“When passing through the watery deep,
I ask in faith His promised aid;
The waves an awful distance keep,
And shrink from my devoted head.
Fearless, their violence I dare,
They cannot harm—for God is there.”
—C. Wesley.
Soon after I got the language of the people, other teachers took the school work, and I went out travelling from place to place, literally “paddling my own canoe.”
There were few steamers in those days, and none between Nanaimo, the centre of our work, and New Westminster and the Fraser River, where I was often called in my labors among the natives.
These trips were invariably made by canoe, except for the chance of catching the river steamer which journeyed from New Westminster to Yale.