Tue Great JouRNEY 119

native escort was reduced to the chief’s son alone.

Next morning (July 21) they put out at six. After steering west for seven miles, they turned up Labouchere Channel for seven miles, then south-west down Dean Channel. Here they had an unpleasant encounter which came near to wrecking the expedition at the moment of its success. Fifteen men in three canoes appeared, and examined the party “with an air of indifference and disdain”.

One of them in particular made me under- stand, with an air of insolence, that a large canoe had lately been in this bay, with people in her like me, and that one of them, whom he called Macubah, had fired on him and his friends, and that Bensins had struck him on the back with the flat part of his sword... . At the same time he illustrated these circum- stances by the assistance of my gun and sword; and I do not doubt but he well deserved the treatment which he described.

It so happened, by a strange coincidence, that Vancouver had visited and charted this part of the coast only a few weeks before, and the