th a very blunt instrument, the cruel
pain of which operation the patient bore with incredible resolution.
The scene afflicted me, and I left it."

The chief of this village had probably met Captain Cook about ten
years before. He had been down in a large canoe[12] with forty of his
people to the seacoast, where he saw two large vessels.

[Footnote 12: Mackenzie thus describes one of the large sea-going
canoes of the coast natives: "This canoe was built of cedar,
forty-five feet long, four feet broad, and three and a half in depth.
It was painted black and decorated with white figures of different
kinds. The gunwale fore and aft was inlaid with the teeth of the sea
otter." He adds that "these coast tribes (north of Vancouver Island
and of Queen Charlotte Sound) had been in indirect contact with the
Spaniards since the middle of the sixteenth century, and with the
Russians from the middle of the eighteenth century. Therefore, from
these two directions they had learnt the use of metal, and had
obtained copper, brass, and iron. They may possibly have had copper
earlier still from the Northern Indians on the other side of the Rocky
Mountains; but brass and iron they could, of course, only have
obtained from Europeans. They had already become very deft at dealing
with these metals, and twisted the iron into collars which weighed
upwards of twelve pounds, also beating it into plates for their
daggers and knives."]

Farther down the river the natives, instead of regaling them with
fish, placed before them a long, clean, and well-made trough full of
berries, most of them resembling blackberries, though white in colour,
and others similar to huckleberries. In this region the women were
employed in beating and preparing the inner rind of the juniper bark,
to which they gave the appearance of flax, and others were spinning
with a distaff; again, others were weaving robes of this fibrous
thread, intermixed with strips of sea-otter skin. The men were fishing
on the river with drag nets between two canoes, thus intercepting the
salmon coming up the river.

At last, on Saturday, the 20th of July, 1793, they emerged from the
Salmon River into an arm of the sea (probably near King Island). The
tide was out, and had left a large space covered with seaweed. The
surrounding hills were involved in fog.... The bay appeared to be some
three miles in breadth, and on the coast the travellers saw a great
number of sea otters.[13] At two in