rom Astoria on board the
"Beaver," on the 4th of August of the preceding year, and should have
returned with that vessel, in the month of October of the same year. We
testified to him our surprise that he had not returned at the time
appointed, and expressed the fears which we had entertained in regard to
his fate, as well as that of the Beaver itself: and in reply he
explained to us the reasons why neither he nor Captain Sowles had been
able to fulfil the promise which they had made us.

After having got clear of the river Columbia, they had scudded to the
north, and had repaired to the Russian post of Chitka, where they had
exchanged a part of their goods for furs. They had made with the
governor of that establishment, Barnoff by name, arrangements to supply
him regularly with all the goods of which he had need, and to send him
every year a vessel for that purpose, as well as for the transportation
of his surplus furs to the East Indies. They had then advanced still
further to the north, to the coast of _Kamskatka_; and being there
informed that some Kodiak hunters had been left on some adjacent isles,
called the islands of St. Peter and St. Paul, and that these hunters had
not been visited for three years, they determined to go thither, and
having reached those isles, they opened a brisk trade, and secured no
less than eighty thousand skins of the South-sea seal. These operations
had consumed a great deal of time; the season was already far advanced;
ice was forming around them, and it was not without having incurred
considerable dangers that they succeeded in making their way out of
those latitudes. Having extricated themselves from the frozen seas of
the north, but in a shattered condition, they deemed it more prudent to
run for the Sandwich isles, where they arrived after enduring a
succession of severe gales. Here Mr. Hunt disembarked, with the men who
had accompanied him, and who did not form a part of the ship's crew; and
the vessel, after undergoing the necessary repairs, set sail for Canton.

Mr. Hunt had then passed nearly six months at the Sandwich islands,
expecting the annual ship from New York, and never imagining that war
had been declared. But at last, weary of waiting so long to no purpose,
he had bought a small schooner of one of the chiefs of the isle of
Wahoo, and was engaged in getting her ready to sail for the mouth of the
Columbia, when four sails hove in sight, and presently came to anchor in