Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

It is more than sixty years now since Captain Beechey[163] camped upon and located Point Barrow, our extreme limit of northern landed possession, and in that time few changes, other than depopulation of the natives, have taken place on this coast. That same village of Noowuk, which he graphically described, still stands there on the tip of a low gravel-spit which extends out from the mainland twelve miles into the chill flood of an Arctic Ocean. All the land at its extremity not inundated by the sea in storms is now, as it was then, occupied by the winter houses of the natives. Blooming here in the short summer of July, on those desolate moors adjacent to Point Barrow, is the same dandelion and buttercup which filled the Englishman then, as it does us now, with thoughts of meadows at home, and some bright little poppies still nod their yellow heads again to us, as they did to him, on this low north end of Alaska. A tiny golden butterfly flits from flower to flower, and as they fade, it, too, disappears over frost-bitten swales.

Big ice-fields seldom ever fail to threaten the coast here, even when they relax their grasp in July. In a few short weeks, however, they return to stay for the rest of the year and best part of the next. Such brief intervals for navigation in the Arctic Ocean during every July and August are those which lure whaling-ships, and the dark lanes of open water in white ice-floes are the last refuge of many hard-hunted whales, unless they dive, and rise to breathe again in that conjectured clear yet frigid flood of a polar sea, far away under the north star.

The Ringed Seal (Phoca fœtida).

[The common Hair-Seal of the Arctic Ocean.]

There is nothing more to see, or noteworthy to learn, at or beyond Point Barrow, even were you to live and drag out a wretched year’s existence in looking for it, so you gladden the heart of your skipper and his hardy crew by telling them to shape a course homeward. Back through the Straits of Bering, wrapped in a chill thick fog, the little schooner heels, with a singing northwester on her quarter that holds her canvas just as taut as if made of tough wood. She fairly scrapes by the Diomedes—the walls of Noornabook loom up high in a cold, gray fog-light, as though its bold, gray cliffs were right over her spars—but the crew know at the time that they are more than two miles away from that surf which noisily thunders on the dark rocks of these islets. That same chill wind, and gloomy fog-surrounding, follows them into Bering Sea—not a glimpse of all the land and mountain, which they so plainly discerned going up, have they caught going down.

What trifles often determine our success or failure in life! Had it not been for a sudden sunburst from the gloom of a leaden fog which shrouded all about it in its misty darkness, and thus lighted up a lofty russet head of the East Cape of St. Lawrence Island, a little vessel bearing the author would have been piled up and thrown into foaming breakers which beat upon a low, rocky reef that reaches out from its feet. This gleam of light reflected from that headland warned a startled man on the lookout just in time to have her wheel put hard up, and thus luff our light trim craft in season to shave safely by.

St. Lawrence is the largest island in Bering Sea. It is directly south of Bering Straits, one hundred and eighty miles distant from the Diomedes; it is eighty to eighty-five miles in length, with an average width of fifteen or twenty. The sea has built onto it quite extensively, in very much the same manner as it has filled out and extended the coast of St. Paul, of the Pribylov group. At Kagallegak, on the east shore, the island is made up of coarse feldspathic, red granitic flats and hills, with extensive lagoons and lakelets. The skeleton of this island seems to have been originally one of low hills and ranges of granite, with volcanic outbursts everywhere manifested at their summits, especially on the north shore. Between them stretch long, low plains, or gently rolling uplands, and perfectly smooth reaches of sand and gravelly beaches that border the sea everywhere not so marked by bluffs.

At Kagallegak your eye sweeps over extensive level plains to the northward, upon which a green-stalked and white-plumed tundra grass (Eriophorum) principally grows everywhere on the wet and boggy surface, while, on those sand-beach margins, the “wild wheat” (Elymus) springs up most abundantly, short and stunted, however. These extended low areas of moorland so peculiar to this island are made up of fine granitic drift and clays, lined at their sea-borders with a low, broad sand-belt. The hills and hill ranges of St. Lawrence are rich in color, with dark blue-black patches interspersed which indicate a location of trap-protrusions. No shrubbery whatever grows upon these wind-swept tundra and hills save dwarfed and creeping willows; yet, a series of characteristic rock-lichens color such bare summits in their bright relief which we have just noted. The rocks themselves are reddish, coarse-grained, shining granites, with abundant trap-protrusions, that weather out and fall down upon the flanks of the peaks and ridges in dusky patches and streaks, so as to contrast, from a slight distance, very sharply with the main ground of pinkish rock, which is moss- and lichen-grown, and colored here and there with areas of that peculiar and characteristic greenish-russet tinge of sphagnous origin. This dark marking of those trap-dikes appears like the presence of low-growing shrubbery from the vessel, as an observer sails by. Snow and ice lie all the year around in small bodies within the gullies and on the hill-sides.