THE BRITISH COLUMBIA COAST AND TONGASS.
If Claude Melnotte had wanted to paint a fairer picture to his lady, he
should have told Pauline of this glorious northwest coast, fringed with
islands, seamed with fathomless channels of clear, green, sea water, and
basking in the soft, mellow radiance of this summer sunshine. The
scenery gains everything from being translated through the medium of a
soft, pearly atmosphere, where the light is as gray and evenly diffused
as in Old England itself. The distant mountain ranges are lost in the
blue vaporous shadows, and nearer at hand the masses and outlines show
in their pure contour without the obtrusion of all the garish details
that rob so many western mountain scenes of their grander effects. The
calm of the brooding air, the shimmer of the opaline sea around one, and
the ranges of green and russet hills, misty purple mountains, and snowy
summits on the faint horizon, give a dream-like coloring to all one’s
thoughts. A member of the Canadian Parliament, in speaking of this coast
country of British Columbia, called it the “sea of mountains” and the
channels of the ocean through which one winds for days are but as
endless valleys and steep cañons between the peaks and ranges that rise
abruptly from the water’s edge. Only the fiords and inlets of the coast
of Norway, and the wooded islands in the Inland Sea of Japan, present
anything like a counterpart to the wonderful scenery of these
archipelagos of the North Pacific. From the head of Puget Sound to the
mouth of the Chilkat River there are seven hundred and thirty-two miles
of latitude, and the trend of the coast and the ship’s windings between
and around the islands make it an actual voyage of more than a thousand
miles on inland waters.
The Strait or Gulf of Georgia, that separates Vancouver’s Island from
the mainland, although widening at times to forty miles, is for the most
part like a broad river or lake, landlocked, walled by high mountain
ranges on both sides, and choked at either end with groups of islands.
The mighty current of the Frazer River rolls a pale green flood of fresh
water into it at the southern entrance, and the river water, with its
different density and temperature floating on the salt water, and
cutting through it in a body, shows everywhere a sharply defined line of
separation. In the broad channels schools of whales are often seen
spouting and leaping, and on a lazy, sunny afternoon, while even the
mountains seemed dozing in the waveless calm, the idlers on the after
deck were roused by the cry of “Whales!” For an hour we watched the
frolicking of the snorting monsters, as they spouted jets of water,
arched their black backs and fins above the surface, and then
disappeared with perpendicular whisks of their huge tails.
Toward the north end of Vancouver’s Island, where Valdes Island is
wedged in between it and the mainland shore, the ship enters Discovery
Pass, in which are the dangerous tide rips of Seymour Narrows. The tides
rushing in and out of the Strait of Georgia dash through this rocky
gorge at the rate of four and eight knots an hour on the turn, and the
navigators time their sailing hours so as to reach this perilous place
in daylight and at the flood tide. Even at that time the water boils in
smooth eddies and deep whirlpools, and a ship is whirled half round on
its course as it threads the narrow pass between the reefs. At other
times the water dashes over the rapids and raises great waves that beat
back an opposing bow, and the dullest landsman on the largest ship
appreciates the real dangers of the run through this wild ravine, where
the wind races with the water and howls in the rigging after the most
approved fashion for thrilling marine adventures. Nautical gossips tell
one of vessels that, steaming against the furious tide, have had their
paddle wheels reversed by its superior strength, and have been swept
back to wait the favorable minutes of slack water. Others, caught by the
opposing current, are said to have been slowly forced back, or, steaming
at full speed, have not gained an inch of headway for two hours. The
rise and fall of the tides is thirteen feet in these narrows, and
although there are from twenty to sixty fathoms of water in the true
channel, there is an ugly ledge and isolated rocks in the middle of the
pass on which there are only two and a quarter fathoms. Long before
Vancouver carried his victorious ensign through these unknown waters,
the Indians had known and dreaded these rapids as the abode of an evil
spirit, and for half a century the adventurous Hudson Bay traders went
warily through the raging whirlpools.
