Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

Our skipper, who has been a whaler in his youth, tells us, with a quaint air of contempt for what we so much admire, that these fish-like monsters are of no consequence in the eyes of a wise whaling captain, for though they are large enough, it is true, yet they are the wrong breed of whales—they are lean, fighting humpbacks, which, if struck with a harpoon, will run like an express engine for fifty miles or more, carrying a boat and crew of our species, either down in its rapid rush, or else diving in the shoals, over which it feeds, it rolls the death-dealing iron out or breaks it off on the bottom.

A stiff head-wind causes the course of the vessel to frequently lie close in to the shore where the massive bluffs of Akoon and Akootan rise in grim defiance, and from the shelves and interstices of which flocks of sea-parrots and little auks fly out in circling flights of curiosity and inspection around the schooner. As we watch the lazy motions of the whales, we recall the fact that on the summits of these bluffs and headlands now before us, the natives of Oonimak, as well as those to the country born, were in the habit of standing through long vigils of daily and nightly watch, as they went whale-fishing long ago after their own primitive fashion.

Nothing fit to eat is, or was, so highly prized by the Aleutes or Kaniags, as the blubber and gristle of a whale. To secure this luxury these savages were in the habit of subjecting themselves to infinite hardship and repeated bitter disappointment. The chase of the “ahgashitnak”[73] and the little “akhoaks”[74] was the important business of their lives in times of peace. The native hunter used, as his sole weapon of destruction, a spear-handle of wood about six feet in length; to the head of this he lashed a neatly-polished socket of walrus ivory, in which he inserted a tip of serrated slate that resembled a gigantic arrow-point, twelve or fourteen inches long and four or five broad at the barbs, and upon the point of which he carved his own mark

In the months of June and July the whales begin to make their first inshore visits to the Aleutian bays, where they follow up schools of herring and shoals of Amphipoda, or sea-fleas, upon which they love to feed. These bays of Akootan and Akoon were and are always resorted to more freely by those cetaceans than are any others in Alaska, and here the hunt is continued as late as August. When a calm, clear day occurs the natives ascend the bluffs and locate a school of whales; then the best men launch their skin-canoes, or bidarkas, and start for the fields. “Two-holed” bidarkas only are used. The hunter himself sits forward with nothing but his whale-spear in his grasp; his companion, in the after hatch, swiftly urges the light boat over the water in obedience to his order. Carefully looking the whales over, the hunter finally recognizes that yearling, or the calf, which he wishes to strike; for it is not his desire to attack an old bull or angry cow-whale. He calculates to a nice range where the “akhoak” will rise again from its last point of disappearance, and directs the course of the bidarka accordingly. If he is fortunate he will be within ten or twenty feet of the rising calf or yearling, and as it rounds its glistening back slowly and lazily out from its cover of the wavelets the Aleut throws his spear with all his physical power, so as to bury the head of it just under the stubby dorsal fin of that marine monster; the wooden shaft is at once detached, but the contortions of the stricken whale only assist to drive and urge the barbed slate-point deeper and deeper into its vitals. Meanwhile the canoe is paddled away as alertly as possible, before the plunging flukes of the tortured animal can destroy it or drown its human occupants.

ALEUTES WHALING

Natives of Akoon and Akootan killing Hump-back Whales

As soon as the whale is thus wounded it makes for the open sea, where “it goes to sleep” for three days, as the natives believe; then death intervenes, and the gases of decomposition cause its carcass to float, and, if the waves and currents are favorable, it will be so drifted as to lodge on a beach at some locality not so very remote from the place where it was struck by the hunter. The business of watching for these expected carcasses then became the great object of everyone’s life in that hunters’ village; dusky sentinels and pickets were ranged over long intervals of coast-line, stationed on the brows of the most prominent headlands, where they commanded an extensive range of watery vision. But the caprices of wind and tides are such in these highways and byways of the Aleutian Islands, that on an average not more than one whale in twenty, struck in this manner by native hunters, was ever secured; nevertheless, that one alone (when cast ashore) amply repaid the labor and the exposure incurred chiefly by watching day after day, in storm and fog, from the bluffs of Akoon and Akootan. The lucky hunter who successfully claimed, by his spear-head mark, the credit of slaying such a stranded calf or yearling, was then an object of the highest respect among his fellow-men, and it was remembered well of him even long after death.[75] Also, the greatest expression of respect for the size and ability of a native village and its people was the statement that it was so populous as to be able to eat all the meat and blubber of a large whale’s carcass in a single day!

As we “put about” under the frowning walls at Cape North, of Akootan, our captain says that the next tack will carry us into Oonalashka Harbor. Meanwhile, as we stand out into the waters of Bering Sea, we have a superb vista of the rugged, seared, and smoking summit of Akootan itself, which rears its hot head high above the rough, rocky island that bears its name. The beaches are few and far between, and there is but little land upon this island to invite a pedestrian, since masses of dark basalt, vesicular and olivine, are scattered in wild profusion everywhere. Over the northeast side steamy clouds arise from the path of a hot spring, which gushes out of the mountain, so hot that meat and fish are cooked in its scalding flood by the natives. On the very crest, as it were, of this whale-backed volcano, are two small, deep lakes that once were the vent-holes of subterranean fires. In olden times seven settlements, with a population of more than six hundred Aleutes, lived on the coast of this island, which, with Akoon, was then the whale-hunter’s paradise. To-day we find it utterly desolate, inhabited by a poverty-stricken hamlet of sixty-five natives, who are located on the southwest shore. The able-bodied men of this place spend the greater part of their time, however, far away from home on the sea-otter grounds of Saanak, being carried, like their brethren of Akoon and Avatanak, to and from that spot by a trader’s vessel.

Closely joined to them is the village of Akoon, in which fifty-five or sixty of their countrymen live on the northwest shore, who hunt and deport themselves as do those of Akootan. The Akoonites, however, enjoy the satisfaction of being nearer than their neighbors to that small, rugged islet of Oogamak, which stands in the path, as it were, of the great Pass of Oonimak; here on the low rocks a comparatively large number of sea-lions repair, and the little hair-seal also. For some reason or other, more of these last-named seals are found here than elsewhere in the entire large extent of this gigantic island chain. Akoon used to boast of many mighty whalers among its prehistoric population of five or six hundred natives, who, in fading away, have left the ruins only of eight settlements to attest their previous proud existence.