ft 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