Page:Astoria by Irving.djvu/365

Rh royal guards, and take possession of the wreck on behalf of the crown. This was done accordingly, and the property and crew were removed to Owyhee. The royal bounty appears to have been but scanty in its dispensations. The crew fared but meagrely; though on reading the journal of the voyage it is singular to find them, after all the hardships they had suffered, so sensitive about petty inconveniences as to exclaim against the king as a "savage monster," for refusing them a "pot to cook in," and denying Mr. Ogden the use of a knife and fork which had been saved from the wreck.

Such was the unfortunate catastrophe of the Lark; had she reached her destination in safety, affairs at Astoria might have taken a different course. A strange fatality seems to have at. tended all the expeditions by sea, nor were those by land much less disastrous.

Captain Northrop was still at the Sandwich Islands on December 20th, when Mr. Hunt arrived. The latter immediately purchased for ten thousand dollars a brig called the Pedler, and put Captain Northrop in command of her. They set sail for Astoria on the 22d of January, intending to remove the property from thence as speedily as possible to the Russian settlements on the northwest coast, to prevent it from falling into the hands of the British. Such were the orders of Mr. Astor, sent out by the Lark.

We will now leave Mr. Hunt on his voyage, and return to see what has taken place at Astoria during his absence.

the 2d of October, about five weeks after Mr. Hunt had sailed in the Albatross from Astoria, Mr. M'Kenzie set off, with two canoes and twelve men, for the posts of Messrs. Stuart and Clarke, to apprise them of the new arrangements determined upon in the recent conference of the partners at the factory.

He had not ascended the river a hundred miles, when he met a squadron of ten canoes, sweeping merrily down under British colors, the Canadian oarsmen, as usual, in full song.

It was an armament fitted out by M'Tavish, who had with him Mr. J. Stuart, another partner of the Northwest Company, together with some clerks and sixty-eight men—seventy-five