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- 198 REMINISCENCES OF OLD VICTORIA
immense stamp and the image was punched on under a pressure of one hundred and twenty-eight tons. They were then coins, and after several other examinations were cooled and passed, one being handed around for our inspection. In addition to the dollar we saw the same routine gone through in making a copper cent piece. I tried to get one, but he said every one was counted and must be produced. There were several who wanted souvenirs and wished to pay for them. We were counted again, signed our names and left.
CHAPTER XXVI.
AN HISTORIC STEAMER.
THE following interesting account of the historic steamer Beaver, the first to round the Horn into the Pacific, will be read by native sons as well as pioneers with renewed interest, as it is many years since this account was published.
The Beaver lay off the old Customs House for a long time, until taken by the Admiralty for hydrographic work. When done with for that purpose she was sold for mercantile purposes again.
For some years she was in charge of my old friend, Captain " Wully Mutchell," as he was called by his friends, and he had many, for he was as jolly as a sand-boy and always joking, in fact more like a man of fifty instead of eighty, as he really was.
" More than thirty-nine years have passed and a generation of men have come and gone since the Hudson's Bay Company's steamer Beaver, whose sale was chronicled yesterday, floated with the tide down the River Thames, through the British Channel, and went out into the open, trackless sea, rounded Cape Horn, clove the placid waters of the Pacific Ocean, and anchored at length, after a passage that lasted one hundred and sixty-three days, at Astoria on the Columbia River, then the chief ` town' on the Pacific Coast. Built and equipped at a period when the problem of steam marine navigation was yet to be solved, is it any
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