Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/46

 But with Parson Fletcher, voyaging with Drake, leaving the manuscript of The World Encompassed and gladdening us with his charming mendacity, we can get along in the particular instances even without the great Shakespeare. The one-eyed Captain Gray was an alert seaman, seeing with his single good eye what no Englishman or Spaniard had vision to see—the current of a mighty river meeting the tides of the ocean in a tumultuous embrace. All the captains of ships that congregated at Nootka respected Gray. He was an able and enterprising captain, but was not a brilliant writer. Fortunately, however, he had on board a young man of 18 who could write very entertainingly; and it is just as well for literature, though not so well perhaps for history and geography, that since of two manuscripts a large portion of one was to become lost, it was the log of Captain Gray and not of John Boit.

Sometimes in our journeyings today, transporting ourselves back in association with certain spots of historic geography, we like to fancy how it was in Oregon before the white man left his traces upon the country. The old discoverers and explorers, the first white men, satisfy this mood of retrospection, satisfy it in the way of literature, if we read that they said first-hand and in detail and not what has been said about them by historians.

In some of the larger libraries of the state, particularly the State Library, the Portland Library, the State Historical Society Library and the University of Oregon Library, these accounts are numerous; but most people have been accustomed to get along with only a historian's digests of what the old explorers did and