Tue Great JOURNEY 117

his departure. He examined by the river-
side an immense canoe, built of cedar and
elaborately decorated, in which the chief
told him, as well as he could by sign-
language, that he had gone to the south about
ten years before and had there met two ves-
sels full of white people. They continued
their voyage in a large canoe with four men
from the village as guides, one the son of the
chief. After stopping at two or three houses
on the way they reached in the late afternoon
a village from which most of the inhabitants
were absent. This was Bella Coola, or Ras-
cals’ Village, as Mackenzie named it. ‘From
these houses,’’ he writes, “I could perceive
the termination of the river, and its discharge
into a narrow arm of the sea.”’ Those are the
words, without any further adornment, in
which he records the achievement of his great
ambition, an ambition which had driven him,
through peril from man and nature and by
grinding toil, first to the Arctic and then to
the Pacific Ocean.

After spending the night in an unoccupied
house, the party covered the short distance