Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/178

164 had rounded Devil's Rock, upon which the ill-fated Mexico was to strike only a few days later. At one o'clock we were within sight of Tow Hill, the most prominent point of the northeast shore of Graham Island. And then the wind veered to the west again. Harder and harder it blew until the sea was lashed into white foam. For twenty-six hours we beat in the face of that wind, now gaining a little to the west, now carried toward Rose Spit by a current which seemed stronger than the gale, and now so close to the shore that we could all too plainly hear the roar of the surf as it broke upon the rocks. Drenched to the skin, the waves breaking over us every few minutes, the air filled with spray, our boat half full of water at times, we passed twenty-six hours of wretchedness, misery, and abject fear. At times we were only a few feet from waves which, had they broken a little nearer, would have filled our boat and lowered us away to the bottom of the sea.

On the following afternoon we began to put miles between our boat and Tow Hill, and were nearing the mouth of Masset Inlet. With one more tack we have rounded the point and are headed due south, and a favorable tide bears us rapidly down the inlet; a minute more and we sight Masset—a strange, quaint little sleepy village, with its tall totem poles and row of cottages.

Masset is one of the two villages which to-day make up all that is left of the Haida nation on the Queen Charlotte Islands. The Haidas numbered seven thousand in 1840, and counted over thirty villages. To-day there are two inhabited villages and less than one thousand Haidas. They are a doomed race. Wars, smallpox, gross immorality, a change from old ways to new ways—their fate is the common fate of the American, whether he sails the sea in the North, gallops over the plain in the West, or sleeps in his hammock in the