CHAPTER XXII.HOMEWARD BOUND.
Life on the waveless arms of the ocean has a great fascination for one on these Alaska trips, and crowded with novelty, incidents, and surprises as each day is, the cruise seems all too short when the end approaches. One dreads to get to land again and end the easy, idle wandering through the long archipelago. A voyage is but one protracted marine picnic and an unbroken succession of memorable days. Where in all the list of them to place the red letter or the white stone puzzles one. The passengers beg the captain to reverse the engines, or boldly turn back and keep up the cruise until the autumn gales make us willing to return to the region of earthly cares and responsibilities, daily mails and telegraph wires. The long, nightless days never lose their spell, and in retrospect the wonders of the northland appear the greater. The weeks of continuous travel over deep, placid waters in the midst of magnificent scenery might be a journey of exploration on a new continent, so different is it from anything else in American travel. Seldom is anything but an Indian canoe met, for days no signs of a settlement are seen along the quiet fiords, and, making nocturnal visits tosmall fisheries, only the unbroken wilderness is in sight during waking hours. The anchoring in strange places, the going to and fro in small boats, the queer people, the strange life, the peculiar fascination of the frontier, and the novelty of the whole thing, affect one strongly. Each arm of the sea and the unknown, unexplored wilderness that lies back of every mile of shore continually tempt the imagination.
Along these winding channels in “the sea of mountains,” only the rushing tides ever stir the surface of the waters where the surveyor’s line drops one hundred, two hundred, and four hundred fathoms without finding bottom, and the navigator casts his lead for miles without finding anchorage. All piloting is by sight, and when clouds, fogs, or the long winter nights of inky darkness obscure the landmarks, the fog whistle is kept going according to regulation, and the ship’s course determined by the echoes flung back from the hidden mountains. Such feats in time of fog gave zest to ship life, and Captain Carroll, who performed them, was accused of being the original of Mark Twain’s man, who made a collection of echoes. At every place in Alaska he had a particular echo that he brought out with the cannon’s salute. At Fort Wrangell the hills repeated the shot five times; and at Juneau it came back seven times, before dying away in a long roll. At Sitka there was the din of a naval battle when the cannon was fired point blank at Mt. Verstovaia, and up among the glaciers, the echoes drowned the thunder of the falling ice.
Captain Carroll, for so many years in command of the mail steamer on this Alaska route, is a genius in his way, and a character, a typical sea captain, a finenavigator, and a bold and daring commander, whose skill and experience have carried his ships through the thousand dangers of the Alaska coast. He is a strict disciplinarian, whose authority is supreme, and the etiquette of the bridge and quarter-deck is severely maintained. When he leaves the deck and lays aside his official countenance, the children play and tumble over him and cling to him, and he is a merciless joker with the elders. He is possessed of a fund of stories and adventures that would make the fortune of a wit orraconteuron shore, and their momentary piquancy, as of salt water and stiff winds, makes it impossible for one to repeat them well. His fish stories are unequalled, and the despair of the most accomplished anglers. He leaves nothing undone to promote the pleasure and comfort of his passengers, who are in a sense his guests during the three or four weeks of a summer pleasure trip, and gold watches and several sets of resolutions have expressed appreciation of his courtesy and attentions to travellers. He is deeply interested in the welfare of the region that he has seen slowly awakening to the march of progress, and, being so identified with these early days and the development of the territory, is destined to live as an historic figure in Alaskan annals.
The pilot, Captain George, is everyone’s friend, and his patience and good nature have to stand the strain of a steady questioning and cross-examination from the beginning to the end of a cruise. He is appealed to for all the heights, depths, distances, and names along the route; and finally, when everyone has bought a large Hydrographic Office chart ofAlaska, Captain George is asked to mark out the ship’s course through the maze of island channels. He has been pilot for twenty years on the northwest coast, and Mr. Seward and many others who saw the country under his guidance speak of him as a Russian. As his early home in “the States” was at Oshkosh, one can understand how that foreign-sounding name misled people. He, as well as all of the ship’s officers, keeps a log of each cruise, and Captain George has furnished many notes and notices for the Coast Survey publications, and helps the memory of the tourists, who keep some of the most remarkable journals and diaries for the first few days of the cruise.
A character in the lower rank on one trip was the captain’s boy, “John,” a faithful henchman and valet, whose devotion and attachment to his master were quite wonderful. John is a Swede by birth, and his pale-blue eyes, fair complexion, and light hair were offset by a continuous array of spotlessly white jackets and ties. In the most Northern latitudes John would trip about the deck with his spry and jaunty tread, clad in these snowy habiliments of the tropics, and after a ramble among Indian lodges on shore, John would appear to our enraptured eyes as the very apotheosis of cleanliness and starchy perfection. At luncheon one day John set two pies before the captain, and announcing them as “mince and apple,” withdrew deferentially behind his master’s chair. “Which is the apple pie, John?” asked the captain, as he held a knife suspended over a disk of golden crust. “The starboard pie, sir,” said John respectfully, and with a seriousness that robbed the thing of any intention.
