The ships were caught in the shoals of Kuskokwim Bay, but Cook does not appear to have discovered this great river, which is the second in size of Alaskan rivers and whose length is nine hundred miles. In the bay the tides have a fifty-foot rise and fall, entering in a tremendous bore. This vicinity formerly furnished exceedingly fine black bear skins.
Cook's surgeon died of consumption and was buried on an island which was named Anderson, in his memory. Upon an island about four leagues in circuit a rude sledge was found, and the name of Sledge Island was bestowed upon it. He entered Norton Sound, but only "suspected" the existence of a mighty river, completely missing the Yukon.
He named the extreme western point of North America, which plunges out into Behring Sea, almost meeting the East Cape of Siberia, Cape Prince of Wales. In the centre of the strait are the two Diomede Islands, between which the boundary line runs, one belonging to Russia, the other to the United States.
Cook sailed up into the Frozen Ocean and named Icy Cape, narrowly missing disaster in the ice pack. There he saw many herds of sea-horses, or walrus, lying upon the ice in companies numbering many hundreds. They huddled over one another like swine, roaring and braying; so that in the night or in a fog they gave warning of the nearness of ice. Some members of the herd kept watch; they aroused those nearest to them and warned them of the approach of enemies. Those, in turn, warned others, and so the word was passed along in a kind of ripple until the entire herd was awake. When fired upon, they tumbled one over another into the sea, in the utmost confusion. The female defends her young to the very last, and at the sacrifice of her own life, if necessary, fighting ferociously.
The walrus does not in the least resemble a horse, and it is difficult to understand whence the name arose. It is somewhat like a seal, only much larger. Those found by Cook in the Arctic were from nine to twelve feet in length and weighed about a thousand pounds. Their tusks have always been valuable, and have greatly increased in value of recent years, as the walrus diminish in number.
Cook named Cape Denbigh and Cape Darby on either side of Norton Bay; and Besborough Island south of Cape Denbigh.
Going ashore, he encountered a family of natives which he and Captain King describe in such wise that no one, having read the description, can ever enter Norton Sound without recalling it. The family consisted of a man, his wife, and a child; and a fourth person who bore the human shape, and that was all, for he was the most horribly, the most pitiably, deformed cripple ever seen, heard of, or imagined. The husband was blind; and all were extremely unpleasant in appearance. The underlips were bored.
These natives would have evidently sold their souls for iron. For four knives made out of old iron hoop, they traded four hundred pounds of fish—and Cook must have lost his conscience overboard with his anchor in Kuskokwim Bay. He recovered the anchor!
He gave the girl-child a few beads, "whereupon the mother burst into tears, then the father, then the cripple, and, at last, the girl herself."
Many different passages, or sentences, have been called "the most pathetic ever written"; but, myself, I confess that I have never been so powerfully or so lastingly moved by any sentence as I was when I first read that one of Cook's. Almost equalling it, however, in pathos is the simple account of Captain King's of his meeting with the same family. He was on shore with a party obtaining wood when these people approached in a canoe. He beckoned to them to land, and the husband and wife came ashore. He gave the woman a knife, saying that he would give her a larger one for some fish. She made signs for him to follow them.