This dry meat, and smoke-dried fish, constituted our daily food, and that in very insufficient quantity for hardworking men.

"We had no bread, and vegetables, of course, were quite out of the question.

In a word our fare was not sumptuous.

Those who accommodated themselves best to our mode of living were the Sandwich-islanders: salmon and elk were to them exquisite viands.
On the 11th of August a number of Chinooks visited us, bringing a strange Indian, who had, they said, something interesting to communicate.

This savage told us, in fact, that he had been engaged with ten more of his countrymen, by a Captain _Ayres_, to hunt seals on the islands in _Sir Francis Drake's Bay_, where these animals are very numerous, with a promise of being taken home and paid for their services; the captain had left them on the islands, to go southwardly and purchase provisions, he said, of the Spaniards of Monterey in California; but he had never returned: and they, believing that he had been wrecked, had embarked in a skiff which he had left them, and had reached the main land, from which they were not far distant; but their skiff was shattered to pieces in the surf, and they had saved themselves by swimming.