We have had charming weather—the Captain says the best trip of the season. Several of our passengers give your correspondent credit for being the mascot of the party—a compliment very complacently accepted. The good, sunny days have not only enabled us to enjoy hugely the beautiful and often sublime scenery, but have given us many opportunities for studying some of the mannerisms of the leviathans of the deep. We have seen many whales, several times ten to twenty at once, and at close range. They rolled themselves in grand dignity up out of the water a few hundred yards from us, and, slowly bending, threw their flukes several feet into the air. Then they would spurt great geysers ten or more feet high, making a noise not unlike that made by elephants when blowing dust over themselves, but far louder. Indeed, when some blew a hundred yards away from us, it sounded like a somewhat continuous emission from a steam stack.
To-day several fine fellows were very near us, and one apparently young one threw himself several feet entirely into the air. He seemed from twelve to eighteen feet long. The passengers thought it a baby whale sporting for the amusement of its dam. But a glass happening to catch him on the fly it was discovered he had a decided snout. Some of us then decided it to be a Greenland shark, which has an underjaw provided with very sharp, rather protruding teeth, with which it scoops out of a whale great chunks of blubber. Close by where it leaped a large whale lifted its fluke almost perpendicularly out of the water and thrashed it into foam. This was kept up for several hundred yards till we got too far away to see it well. This we are told is sometimes done in a kind of wanton sport, but I suspect in this instance the monster was trying to defend itself from one of its inveterate enemies. At any rate our passengers were afforded a very unusual sight.
THE NATIVE ALASKANS.
Of the animated nature, however, exhibited for our amusement and study, the native Alaskans were the most interesting part. They are very improperly called Indians, being of a distinct race from the American red men. I went into several shacks or native houses. They are built by the natives, and under no outside advice or architectural interference. I saw the manner of arrangement of their little stock of furniture. I saw them preparing their food and eating their meals; heard them talk, and watched the play of their features when trading and when having some sport. I thought I saw cropping out everywhere decided Japanese characteristics. It is difficult to name or enumerate the points of resemblance. But they exist, and are to me far more marked than any resemblance between the Japanese and the Chinese, who are supposed by most ethnologists to be of cognate families. These people are to me degraded descendants of the land of the rising sun who entered America through the Aleutian Isles.
The Alaskan shacks are generally located near the water, in somewhat orderly rows, one behind the other. They usually, as far as I could see, consist of a single room occupying the entire house. At or near the center of the building is a square, covered with dirt when the house is raised up, or if the house be low down, then on the ground, whereon the fire burns. Around this square is a somewhat raised platform, as in a Japanese house; on this, the different members of the family, or the several families have their separate locations, with their boxes, beds and other individual property. Frequently the room is thirty to forty feet square, and houses ten, twenty, and often forty or more people. These are members of a large family or of a sub-tribe. By the way a woman is frequently chief of a tribe, and one reads over the door in large letters the name of "Blank (a woman) chief." The Indians seem to evince a sort of boastfulness in the numberings on their houses, which at Sitka run from 3,000 or 4,000 up to five and six. It is barely possible this may be a part of a system of enumeration running through several colonies or tribes, and throughout the land wherever such tribes live. But a white man living in the territory told us it arose from the native desire to look big and to appear as one of a great multitude.
The individual possessions of the different members of a family, are kept in boxes and piled upon them. I looked into several of these boxes. Every thing was thrown in pell-mell—shoes, skins, scarfs, tools, pails and even iron pots and axes. The packing of a box looked as if it had been done in a hurry. The women and children when indoors were found, except at meal time, squatted about the several platforms. When at meals they were huddled on their haunches on the earthen square about the open fire. There are no chimneys to the houses. The fire being built in the center of the squares, the smoke goes out as in Japan through openings in the center of the roof, and to a considerable extent through the doors. About and above the openings in the roof are a sort of screen which may be shifted according to the direction of the wind.
In several small shacks at Juneau, old fashioned iron stoves were seen, with stove pipes leading above the roof. The inside of a shack is an omnium gatherum, not only of people of both sexes and of all ages, but of fishing nets, axes and saws, boat paddles, and blocks on which wooden work was being done. Dried fish and pelts stretched are on the walls and hanging from the roof poles.
The natives are very dark and swarthy, and have rather a yellow tinge in their complexions than red; have large heads and huge, broad, flat, stolid faces, long bodies, short, ill-shaped legs, and ungainly gaits. The habit of squatting when at rest, and when propelling their canoes and fishing, has developed unduly the upper body at the great expense of the lower limbs. They obtain their livelihood from the sea, and spend much more than half of their waking hours in their dugouts. They have no thwarts in their canoes to sit upon, but squat down upon the bottom, or bend on their knees. This causes the legs to dwindle when young and to become decidedly crooked. This, too, is the cause of their decidedly shambling gait when walking. They do not look bright, but are skilled in all things they understand, and learn with great rapidity, not by imitation as the Chinese do, but from inborn aptitude like that of the Japanese. Their blankets, made of the wool of the mountain goat, are marvels of closely woven fabrics, and their baskets of a kind of tough grass are as close as the finest Panama hats and very harmoniously colored. They carve fairly in wood, their totems and small ware being quite artistic. In silver ornamentation they excel. Blankets are the medium of exchange; not the native ornamental blankets, but those introduced by the Hudson Bay people. The old traders bought furs, and pelts, paying for them in woolen blankets. A pile of furs was worth so many blankets. From what I can learn the skill of a native trader has always been in his ability to demand a large number of blankets for his goods, and then to maintain as long as possible the stolidity of his countenance, during the higgling necessary to meet the views of the shrewd Hudson Bay fellow. About the places we visited only silver coin is taken in trade, and a native man or woman rarely drops a peg from the price first demanded.
THE HOME AT SITKA.
At a school, "The Home," in Sitka, under the control of a church organization in the States, are a large number of girls and boys of all sizes. They are neat, intelligent in feature, recite fluently and feelingly simple speeches and verses, and sing sweetly and as if they felt not only the sense but the harmony of their hymns. A band of twenty youths plays brass instruments well and with great precision in time. They have all pleasant low voices and the girls exceedingly sweet ones. I noticed the same characteristics among some wholely uneducated and semi-savage women when singing to a wild uncouth dance of the men.