Don’t wonder if the missionary, above every other man, should be a strong total abstainer and hate the very sight of liquor or its trade. CHAPTER XIV. _SOME PERILOUS CANOE TRIPS._ “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. The canoes of the Pacific Coast are of the type usually called “dug-outs,” that is to say, they are mostly cut out of a cedar log. In the south, the large ones were spoken of as “Chinook” canoes, with rather a stub or short stern and a very high bow or neck. There were a great variety of smaller canoes used for hunting and fishing, as well as what they called a “spoon canoe,” flat-bottomed and nearly straight, with hardly any bow or stern, which was used for travelling on very shallow rivers. These latter were often made of cottonwood, while the other types were always made of cedar. The largest canoes were made in the north. The great war-canoes, with a very heavy bow and stern, and capable of carrying easily fifty or sixty people, were so shaped that, when properly managed, they would sail over almost any sea. The Hydahs of Queen Charlotte Islands made the largest and best canoes; they had larger cedar trees on their islands than could be found on the mainland opposite. These canoes were often from thirty to forty feet long and five or six feet beam, a beautiful model, with gracefully shaped bow and stern, that would in English phraseology be called a “clipper” for sailing. One of the largest of these canoes, seventy feet in length by eight feet beam, was presented to Lord Lorne when he visited British Columbia during his term of administration as Governor-General of Canada.