Bering on the expedition
of 1741, and the rough adventurers seemed almost to worship the Dane's
memory. Later came Ismyloff, chief factor of the Russian fur posts in
Oonalaska, attended by a retinue of thirty native canoes, very suave as
to manners, very polished and pompous when he was not too convivial,
but very chary of any information to the English, whose charts he
examined with keenest interest, giving them to understand that the
Empress of Russia had first claim to all those parts of the country,
rising, quaffing a glass and bowing profoundly as he mentioned the
august name. "Friends and fellow-countrymen glorious," the English
were to the smooth-tongued Russian, as they drank each other's health.
Learning that Cook was to visit Avacha Bay, Ismyloff proffered a letter
of introduction to Major Behm, Russian commander of Kamchatka. Cook
thought the letter one of commendation. It turned out otherwise. Fur
traders, world over, always resented the coming of the explorer.
Ismyloff was neither better nor worse than his kind.[2]

Heavy squalls pursued the ships all the way from Oonalaska, left on
October 26, to the Sandwich Islands, reached in the new year 1779. A
thousand canoes of enthusiastic natives welcomed Cook back to the sunny
islands of the Pacific. Before the explorer {197} could anchor,
natives were swimming round the ship like shoals of fish. When Cook
landed, the whole population prostrated itself at his feet as if he had
been a god. It was a welcome change from the desolate cold of the
inhospitable north.

Situated midway in the Pacific, the Sandwich Islands were like an oasis
in a watery waste to Cook's mariners. The ships had dropped anchor in
the centre of a horn-shaped bay called Karakakooa, in Hawaii, about two
miles from horn to horn. On the sandy flats of the north horn was the
native village of Kowrowa: amid the cocoanut grove of the other horn,
the village of Kakooa, with a well and Morai, or sacred burying-ground,
close by. Between the two villages alongshore ran a high ledge of
black coral rocks. In all there were, perhaps, four hundred houses in
the two villages, with a population of from two to three thousand
warriors; but the bay was the rallying place for the entire group of
islands; and the islands numbered in all several hundred thousand
warriors.

Picture, then, the scene to these wanderers of the northern seas: the
long coral reef, wave-washed by bluest of seas; the little