58 
THROUGH WONDERLAND. 
charts. A huge yellow bluff, projecting into the sea, greets the eye as the 
passage is approached, and the great, wide channel to the east is the one 
the tourist has selected as a matter of course for the steamer to pursue; but 
she agreeably disappoints him, and enters the narrow, picturesque way. This 
Discovery Passage is a Yankee “find,” having first been entered by a Bos¬ 
ton sloop, the “Washington,” in 1789. The broad right-hand passage could 
have been taken, as the land to our right is an island (of which the yellow 
clay bluff is the southern cape), called Valdez Island after an ancient mari¬ 
ner who visited this part of the world in 1792, in the Spanish galleon “Mex- 
icana.” At first one is slightly nonplused at the frequency of Spanish names 
in these quarters; but, as the early history of the country is closely searched, 
the conclusion is forced on one more and more that these old Castilian nav¬ 
igators have not even got their dues, and, where their names once formed 
an honorable majority, they have slowly disappeared before the constant 
revisions of the geographers and hydrographers of another people, who have 
since acquired possession. We will come to many such changes of nomen¬ 
clature on our interesting trip. 
About two miles from the entrance to Discovery Passage we come to the 
Indian Village of Yaculta, on Valdez Island. It is the first of many we will see 
before we return to Victoria again, and, like most of them, it is on one of 
the narrow, level places between the high hills and the deep sea that happens 
here and there in this Alpine country ; or its inhabitants would have to live in 
the trees on the steep hillsides, or in their canoes on the water. The large river 
coming in from the Vancouver Island side, some five or six miles from the 
entrance to the passage, is Campbell river, and is navigable for some distance 
inland by boats and canoes. 
About half way through Discovery .Passage we come to the Seymour 
Narrows, a contracted channel of the passage, about two miles long, and 
not much over one-fourth the previous width, where the tides rush through 
with the velocity of the swiftest rivers (said to be nine knots at spring- 
tides), a Current which is so strong that it is generally calculated upon 
in departing from Victoria so as to reach this point about slack water. In 
the narrows is a submerged rock, with the pretty-sounding alliterative title 
of Ripple Rock, on which the United States man-of-war “Saranac” was 
lost in the summer of 1875. Ripple Rock is now so well marked that it 
is no longer dangerous to navigation. Northward from the narrows the 
hills rise in bold gradients, making the change quite noticeable, and more 
picturesque. 
Chatham Point marks the northern entrance to Discovery Passage, and here 
the tourist apparently sees the inland passage bearing off slightly to the east 
from this cape, when, with a sudden swerve to the westward, the ship swings 
around at full right angles to her original course, and enters a channel which a 
minute before seemed to be but a bay on the west side of the original water¬ 
way. The new channel is Johnstone Strait, and is over twice as long as Dis- 