Although the British Admiralty have made careful surveys, and the charts
are in the main accurate, there have been serious wrecks on this part of
the coast. The United States man-of-war _Saranac_ was lost in Seymour
Narrows on the 18th of June, 1875. The _Saranac_ was an old side-wheel
steamer of the second rate in naval classification, carrying eleven
guns, and was making its third trip to Alaskan waters. There was an
unusually low tide the morning the _Saranac_ entered the pass, and the
ship was soon caught in the wild current, and sent broadside on to the
mid-rock. It swung off, and was headed for the Vancouver shore, and made
fast with hawsers to the trees, but there was only time to lower a boat
with provisions and the more important papers before the _Saranac_ sunk,
and not even the masts were left visible. The men camped on shore while
a party went in the small boats to Nanaimo for help. No attempt was ever
made to raise the ship, and in the investigation it was shown that the
boilers were in such a condition when they reached Victoria, that
striking the rock in Seymour Narrows was only one of the perils that
awaited those on board. No lives were lost by this disaster, and Dr.
Bessels, of the Smithsonian Institute, who was on his way up the coast
to make a collection of Indian relics for the Centennial Exposition,
showed a scientist’s zeal in merely regretting the delay, and continuing
on his journey by the first available craft. In April, 1883, the steamer
_Grappler_, which plied between Victoria and the trading-posts on the
west coast, took fire late at night, just as it was entering Seymour
Narrows. The flames reached the hempen rudder-ropes, and the boat was
soon helplessly drifting into the rapids. Flames and clouds of smoke
made it difficult to launch the boats, and all but one were swamped. The
frantic passengers leaped overboard while the ship was whirling and
careening in the rapids, and the captain, with life-preserver on, was
swept off, and disappeared in midstream. The _Grappler_ finally drifted
in to the Vancouver shore, and burned until daylight. Another United
States war vessel, the _Suwanee_ was lost a hundred miles beyond the
Seymour Narrows by striking an unknown rock at the entrance to Queen
Charlotte Sound.
In crossing this forty-mile stretch of Queen Charlotte Sound the voyager
feels the swell, and touches the outer ocean for the first time. If the
wind is strong there may be a chopping sea, but in general it is a
stilled expanse on which fog and mist eternally brood. The Kuro Siwo, or
Black Stream, or Japan Current, of the Pacific, which corresponds to the
Gulf Stream of the Atlantic, touches the coast near this Sound, and the
colder air from the land striking this warm river of the sea produces
the heavy vapors which lie in impenetrable banks for miles, or float in
filmy and downy clouds along the green mountain shores. It is this warm
current which modifies the climate of the whole Pacific coast, bends the
isothermal lines northward, and makes temperature depend upon the
distance from the sea instead of upon distance from the equator. Bathed
in perpetual fog, like the south coast of England and Ireland, there is
a climatic resemblance in many ways between the islands of Great Britain
and the islands of the British Columbia shore. The constant moisture and
the long days force vegetation like a hothouse, and the density of the
forests and the luxuriance of the undergrowth are equalled only in the
tropics. The pine-trees cover the mountain slopes as thickly as the
grass on a hillside, and as fires have never destroyed the forests, only
the spring avalanches and land-slides break their continuity. There is
an inside passage between the mountains from Queen Charlotte to Milbank
Sound that gave us an afternoon and evening in the midst of fine
scenery, but for another whole day we passed through the grandest of
fiords on the British Columbia coast.
The sun rose at three o’clock on that rare summer morning, when the ship
thrust her bow into the clear, mirror-like waters of the Finlayson
Channel, and at four o’clock a dozen passengers were up in front
watching the matchless panorama of mountain walls that slipped silently
past us. The clear, soft light, the pure air, and the stillness of sky,
and shore, and water, in the early morning, made it seem like the dawn
of creation in some new paradise. The breath of the sea and the breath
of the pine forest were blended in the air, and the silence and calm
added to the inspiration of the surroundings. The eastern wall of the
channel lay in pure shadow, the forest slopes were deep unbroken waves
of green, with a narrow base-line of sandstone washed snowy white, and
beneath that every tree and twig lay reflected in the still mirror of
waters of a deeper, purer, and softer green than the emerald.
The marks of the spring avalanches were white scars on the face of the
mountains, and the course of preceding landslides showed in the paler
green of the ferns, bushes, and the dense growth of young trees that
quickly cover these places. Cliffs of the color and boldness of the
Yosemite walls shone in the sunlight on the opposite side, and wherever
there were snowbanks on the summits, or lakes in the hollows and
amphitheatres back of the mountain ridge, foaming white cataracts
tumbled down the sheer walls into the green sea water. Eagles soared
overhead in long, lazy sweeps, and hundreds of young ducks fluttered
away from the ship’s bow, and dived at the sharp echoes of a rifle shot.
