apprentice on board the Owyhee. The vessel belonged to Bryant and Sturges, of Boston, and was commanded by Captain Dominis, a well-known sailing master who had his home in the vicinity of that town. He seems to have been a commander who was cheerfully obeyed, for although several of his crew were, like Lemont, lads from Bath who had never been to sea, before they reached Cape Horn they could all "take their tricks at the wheel, and go aloft and reef like old sailors. In a gale off Rio de la Plata Lemont fell from the mast, but was caught in the rigging and saved. With this exception the voyage to the Straits of Magellan was fair, and after getting through that stormy passage the ship had good weather to the Chilean convict island of San Juan Fernandez, where she took water and provisions, as was the custom in those days.
A continuance of favorable winds brought the Owyhee off the Columbia, in April, 1829, though she could not enter until soundings had been taken, and the channel buoyed out. This survey occupied two weeks, the buoys toeing made of stovewood, anchored with cordage made by ravelling condemned cables and twisting three strands into one, making what was called "spun yarn,' which was wound on a wheel and payed out from small boats. This work being completed, the vessel came safely in by the north channel, and felt her way up the river as far as Deer Island, a few miles below Saint Helens, where she ran aground, being compelled to send a boat to Fort Vancouver, the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company in the Oregon Territory, for aid. Chief factor Dr. John McLoughlin not only sent down a crew of kanakas with a mackinaw boat to help the vessel off, but with them a present of potatoes, and a quarter of fresh beef, as a mark of peculiar favor beef cattle being too few and too precious at that period to be slaughtered except upon rare
