At Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, the capital of Oregon, the vessel was to be completed by her carpenters, and to be the first steamer on the Pacific Ocean.

Long afterwards it was, in 1842, that the Beaver carried the great Sir George Simpson to the founding of Fort Camosun on Vancouver Island. When, many years later, the Beaver was sold to become a tug, her log books were pitched into the loft of an old log barn, the last remnant of Fort Camosun, hid in a backyard of the city of Victoria, capital of British Columbia. I found the rat-eaten log books there in 1889, and begged the Hudson's Bay Company to preserve these precious annals. The memory of them helps my story-telling.

X

The flood tide swept Bill's dinghy up past the Roman fortress of Reculver, on by Whitstable where oyster smacks lay moored, and thence towards the Isle of Sheppey and the Thames. It was only to keep warm that sometimes he would scull, oar over stern, athwart the stream, northward to channels with a stronger tide. Numb with cold, his heart like lead, not caring where he went, hour by hour he sculled until he was tired, or rested until he froze, not caring at all what happened. The new police would catch him if he went ashore, to charge him with murdering his parents, and send him to the gallows; or Uncle Thomas, his owner, would curse him for leaving the barge derelict, the property in law of the first man who went on board. Bill did not care now for Uncle Thomas, or anybody alive, but only in a hard, dry, gnawing grief mourned and was silent. He did not believe any more in God, who had allowed his mother to be murdered; and as to spirits, they were only phantasms of nightmare. A sullen hatred of the world, of men, of everything, of life itself, filled the north wind, the dark spaces of seething water, and the indifferent stars. And on towards dawn he sank down on his knees, his face in his hands, hoping for death, an end of everything. Yet, as he afterwards confessed, when the Beaver's dolphin striker knocked his cap off, and her clipper bows hove the boat's gunwale under, so that she filled and sank beneath his feet, he fought for life as keenly as anybody who enjoyed the same. Groping, so he said, in the dark for hand and foot holds in the hanging wall, he found the anchor astrip, and jumped upon the fluke, swarmed up the shank and chain, then, getting a purchase with one toe in the hawse hole, vaulted across the bulwark.

The lad on lookout squeaked, and ran for all he was worth, reporting a ghost up on the starboard bow.

CHAPTER II
THE VOYAGE OF THE "BEAVER"

I

In sailing-ship days we who were seamen and self-respecting did not join for a voyage while we were sober enough to come on board all of our own accord. It would have been bad form.

So, having shipped her joyful mariners, the Beaver's officers and the afterguard, not more than half-seas over, got the vessel off from Gravesend as best they could, dropping downtide so far as the ebb served, then brought her up in the fairway. They dropped anchor on the Nore, hoisted a riding light, and posted two comparatively sober apprentices to keep each other awake and call the mate at dawn.