Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 22.djvu/270

258 This journal of John Boit was published in volume 53 of The Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. That portion of it recording the movements of the Columbia while on this coast was reprinted in The Washington Historical Quarterly, volume XII, No. I. The Oregon Historical Society would here express highest appreciation of the courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society in granting it the privilege of reprinting this document. To the Washington State University Historical Society it is indebted for the use of the annotations made by Professor Edmond S. Meany in his reprint. The items of bibliography in Professor Meany's Introduction are exceedingly valuable.

The considerations that compel the reprinting complete of the Boit log of the Columbia in the Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society are connected primarily with the specially planned annotations with which it here appears. And the command of this source record as a whole enables us also more easily to see the wider relations and meaning of this voyage and thus to connect the flow of our Pacific northwest history with the currents of the world's greatest movements. This document contains the record of a close inspection of this coast line through two summers by an experienced navigator spying out opportunities for trade with the native tribes. The Columbia passed up and down the stretch of coast from Cape Blanco at about the 43d parallel to the 55th parallel and beyond, covering a large portion of it half-a-dozen times and nearly all of it as many as four times. This log registers the latitude and longitude from observations taken regularly of the vessel's position. Through annotations on the entries of such a record that utilize critically all the sources of light from other MS. and printed records of exploration available, this document becomes the best guiding clue through the somewhat labyrinthine confusion necessarily created by the conditions under which these sources of the exploration history of the Pacific Northwest were produced. Both the region to be explored and the combination of explorers participating were factors in creating this confusion. The intricacy of the coast line indentations north of the Straits of Juan de Fuca and the