[CHAPTER XVI.]
BERING'S PLACE OF LANDING ON THE AMERICAN COAST.—CAPTAIN COOK'S UNCERTAINTY.—THE QUESTION DISCUSSED AND DEFINITELY SETTLED.
In geographical literature complete uncertainty in regard to Bering's island St. Elias and its situation off the American coast still prevails. This uncertainty is due partly to Müller and partly to Cook. Müller is inaccurate; in fact, confused. He says that Bering saw the American continent in a latitude of 58° 28', and at a difference of longitude from Avacha of 50° (in reality, 58° 14' and 56° 30'), but he gives neither the latitude nor longitude of the island of St. Elias, which is the important point, and on his map of 1758, where he goes into details more than in his description, he marked on latitude 58° 28': "Coast discovered by Bering in 1741." On such vague reports nothing can be based. In the ship's journal, however, which Müller in all likelihood must have seen, the latitude of the island is entered as 59° 40', and the longitude, according to the ship's calculations, as 48° 50' east of Avacha. But as Bering's calculations, on account of the strong current, which in these waters flows at a rate of twenty miles, had an error of about 8°, the longitude becomes 56° 30' east of Avacha, and at this astronomical point, approximately correct, lies Kayak Island, which is Cook's Kayes Island, having a latitude of 59° 47' and a longitude of 56° 44' east of Avacha, and hence the question is to prove that this island really is the Guanahani of the Russians, that is, St. Elias.
Cook is the authority for the opinion which has hitherto prevailed; but surely no one can be more uncertain and cautious on this point than he. He says: "Müller's report of the voyage is so abbreviated, and his map is so extremely inaccurate, that it is scarcely possible from the one or the other, or by comparing both, to point out a single place that this navigator either saw or landed on. If I were to venture an opinion on Bering's voyage along this coast, I should say that he sighted land in the vicinity of Mt. Fairweather. But I am in no way certain that the bay which I named in his honor is the place where he anchored. Nor do I know whether the mountain which I called Mt. St. Elias is the same conspicuous peak to which he gave this name, and I am entirely unable to locate his Cape St. Elias."
It would seem that such uncertain and reserved opinions were scarcely liable to be repeated without comment or criticism. But nevertheless, the few reminiscences of this chapter of Bering's explorations which our present geography has preserved are obtained principally from Cook's map; for the first successors of this great navigator, Dixon, 1785, La Pérouse, 1786, Malespina, 1791, and Vancouver, 1792, through whose efforts the northwest coast was scientifically charted, maintained, with a few unimportant changes, Cook's views on this point. According to these views, Bering Bay was in 59° 18' north latitude and 139° west longitude, but Cook had not himself explored this bay; he had simply found indications of a bay, and hence La Pérouse and Vancouver, whose explorations were much more in detail, and who at this place could find no bay, were obliged to seek elsewhere for it. La Pérouse puts Bering Bay 10' farther south, at the present Alsekh River, northwest of Mt. Fairweather, the lagoon-shaped mouth of which he calls Rivière de Bering, and Vancouver was of the opinion that in La Pérouse's Bay de Monti, Dixon's Admiralty Bay, 59° 42' N. lat., he had found Bering's place of landing. Vancouver's opinion has hitherto held its own. The names Bering Bay, Admiralty Bay, or, as the Russians call it, Yakutat, are found side by side; the latter, however, is beginning to displace the former, and properly so, for Bering was never in or near this bay.[75]
While this Cook cartography fixed Bering's place of landing too far east, the Russians committed the opposite error. On the chart with which the Admiralty provided Captain Billings on his great Pacific expedition, the southern point of the Island of Montague, in Prince William's Sound, (the Russian name of the island is Chukli), is given as Bering's promontory St. Elias, and the Admiralty gave him the right, as soon as the expedition reached this point, to assume a higher military rank, something which he actually did. But Admiral Krusenstern, with his usual keenness, comes as near the truth as it was possible without having Bering's own chart and the ship's journal. He thinks that, according to Steller's narrative, the St. Peter must have touched America farther west than Yakutat Bay, and considers it quite probable that their anchoring place must be sought at one of the passages leading into Controller Bay, either between Cape Suckling (which on Russian maps is sometimes called Cape St. Elias) and Point Le Mesurier, or between the islands Kayak and Wingham. We shall soon see that this last supposition is correct. O. Peschel has not ventured wholly to accept Krusenstern's opinion, but he nevertheless calls attention to the fact that Bering Bay is not correctly located. He fixes Bering's landing place west of Kayak Island, and contends against considering Mt. St. Elias as the promontory seen by Bering, something which would seem quite superfluous.[76]
