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
passage 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 passion for discovery of that mythical
Northwest Passage. 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 ships, the _Resolution_ and the _Discovery_,
was a young man whose name was to become a household word in America,
Vancouver, a midshipman.

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 ships 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 ships in amid a flotilla of Indian dugouts whose
occupants chanted weird welcome to the echo of the surrounding hills.
Women and children were in