I have heard of steamers that have been built and sent out by missionary
or church societies to do good in far and lonely places.
The little _Dora_ is not one of these, nor is religion her cargo; her
hold is filled with other things. Yet blessings be on her for the good
she does! Her mission is to carry mail, food, freight, and good cheer to
the people of these green islands that go drifting out to Siberia, one
by one. She is the one link that connects them with the great world
outside; through her they obtain their sole touch of society, of which
their appreciation is pitiful.
Our captain was a big, violet-eyed Norwegian, about forty years old. He
showed a kindness, a courtesy, and a patience to those lonely people
that endeared him to us.
He knew them all by name and greeted them cordially as they stood,
smiling and eager, on the wharves. All kinds of commissions had been
intrusted to him on his last monthly trip. To one he brought a hat; to
another a phonograph; to another a box of fruit; dogs, cats, chairs,
flowers, books--there seemed to be nothing that he had not personally
selected for the people at the various ports. Even a little
seven-year-old half-breed girl had travelled in his care from Valdez to
join her father on one of the islands.
Wherever there was a woman, native or half-breed, he took us ashore to
make her acquaintance.
"Come along now," he would say, in a tone of command, "and be nice.
They don't get a chance to talk to many women. Haven't you got some
little womanly thing along with you that you can give them? It'll make
them happy for months."
We were eager enough to talk to them, heaven knows, and to give them
what we could; but the "little womanly things" that we could spare on a
two months' voyage in Alaska were distressingly few. When we had nothing
more that we could give, the stern disapproval in the captain's eyes
went to our hearts. Box after box of bonbons, figs, salted almonds,
preserved ginger, oranges, apples, ribbons, belts, pretty bags--one
after one they went, until, like Olive Schreiner's woman, I felt that I
had given up everything save the one green leaf in my bosom; and that
the time would come when the captain would command me to give that up,
too.
There seems to be something in those great lonely spaces that moves the
people to kindness, to patience and consideration--to tenderness, even.
I never before came close to such _humanness_. It shone out of people in
whom one would least expect to find it.
Several times while we were at dinner the chief steward, a gay and
handsome youth not more than twenty-one years old, rushed through the
dining room, crying:--
"Give me your old magazines--_quick_! There's a whaler's boat
alongside."
A stampede to our cabins would follow, and a hasty upgathering of such
literature as we could lay our hands upon.
The whaling and cod-fishing schooners cruise these waters for months
without a word from the outside until they come close enough to a
steamer to send out a boat. The crew of the steamer, discovering the
approach of this boat, gather up everything they can throw into it as it
flashes for a moment alongside. Frequently the occupants of the boat
throw fresh cod aboard, and then there are smiling faces at dinner. It
is my opinion, however, that any one who would smile at cod would smile
at anything.
The most marvellous voyage ever made in the beautiful and not always
peaceful Pacific Ocean was the one upon which the _Dora_ started at an
instant's notice, and by no will of her master's, on the first day of
January, 1906. Blown from the coast down into the Pacific in a freezing
storm, she became disabled and drifted helplessly for more than two
months.
During that time the weather was the worst ever known by seafaring men
on the coast. The steamship _Santa Ana_ and the United States steamship
_Rush_ were sent in search of the _Dora_, and when both had returned
without tidings, hope for her safety was abandoned.
Eighty-one days from the time she had sailed from Valdez, she crawled
into the harbor of Seattle, two thousand miles off her course. She
carried a crew of seven men and three or four passengers, one of whom
was a young Aleutian lad of Unalaska. As the _Dora_ was on her outward
trip when blown to sea, she was well stocked with provisions which she
was carrying to the islanders; but there was no fuel and but a scant
supply of water aboard.
The physical and mental sufferings of all were ferocious; and it was but
a feeble cheer that arose from the little shipwrecked band when the
_Dora_ at last crept up beside the Seattle pier. For two months they had
expected each day to be their last, and their joy was now too deep for
expression.
The welcome they received when they returned to their regular run among
the Aleutian Islands is still described by the settlers.
[Illustration: Copyright by E. A. Hegg, Juneau Courtesy of Webster &
Stevens, Seattle
CLOUD EFFECT ON THE YUKON]
The _Dora_ reached Kodiak late on a boisterous night; but her whistle
was heard, and the whole town was on the wharf when she docked, to
welcome the crew and to congratulate them on their safety. Some greeted
their old friends hilariously, and others simply pressed their hands in
emotion too deep for expression.