In this Finlayson Channel the soundings give from 50 to 130 fathoms, and
from the surface of these still, deep waters the first timbered slopes
of the mountains rise nearly perpendicularly for 1,500 feet, and their
snow-crowned summits reach 3,000 feet above their perfect reflections.
From a width of two miles at the entrance, the pass narrows one half,
and then by a turn around an island the ship enters Tolmie and Fraser
channels, which repeat the same wonders in bolder forms, and on deeper
waters. At the end of that last fiord, where submerged mountain peaks
stand as islands, six diverging channels appear, and the intricacy of
the inside passage up the coast is as marvellous now, as when Vancouver
dropped his anchor in this Wright Sound, puzzled as to which way he
should turn to reach the ocean. Finer even than the three preceding
fiords is the arrowy reach of Grenville Channel, which is a narrow cleft
in the mountain range, forty-five miles long, and with scarcely a curve
to break the bold palisade of its walls. In the narrowest part it is not
a quarter of a mile in width; and the forest walls, and bold granite
cliffs, rising there to their greatest height, give back an echo many
times before it is lost in long reverberations.
Emerging from Grenville Channel, the church and houses of Metlakatlah,
the one model missionary settlement on the coast, and an Arcadian
village of civilized and Christianized Indians, were seen shining in the
afternoon sun. At that point the water is tinged a paler green by the
turbid currents of the Skeena River, and up that river the newest El
Dorado has lately been found. Miners have gone up in canoes, and
fishermen have dropped their lines and joined them in the hunt for gold,
which is found in nuggets from the size of a pea to solid chunks worth
$20 and $60. “Jerry,” the first prospector, took out $600 in two days,
and in the same week two miners panned out $680 in six hours. One
nugget, taken from a crevice in a rock, was sent down to Victoria, and
found to be pure gold and worth $26. Other consignments of treasure
following, that quiet colonial town has been shaken by a gold fever that
is sending all the adventurous spirits off to the Lorne Creek mines.
Before the sunset hour we crossed Dixon Entrance and the famous
debatable line of 59° 40´, and the patriots who said the northern
boundary of the United States should be “Fifty-nine Forty, or Fight,”
are best remembered now, when it is seen that the Alaska possessions
begin at that line. We were within the Alaska boundaries and standing on
United States soil again at the fishing station of Tongass, on Wales
Island. It is a wild and picturesque little place, tucked away in the
folds of the hills and islands, and the ship rounded many points before
it dropped anchor in front of two new wooden houses on a rocky shore
that constituted Tongass. A cluster of bark huts and tents further down
the beach was the home of the Indians who catch, salt, and barrel the
salmon. There was one white man as host at the fish house, a fur-capped,
sad-eyed mortal, who wistfully said that he had not been “below” in
seven years, and entertained us with the sight of his one hundred and
forty barrels of salmon, and the vats and scow filled with split and
salted or freshly caught fish. He showed us a string of fine trout that
set the amateur fishermen wild, and then gallantly offered to weigh the
ladies on his new scales. Over in the group of Tongass Indians, sitting
stolidly in a row before their houses, there was a “one-moon-old” baby
that gave but a look at the staring white people, and then sent up one
pitiful little barbaric yawp. A clumsy, flat-bottomed scow was rowed
slowly out to the steamer, and while the salt, the barrel hoops, barrel
staves, and groceries were unloaded to it from the ship, a ball was
begun on deck. A merry young miner bound for the Chilkat country gave
rollicking old tunes on his violin, and a Juneau miner called off
figures that convulsed the dancers and kept the four sets flying on the
after deck. “The winnowing sound of dancers’ feet” and the scrape of the
fiddle brought a few Indian women out in canoes, and they paddled
listlessly around the stern, talking in slow gutturals of the strange
performances of the “Boston people,” as all United States citizens have
been termed by them since Captain Gray and John Jacob Astor’s ships
first came to the Northwest coast. At half-past ten o’clock daylight
still lingered on the sky, and the Chicago man gravely read a page of a
Lake Shore railroad time-table in fine print for a test, and then went
solemnly to bed, six hundred miles away from the rest of the United
States.