The chief came on board the steamer whilst the anchor was being weighed. Imagine what I felt when he seated himself deliberately upon the cask wherein I had hid his property. The wished-for moment came, the wheels splashed slowly round, my plundered friend was bowed over the side, and not until the smoke of the lodge-fires, and the fading outline of the village, grew dim in the distance, did I feel my scalp safe. The head is now in the Osteological Room of the British Museum, and well worth investigation by any who may be curious to compare the effect of circular pressure with that of the flat-head.[5] Skulls similarly flattened were also brought by me from Vancouver Island. We again called at Nanaimo on our return, and, whilst ‘coaling,’ delivered the ransomed lady safely into the hands of her owner. At the same time three hundred Indians from Queen Charlotte’s Island landed, _en route_ to Victoria, arriving in large canoes, each holding about twenty Indians and their baggage. These canoes were not at all similar to any I had seen at Fort Rupert, or to those used by the Coast and Fraser river Indians. The shape was similar to the boats one sees in very old pictures, filled with sailors in armour, the bow and stern carved to represent a neck, bearing on it some hideous grinning monster’s head. Their chief, named Edin-saw, once saved the crew of a small schooner, the ‘Susan Sturges,’ from being killed by the islanders under his control. The vessel was wrecked on Queen Charlotte’s Island, and the crew subsequently ransomed. This little army of savages reached Victoria safely, having taken four months to make the voyage threading all the difficult and dangerous straits, with the risk of capture from other tribes, exposed to all the vicissitudes of weather, in open canoes as easily upset as a child’s cradle. Reaching Victoria in safety, I proceeded up the Fraser, and for the first time witnessed sturgeon-spearing. CHAPTER VII. STURGEON-SPEARING—MANSUCKER—CLAMS. The Sturgeon found in North-western waters differs only in some unimportant specific distinctions from the one living in the pond of the Zoological Society’s Gardens, in the Regent’s Park. _Accipenser transmontanus_ is the name given by Sir J. Richardson to sturgeon that frequent rivers that flow into the St. Lawrence, on the east side of the Rocky Mountains, but unknown in streams that fall into the Arctic Ocean. On the western side sturgeon abound in the Columbia, Fraser, and most other rivers as far north as lat. 53° N. It is certainly not a handsome fish to look at, reminding one of a shark in armour; yet, clad as he is from head to tail in bony mail, every movement is easy and graceful.