Page:History of California, Volume 3 (Bancroft).djvu/421

Rh the bare record of their presence; and some are not mentioned at all, though known to have been in the country earlier and later.

Under date of 1831 may be noticed the visit of David Douglas, the famous Scotch botanist. He had spent five or six years in the north in an earnest and adventurous search for botanical specimens, as elsewhere related, and he came down from the Columbia on the Dryad to investigate the flora of California, arriving ať Monterey in December 1830. He brought letters from Captain Beechey to Hartnell, with whose family he became very intimate, and by whose aid he easily obtained in April a carta de seguridad to prosecute his researches for six months. He remained in the country twenty months. His name appears on the rolls of the compañía extrangera in January 1832; and in a table of latitudes and longitudes promised to Governor Victoria and subsequently furnished to Figueroa, the variation of the compass at Monterey is dated August 1832. Parry quotes a letter to Hooker, written at Monterey November 23, 1831, in which is given a slight description of the country and of the writer's botanical discoveries, but nothing of his personal adventures. He hoped to secure a passage to the Columbia River direct, but was obliged to wait until August 1832, and sail on an American schooner for Honolulu, and thence to Vancouver in October. There was a current rumor in later years that he had