ling a bone. Why should they? Their {189} code was to take.
The chief of the Nootkas presented Cook with a sea-otter cloak. Cook
reciprocated with a brass-hilted sword.

By the end of April the ships had been overhauled, and Cook was ready
to sail. Porpoise were coursing the sea like greyhounds, and the
stormy petrels in a clatter; but Cook was not to be delayed by storm.
Barely had the two ships cleared the harbor, when such a squall broke
loose, they could do nothing but scud for open sea, turn tails to the
wind, and lie helpless as logs, heads south. If it had not been for
this storm, Cook would certainly have discovered that Nootka was on an
island, not the coast of the mainland; but by the time the weather
permitted an approach to land again, Friday, May 1, the ships were
abreast that cluster of islands below the snowy cone of Mt. Edgecumbe,
Sitka, where Chirikoff's Russians had first put foot on American soil.
Cook was now at the northernmost limit of Spanish voyaging.

By the 4th of May Cook had sighted and passed the Fairweather Range,
swung round westward on the old course followed by Bering, and passed
under the shadow of St. Elias towering through the clouds in a dome of
snow. On the 6th the ships were at Kyak, where Bering had anchored,
and amid myriad ducks and gulls were approaching a broad inlet
northward. Now, just as Bering had missed exploring this part of the
coast owing to fog, so Cook had failed to trace that long archipelago
of islands from Sitka Sound {190} northward; but here, where the coast
trends straight westward, was an opening that roused hopes of a
Northeast Passage. The _Resolution_ had sprung a leak; and in the
second week of May, the inlet was entered in the hope of a shelter to
repair the leak and a way northeast to the Atlantic. Barely had the
ships passed up the sound, when they were enshrouded in a fog that
wiped out every outline; otherwise, the high coast of glacial
palisades--two hundred feet in places and four miles broad--might have
been seen landlocked by mountains; but Mr. Gore launched out in a small
boat steering north through haze and tide-rip. Twenty natives were
seen clad in sea-otter skins, by which--the white men judged--no
Russians could have come to this sound; for the Russians would not have
permitted the Indians to keep such valuable sea-otter clothing. The
glass beads possessed by the natives were supposed to attest proximity
to traders of Hudson Bay.