[83] Of David Thompson we get a portrait from Mr. H. H. Bancroft. He was, he says, "of an entirely different order of man from the orthodox fur-trader. Tall and fine looking, with sandy complexion, with large features, deep-set studious eyes, high forehead and broad shoulders, the intellectual was set upon the physical. His deeds have never been trumpeted as have those of some of the others; but in the westward explorations of the North-West Company, no man performed more valuable service or estimated his achievements more modestly. Unhappily his last days were not as pleasant as fell to the lot of some of the worn out members of the Company. He retired, almost blind, to Lachine House, once the headquarters of the Company, where he was met with in 1831 in a very decrepit condition." CHAPTER XXVIII. 1787-1808. Captain Vancouver -- La Pérouse in the Pacific -- The Straits of Anian -- A Fantastic Episode -- Russian Hunters and Traders -- The Russian Company -- Dissensions amongst the Northmen -- They send the _Beaver_ to Hudson's Bay -- The Scheme of Mackenzie a Failure -- A Ferocious Spirit Fostered -- Abandoned Characters -- A series of Outrages -- The affair at Bad Lake. When Mackenzie, in July, 1793, reached the Pacific by land from the east, he had been preceded by sea only three years by Captain George Vancouver, the discoverer of the British Columbian coast. The same year Gray, sailing from Boston in 1790, entered the Columbia River farther south. But the title of Muscovy to the northern coasts had already been made good by several Russians since Bering's time, and the Company's charter secured to them the lands drained by the Fraser, Mackenzie, and Peace rivers, to the west. [Sidenote: La Pérouse in the Pacific.] So little, however, was the Russian title recognized for some time, that when this unfortunate expedition of La Pérouse, with the frigates _Boussole_ and _Astralabe_, stopped on this coast in 1787, that doughty destroyer of York and Prince of Wales' Forts did not hesitate to consider the friendly harbour in latitude 58° 36' as open to permanent occupation. Describing this harbour, which he named Port des François, he says that nature seemed to have created at this extremity of the world a port like that of Toulon, but vaster in plan and accommodation; and then, considering that it had never been discovered before, that it was situated thirty-three leagues north-west of Remedios, the limit of Spanish navigation, about two hundred and eighty-four leagues from Nootka, and one hundred leagues from Prince William Sound. The mariner records his judgment that "if the French Government had any project of a factory on this coast no nation could have the slightest right to oppose it." [Illustration: DE L'ISLE'S MAP, 1752.]