[Illustration: Captain George Vancouver.]
Vancouver was still in his prime, under forty. Serving in the navy from boyhood, he had all a practical seaman’s contempt for theories. This contempt was given point by the world’s attitude toward Cook. Vancouver had been on the spot with Cook. He knew there was no Northeast Passage. Cook had proved that. Yet the world refused credence.
For the practical navigator there remained only one course, and that course became the one aim, the consuming ambition of Vancouver’s life—to destroy the {266} last vestige of the myth of a Northeast Passage; to explore the northwest coast of America so thoroughly there would not remain a single unknown inlet that could be used as a possible prop for the schoolmen’s theories, to penetrate every inlet from California to Alaska—mainland and island; to demonstrate that not one possible opening led to the Atlantic. This was to be the object of Vancouver’s life, and he carried it out with a thoroughness that left nothing for subsequent explorers to do; but he died before the record of his voyages had been given to the world.
The two ships, Discovery and Chatham, with a supply ship, the Daedalus, to follow later, were fitted out for long and thorough work. Vancouver’s vessel, the Discovery, carried twenty guns with a crew of a hundred men. The tender, Chatham, under Broughton, had ten guns and forty-five men. With Vancouver went Menzies, and Puget, and Baker, and Johnstone—names that were to become place marks on the Pacific. The Discovery and Chatham left England in the spring of 1791. A year later found them cutting the waves from Hawaii for America, the New Albion of Drake’s discovery, forgotten by England until Spain’s activity stimulated memory of the pirate voyage.
A swashing swell met the ships as they neared America. Phosphorescent lights blue as sulphur flame slimed the sea in a trail of rippling fire; and a land bird, washed out by the waves, told of New Albion’s shore. {267} For the first two weeks of April, the Discovery and Chatham had driven under cloud of sail and sunny skies; but on the 16th, just when the white fret of reefs ahead forewarned land, heavy weather settled over the ships. To the fore, bare, majestic, compact as a wall, the coast of New Albion towered out of the surf near Mendocino. Cheers went up from the lookout for the landfall of Francis Drake’s discovery. Then torrents of rain washed out surf and shore. The hurricane gales, that had driven all other navigators out to sea from this coast, now lashed Vancouver. Such smashing seas swept over decks, that masts, sails, railings, were wrenched away.
Was it ill-luck or destiny, that caught Vancouver in this gale? If he had not been driven offshore here, he might have been just two weeks before Gray on the Columbia, and made good England’s claim of all territory between New Spain and Alaska. When the weather cleared on April 27, the ocean was turgid, plainly tinged river-color by inland waters; but ground swell of storm and tide rolled across the shelving sandbars. Not a notch nor an opening breached through the flaw of the horizon from the ocean to the source of the shallow green. Vancouver was too far offshore to see that there really was a break in the surf wash. He thought—and thought rightly—this was the place where the trader, Meares, had hoped to find the great River of the West, only to be disappointed and to name the point Cape Disappointment. Vancouver was {268} not to be fooled by any such fanciful theories. “Not considering this opening worthy of more attention,” he writes, “I continued to the northwest.” He had missed the greatest honor that yet remained for any discoverer on the Pacific. Within two weeks Gray, the American, heading back to these baffling tides with a dogged persistence that won its own glory, was to succeed in passing the breakers and discovering the Columbia. As the calm permitted approach to the shore again, forests appeared through the haze—that soft, velvet, caressing haze of the dreamy, lazily swelling Pacific—forests of fir and spruce and pine and cypress, in all the riot of dank spring growth, a dense tangle of windfall and underbrush and great vines below, festooned with the light green stringy mosses of cloud line overhead and almost impervious to sunlight. Myriad wild fowl covered the sea. The coast became beetling precipice, that rolled inland forest-clad to mountains jagging ragged peaks through the clouds. This was the Olympus Range, first noticed by Meares, and to-day seen for miles out at sea like a ridge of opalescent domes suspended in mid-heaven.
Vancouver was gliding into the Straits of Fuca when the slender colors of a far ship floated above the blue horizon outward bound. Another wave-roll, and the flag was seen to be above full-blown sails and a square-hulled, trim little trader of America. At six in the morning of April 29, the American saluted with a {269} cannon-shot. Vancouver answered with a charge from his decks, rightly guessing this was Robert Gray on the Columbia.