So completely are the people of the smaller places on the route cut off
from the world, save for the monthly visits of the _Dora_, that they had
not heard of her safety. When, after supposing her to be lost for two
months, they beheld her steaming into their harbors, the superstitious
believed her to be a spectre-ship.
The greatest demonstration was at Unalaska. A schooner had brought the
news of her safety to Dutch Harbor; from there a messenger was
despatched to Unalaska, two miles away, to carry the glad tidings to the
father of the little lad aboard the _Dora_.
The news flashed wildly through the town. People in bed, or sitting by
their firesides, were startled by the flinging open of their door and
the shouting of a voice from the darkness outside:--
"The _Dora's_ safe!"--but before they could reach the door, messenger
and voice would be gone--fleeing on through the town.
At last he reached the Jessie Lee Missionary Home, at the end of the
street, where a prayer-meeting was in progress. Undaunted, he flung wide
the door, burst into the room, shouting, "The _Dora's_ safe!"--and was
gone. Instantly the meeting broke up, people sprang to their feet, and
prayer gave place to a glad thanksgiving service.
When the _Dora_ finally reached Unalaska once more, the whole town was
in holiday garb. Flags were flying, and every one that could walk was on
the wharf. Children, native and white, carried flags which they joyfully
waved. Their welcome was enthusiastic and sincere, and the men on the
boat were deeply affected.
The _Dora_ is not a fine steamship, but she is stanch, seaworthy, and
comfortable; and the islanders are as attached to her as though she were
a thing of flesh and blood.
No steamer could have a twelve-hundred-mile route more fascinating than
the one from Valdez to Unalaska. It is intensely lovely. Behind the gray
cliffs of the peninsula float the snow-peaks of the Aleutian Range. Here
and there a volcano winds its own dark, fleecy turban round its crest,
or flings out a scarlet scarf of flame. There are glaciers sweeping
everything before them; bold headlands plunging out into the sea, where
they pause with a sheer drop of thousands of feet; and flowery vales and
dells. There are countless islands--some of them mere bits of green
floating upon the blue.
At times a kind of divine blueness seems to swim over everything.
Wherever one turns, the eye is rested and charmed with blue. Sea, shore,
islands, atmosphere, and sky--all are blue. A mist of it rests upon the
snow mountains and goes drifting down the straits. It is a warm,
delicate, luscious blue. It is like the blue of frost-touched grapes
when the prisoned wine shines through.
* * * * *
Sand Point, a trading post on Unga Island, is a wild and picturesque
place. It impressed me chiefly, however, by the enormous size of its
crabs and starfishes, which I saw in great numbers under the wharf.
Rocks, timbers, and boards were incrusted with rosy-purple starfishes,
some measuring three feet from the tip of one ray to the tip of the ray
nearly opposite. Smaller ones were wedged in between the rays of the
larger ones, so that frequently a piling from the wharf to the sandy
bottom of the bay, which we could plainly see, would seem to be solid
starfish.
As for the crabs--they were so large that they were positively
startling. They were three and four feet from tip to tip; yet their
movements, as they floated in the clear green water, were exceedingly
graceful.
Sand Point has a wild, weird, and lonely look. It is just the place for
the desperate murder that was committed in the house that stands alone
across the bay,--a dull and neglected house with open windows and
banging doors.
"Does no one live there?" I asked the storekeeper's wife.
"Live there!" she repeated with a quick shudder. "No one could be hired
at any price to live there."
The murdered man had purchased a young Aleutian girl, twelve years old,
for ten dollars and some tobacco. When she grew older, he lived with her
and called her his wife. He abused her shamefully. A Russian half-breed
named Gerassenoff--the name fits the story--fell in love with the girl,
loved her to desperation, and tried to persuade her to run away with
him.
She dared not, for fear of the brutal white wretch who owned her, body
and soul. Gerassenoff, seeing the cruelties and abuse to which she was
daily subjected, brooded upon his troubles until he became partially
insane. He entered the house when the man was asleep and murdered
him--foully, horribly, cold-bloodedly.
Gerassenoff is now serving a life-sentence in the government
penitentiary on McNeil's Island; the man he murdered lies in an unmarked
grave; the girl--for the story has its touch of awful humor!--the girl
married another man within a twelvemonth.
There is a persistent invitation at Sand Point to the swimmer. The
temptation to sink down, down, through those translucent depths, and
then to rise and float lazily with the jelly-fishes, is almost
irresistible. There is a seductive, languorous charm in the slow curve
of the waves, as though they reached soft arms and wet lips to caress.
There are more beautiful waters along the Alaskan coast, but none in
which the very spirit of the swimmer seems so surely to dwell.