These natives were found to be thievish and treacherous, attempting to capture a boat under the ship's very guns and in the face of a hundred men.
Cook then sailed southward and discovered the largest island in the sound, the Sukluk of the natives, which he named Montagu.
Nutchek, or Port Etches, as it was named by Portlock, is just inside the entrance to the sound on the western shore of the island that is now known as Hinchingbroke, but which was formerly called Nutchek.
Here Baranoff, several years later, built the ships that bore his first expedition to Sitka. The Russian trading post was called the Redoubt Constantine and Elena. It was a strong, stockaded fort with two bastions.
There is a salmon cannery at Nutchek, and the furs of the Copper River country were brought here for many years for barter.
Orca is situated about three miles north of Cordova, in Cordova Bay. There is a large salmon cannery at Orca; and the number of sea-birds to be seen in this small bay, filling the air in snowy clouds and covering the precipitous cliffs facing the wharf, is surpassed in only one place on the Alaskan coast—Karluk Bay.
For several years before the founding of Valdez, Orca was used as a port by the argonauts who crossed by way of Valdez Pass to the Copper River mining regions, and by way of the Tanana River to the Yukon.
Prince William Sound is one of the most nobly beautiful bodies of water in Alaska. Its wide blue water-sweeps, its many mountainous, wooded, and snow-peaked islands, the magnificent glaciers which palisade its ice-inlets, and the chain of lofty, snowy mountains that float mistily, like linked pearls, around it through the amethystine clouds, give it a poetic and austere beauty of its own. Every slow turn of the prow brings forth some new delight to the eye. Never does one beautiful snow-dome fade lingeringly from the horizon, ere another pushes into the exquisitely colored atmosphere, in a chaste beauty that fairly thrills the heart of the beholder.
The sound, or gulf, extends winding blue arms in every direction,—into the mainland and into the many islands. It covers an extent of more than twenty-five hundred square miles. The entrance is about fifty miles wide, but is sheltered by countless islands. The largest and richest are Montagu, Hinchingbroke, La Touche, Knight's, and Hawkins. There are many excellent harbors on the shores of the gulf and on the islands, and the Russians built several ships here. In Chalmers Bay Vancouver discovered a remarkable point, which bore stumps of trees cut with an axe, but far below low-water mark at the time of his discovery. He named it Sinking Point.
There is a portage from the head of the gulf to Cook Inlet, which, the earliest Russians learned, had long been used by the natives, who are of the Innuit, or Eskimo, tribe, similar to those of the Inlet, and are called Chugaches. The northern shore of Kenai and the western coast of the Inlet are occupied by Indians of the Athabascan stock.