In rough weather, steamers bound for Sitka from the westward frequently
enter Cross Sound and proceed by way of Icy Straits and Chatham to
Peril.
Icy Straits are filled, in the warmest months, with icebergs floating
down from the many glaciers to the north. Of these Muir has been the
finest, and is a world-famous glacier, owing to the charming
descriptions written of it by Mr. John Muir. For several years it was
the chief object of interest on the "tourist" trip; but early in 1900 an
earthquake shattered its beautiful front and so choked the bay with
immense bergs that the steamer _Spokane_ could not approach closer than
Marble Island, thirteen miles from the front. The bergs were compact and
filled the whole bay. Since that time excursion steamers have not
attempted to enter Glacier Bay.
In the summer of 1907, however, a steamer entered the bay and, finding
it free of ice, approached close to the famed glacier--only to find it
resembling a great castle whose towers and turrets have fallen to ruin
with the passing of years. Where once shone its opaline palisades is now
but a field of crumpled ice.
There are no less than seven glaciers discharging into Glacier Bay and
sending out beautiful bergs to drift up and down Icy Straits with the
tides and winds. Rendu, Carroll, Grand Pacific, Johns Hopkins, Hugh
Miller, and Geikie front on the bay or its narrow inlets.
Brady Glacier has a three-mile frontage on Wimbledon, or Taylor, Bay,
which opens into Icy Straits.
* * * * *
When, on her mid-June voyage from Seattle in 1905, the _Santa Ana_ drew
out and away from Sitka, and turning with a wide sweep, went drifting
slowly through the maze of green islands and set her prow "to Westward,"
one of the dreams of my life was "come true."
I was on my way to the far, lonely, and lovely Aleutian Isles,--the
green, green isles crested with fire and snow that are washed on the
north by the waves of Behring Sea.
It was a violet day. There were no warm purple tones anywhere; but the
cool, sparkling violet ones that mean the nearness of mountains of snow.
One could almost feel the crisp _ting_ of ice in the air, and smell the
sunlight that opalizes, without melting, the ice.
Round and white, with the sunken nest of the thunder-bird on its crest,
Mount Edgecumbe rose before us; the pale green islands leaned apart to
let us through; the sea-birds, white and lavender and rose-touched,
floated with us; the throb of the steamer was like a pulse beating in
one's own blood; there were words in the violet light that lured us on,
and a wild sweet song in the waves that broke at our prow.
"There can be nothing more beautiful on earth," I said; but I did not
know. An hour came soon when I stood with bared head and could not speak
for the beauty about me; when the speech of others jarred upon me like
an insult, and the throb of the steamer, which had been a sensuous
pleasure, pierced my exaltation like a blow.
The long violet day of delight wore away at last, and night came on. A
wild wind blew from the southwest, and the mood of the North Pacific
Ocean changed. The ship rolled heavily; the waves broke over our decks.
We could see them coming--black, bowing, rimmed with white. Then came
the shock--followed by the awful shudder and struggle of the boat. The
wind was terrific. It beat the breath back into the breast.
It was terrible and it was glorious. Those were big moments on the texas
of the _Santa Ana;_ they were worth living, they were worth while. But
on account of the storm, darkness fell at midnight; and as the spray was
now breaking in sheets over the bridge and texas, I was assisted to my
cabin--drenched, shivering, happy.
"Shut your door," said the captain, "or you will be washed out of your
berth; and wait till to-morrow."
I wondered what he meant, but before I could ask him, before he could
close my cabin door, a great sea towered and poised for an instant
behind him, then bowed over him and carried him into the room. It
drenched the whole room and everything and everybody in it; then swept
out again as the ship rolled to starboard.
My travelling companion in the middle berth uttered such sounds as I had
never heard before in my life, and will probably never hear again unless
it be in the North Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of Yakutat or Katalla.
She made one attempt to descend to the floor; but at sight of the
captain who was struggling to take a polite departure after his anything
but polite entrance, she uttered the most dreadful sound of all and fell
back into her berth.
I have never seen any intoxicated man teeter and lurch as he did, trying
to get out of our cabin. I sat upon the stool where I had been washed
and dashed by the sea, and laughed.
