Toward daylight the storm grew too terrible for further quarrelling; too big for all little petty human passions. A coward would have become a man in the face of such a conflict. I have never understood how one can commit a cowardly act during a storm at sea. One may dance a hornpipe of terror on a public street when a man thrusts a revolver into one's face and demands one's money. That is a little thing, and inspires to little sensations and little actions. But when a ship goes down into a black hollow of the sea, down, down, so low that it seems as though she must go on to the lowest, deepest depth of all—and then lies still, shudders, and begins to mount, higher, higher, higher, to the very crest of a mountainous wave; if God put anything at all of courage and of bravery into the soul of the human being that experiences this, it comes to the front now, if ever.
In that most needlessly cruel of all the ocean disasters of the Pacific Coast, the wreck of the Valencia on Seabird Reef of the rock-ribbed coast of Vancouver Island, more than a hundred people clung to the decks and rigging in a freezing storm for thirty-six hours. There was a young girl on the ship who was travelling alone. A young man, an athlete, of Victoria, who had never met her before, assisted her into the rigging when the decks were all awash, and protected her there. On the last day before the ship went to pieces, two life-rafts were successfully launched. Only a few could go, and strong men were desired to manage the rafts. The young man in the rigging might have been saved, for the ones who did go on the raft were the only ones rescued. But when summoned, he made simple answer:—
"No; I have some one here to care for. I will stay."
Better to be that brave man's wave-battered and fish-eaten corpse, than any living coward who sailed away and left those desperate, struggling wretches to their awful fate.
The storm died slowly with the night; and at last we could sleep.
It was noon when we once more got ourselves up on deck. The sun shone like gold upon the sea, which stretched, dimpling, away for hundreds upon hundreds of miles, to the south and west. I stood looking across it for some time, lost in thought, but at last something led me to the other side of the ship.
All unprepared, I lifted my eyes—and beheld before me the glory and the marvel of God. In all the splendor of the drenched sunlight, straight out of the violet, sparkling sea, rose the magnificent peaks of the Fairweather Range and towered against the sky. No great snow mountains rising from the land have ever affected me as did that long and noble chain glistening out of the sea. They seemed fairly to thunder their beauty to the sky.
From Mount Edgecumbe there is no significant break in the mountain range for more than a thousand miles; it is a stretch of sublime beauty that has no parallel. The Fairweather Range merges into the St. Elias Alps; the Alps are followed successively by the Chugach Alps, the Kenai and Alaskan ranges,—the latter of which holds the loftiest of them all, the superb Mount McKinley,—and the Aleutian Range, which extends to the end of the Aliaska Peninsula. The volcanoes on the Aleutian and Kurile islands complete the ring of snow and fire that circles around the Pacific Ocean.