Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

As the trader shapes his course from St. Michael’s for Port Clarence and Kotzebue Sound, his little vessel skirts the low north shore of Norton’s Sound very closely. He may stop for an hour or two, if the weather permits, at Sledge Islet, standing “off and on” while the Innuits come out to the schooner in their skin “oomiaks” or bidarrahs. This barren rock was so named by Captain Cook, who, when he landed on it, found nothing but a native’s hand-sled. Its inhabitants were all sojourning on the mainland, berrying. It is only about a mile in its greatest length, less than half a mile wide, and raised almost perpendicularly from the sea to a height of five or six hundred feet. When the modicum of walrus-oil and ivory which these natives have to barter has been hoisted on board, the schooner shapes her course for another islet—the curious “Ookivok,” or King’s Island—which stands, a mere rock as it were, in the flood that sweeps through Bering Straits. It is rugged, and strewn with immense quantities of basaltic fragments, scoriæ, and rises so precipitately from the sea that no place for a beach-landing can be found.

Here on the south side, clinging like nests of barn-swallows, are the summer houses of the Ookivok walrus-hunters. They are from fifty to one hundred feet above the brawling surf that breaks incessantly beneath them, and secured to the perpendicular cliffs by lashings and guys of walrus-thongs. The wooden poles thus fastened to the rocks are covered with walrus-hides. On these unique brackets those hardy Innuits spend the warmer weather. Their winter residences are mere holes excavated in the interstices and fissures of the same bluff to which their flimsy summer dwellings are attached, the entrances to most of them being directly under the frail platforms upon which these Mahlemoöt families are perched with all of their rude household belongings. The nakedness of the island is so great as to forbid life to even a spear of grass or moss—nothing but close, leathery lichens, that grow so tightly to its weathered rocks that they appear to be part and parcel of the splintered basaltic cubes or olivine bluffs themselves. A more uninviting spot for human habitation could not be found in all the savage solitudes of the north. But the Innuit is here, not for the pleasure of location; he is here for that command which this station gives him over all walrus-herds floating up and down on the ice-floes of Bering Sea at the sport of varying moods of wind and current.

Ookivok.

From the rugged crests of King’s Island the natives can apprehend drifting sea-horses as they sleep heavily on broad ice-cakes, and make ample preparation for their capture. The violence of the wind is so great that the small, flat summit of this islet cannot be utilized as a place of residence—the winds that howl over and around its rock-strewn head would hurl the Innuits, bag and baggage, into those angry waves which thunder incessantly below. Long experience at plunging through surf with their handsomely made kayaks, and returning to land on these perilous shores of King’s Island, has made the Ookivok people the boldest and the best watermen in the north. Their little skin canoes are of the finest construction, and their surplus time is largely passed in carving walrus-ivory into all fashions of rude design for barter in the summer, when the ice shall disappear and the sails of whaling-ships and fur-trading schooners challenge their attention in the offing.

What a winter these people must witness! What a succession of furious storms and snow-laden gales! When their summer comes it brings but little sunlight to their rocky retreat; for, standing, as it does, in the full sweep of that warmer flood which flows up from the Japanese coast into the Arctic, cold, chilly fogs and obstinate clouds envelope them most of the time. But sympathy is utterly wasted; were they to be transported to California, and surrounded with all the needs of a creature existence, they would soon entreat, beg, implore us to return them to the inhospitable rock from which they were taken. The whalers have, at various intervals during the last twenty years, carried Innuits down to spend the winter with them at the Sandwich Islands, under an idea that these people would be delighted with the soft, warm climate there, and such fruits and flowers, and be grateful for the trip. But in no instance did an individual of this hyperborean race fail to sigh for his home in Bering Sea, or the Arctic Ocean, soon after landing at Hawaii. Those Innuits who were without kith or kin became just as homesick and forlorn as any natives did who had relatives behind awaiting their return.

A few hours’ sailing, with a free wind, to the north from King’s Island, brings you into full view of a bold headland at the entrance to Port Clarence. Cape York is a noted landmark in this well-travelled highway to the Arctic Ocean—well travelled by the whaling fleets of the whole world until recently; now, an elimination of cetacean life from these waters has caused their substantial abandonment by those vessels, and no others come, save a trading-schooner ever and anon at wide intervals. A roomy harbor, sheltered from the south by a long pier of alluvium, is Port Clarence. Leading beyond it is an immense inner basin, walled in all about by steep slate precipices: this is Grantley Harbor. High hopes and great expectations were centred here in 1865-66, by the location of that short cable-end which, underrunning Bering Straits, was to unite an overland telegraph wire from St. Petersburg with that one we were to build, in the same fashion, from Portland, Ore., thus to span the Old and New Worlds by this short submarine link. Naturally, then, it made this point of its beginning a most interesting locality. In obedience to an order of a few wealthy, energetic capitalists, who did not then believe in the practicability of the Atlantic cable, many stately ships, freighted with men and goods, left San Francisco in the summer of 1865, and, again, in the succeeding season of 1866, for divers points in Alaska and Siberia. These men were to build the line overland. They were landed at St. Michael’s and at Port Clarence, and at several harbors on the Asiatic coast. They had fairly got to work, when, late in 1866, the success of the submarine cable between Newfoundland and Ireland was assured. That success compelled an abandonment of the Collins Overland Telegraph, and these men were consequently recalled, and sailed back to California in those handsome vessels of the telegraph fleet. How the Innuits of Port Clarence marvelled when these smart, richly dressed men disembarked, and put up houses in which to store their treasures of food and telegraph materials, as well as to actually live in—to stay there with them, in their own rude country, where no such thing had ever been even dreamed of before. After the ships had squared their yards and filled away, without calling the Americans on board, then the Mahlemoöt heart was filled with unknown and strange emotions of joy and curiosity—both of these passions were fully satisfied ere the white men left Grantley Harbor.

With Cape York just astern, you pass under the lee of those sheer and lofty walls of that shoulder to our continent, Cape Prince of Wales. Its bold front stands in full but silent recognition of an Asiatic coast westward, just thirty-six miles away, over the shallow flood of Bering Straits. What changes in a great northland and seas would have been wrought had a tithe of such volcanic energy which raised up the Aleutian archipelago been only exerted here in throwing a basaltic dike across from continent to continent! Had the upheaval and power that elevated the large island of Oonimak alone been focused here, we should have no division of the Old World and the New. That ocean-river which flows steadily into the icy wastes of a known and unknown polar basin above Alaska and Siberia would not now give that life which it so freely grants both animals and vegetables in the wide reach of the North Pacific. A dam of adamantine rock or basalt across the Straits of Bering would cause a startling revision of all the natural order of life in Bering Sea and our Arctic Ocean.

CAPE PRINCE OF WALES