Norton Sound was explored on the way back; and October saw Cook down at Oonalaska, where Ledyard was sent overland across the island to conduct the { 196} Russian traders to the English ships. Three Russians came to visit Cook. One averred that he had been with Bering on the expedition of 1741, and the rough adventurers seemed almost to worship the Dane's memory. Later came Ismyloff, chief factor of the Russian fur posts in Oonalaska, attended by a retinue of thirty native canoes, very suave as to manners, very polished and pompous when he was not too convivial, but very chary of any information to the English, whose charts he examined with keenest interest, giving them to understand that the Empress of Russia had first claim to all those parts of the country, rising, quaffing a glass and bowing profoundly as he mentioned the august name. "Friends and fellow-countrymen glorious," the English were to the smooth-tongued Russian, as they drank each other's health. Learning that Cook was to visit Avacha Bay, Ismyloff proffered a letter of introduction to Major Behm, Russian commander of Kamchatka. Cook thought the letter one of commendation. It turned out otherwise. Fur traders, world over, always resented the coming of the explorer. Ismyloff was neither better nor worse than his kind.[2]
Heavy squalls pursued the ships all the way from Oonalaska, left on October 26, to the Sandwich Islands, reached in the new year 1779. A thousand canoes of enthusiastic natives welcomed Cook back to the sunny islands of the Pacific. Before the explorer { 197} could anchor, natives were swimming round the ship like shoals of fish. When Cook landed, the whole population prostrated itself at his feet as if he had been a god. It was a welcome change from the desolate cold of the inhospitable north.
Situated midway in the Pacific, the Sandwich Islands were like an oasis in a watery waste to Cook's mariners. The ships had dropped anchor in the centre of a horn-shaped bay called Karakakooa, in Hawaii, about two miles from horn to horn. On the sandy flats of the north horn was the native village of Kowrowa: amid the cocoanut grove of the other horn, the village of Kakooa, with a well and Morai, or sacred burying-ground, close by. Between the two villages alongshore ran a high ledge of black coral rocks. In all there were, perhaps, four hundred houses in the two villages, with a population of from two to three thousand warriors; but the bay was the rallying place for the entire group of islands; and the islands numbered in all several hundred thousand warriors.