"Captain," I said, a little later, "I want to add something to Sarah's name."
"What is it?" said he, scowling over the chart.
"I want to name her 'Sarah, the Remembered.'"
He smiled.
"All right," said he, promptly. "I'll write that on the chart."
And what an epitaph that would be for a woman—"The Remembered!" If one only knew upon whose bit of marble to grave it.
Fraser and McKay reaches follow Graham, and then is entered Wright Sound, a body of water of great, and practically unknown, depth. This small sound feeds six channels leading in different directions, one of which—Verney Pass—leads through Boxer Reach into the famed magnificence and splendor of Gardner Canal, whose waters push for fifty miles through dark and towering walls. An immense, glaciered mountain extends across the end of the canal.
Gardner Canal—named by Vancouver for Admiral Sir Alan Gardner, to whose friendship and recommendation he was indebted for the command of the expedition to Nootka and the Northwest Coast—is doubtless the grandest of British Columbian inlets or fiords. At last, the favorite two adjectives of the Vancouver expedition—"tremendous" and "stupendous"—seem to have been most appropriately applied. Lieutenant Whidbey, exploring it in the summer of 1793, found that it "presented to the eye one rude mass of almost naked rocks, rising into rugged mountains, more lofty than he had before seen, whose towering summits, seeming to overhang their bases, gave them a tremendous appearance. The whole was covered with perpetual ice and snow that reached, in the gullies formed between the mountains, close down to the high-water mark; and many waterfalls of various dimensions were seen to descend in every direction."
This description is quoted in full because it is an excellent example of the descriptions given out by Vancouver and his associates, who, if they ever felt a quickening of the pulses in contemplation of these majestic scenes, were certainly successful in concealing such human emotions from the world. True, they did occasionally chronicle a "pleasant" breeze, a "pleasing" landscape which "reminded them of England;" and even, in the vicinity of Port Townsend, they were moved to enthusiasm over a "landscape almost as enchantingly beautiful as the most elegantly finished pleasure-grounds in Europe," which called to their remembrance "certain delightful and beloved situations in Old England."
But apparently, having been familiar only with pleasing pastoral scenes, they were not able to rise to an appreciation of the sublime in nature. "Elegant" is the mincing and amusing adjective applied frequently to snow mountains by Vancouver; he mentions, also, "spacious meadows, elegantly adorned with trees;" but when they arrive at the noble beauty which arouses in most beholders a feeling of exaltation and an appreciation of the marvellous handiwork of God, Vancouver and his associates, having never seen anything of the kind in England, find it only "tremendous," or "stupendous," or a "rude mass." They would have probably described the chaste, exquisite cone of Shishaldin on Unimak Island—as peerless and apart in its delicate beauty among mountains as Venice is among cities—as "a mountain covered with snow to the very sea and having a most elegant point."