Up Behm Canal the
ships were visited by warriors wearing death-masks, who refused
everything in exchange for their sea-otter except firearms. The canal
here narrowed to a dark canyon overhung by beetling cliffs. Four large
war canoes manned by several hundred savages daubed with war paint
succeeded in surrounding the small launch, and while half the warriors
held the boat to prevent it escaping, the rest had rifled it of
everything they could take, from belaying-pins and sail rope to
firearms, before Vancouver lost patience and gave orders to fire. At
the shot the Indians were over decks and into the sea like water-rats,
while forces ambushed on land began rolling rocks and stones down the
precipices. One gains some idea of Vancouver's thoroughness by his
work up Portland Canal, which was to become famous a hundred years
later as the scene of boundary disputes. Here, so determined was he to
prove none of the passages led to the Atlantic that his small boat
actually cruised seven hundred miles without going more than sixty
miles from ocean front. By October of 1793 Vancouver had demolished
the myth of {287} a possible passage between New Spain and Russian
America; for he had examined every inlet from San Francisco to what is
now Sitka.
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