or the safest course, because he could not refuse to encourage the right.
As early as 1836 the lever was applied to the foundations of the old society that was destined to overturn it. The boasted civilization of this English company, aristocratic and cultured, could not stand before the face of one white woman. The Nereid, coming from England and the Sandwich Islands, brought a chaplain to Fort Vancouver—a direct result, it may reasonably be inferred, of the American Mission. The name of this new officer on the governor's staff was Rev. Herbert Beaver, an appropriate name for the service, and one which the junior clerks undoubtedly repeated among themselves with the highest satisfaction. Mr Beaver had been chaplain of a regiment at Santa Lucía, in the West Indies. He was of the foxhunting type of English clergymen, and had been much diverted by the manners of his fellow-passenger from Honolulu, Mr Lee, whom he was constantly in the habit of quizzing. From the glimpse Dunn gives of the sentiment of Bachelor's Hall, his gibes at his Methodist brother must have provoked responsive mirth. But the inmates of the fort, grave, dignified, disciplined, and accustomed to respect, did not always escape the reverend gentleman's sallies of wit; nor, as it proved, his strictures on their immoral and uncivilized condition.
Gray, who saw him at Fort Vancouver, describes him as rather a small person, with a light complexion and feminine voice, who made pretensions to oratory, entirely unsupported by the facts. Also, his ideas of clerical dignity were such that he felt himself defiled by association with the gentlemen at Fort Vancouver. McLoughlin was uncivil, the clerks boors, the women savages. Here was a fine beginning of English missionary work! And yet the feudal lords could not deny it. There was Mrs Jane Beaver, who had accompanied her husband. They might kick the chaplain,
