upon it, and a guide entirely familiar with the tricks of the perfidious waters.  Especially important would this have been because Lieutenant Ives, who was instructed to direct this work, was ordered to accomplish it at the lowest and worst stage of the stream.  Ives had been Whipple’s chief assistant in 1853-54, and therefore well understood the situation.  But he states that the company was “unable to spare a boat except for a compensation beyond the limits of the appropriation.”  As a boat was spared, however, for the less important matter of going far up the river to ferry Beale across, it would appear that either the negotiations were not conducted in a proper spirit, or that Ives rather preferred a boat of his own.  The cost of building in Philadelphia the boat he used, and sending her in sections to San Francisco, and thence to the Colorado, must have been very great.  The steamer was ordered June 1, 1857, and had to be at the mouth of the Colorado by December 1st of the same year.  After a trial on the Delaware, a mill-pond compared with the Colorado, she was hastily shipped, with all her defects, by way of Panama, there being no time to make any changes.  The chief trouble discovered was radical, being a structural weakness of the hull.  To, in a measure, offset this, timbers and bolts were obtained in San Francisco, the timbers to be attached to the outside of the hull on putting the sections together, there being no room within.  It requires little understanding of naval architecture to perceive that a great handicap was thus imposed on the little vessel.  Yet Lieutenant Ives says, on the trial trip she was “found satisfactory”!  By November 1st, the party was on board the schooner Monterey, bound for the head of the Gulf.  Though the vessel was loaded down with supplies for Fort Yuma, room was made for the Ives expedition and they arrived, passing through a heavy gale in the gulf, at Robinson’s Landing on November 30th.  The schooner was anchored over a shoal, and was soon aground, as the fierce tide ran out, a circumstance that enabled her to stay there and stem the torrent.  A deep booming sound was presently heard, growing louder and nearer, and

“in half an hour a great wave several feet in height, could be distinctly seen flashing and sparkling in the moonlight, extending from one bank to the other and advancing swiftly upon us.  While it was only a few hundred yards distant, the ebb tide continued to flow by at the rate of three miles an hour.  A point of land and an exposed bar close under our lee broke the wave into several long swells, and as these met the ebb the broad sheet around us boiled up and foamed like the surface of a cauldron, and then, with scarcely a moment of slack water, the whole went whirling by in the opposite direction.  In a few moments the low rollers had passed the islands and united again in a single bank of water, which swept up the narrowing channel with the thunder of a cataract.”