Next came the customs officer, a relative of Sir Alexander MacKenzie’s, called Reid, a dissipated old man, creating bedlam and endless delay examining the colonists’ baggage. MacDonell saw clearly that if he was to have any colonists left he must put to sea that very night; but out rows another sham officer of the law, a Captain MacKenzie, to bawl out the Emigration Act from his boat alongside “to know if every man was going of his own free will.” Exasperated beyond patience, some of the colonists answered by heaving a nine-pound cannon ball into the captain’s rowboat. It knocked a hole through the bottom, and compelled MacKenzie to swim ashore. Back came another rowboat with challenge to a duel for this insult; but the baggage was all on board. By the grace of Heaven, a wind sprang up. At 11 P. M. on the 25th of July, the three Hudson’s Bay ships spread their sails to the wind and left in such haste they forgot their convoy, forgot two passengers on land whom Robertson rowed out like mad and put on board, forgot to fire farewell salutes to the harbor master; in fact, sailed with such speed that one colonist, who had lost his courage and wanted to desert, had to spring overboard and swim ashore. Such was the departure of the first colonists for the Great Northwest. The passage was the longest ever experienced by the Company’s ships. Sixty-one days it took for these Pilgrims of the Plains to cross the ocean. Storm succeeded storm. The old fur freighters wallowed in the waves like water-logged tubs, straining to the pounding seas as if the timbers would part, sails flapping to the wind tattered and rotten as the ensigns of pirates. MacDonell was furious that the colonists should have been risked on such old hulks, and recommended the dismissal of all three captains--Hanwell, Ramsey and Turner; but these mariners of the North probably knew their business when they lowered sails and lay rolling to the sea. In vain MacDonell tried to break the monotony of the long voyage, by auctioning the baggage of the deserters, by games and martial drill. One Walker stood forward and told him to his face that “they had not come to fight as soldiers for the Hudson’s Bay Company: they had come as free settlers”; besides, he spread the report that the country did not belong to the Hudson’s Bay anyway; the country had been found by the French and belonged to the Nor’Westers. MacDonell probably guessed the rest--the fellow had been primed.