Born 1770 Died 1834 _His eye was not dim Nor his natural force abated_ "This was his wife," Rod pointed. "The first white woman to live on the Pacific coast north of California. That was his youngest son. That was his eldest son, my great-grandfather. And that was his youngest son, who was killed by the Chilcotin Indians on their second raid. There's grandfather's wife, and a son and daughter. There is my mother's grave. And over there is my oldest brother, who died before I was born." "How interesting," the girl murmured. "What an adventurous time these first people of yours must have had." "Rather," Rod agreed, "when you think of some of the things they had to face. Still, by all accounts, they rather enjoyed themselves. It never seems to have occurred to them to go elsewhere. There were lots of men pioneered after Vancouver's first voyage, but all of them except old Roderick seem to have come here to make a fortune in the fur trade and go home to live on their gains. Old Roderick kept a journal all his life. It's a queer matter-of-fact account of what he did, mixed up with a lot of philosophic speculation on why he did it. It appears that from the first time he dropped anchor in Mermaid Bay to wait out a fair tide through the narrows, he had the feeling that right here was the place to make a stand. He says quite frankly in his journal that a few determined men could easily subdue the natives and possess great estates. He says further that shortly after letting go the anchor he saw a hawk fly from its nest in a great tree, and he thought to himself that, by the grace of God and his own resolution, he would some day build on this silent headland a stout nest in which many a brood of Norquays should be hatched. "Imagine a man who had crossed the Atlantic and rounded Cape Horn in a hundred-ton sailing vessel on a fur-trading venture looking at a savage coast and planning to found a family!" "He had vision," Laska supplied. "He needed to have, those days," Rod grinned. "The North Pacific was a fur-trader's paradise, but it was several thousand miles from anything like civilization. Old Roderick knew that well enough. He knew a good deal about this region before he came here on his own hook, you see. He happened out here first when Captain George Vancouver made his voyage of exploration in 1792. He was a petty officer on the _Discovery_. He had the journal habit, even in those days. He tells about the surveys they made that year and the next. The idea of this country--after he'd seen a lot of it--took such a hold of him that three or four years later he got out of the British navy, scraped up all the money he could beg and borrow, outfitted a barque called the _Hermes_ and sailed for the Northwest to make a fortune trading beads and brass wire and Sheffield knives to the Indians for sea-otter skins.