Alaska, Its Southern Coast and the Sitkan Archipelago

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

The pilot, Captain George, is everyone’s friend, and his patience and good nature have to stand the strain of a steady questioning and cross-examination from the beginning to the end of a cruise. He is appealed to for all the heights, depths, distances, and names along the route; and finally, when everyone has bought a large Hydrographic Office chart of Alaska, Captain George is asked to mark out the ship’s course through the maze of island channels. He has been pilot for twenty years on the northwest coast, and Mr. Seward and many others who saw the country under his guidance speak of him as a Russian. As his early home in “the States” was at Oshkosh, one can understand how that foreign-sounding name misled people. He, as well as all of the ship’s officers, keeps a log of each cruise, and Captain George has furnished many notes and notices for the Coast Survey publications, and helps the memory of the tourists, who keep some of the most remarkable journals and diaries for the first few days of the cruise.

A character in the lower rank on one trip was the captain’s boy, “John,” a faithful henchman and valet, whose devotion and attachment to his master were quite wonderful. John is a Swede by birth, and his pale-blue eyes, fair complexion, and light hair were offset by a continuous array of spotlessly white jackets and ties. In the most Northern latitudes John would trip about the deck with his spry and jaunty tread, clad in these snowy habiliments of the tropics, and after a ramble among Indian lodges on shore, John would appear to our enraptured eyes as the very apotheosis of cleanliness and starchy perfection. At luncheon one day John set two pies before the captain, and announcing them as “mince and apple,” withdrew deferentially behind his master’s chair. “Which is the apple pie, John?” asked the captain, as he held a knife suspended over a disk of golden crust. “The starboard pie, sir,” said John respectfully, and with a seriousness that robbed the thing of any intention.

Two deck passengers that enlivened the return trip of the Idaho were small black bear cubs four or five months old. There was always high revel on the hurricane deck during the “dog watches” when the bears were fed, and cakes and lumps of sugar from the cabin table enticed them to play pranks. The treacherous young bruin bought at Chilkat grew fat on the voyage, and was twice the size of a little stunted cub bought of a trader at Fort Wrangell. The Chilkat cub climbed the rigging like a born sailor after a fortnight’s training, but much teasing made him surly and suspicious, and he would run for the ratlines at sight of a man. For the ladies, who fed them on sugar and salmon berries, both bears showed a great fondness, and the two clumsy pets would trot around the deck after them as tamely as kittens, and stand up and beg for sugar plainly. The little Fort Wrangell bear would crawl up on a bench beside one, and make plaintive groans until it was petted, and it would sun itself contentedly there for hours. They were amiable playfellows together, but they were puzzled and bewitched by the agile little toy-terrier “Toots,” who lived on an afghan in the captain’s cabin. That aristocratic little mite of a dog delighted to caper around and bewilder the bears with his quick motions, and it was a funny by-play to watch these young animals together. One evening in the Gulf of Georgia, we lingered on deck to watch a stormy, crimson sunset, and after that, when the moon rose like a fiery ball from the water, and faded to pale gold and silver in the zenith, the company grew musical and sang in enthusiastic chorus all the good old sea songs. With the first notes of the music the bears came pattering out, and, circling gravely before the singers, lay down, folded their forepaws before them in the most human attitude and listened attentively to “Nancy Lee” and “John Brown.” Two young fawns, caught as they were swimming the channel near Fort Wrangell one morning, were quartered on the lower deck. In captivity their soft black eyes were sadly pathetic, and they were visited daily and fed on all the dainties for deer that could be gathered on shore. Foxes, strange birds, Esquimaux dogs, and other pets have been passengers on the return trips of the steamer, and the officers of the ship have done their share in presenting animals to different city gardens and parks.