Two deck passengers that enlivened the return trip of theIdahowere small black bear cubs four or five months old. There was always high revel on the hurricane deck during the “dog watches” when the bears were fed, and cakes and lumps of sugar from the cabin table enticed them to play pranks. The treacherous young bruin bought at Chilkat grew fat on the voyage, and was twice the size of a little stunted cub bought of a trader at Fort Wrangell. The Chilkat cub climbed the rigging like a born sailor after a fortnight’s training, but much teasing made him surly and suspicious, and he would run for the ratlines at sight of a man. For the ladies, who fed them on sugar and salmon berries, both bears showed a great fondness, and the two clumsy pets would trot around the deck after them as tamely as kittens, and stand up and beg for sugar plainly. The little Fort Wrangell bear would crawl up on a bench beside one, and make plaintive groans until it was petted, and it would sun itself contentedly there for hours. They were amiable playfellows together, but they were puzzled and bewitched by the agile little toy-terrier “Toots,” who lived on an afghan in the captain’s cabin. That aristocratic little mite of a dog delighted to caper around and bewilder the bears with his quick motions, and it was a funny by-play to watch these young animals together. One evening in the Gulf of Georgia, we lingered on deck to watch a stormy, crimson sunset, and after that, when the moon rose like a fiery ball from the water, and faded to pale gold and silver in the zenith, the company grew musical and sang in enthusiastic chorus all the good old sea songs. With the first notes of the music the bears came patteringout, and, circling gravely before the singers, lay down, folded their forepaws before them in the most human attitude and listened attentively to “Nancy Lee” and “John Brown.” Two young fawns, caught as they were swimming the channel near Fort Wrangell one morning, were quartered on the lower deck. In captivity their soft black eyes were sadly pathetic, and they were visited daily and fed on all the dainties for deer that could be gathered on shore. Foxes, strange birds, Esquimaux dogs, and other pets have been passengers on the return trips of the steamer, and the officers of the ship have done their share in presenting animals to different city gardens and parks.
As the end of Vancouver Island drew near, the scenery of the British Columbia coast gained in beauty, with the prospect of so soon losing our wild surroundings. After leaving Metlakatlah there was not a sign of civilization for two days, and in spite of Buffon and Henry James, Jr., we grew the more enthusiastic over the “brute nature” that so offends those worldlings. The days were clear, but one night the fog promised to be so dense that the ship made an outside run from the Milbank to Queen Charlotte Sound, over waters so still that none suspected that we had left the narrow inside channels.
We never met the oulikon, or “candle fish” of this coast, except as we saw the piscatorial torch at grocers’ stores in Victoria; but we sailed for four hours through a school of herring one afternoon, as we neared the Vancouver shore. Sharks were following them by dozens, and sea-gulls flew overhead, ready to swoop upon the unlucky herring that jumped to the enemy in the air to escape the one in the water.Both times on the return voyage we slipped through Seymour Narrows without knowing it, so smoothly was the water boiling at the flood tide, and so absorbed were we once in the soft poetic sunset that finally left a glowing wall of orange in the west, against which the ragged forest line of the summits and the mountain masses were as if carved in jet. Looking upwards, even the masts and spars were sharply silhouetted against the glorious amber zenith, and it was hours before it faded to the pure violet sky of such midsummer nights.
Besides Mt. St. Elias, the Alaska passengers always beg for a view of Bute Inlet, which opens from the network of channels there at the head of the Gulf of Georgia, and runs far into the heart of the mountain range that borders the mainland shore. We hung over the captain’s charts of the inlet with the greatest interest, and, with his explanations, imagination could picture that grand fiord, not a quarter of a mile in width, and with vertical mountain walls that rise from four thousand feet at the entrance, to eight thousand feet above the water’s level at the head of the inlet. Soundings of four hundred fathoms are marked on the chart, and with cascades and glaciers pouring into the chasm, little is left for a scenic artist to supply. A trail was once cleared from the head of the inlet to the Cariboo mining district on the Frazer river, and surveys were made looking to a terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, but both have been abandoned, and Bute Inlet is not accessible by any established line of boats. Lord Dufferin and the Marquis of Lorne visited it on British men-of-war, and carried its fame to England, by extolling its sceneryas the grandest on any coast. When Lord Dufferin had gone further up and into Alaska, he made his prophecy that this northwest coast, with its long stretch of protected waters, would in time become one of the favorite yachting grounds of the world.
