The chief of this village had probably met Captain Cook about ten years before.  He had been down in a large canoe[12] with forty of his people to the seacoast, where he saw two large vessels.

[Footnote 12:  Mackenzie thus describes one of the large sea-going canoes of the coast natives:  “This canoe was built of cedar, forty-five feet long, four feet broad, and three and a half in depth.  It was painted black and decorated with white figures of different kinds.  The gunwale fore and aft was inlaid with the teeth of the sea otter.”  He adds that “these coast tribes (north of Vancouver Island and of Queen Charlotte Sound) had been in indirect contact with the Spaniards since the middle of the sixteenth century, and with the Russians from the middle of the eighteenth century.  Therefore, from these two directions they had learnt the use of metal, and had obtained copper, brass, and iron.  They may possibly have had copper earlier still from the Northern Indians on the other side of the Rocky Mountains; but brass and iron they could, of course, only have obtained from Europeans.  They had already become very deft at dealing with these metals, and twisted the iron into collars which weighed upwards of twelve pounds, also beating it into plates for their daggers and knives.”]

Farther down the river the natives, instead of regaling them with fish, placed before them a long, clean, and well-made trough full of berries, most of them resembling blackberries, though white in colour, and others similar to huckleberries.  In this region the women were employed in beating and preparing the inner rind of the juniper bark, to which they gave the appearance of flax, and others were spinning with a distaff; again, others were weaving robes of this fibrous thread, intermixed with strips of sea-otter skin.  The men were fishing on the river with drag nets between two canoes, thus intercepting the salmon coming up the river.

At last, on Saturday, the 20th of July, 1793, they emerged from the Salmon River into an arm of the sea (probably near King Island).  The tide was out, and had left a large space covered with seaweed.  The surrounding hills were involved in fog....  The bay appeared to be some three miles in breadth, and on the coast the travellers saw a great number of sea otters.[13] At two in the afternoon the swell was so high, and the wind, which was against them, so boisterous, that they could not proceed along the seacoast in their leaky canoe.  A young chief who had come with them as one of their guides, and who had been allowed to leave when the seacoast was reached, returned bearing a large porcupine on his back.  He first cut the animal open and threw its entrails into the sea, then singed the skin and boiled it in separate pieces; nor did he go to rest till, with the assistance of two others who happened to be awake, every morsel of it had been devoured.  This was fortunate, because their stock of provisions was reduced to twenty pounds’ weight of pemmican, sixteen pounds of rice, and six pounds of flour amongst ten men, “in a leaky vessel, and on a barbarous coast”.