This uncertainty is all the more striking, as, from the beginning of this century, there have been accessible, in the works of Sauer and Sarycheff, facts enough to establish the identity of the island of St. Elias with the present Kayak Island, and since the publication of Bering's own map, in 1851, by the Russian Admiralty, there can no longer be a shadow of a doubt. The map is found in the appendix of this work, and hence a comparison between the islands of St. Elias and Kayak is possible (Map IV). The astronomical situation of the islands, their position with reference to the mainland, their surroundings, coast-lines, and geographical extension, the depths of the sea about both—everything proves that they are identical; and, moreover, Sauer's and Sarycheff's descriptions, which are quite independent of the St. Peter's journal, coincide exactly with the journal's references to the island of St. Elias. Sauer says that the island, from its most southerly point, extends in a northeasterly direction ("trend north 46° east"), that it is twelve English miles long and two and a half miles wide, that west of the island's most northerly point there is a smaller island (Wingham), with various islets nearer the mainland, by which a well-protected harbor is formed behind a bar, with about seven feet of water at ebb-tide,—hence just at the place where Khitroff, as we have already seen, found an available harbor for the St. Peter. The journal, as well as Steller, describes St. Elias as mountainous, especially in the southern part, thickly covered with low, coniferous trees, and Waxel particularly mentions the fact that off the coast of the island's southern point, Bering's Cape St. Elias, there was a single cliff in the sea, a "kekur," which is also marked on the map. Sarycheff and Sauer speak of Kayak Island as mountainous and heavily timbered. Its southern extremity rises above the rest of the island and ends very abruptly in a naked, white, saddle-shaped mountain. A solitary cliff of the same kind of rock, a pyramid-shaped pillar ("kekur," "Abspringer") lies a few yards from the point. Cook, too, in his fine outlines of Kayak Island, puts this cliff directly south of the point. If we then consider that the true dimensions of Bering's island plainly point to Kayak, that his course along the new coast is possible only on the same supposition that the direction in which Bering from his anchorage saw Mt. St. Elias exactly coincides with this mountain's position with reference to Kayak, that the soundings given by him agree with those of Kayak, but do not agree with those of Montague Island, which is surrounded by far more considerable depths that have none of the above described characteristics, and which, moreover, has so great a circumference that Khitroff could not possibly have circumnavigated it in twelve hours, and finally, considering the fact that everything which Steller gives as signs that a large current debouched near his anchorage finds an obvious explanation in the great Copper or Atna estuary, in 60° 17' N., then it will be difficult to resist the conviction that Kayak is Bering's St. Elias, and that Vancouver's Cape Hammond is his Cape St. Elias.
Moreover, the traditions of the natives corroborate this conclusion. While Billings's expedition was in Prince William's Sound, says Sauer, an old man came on board and related that every summer his tribe went on hunting expeditions to Kayak.[77] Many years before, while he was a boy, the first ship came to the island and anchored close to its western coast. A boat was sent ashore, but when it approached land all the natives fled, and not until the ship had disappeared did they return to their huts, where in their underground store-rooms they found some beads, leaves (tobacco), an iron kettle, and some other things. Sarycheff gives an account of this meeting, which in the main agrees with Billings's. These stories also agree with Steller's account.[78]
These facts have not before, so far as the author knows, been linked together, but Sokoloff states, without proof, however, that Bering's landfall was Kayak Island.[79] This correct view is now beginning to find its way into American maps, where, in the latest works, Cape St. Elias will be found in the proper place, together with a Bering Haven on the northern coast of Kayak.[80]