The surrounding hills were involved in fog....

The bay appeared to be some three miles in breadth, and on the coast the travellers saw a great number of sea otters.[13] At two in the afternoon the swell was so high, and the wind, which was against them, so boisterous, that they could not proceed along the seacoast in their leaky canoe.

A young chief who had come with them as one of their guides, and who had been allowed to leave when the seacoast was reached, returned bearing a large porcupine on his back.

He first cut the animal open and threw its entrails into the sea, then singed the skin and boiled it in separate pieces; nor did he go to rest till, with the assistance of two others who happened to be awake, every morsel of it had been devoured.

This was fortunate, because their stock of provisions was reduced to twenty pounds' weight of pemmican, sixteen pounds of rice, and six pounds of flour amongst ten men, "in a leaky vessel, and on a barbarous coast".
[Footnote 13: These _may_ have been small seals, but the sea otter (_Enhydris lutris_), now nearly extinct, was at one time found in numbers along the north-west American coast, from the Aleutian Islands and Alaska to Oregon.