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Robert Carlton Clark

est wonder and delight. In September, 1788, Tianna returned to his island home with Meares who went there for the winter.

In the year 1788 when Portlock and Dixon again stopped at the islands on their way to China they found the natives over joyed to see them. Tyheira, the son of the king, brought his wife and children on board the ship to greet Captain Dixon. He had named his oldest son "Po Pate" after Portlock and the younger son "Dittiana" for Dixon. Both captains testify to many acts of kindness shown them by the natives that proved them far from being destitute of fine feelings.[1]

In 1789, Meares sent two vessels on which 70 Chinamen were embarked to Nootka to establish a permanent trading post. He planned to provide the Chinamen with Hawaiian wives and thus start a settlement to be named Fort Pitt. The Spaniards, however, seized his vessels before his project could be carried out.

When the Americans entered the fur trade of the Pacific in 1788 they, like the British, stopped at the Hawaiian Islands. The relations of the traders with the natives were not always friendly. At times there were quarrels in which lives were lost. Simon Metcalf, an American trader, in 1789, after a quarrel with the natives killed 100 of them in the conflict that ensued. Later a son of Metcalf and four of his crew lost their lives in an attack by natives. John Young, a member of the crew of the elder Metcalf, however, entered the service of the Hawaiian king, Kamehameha, became his cabinet counselor and ruler of the island of Owyhee until his death in 1842. When Captain Robert Gray returned to Boston in 1790 from his first "voyage of adventure to the North-West Coast of America" he had on board his ship Columbia a native of the Hawaiian Islands.[2] On her voyage from Nootka to Canton the Columbia stopped 24 days at the Hawaiian Islands for provisions, having arrived August 24, 1789. At the island of Niihau a young Hawaiian chief named Attoo was taken aboard as servant to Captain

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  1. Dixon, Voyage, (London, 1789), 252-59.
  2. Howay, "Voyages of Kendrick and Gray in 1787-90," Oregon Historical Quarterly, XXX, 93.