Not a notch nor an opening breached through the flaw of the
horizon from the ocean to the source of the shallow green. Vancouver
was too far offshore to see that there really was a break in the surf
wash. He thought--and thought rightly--this was the place where the
trader, Meares, had hoped to find the great River of the West, only to
be disappointed and to name the point Cape Disappointment. Vancouver
was {268} not to be fooled by any such fanciful theories. "Not
considering this opening worthy of more attention," he writes, "I
continued to the northwest." He had missed the greatest honor that yet
remained for any discoverer on the Pacific. Within two weeks Gray, the
American, heading back to these baffling tides with a dogged
persistence that won its own glory, was to succeed in passing the
breakers and discovering the Columbia. As the calm permitted approach
to the shore again, forests appeared through the haze--that soft,
velvet, caressing haze of the dreamy, lazily swelling Pacific--forests
of fir and spruce and pine and cypress, in all the riot of dank spring
growth, a dense tangle of windfall and underbrush and great vines
below, festooned with the light green stringy mosses of cloud line
overhead and almost impervious to sunlight.
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