“Mr. Phillips and Mr. Wilson behaved,” says the mate, “in a most mutinous manner.” So the captain had all hands aft to witness their punishment with the cat-o’-nine-tails. Phillips called on the crew to rescue him, and they went for the captain. Calling for his sword, the skipper defended himself like a man, wounding one seaman in the head. Then he “succeeded in tying up Phillips, and punishing him with two dozen lashes with a rope’s end over his clothes,” whereupon William Wilson demanded eleven strokes for himself, so sharing the fun, for better or worse, with a shipmate. Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia River, an old stockade of the Nor’westers, was at this time the Hudson’s Bay Company’s capital on the Pacific coast, where reigned the great Doctor McLauchlan, founder of Oregon. Here the _Beaver_ shipped her paddles, started up her engines, and gave an excursion trip for the ladies. So came her voyage under steam out in the open Pacific of eight hundred miles to her station on the British Columbian coast. She sailed on the last day of May in 1836, two years before the Atlantic was crossed under steam. On the Vancouver coast she discovered an outcrop of steam coal, still the best to be had on the Pacific Ocean. In her days of glory, the _Beaver_ was a smart little war-ship trading with the savages, or bombarding their villages, all the way from Puget Sound to Alaska. In her middle age she was a survey vessel exploring Wonderland. In her old age the boiler leaked, so that the engineer had to plug the holes with a rag on a pointed stick. She was a grimy tug at the last, her story forgotten; and after fifty-two years of gallant service, was allowed to lie a weed-grown wreck within a mile of the new City of Vancouver, until a kindly storm gave her the honor of sea burial. It was in 1851 that the _Beaver_ brought to the factor at Fort Simpson some nuggets of the newly discovered Californian gold. At first he refused to take the stuff in trade, next bought it in at half its value, and finally showed it to Edenshaw, head chief of the Haida nation. As each little yellow pebble was worth a big pile of blankets, the chief borrowed a specimen and showed it to his tribe in the Queen Charlotte Islands.