Friday evening we weighed anchor and steamed out of the harbor. The beautiful bay, with its beautiful islands, slowly receded from view and we bade farewell to the historic old town of Sitka.
Hamerton, in his charming work on Landscape, says: “There are, I believe, four new experiences for which no description ever adequately prepares us, the first sight of the sea, the first journey in the desert, the sight of flowing molten lava, and a walk on a great glacier. We feel in each case that the strange thing is pure nature, as much nature as a familiar English moor, yet so extraordinary that we might be in another planet.”
I would add a fifth, sunset at sea. Earth holds nothing more fair, nothing more beautiful than sunshine.
A little while ago the sky was blue, flaked with fleecy white clouds, the snows on the coast range lay sparkling like diamonds in the sun, the forest lay dark and green on the mountainside, the sea gray and blue by turns; but now a change comes over nature’s moods, the clouds glow, the snows take on brilliant hues, the dark old forest grows darker, the sea shimmers and sparkles, a flaming molten mass.
The imperial sunset throws its red flame afar, ’till the land, the sea, the mountains, the sky, the very air it incarnadines in one grand flame of scarlet. Long, long will the beholder remember that glorious sunset at Sitka.
CHAPTER IX
ALASKA
A friend of the writer who owns mines at Cook’s Inlet thus describes his voyage north along the coast to Unalaska:
We were now aboard the Excelsior. About noon the next day we put out to sea and saw no more island passages such as we had seen while aboard the Queen.
Our first stop was at Yakutat, an Indian village on the Yakutat Bay. This bay is only an indentation of the coast, curving inward for about twenty miles. The whole force of the Pacific sweeps into it. Landing is both difficult and dangerous. In the bay are always many icebergs from the glaciers at its head.