If the beautiful Gulf of Georgia is wonderland and dreamland by day, it is often fairyland by night, and there was an appropriate finale to the last cruise, when the captain came down the deck at midnight and rapped up the passengers. “Wake up! The whole sea is on fire” said the commander. We roused and flung open stateroom doors and windows to see the water shining like a sheet of liquid silver for miles on every side. The water around us was thickly starred with phosphorescence, and at a short distance, the million points of lights mingled in a solid stretch of miles of pale, unearthly flame. It lighted the sky with a strange reflection, and the shores, which there, off Cape Lazro, are twenty miles away, seemed near at hand in the clear, ghostly light. A broad pathway of pale-green, luminous water trailed after us, and the paddle-wheels threw off dazzling cascades. Under the bows the foaming spray washed high on the black hull, and cast long lines of unearthly, greenish white flame, that illuminated the row of faces hanging over the guards as sharply as calcium rays. A bucket was lowered and filled with the water, and the marvel of the shining sea was repeated in miniature on deck, each time the water was stirred. It was a most wonderful display, and many, who had seen this glory of the seas in the tropics, declared that they had never seen phosphorescent waters more brilliant than those of the Gulf of Georgia.
With such an illumination and marine fireworks we brought the last cruise virtually to an end, and another morning found the ship tied to the same coal wharf in Departure Bay. The pleasure travellers laid their plans for other trips, and in a few days the company was scattered.
Those who went up the Frazer River to its cañons said later: “The best of the Frazer only equals Grenville Channel, and the dust and heat are intolerable after the northern coast.”
Those who went down past Mt. Tacoma, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Shasta, and into the Yosemite, said: “If we had only seen these places first, and not after the Alaska trip.”
All agreed in the summing up of an enthusiast, who had travelled the fairest scenes of Europe and his own country, and wrote: “Take the best of the Hudson and the Rhine, of Lake George and Killarney, the Yosemite and all Switzerland, and you can have a faint idea of the glorious green archipelago and the Alaska coast.”
My first journey on theIdahoin 1883 ended with our staying by the ship, and going around outside from Puget Sound to the Columbia River, and then we were tied up for three days at the government wharf at Tongue Point, near Astoria, while three hundred tons of Wellington coal was slowly unloaded. The smoke of forest fires and the summer fogs hid all the magnificent shores and headlands at the mouth of the great river, and the hundreds of little fishing-boats, with their pointed sails, that set out at sunset, soon vanished in the opaline mists. After dark a thousand tiny points of flame could be dimlyseen on the water, as the fishermen lighted the fires in their boats to cook their suppers, or set their lanterns in the bows as they sailed slowly back to the canneries with their loads of salmon. Five days after we crossed the Columbia River bar, the ship reached Portland, and the journey was over.
The second cruise, which was blessed with clear sunshiny weather from beginning to end, was concluded at Port Townsend, where for three weeks we enjoyed such perfect summer days as are known nowhere but on Puget Sound. With Mt. Baker on one side as a snowy sentinel, and the broken range of the Olympic Mountains a violet wall against the western sky, it needed only the foreground of water and the immaculate silver cone of Mt. Tacoma rising over level woodlands, to make the view from Port Townsend’s heights the finest on Puget Sound. When a great full moon hung in the purple sky of night, miles of the waters of the bay were pure, rippling silver; and, like a vision in the southern sky, glistened a faint, ethereal image, the peak of Mt. Tacoma, sixty miles away.
Appreciating all that was overhead and around us, we found a wonderland under foot one morning by rowing and poling a small boat far in under the wharf, at the low tide. The water having receded thirteen feet, the piles for that distance were covered with the strangest and most fanciful marine growths. Star fish, pink, yellow, white, and purple, clung to the piles, many of them with eighteen and twenty-one feelers radiating from their thick fleshy bodies, that were twelve inches and more in diameter. There were slender, skeleton-like little starfish of thebrightest carmine, and bunches of snow-white and pale yellow anemones (actinia) that looked like large cauliflower blossoms when opened fully under the water. Long brown pipes, growing in clusters on the piles, hung out crimson petals and ragged streamers until it seemed as though thousands of carnation pinks had been swept in among the piles. Theserpula, that lives in this pipe-stem house, is valued for fish bait, and the voyage under the wharf was not wholly for studies in zoology. Huge jelly-fish floated by, opening and shutting their umbrella-like disks of pink and yellow, as if some wind were blowing rudely the petals of these wonderful blossoms of the sea. Shells of the “Spanish dollar” lay on the sands at the bottom, and at the water line little jelly-fish could be seen shimmering like disks of ice in the clear light of the early summer morning. A scientist would have been wild at sight of that natural aquarium, and to any one it would appear as a part of wonderland, a beautifully decorated hall for mermaids’ revels, and a model for a transformation fairy scene in some spectacular drama. The woods and drives, the scenes and shores about Port Townsend, excite the admiration of every visitor, and when the aquarium under the wharf is regularly added to its list of attractions, that charming town will have done its whole duty to the travelling public.