164 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



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had rounded Devil's l\ock, upon wliicli 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 Gra- 

 ham 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 gain- 

 ing 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 

 Ijroke upon the rocks. 

 Drenched to the skin, the 

 A Tattooed Haida uk Maj^set. 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 IsTorth, 

 gallops over the plain in the West, or sleeps in his hammock in the 



