Where the little saw-mill rivers enter the sea, there is usually a sort of roadstead—­a curve of the shore, not enough to make a harbor, but sufficient to give anchorage and a lee from the prevailing north-west wind, which makes it possible, by different devices, to load vessels.  There are rivers in Humboldt County where nature has not provided even this slight convenience, and there—­it being impossible to ship the lumber—­no saw-mills have been established.

Vessels are frequently lost, in spite of all precautions; for, when the wind changes to south-west, the whole Pacific Ocean rolls into these roadsteads; and, when a gale is seen approaching, the crews anchor their ships as securely as they can, and then go ashore.  It has happened in Mendocino harbor, that a schooner has been capsized at her anchorage by a monstrous sea; and Captain Lansing told me that in the last twenty years he had seen over a hundred persons drowned in that port alone, in spite of all precautions.

The waves have cut up the coast in the most fantastic manner.  It is rock-bound, and the rock seems to be of varying hardness, so that the ocean, trying every square inch every minute of the day for thousands of years, has eaten out the softer parts, and worked out the strangest caverns and passages.  You scarcely see a headland or projecting point through which the sea has not forced a passage, whose top exceeds a little the mark of high tide; and there are caves innumerable, some with extensive ramifications.  I was shown one such cave at Mendocino City, into which a schooner, drifting from her anchors, was sucked during a heavy sea.  As she broke from her anchors the men hoisted sail, and the vessel was borne into the cave with all sail set.  Her masts were snapped off like pipe-stems, and the hull was jammed into the great hole in the rock, where it began to thump with the swell so vehemently that two of the frightened crew were at once crushed on the deck by the overhanging ceiling of the cave.  Five others hurriedly climbed out over the stern, and there hung on until ropes were lowered to them by men on the cliff above, who drew them up safely.  It was a narrow escape; and a more terrifying situation than that of this crew, as they saw their vessel sucked into a cave whose depth they did not know, can hardly be imagined outside of a hasheesh dream.  The next morning the vessel was so completely broken to pieces that not a piece the size of a man’s arm was ever found of her hull.

[Illustration:  LUMBERING IN WASHINGTON TERRITORY—­PREPARING LOGS.]

I suppose all saw-mills are pretty much alike; those on this coast not only saw lumber of different shapes and sizes, but they have also planing and finishing apparatus attached; and in some the waste lumber is worked up with a good deal of care and ingenuity.  But in many of the mills there is great waste.  It is probably a peculiarity of the saw-mills on this coast, that they must provide a powerful rip-saw to