But as the man bragged he kept twitching the rope, and down fell the pot, smash on the ground, and broken all to pieces. Now as to the first white man who came up Skeena River: A very old man of Kitzelash remembered that when he was a boy he stood on the banks of the cañon and there came a canoe with a white man, a big chief called Manson, a Spaniard, and a black man, all searching for gold. He remembered that first one man sang a queer song and then they all took it up and sang, laughing together. A middle-aged man of Gaet-wan-gak remembered that in his childhood a canoe came up the river full of Indians, and with two white men. Nobody had ever seen the like, and they took the strangers for ghosts, so that the women ran away and hid. The ghosts gave them bread, but they spat it out because it was ghost food and had no taste. They offered tea, but the people spat it out, because it was like earth water out of graves. Rice, too, they would not touch, for it was like--perhaps one should not say what that was like. XLVI THE BEAVER In the heart of the city of Victoria I once found an old log barn, the last remnant of Fort Camosun, and climbing into the loft, kicked about in a heap of rubbish from which emerged some damp rat-gnawed manuscript books. From morning to evening, and far into the dusk, I sat reading there the story of a great adventuress, a heroine of tonnage and displacement, the first steamer which ever plied on the Pacific Ocean. Her builders were Messrs. Boulton and Watt, and Watt was the father of steam navigation. She was built at Blackwall on London River in the days of George IV. She was launched by a duchess in a poke bonnet and shawl, who broke a bottle of wine against the ship’s nose and christened her the _Beaver_. Then the merchant adventurers of the Hudson’s Bay Company, in bell toppers, Hessian boots and white chokers, gave three hearty cheers. The _Beaver_ was as ugly as it was safe to make her, but built of honest oak, and copper bolted, her engines packed in the hold, and her masts brigantine-rigged for the sailing voyage round Cape Horn. She went under convoy of the barque _Columbia_, a slow and rather helpless chaperon, who fouled and nearly wrecked her at Robinson Crusoe’s Island. Her master, to judge by the ship’s books, was a peppery little beast, who logged the mate for a liar: “Not correct D. Home;” drove his officers until they went sick, quarreled with the _Columbia’s_ doctor, found his chief engineer “in a beastly state of intoxication,” and finally, at the Columbia River, hounded his crew into mutiny.