He made it at last. He uttered no apologies and no adieux; and never
have I seen a man so openly relieved to escape from the presence of
ladies.
I closed the window. Disrobing was out of the question. I could neither
stand nor sit without holding tightly to something with both hands for
support; and when I had lain down, I found that I must hold to both
sides of the berth to keep myself in.
"Serves you right," complained the occupant of the middle berth, "for
staying up on the texas until such an unearthly hour. I'm glad you can't
undress. Maybe you'll come in at a decent hour after this!"
It is small wonder that Behring and Chirikoff disagreed and drifted
apart in the North Pacific Ocean. It is my belief that two angels would
quarrel if shut up in a stateroom in a "Yakutat blow"--than which only a
"Yakataga blow" is worse; and it comes later.
I am convinced, after three summers spent in voyaging along the Alaskan
coast to Nome and down the Yukon, that quarrelling with one's room-mate
on a long voyage aids digestion. My room-mate and I have never agreed
upon any other subject; but upon this, we are as one.
Neither effort nor exertion is required to begin a quarrel. It is only
necessary to ask with some querulousness, "Are you going to stand before
that mirror _all day?_" and hey, presto! we are instantly at it with
hammer and tongs.
Toward daylight the storm grew too terrible for further quarrelling; too
big for all little petty human passions. A coward would have become a
man in the face of such a conflict. I have never understood how one can
commit a cowardly act during a storm at sea. One may dance a hornpipe of
terror on a public street when a man thrusts a revolver into one's face
and demands one's money. That is a little thing, and inspires to little
sensations and little actions. But when a ship goes down into a black
hollow of the sea, down, down, so low that it seems as though she must
go on to the lowest, deepest depth of all--and then lies still,
shudders, and begins to mount, higher, higher, higher, to the very crest
of a mountainous wave; if God put anything at all of courage and of
bravery into the soul of the human being that experiences this, it comes
to the front now, if ever.
In that most needlessly cruel of all the ocean disasters of the Pacific
Coast, the wreck of the _Valencia_ on Seabird Reef of the rock-ribbed
coast of Vancouver Island, more than a hundred people clung to the decks
and rigging in a freezing storm for thirty-six hours. There was a young
girl on the ship who was travelling alone. A young man, an athlete, of
Victoria, who had never met her before, assisted her into the rigging
when the decks were all awash, and protected her there. On the last day
before the ship went to pieces, two life-rafts were successfully
launched. Only a few could go, and strong men were desired to manage the
rafts. The young man in the rigging might have been saved, for the ones
who did go on the raft were the only ones rescued. But when summoned, he
made simple answer:--
"No; I have some one here to care for. I will stay."
Better to be that brave man's wave-battered and fish-eaten corpse, than
any living coward who sailed away and left those desperate, struggling
wretches to their awful fate.
The storm died slowly with the night; and at last we could sleep.
It was noon when we once more got ourselves up on deck. The sun shone
like gold upon the sea, which stretched, dimpling, away for hundreds
upon hundreds of miles, to the south and west. I stood looking across it
for some time, lost in thought, but at last something led me to the
other side of the ship.
All unprepared, I lifted my eyes--and beheld before me the glory and the
marvel of God. In all the splendor of the drenched sunlight, straight
out of the violet, sparkling sea, rose the magnificent peaks of the
Fairweather Range and towered against the sky. No great snow mountains
rising from the land have ever affected me as did that long and noble
chain glistening out of the sea. They seemed fairly to thunder their
beauty to the sky.
From Mount Edgecumbe there is no significant break in the mountain range
for more than a thousand miles; it is a stretch of sublime beauty that
has no parallel. The Fairweather Range merges into the St. Elias Alps;
the Alps are followed successively by the Chugach Alps, the Kenai and
Alaskan ranges,--the latter of which holds the loftiest of them all, the
superb Mount McKinley,--and the Aleutian Range, which extends to the end
of the Aliaska Peninsula. The volcanoes on the Aleutian and Kurile
islands complete the ring of snow and fire that circles around the
Pacific Ocean.