large sawmills, the two products of this district being fish and lumber, and the Chinese, who are numerous, doing most of the labor. BOUND TO ALASKA. Westward from the Gulf of Georgia is Vancouver Island, stretching parallel to the coast and nearly three hundred miles long, the larger part of it being composed of mountains, some reaching an elevation of over seven thousand feet. It has fine forests and valuable coal mines at Nanaimo and Wellington, which furnish fuel supplies along the Pacific coast. The redoubtable Spanish adventurer, Juan de Fuca, discovered it in 1592, and his name was given the strait at its southern extremity, separating the island from the United States. The Spaniards held it until near the close of the eighteenth century, when Captain George Vancouver came with a squadron and it was surrendered to the English by the Spanish Governor Quadra, its name afterwards being called for many years Quadra and Vancouver, after the two officers. Upon a little harbor at the southeastern extremity in 1842, the Hudson Bay Company established Fort Victoria, which has since become the capital of the Province of British Columbia. This is a pleasant city of twenty-five thousand population, having an extensive Chinese quarter. To the westward is the important British naval station and dockyard of Esquimalt, upon an admirable land-locked harbor of large capacity. For over a thousand miles, a series of internal waters behind large islands, with bays, straits and archipelagoes, lead northward from the Gulf of Georgia to Alaska, making one of the most admirable scenic routes in America. Their shores are high mountains covered with superb forests, and the voyage over these waters is most attractive. From the Gulf of Georgia the route passes through Discovery Passage, the Seymour Narrows (where the tide rushes sometimes at twelve knots an hour), Johnstone Strait, Broughton Strait, and Queen Charlotte Sound. North of Vancouver Island there is a short passage on the open sea and then Fitzhugh Sound is entered, opening into the Lama Passage and Seaforth Channel to Millbank Sound, where there is another brief open sea journey. Then various interior waters lead to Greenville Channel and Chatham Sound. High mountains are everywhere, and deep, narrow fiords run far up into the land, the journey displaying so much magnificent scenery that the mind soon becomes satiated with the excessive supply of unadulterated grandeur. In this region is the Nasse River, where in the spring the Indians catch the Oulichan or "candle-fish," which gives them light, this fish being so full of oil that when dry and provided with a wick it burns like a candle. Just beyond is the boundary of Alaska at fifty-four degrees forty minutes north latitude, the famous "fifty-four forty or fight" boundary of 1843, when the United States claimed that Oregon extended up to the Russian territory at that latitude, but afterwards abandoned the claim.