As the end of Vancouver Island drew near, the scenery of the British Columbia coast gained in beauty, with the prospect of so soon losing our wild surroundings. After leaving Metlakatlah there was not a sign of civilization for two days, and in spite of Buffon and Henry James, Jr., we grew the more enthusiastic over the “brute nature” that so offends those worldlings. The days were clear, but one night the fog promised to be so dense that the ship made an outside run from the Milbank to Queen Charlotte Sound, over waters so still that none suspected that we had left the narrow inside channels.

We never met the oulikon, or “candle fish” of this coast, except as we saw the piscatorial torch at grocers’ stores in Victoria; but we sailed for four hours through a school of herring one afternoon, as we neared the Vancouver shore. Sharks were following them by dozens, and sea-gulls flew overhead, ready to swoop upon the unlucky herring that jumped to the enemy in the air to escape the one in the water. Both times on the return voyage we slipped through Seymour Narrows without knowing it, so smoothly was the water boiling at the flood tide, and so absorbed were we once in the soft poetic sunset that finally left a glowing wall of orange in the west, against which the ragged forest line of the summits and the mountain masses were as if carved in jet. Looking upwards, even the masts and spars were sharply silhouetted against the glorious amber zenith, and it was hours before it faded to the pure violet sky of such midsummer nights.

Besides Mt. St. Elias, the Alaska passengers always beg for a view of Bute Inlet, which opens from the network of channels there at the head of the Gulf of Georgia, and runs far into the heart of the mountain range that borders the mainland shore. We hung over the captain’s charts of the inlet with the greatest interest, and, with his explanations, imagination could picture that grand fiord, not a quarter of a mile in width, and with vertical mountain walls that rise from four thousand feet at the entrance, to eight thousand feet above the water’s level at the head of the inlet. Soundings of four hundred fathoms are marked on the chart, and with cascades and glaciers pouring into the chasm, little is left for a scenic artist to supply. A trail was once cleared from the head of the inlet to the Cariboo mining district on the Frazer river, and surveys were made looking to a terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, but both have been abandoned, and Bute Inlet is not accessible by any established line of boats. Lord Dufferin and the Marquis of Lorne visited it on British men-of-war, and carried its fame to England, by extolling its scenery as the grandest on any coast. When Lord Dufferin had gone further up and into Alaska, he made his prophecy that this northwest coast, with its long stretch of protected waters, would in time become one of the favorite yachting grounds of the world.

If the beautiful Gulf of Georgia is wonderland and dreamland by day, it is often fairyland by night, and there was an appropriate finale to the last cruise, when the captain came down the deck at midnight and rapped up the passengers. “Wake up! The whole sea is on fire” said the commander. We roused and flung open stateroom doors and windows to see the water shining like a sheet of liquid silver for miles on every side. The water around us was thickly starred with phosphorescence, and at a short distance, the million points of lights mingled in a solid stretch of miles of pale, unearthly flame. It lighted the sky with a strange reflection, and the shores, which there, off Cape Lazro, are twenty miles away, seemed near at hand in the clear, ghostly light. A broad pathway of pale-green, luminous water trailed after us, and the paddle-wheels threw off dazzling cascades. Under the bows the foaming spray washed high on the black hull, and cast long lines of unearthly, greenish white flame, that illuminated the row of faces hanging over the guards as sharply as calcium rays. A bucket was lowered and filled with the water, and the marvel of the shining sea was repeated in miniature on deck, each time the water was stirred. It was a most wonderful display, and many, who had seen this glory of the seas in the tropics, declared that they had never seen phosphorescent waters more brilliant than those of the Gulf of Georgia.

With such an illumination and marine fireworks we brought the last cruise virtually to an end, and another morning found the ship tied to the same coal wharf in Departure Bay. The pleasure travellers laid their plans for other trips, and in a few days the company was scattered.

Those who went up the Frazer River to its cañons said later: “The best of the Frazer only equals Grenville Channel, and the dust and heat are intolerable after the northern coast.”

Those who went down past Mt. Tacoma, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Shasta, and into the Yosemite, said: “If we had only seen these places first, and not after the Alaska trip.”