f the report. The Indians of the Bay looked fiercer and more warlike
than those of our neighborhood; so we redoubled our vigilance, and
performed a regular daily drill to accustom ourselves to the use of
arms.

To the necessity of securing ourselves against an attack on the part of
the natives, was joined that of obtaining a stock of provisions for the
winter: those which we had received from the vessel were very quickly
exhausted, and from the commencement of the month of July we were forced
to depend upon fish. Not having brought hunters with us, we had to rely
for venison, on the precarious hunt of one of the natives who had not
abandoned us when the rest of his countrymen retired. This man brought
us from time to time, a very lean and very dry doe-elk, for which we had
to pay, notwithstanding, very dear. The ordinary price of a stag was a
blanket, a knife, some tobacco, powder and ball, besides supplying our
hunter with a musket. This dry meat, and smoke-dried fish, constituted
our daily food, and that in very insufficient quantity for hardworking
men. "We had no bread, and vegetables, of course, were quite out of the
question. In a word our fare was not sumptuous. Those who accommodated
themselves best to our mode of living were the Sandwich-islanders:
salmon and elk were to them exquisite viands.

On the 11th of August a number of Chinooks visited us, bringing a
strange Indian, who had, they said, something interesting to
communicate. This savage told us, in fact, that he had been engaged with
ten more of his countrymen, by a Captain _Ayres_, to hunt seals on the
islands in _Sir Francis Drake's Bay_, where these animals are very
numerous, with a promise of being taken home and paid for their
services; the captain had left them on the islands, to go southwardly
and purchase provisions, he said, of the Spaniards of Monterey in
California; but he had never returned: and they, believing that he had
been wrecked, had embarked in a skiff which he had left them, and had
reached the main land, from which they were not far distant; but their
skiff was shattered to pieces in the surf, and they had saved
themselves by swimming. Believing that they were not far from the river
Columbia, they had followed the shore, living, on the way, upon
shell-fish and frogs; at last they arrived among strange Indians, who,
far from receiving them kindly, had killed eight of them and made the
rest prisoners; but the _Klemooks_, a neighborin