Before doubling the Horn the Isaac Todd was to sail from Quebec to England for convoy of a war-ship. The Nor' Westers naïve assurance of victory was only exceeded by their utter indifference to danger, difficulty, and distance in the attainment of an end. In view of the terror which the Isaac Todd was alleged to have inspired in MacDougall's mind, it is interesting to know what the Nor' Westers thought of their ship. "_A twenty-gun letter of marque with a mongrel crew_," writes MacDonald of Garth, "_a miserable sailor with a miserable commander and a rascally crew_." On the way out MacDonald transferred to the British convoy Raccoon, leaving the frisky old Governor MacTavish with his gay barmaid Jane[19] drinking pottle deep on the Isaac Todd, where the rightly disgusted captain was not on speaking terms with his Excellency. "_We were nearly six weeks before we could double Cape Horn, and were driven half-way to the Cape of Good Hope; ... at last doubled the cape under topsails, ... the deck one sheet of ice for six weeks, ... our sails one frozen sheet; ... lost sight of the Isaac Todd in a gale_," wrote MacDonald on the Raccoon. It will be remembered that Hunt's overlanders arrived at Astoria months after the Pacific Company's ship. Such swift coasters of the wilderness were the Nor' Westers, this overland party came sweeping down the Columbia, ten canoes strong, hale, hearty, singing as they paddled, a month before the Raccoon had come, six months before their own ship, the Isaac Todd. And what did MacDougall do? Threw open his gates in welcome, let an army of eighty rivals camp under shelter of his fort guns, demeaned himself into a pusillanimous, little, running fetch-and-carry at the beck of the Nor' Westers, instead of keeping sternly inside his fort, starving rivals into surrender, or training his cannon upon them if they did not decamp. Alexander Henry, the partner at the head of these dauntless Nor' Westers, says their provisions were "nearly all gone." But, oh! the bragging _voyageurs_ told those quaking Astorians terrible things of what the Isaac Todd would do. There were to be British convoys and captures and prize-money and prisoners of war carried off to Sainte Anne alone knew where. The American-born scorned these exaggerated yarns, knowing their purpose, but not so MacDougall. All his pot-valiant courage sank at the thought of the Isaac Todd, and when the campers ran up a British flag he forbade the display of American colours above Astoria. The end of it was that he sold out Mr. Astor's interests at forty cents on the dollar, probably salving his conscience with the excuse that he had saved that percentage of property from capture by the Raccoon.