His lieutenant,
Broughton, who had been in charge of the boats that explored the
Columbia, here left him and accompanied Quadra to San Blas, whence he
went overland to the Atlantic and sailed for England, bearing
dispatches to the government. Vancouver spent yet another year on the
North Pacific, corroborating his first year's charting and proving that
no north-east passage through the continent existed. Portland Canal,
Jervis Inlet, Cook Inlet, Prince William Sound, Lynn Canal--all were
traced to head-waters by Vancouver.

[Illustration: George Vancouver. From a painting in the National
Portrait Gallery, London.]

The curtain then drops on the exploration of the North Pacific, with
Spain jealously holding all south of the Columbia, Russia jealously
holding all north of Sitka, and England and the United States advancing
counter-claims for all the territory between.

{71}

CHAPTER V

'ALEXANDER MACKENZIE, FROM CANADA, BY LAND'

The movement of the fur traders towards the Pacific now became a
fevered race for the wealth of a new El Dorado. Astor's traders in New
York, the Scottish and English merchants of the North-West Company in
Montreal, the Spanish traders of the South-West, even the directors of
the sleepy old Hudson's Bay Company--all turned longing eyes to that
Pacific north-west coast whence came sea-otter skins in trade, each for
a few pennies' worth of beads, powder, or old iron. Rumours, too, were
rife of the great wealth of the seal rookeries, and the seal proved as
powerful a magnet to draw the fur traders as the little beaver, the
pursuit of which had led them into frozen wilds.

Up in the Athabaska country, eating his heart out with chagrin because
his associates in the North-West Company of Montreal had {72} ignored
his voyage of discovery down the Mackenzie river to the Arctic in
1789,[1] the young trader Alexander Mackenzie heard these rumours of
new wealth in furs on the Pacific. Who would be the first overland to
that western sea? If Spaniard and Russian had tapped the source of
wealth from the ocean side, why could not the Nor'westers cross the
mountains and secure the furs from the land side? Mackenzie had heard,
too, of the fabled great River of the West. Could he but catch the
swish of its upper current, what would hinder him floating down it to
the sea? Mackenzie thought and thought, and paced his quarters up at
Fort Chipewyan, on Lake Athabaska, till his mind became so f