It need not be wondered at, if, under the influence of such extravagant expectations, many applicants appeared; but in accordance with Astor’s plan, that the business should be carried on only by persons of well-tested merit and experience, for on their habits of perseverance and enterprise alone rested all hopes {10} of ultimate success, his assistants were selected with more than ordinary care, every poor fellow that engaged being led to believe that his fortune was already made. Here Messrs. Franchère, Pillet, M‘Gillis, Farnham, and M‘Lennan, besides Mr. Stuart and myself, joined the adventurers;[9] besides five tradesmen or mechanics, and twenty-four canoe men, the best that could be found of their classes. Operations were now deemed requisite for the accomplishment of the Company’s views; therefore, while one party, headed by Mr. Hunt, was ordered to make its way across the Continent by land, another party, headed by Mr. M‘Kay, was to proceed by sea in the _Tonquin_, a ship of 300 tons, and mounting twelve guns. The _Tonquin’s_ course was round Cape Horn, for the north-west coast. The Columbia River was to be the common destination of both parties. The land party at its outset consisted of only seventeen persons, but Mr. Hunt’s object was to augment that number to about eighty as he passed along, by means of American trappers and hunters from the south. Here M‘Kenzie strongly recommended Mr. Hunt to take all his men from Canada, as too much time might probably be lost in collecting them from the south; and besides, Canadians, as he thought, would answer much better; but Mr. Hunt adhered to his first plan. The arrangement of these two expeditions, in which M‘Kay, whose life had been spent in voyaging through the Indian countries, and who was nowise {11} qualified as a merchant, had resigned the inland voyage to a gentleman, bred to mercantile pursuits, but unacquainted with this new mode of travelling, exhibited such an egregious inversion of the ordinary rules of prudence, as gave rise to much comment.