Early one morning in April the men cutting timber inland were startled to notice the underbrush alive with warriors armed. The first fear was of an ambush. Cook ordered the men to an isolated rock ready for defence; but the grand _tyee_ or chief explained by signs that his tribe was only keeping off another tribe that wanted to trade with the white men. The worst trouble was from the inordinate thieving propensities of the natives. Iron, nails, belaying pins, rudders, anchors, bits of sail, a spike that could be pulled from the rotten wood of the outer keel by the teeth of a thief paddling below--anything, everything was snatched by the light-fingered gentry. Nor can we condemn them for it. Their moral standard was the Wolf Code of Existence--which the white man has elaborated in his evolution--to take whatever they had the dexterity and strength to take and to keep. When caught in theft, they did not betray as much sense of guilt as a dog stealing a bone. Why should they? Their {189} code was to take. The chief of the Nootkas presented Cook with a sea-otter cloak. Cook reciprocated with a brass-hilted sword. By the end of April the ships had been overhauled, and Cook was ready to sail. Porpoise were coursing the sea like greyhounds, and the stormy petrels in a clatter; but Cook was not to be delayed by storm. Barely had the two ships cleared the harbor, when such a squall broke loose, they could do nothing but scud for open sea, turn tails to the wind, and lie helpless as logs, heads south. If it had not been for this storm, Cook would certainly have discovered that Nootka was on an island, not the coast of the mainland; but by the time the weather permitted an approach to land again, Friday, May 1, the ships were abreast that cluster of islands below the snowy cone of Mt. Edgecumbe, Sitka, where Chirikoff's Russians had first put foot on American soil. Cook was now at the northernmost limit of Spanish voyaging.