vancouvek's laboks. 



of thirteen guns, which was done ; while other courtesies were 

 cordially exchanged. The ceremony then took place. Van- 

 couver now returned to Owhyhee, and the king, smitten by a 

 sudden and vehement attachment for the English, proposed to 

 make over the island to the dominion of the King of England. 

 All the insular dignitaries assembled on the decks of the Dis- 

 covery, and the surrender was -made in the midst of speeches 

 and cannonades. Vancouver did not seem to have been deeply 

 impressed with the importance of this event. The solemnity 

 of the transaction was not increased by the circumstance that it 

 took * place upon the spot where Cook had so recently been 

 massacred. 



Returning to the north, Vancouver continued his surveys and 

 explorations of the American coast as far as the fifty-sixth 

 degree of latitude. He terminated his operations on the 22d 

 of August, at Port Conclusion, where an additional allowance 

 of grog was served, that the day might be celebrated with 

 proper festivity. He returned to Europe with the certitude 

 that no passage existed from the North Pacific across the 

 American continent into the Atlantic. His surveys remain as 

 a monument of his activity, skill, and perseverance. The pre- 

 sent charts of the coast of North America upon the Pacific are 

 based upon them. More than nine thousand miles of shore, 

 with its headlands, capes, rivers, bays, promontories, and laby- 

 rinths of islands, had been carefully explored by surveying 

 parties in boats, in superintending which Vancouver injured his 

 health and brought on the decline which terminated in his 

 death, in the year 1798, at the early age of forty-eight. 



We have now to record the remarkable series of acts by 

 which the United States of America, in the twenty-fifth year 

 of their existence as a nation, put an end to a humiliation to 

 which the commercial powers of Europe had submitted for cen- 

 turies. From the time when the Spanish Moors, driven out of 

 Granada by Ferdinand the Catholic, settled on the opposite 



