A GLIMPSE OF SHISHALDIN
The Volcano of Shishaldin, 8,500 feet The Volcano of Pogromnia Sopka, 5,500 feet
The beautiful Peak of Shishaldin as seen from the entrance to Oonimak Pass, in Bering Sea. A Summer picture looking East over Oonimak Island
As we draw into Oonimak Pass—it is the gateway for all sailing vessels bound to Bering Sea from American ports, we, in closing up with the land, almost lose sight of Shishaldin, and come into the shadow of the rougher and less attractive volcano of Pogromnia. It shows ample evidence of its origin by the streams of blackened frost-riven basalt and breccia which are ribbed upon its rugged sides; great masses of eruptive rock and pumice lie here and there scattered all over the broad-stubbed head of the mountain; tons and tons of this material have rolled from thence in lavish profusion and disorder, clear down for miles to the very waters of the sea and straits, strewing that entire route with huge débris. Seams of snow and ice lacquer, in white, thread the bold black crown of this, the “booming” or “noisy” volcano of the Russians. It has not been in action since 1820, when it then threw showers of ashes and pumice; but those fires in its furnace are only banked, as it has been smoking in inky brown and black clouds at irregular and frequent intervals ever since; loud mutterings, deep rumblings and wide-felt tremors of land and sea are aroused by it constantly. This Island of Oonimak has been always regarded by the Russians as the roof of a subterranean smelting furnace with many chimneys through which telluric forces ascended from the molten masses beneath. It has been, and is still, the theatre of the greatest plutonic activity in Alaska. Russian eye-witnesses have described violent earthquakes here where whole ridges of the interior and coast have been rent asunder, cleft open, from which torrents of lava poured and columns of flame and clouds of ashes, steam and smoke, have risen so as to be viewed and noticed for a circuit of hundreds of miles around. These manifestations were always accompanied by violent earthquakes, and tidal-waves which often submerged adjacent villages on the sea-level, and also whole native settlements were swept away in mountain floods caused by the sudden melting of those big banks of ice and snow on such volcanic summits and their foothills, upon which the hot breccia from a vomiting crater fell.[69]
This great island in olden times was the one most densely populated by the Aleutes. The excesses and terrible outrages of Russian promishlyniks, followed by the wholesale work of death wrought by small-pox, have utterly eliminated every human settlement from the length and breadth of Oonimak, upon which no one has resided since 1847. Ruins on the north shore show the abandoned sites of numerous large hamlets; one was over four thousand two hundred feet in its frontage on the beach. The fear and superstition which those tragedies of early Russian intercourse produced in the simple minds of the natives, who belonged by birth to this great island, became at length so potent as to cause the entire and permanent abandonment of their desolated villages, which were once so populous and well satisfied.
The craters, and outflow therefrom, on Oonimak have been, from time immemorial, resorted to by the natives as their store-houses for sulphur, and that shining obsidian with which they tipped their bone-spear and arrow-heads; of it, also, they made their primitive knives, and traded the surplus stock to those Aleutes living elsewhere. They used the sulphur with dried moss in making fires, which they started with the fire-stick and by rocky concussions.[70]
Before entering the straits of Oonimak, we had a fine view of the entire sweep of the Krenitzin group, that presents a succession of the wildest and most irregular peaks and bluffs, everywhere seeming to jut up and fall into the sea, without a gentle slope for a human landing, as they face the Pacific billows dashing so incessantly upon their basaltic bases; the extreme eastern islet of the group is Oogamok, and it forms the opposite land from Cape Heethook on Oonimak, directly across the straits. A swarm of sea-parrots fly out from its rocky bluffs on the south shore, stirred into unwonted activity and curiosity by the near approach of our vessel, while a dozing herd of sea-lions suspiciously stretch their long necks into the air, smell us, then simultaneously and precipitately plump themselves into the foaming breakers just below their basking-place above the surf-wash.
It is very difficult to adequately define or express those varying impressions which are inspired by a panorama of these Aleutian Islands, such as unfolds itself to your eye when rapidly sailing along under their lee on a clear day. The scene is one of rare beauty. The water is blue and dancing until it strikes in heavy waves upon the rocky curbing of the islands, dashing up clouds of spray in white, fleecy masses against the dark-brown and reddish cliff-walls rising over all. The slopes and the summits of everything on land, save the very highest peaks, are clothed in an indescribably rich green and golden carpet of circumpolar sphagnum; exquisitely-colored lichens[71] adorn the stony sea-bluffs and precipices inland. Every minute of the ship’s progress in a free, fair wind shifts the fascinating scene—a new peak, another bold headland, a narrow pass, unfolds now between two islets that just before apparently were solid and as united as one island could be; a steamy jet of hot-spring vapor rises from a deeper, richer mass of green and gold than that surrounding it, and a dark-brownish column of smoke that issues from a lofty, cloud-encircled summit in the distance is the burning crater of Akootan.
Everything is so open here, is so plain to see, that when you try to find some points of resemblance to that picture which has challenged your admiration in the Sitkan archipelago, you find nothing—absolutely nothing—in common effect. It is, nevertheless, just as attractive, just as grand; but how different! All is laid perfectly bare to inspection here—no dense forests and tangled thickets to conceal the surface of the diversified uplands and mountain slopes, or to hide the innermost recesses of the deep ravines and narrow valleys. While there is a vast variation in the islands, yet there is, to the mind of him who views them for the first time, the most helpless inability on his part to distinguish or even recognize them apart when he happens to revisit them. They are seldom ever clearly defined, being more or less obscured in fog and heavy rifts of cloud. The top of a headland peeps aloft, sharply outlined, while all below is lost in the mists and banks of fog that roll up there from the sea. Then, in remarkable contrast, only a few miles beyond, the rocks at sea-level and foothills of the next island will be entirely plain to your sight; while everything above is concealed, in turn, by a curtain of the same moist and vanishing misty fog. Fog, fog, fog everywhere, rising and descending with the force of wind-currents that bear it—now veiling, now revealing the startling and impressive beauties of this vast sea-girt chain of the Aleutian archipelago. These majestic blue swells of the great Pacific join with those cold green waves of that lesser, shallower ocean of the North in holding with firm embrace the most impressive range of fire-eaten mountains known to the geographer. This cordon of smoking, grumbling, quaking hills and peaks, when once surveyed, leaves an enduring image, grand and superb, on the retina of that eye which has been so fortunate as to behold it.
As the little schooner bears up to the westward for our port of Oonalashka, after we have well passed the Straits of Oonimak, we sail into the shorter, choppy waters of Bering Sea—into its characteristic light gray-green hue of soundings. The precipitous walls of Akoon Island, rising like so much Titanic sandstone masonry everywhere abruptly from the surf, carry a broad green plateau, that rolls and extends high above the surrounding tide-level. Here, under their lee, on the north shore, we encounter one of those large schools of humpback whales[72] which are so common and so frequently met with in the Aleutian straits and passages. These animals rise and sink alongside of the vessel, in utter disregard of its presence; and even volleys and bullets of our breech-loading rifles rapidly fired into their broad, glistening, gray-black backs and sides do not seem to arouse or alarm them in the least. Down they lazily go, to soon rise again with a sonorous whistle as they “blow.” A cloud of whale-birds hover over and settle on the watery area occupied by the feeding whales, ever and anon rising, to alight again as the cetacean fleet leaves its feathered convoy tossing behind on the wavelets of the sea.