E-text prepared by Al Haines Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 19765-h.htm or 19765-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/9/7/6/19765/19765-h/19765-h.htm) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/9/7/6/19765/19765-h.zip) Transcriber's note: Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {vi} or {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book, in accordance with Project Gutenberg's FAQ-V-99. For its Index, page numbers have been placed only at the start of that section. VIKINGS OF THE PACIFIC The Adventures of the Explorers Who Came from the West, Eastward Bering, the Dane; the Outlaw Hunters of Russia; Benyowsky, the Polish Pirate; Cook and Vancouver, the English Navigators; Gray of Boston, the Discoverer of the Columbia; Drake, Ledyard, and Other Soldiers of Fortune on the West Coast of America by A. C. LAUT Author of "Pathfinders of the West," Etc. [Frontispiece: Seal Rookery, Commander Islands.] New York The MacMillan Company London: MacMillan & Co., Ltd. 1905 All rights reserved Copyright, 1905, by the MacMillan Company. Set up and electrotyped. Published December, 1905. {vii} Foreword At the very time the early explorers of New France were pressing from the east, westward, a tide of adventure had set across Siberia and the Pacific from the west, eastward. Carrier and Champlain of New France in the east have their counterparts and contemporaries on the Pacific coast of America in Francis Drake, the English pirate on the coast of California, and in Staduchin and Deshneff and other Cossack plunderers of the North Pacific, whose rickety keels first ploughed a furrow over the trackless sea out from Asia. Marquette, Jolliet and La Salle--backed by the prestige of the French government are not unlike the English navigators, Cook and Vancouver, sent out by the English Admiralty. Radisson, privateer and adventurer, might find counterpart on the Pacific coast in either Gray, the discoverer of the Columbia, or Ledyard, whose ill-fated, wildcat plans resulted in the Lewis and Clark expedition. Bering was contemporaneous with La Verendrye; and so the comparison might be carried on between Benyowsky, the Polish pirate of the Pacific, or the Outlaw Hunters of Russia, and the famous buccaneers of the eastern Spanish Main. The main point is--that both tides {viii} of adventure, from the east, westward, from the west, eastward, met, and clashed, and finally coalesced in the great fur trade, that won the West.