Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 2.djvu/56

40 of the Hudson's Bay Company, and the attentions of Doctor McLoughlin, who labored faithfully, but in vain, to arrest the disease. It is stated that this epidemic, extending even to the Bay of San Francisco, carried off about thirty thousand Indians on the Pacific Coast.

During the two fishing seasons passed on the Columbia, Captain Dominis put up fifty hogsheads of salmon, which sold in Boston at ten cents per pound in April, 1831. The home voyage was made by the way of the Sandwich Islands, and among the passengers picked up was Captain Hallowell, master of the first missionary packet to the islands, who returned in the Owyhee to Boston.

I suggested to the narrator of these reminiscences connected with the noble river at our feet, that for a first voyage he must have felt himself a long time and a long way from home. "Yes," said he, raising his head to snuff anew the sea air blowing up the stream, "I didn't know I was homesick; until I happened at the islands to recognize the brig Diana, which was built in Bath. Then my heart jumped up in my mouth and I wanted to get home."

The homeward voyage was without noteworthy incident, except that the vessel was becalmed off Rio Janeiro for forty days. At the end of the thirtieth day Captain Dominis announced to his crew that the winds of heaven were all blown out; but that night it "came on to rain, as in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, giving them fresh water, of which they were greatly in need, and in another ten days the ship was going before a favorable breeze, arriving at her berth in April.

Captain Dominis, in later years, returned to settle at the Sandwich Islands and purchased the brig Diana. At length he took a voyage in her, from which he never returned; nor was he ever afterward heard of,