttonous of
booty, the savages beset the sides of the Tonquin like flocks of
carrion-birds. Barely were they on deck when sea and air were rent with
a terrific explosion as of ten thousand cannon! The ship was blown to
atoms, bodies torn asunder, and the sea scattered with bloody remnants
of what had been living men but a moment before.

The mortally wounded man, thought to be Lewis, the clerk,[15] had
determined to effect the death of his enemies on his own pyre. Unable to
escape with the other four refugees under cover of night, he had put a
match to four tons of powder in the hold. But the refugees might better
have perished with the Tonquin; for head-winds drove them ashore, where
they were captured and tortured to death with all the prolonged cruelty
that savages practise. Between twenty and thirty lives were lost in this
disaster to the Pacific Fur Company; and MacDougall was left at Astoria
with but a handful of men and a weakly-built fort to wait the coming of
the overland traders whom Mr. Astor was sending by way of the Missouri
and Columbia.

Indian runners brought vague rumours of thirty white men build