During our recent visit to Port Mulgrave we did not find the native women answering to the glowing description of the voyager who discovered the harbor; but this may be owing to the fact that we did not prevail upon any of them to wash their faces.
One other discrepancy must be noted between the records of Dixon's voyage and my own observations, made one hundred years later. The houses of the natives are described in the narrative just cited as—
"The most wretched hovels that can possibly be conceived: a few poles stuck in the ground, without order or regularity, recrossed and covered with loose boards, ... quite insufficient to keep out the snow and rain."
While this description would apply to the temporary shelters now used by the Yakutat Indians when on their summer hunting and fishing expeditions, it by no means describes the houses in which they pass the winter. These are large and substantially built of planks hewn from spruce trees, and in some instances supported from the inside by four huge posts, carved and painted to represent grotesque figures. In the center of the roof there is a large opening through which the smoke escapes from the fire kindled in an open space in the floor. But few of the Indian villages of Alaska, excepting perhaps the homes of the Thlinkets in the Alexandrian archipelago, are better built or more comfortable than those at Port Mulgrave.
On the map of Port Mulgrave already referred to, "Point Turner" and "Point Carrew" appear. The former was named for the second mate of the Queen Charlotte, who was the first of her officers to land; the second name was probably designed to honor another officer of the expedition, but of this I am not positive.
DOUGLAS, 1788.5
5 Voyage of the Iphigenia; Captain Douglas: in Voyages made in the years 1788–1789 from China to the Northwest Coast of America. John Meares, 4°, London, 1790.
In 1788, another trading vessel, the ship Iphigenia, in command of Captain Douglas, visited the southern shore of Alaska and anchored in Yakutat bay; but no special account of the country or the inhabitants is recorded in the narrative of the voyage.
MALASPINA, 1792.6
6 Relacion del viage hecho por las goletas Sutil y Mexicana en el año de 1792 para reconocer el estrecho de Fuca; con una introduccion en que se da noticia de las expediciones executadas anteriormente por los Españoles en busca del paso del noroeste de la América [Por Don Dionisio Alcala Galiano]. Madrid, 1802 [accompanied by an atlas]. Pp. CXII–CXXI.