CHAPTER I

The Land and the People

The Wonderland of the Pacific Coast. This
is the Wonderland of the Pacific Coast. West of
the Rockies, down through the Coast Range to salt
water, then north by west out of the city of Van-
couver through coastal tide-waters for six hundred
straight miles, and if you have time to follow the
coast-line of mainland and islands, five thousand
crooked ones, you will view the noblest panorama of
Nature, in which sea, islands, and mountains are
intermingled, that can be found anywhere in the
world. I grant you there may be prettier, daintier
scenes, or those with more startling colours and bril-
liant effects, but here you have a lavishness in extent,
an endlessness in variety of ocean and mountain
scenery, quiet inlets and angry storm-white reefs,
glacier-capped summits and heavily-wooded valleys,
that make altogether a combination unsurpassed
and, I think, unequalled anywhere else on earth.

It is more imposing than the fiords of Norway,
nor has the far-famed Inland Sea of Japan anything
more lovely. In these waters you are doing moun-
tain climbing by steamboat, for the ocean has inun-
dated a series of colossal ranges. You can sail for
days through winding channels, broad and narrow,
and among cloud-topped peaks that make your boat
look like a child’s toy. Sometimes the trees, giant

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