BERING'S PLACE OF LANDING ON THE AMERICAN COAST.--CAPTAIN COOK'S
UNCERTAINTY.--THE QUESTION DISCUSSED AND DEFINITELY SETTLED.
In geographical literature complete uncertainty in regard to Bering's
island St. Elias and its situation off the American coast still
prevails. This uncertainty is due partly to Müller and partly to Cook.
Müller is inaccurate; in fact, confused. He says that Bering saw the
American continent in a latitude of 58° 28', and at a difference of
longitude from Avacha of 50° (in reality, 58° 14' and 56° 30'), but he
gives neither the latitude nor longitude of the island of St. Elias,
which is the important point, and on his map of 1758, where he goes
into details more than in his description, he marked on latitude 58°
28': "_Coast discovered by Bering in 1741._" On such vague reports
nothing can be based. In the ship's journal, however, which Müller in
all likelihood must have seen, the latitude of the island is entered as
59° 40', and the longitude, according to the ship's calculations, as
48° 50' east of Avacha. But as Bering's calculations, on account of the
strong current, which in these waters flows at a rate of twenty miles,
had an error of about 8°, the longitude becomes 56° 30' east of Avacha,
and at this astronomical point, approximately correct, lies Kayak
Island, which is Cook's Kayes Island, having a latitude of 59° 47' and
a longitude of 56° 44' east of Avacha, and hence the question is to
prove that this island really is the Guanahani of the Russians, that
is, St. Elias.
Cook is the authority for the opinion which has hitherto prevailed; but
surely no one can be more uncertain and cautious on this point than he.
He says: "Müller's report of the voyage is so abbreviated, and his map
is so extremely inaccurate, that it is scarcely possible from the one
or the other, or by comparing both, to point out a single place that
this navigator either saw or landed on. If I were to venture an opinion
on Bering's voyage along this coast, I should say that he sighted land
in the vicinity of Mt. Fairweather. But I am in no way certain that the
bay which I named in his honor is the place where he anchored. Nor do
I know whether the mountain which I called Mt. St. Elias is the same
conspicuous peak to which he gave this name, and I am entirely unable
to locate his Cape St. Elias."
It would seem that such uncertain and reserved opinions were scarcely
liable to be repeated without comment or criticism. But nevertheless,
the few reminiscences of this chapter of Bering's explorations
which our present geography has preserved are obtained principally
from Cook's map; for the first successors of this great navigator,
Dixon, 1785, La Pérouse, 1786, Malespina, 1791, and Vancouver, 1792,
through whose efforts the northwest coast was scientifically charted,
maintained, with a few unimportant changes, Cook's views on this point.
According to these views, Bering Bay was in 59° 18' north latitude
and 139° west longitude, but Cook had not himself explored this bay;
he had simply found indications of a bay, and hence La Pérouse and
Vancouver, whose explorations were much more in detail, and who at
this place could find no bay, were obliged to seek elsewhere for it.
La Pérouse puts Bering Bay 10' farther south, at the present Alsekh
River, northwest of Mt. Fairweather, the lagoon-shaped mouth of which
he calls _Rivière de Bering_, and Vancouver was of the opinion that in
La Pérouse's _Bay de Monti_, Dixon's Admiralty Bay, 59° 42' N. lat., he
had found Bering's place of landing. Vancouver's opinion has hitherto
held its own. The names Bering Bay, Admiralty Bay, or, as the Russians
call it, Yakutat, are found side by side; the latter, however, is
beginning to displace the former, and properly so, for Bering was never
in or near this bay.[75]
While this Cook cartography fixed Bering's place of landing too far
east, the Russians committed the opposite error. On the chart with
which the Admiralty provided Captain Billings on his great Pacific
expedition, the southern point of the Island of Montague, in Prince
William's Sound, (the Russian name of the island is Chukli), is
given as Bering's promontory St. Elias, and the Admiralty gave him
the right, as soon as the expedition reached this point, to assume a
higher military rank, something which he actually did. But Admiral
Krusenstern, with his usual keenness, comes as near the truth as it
was possible without having Bering's own chart and the ship's journal.
He thinks that, according to Steller's narrative, the St. Peter must
have touched America farther west than Yakutat Bay, and considers it
quite probable that their anchoring place must be sought at one of the
passages leading into Controller Bay, either between Cape Suckling
(which on Russian maps is sometimes called Cape St. Elias) and Point
Le Mesurier, or between the islands Kayak and Wingham. We shall soon
see that this last supposition is correct. O. Peschel has not ventured
wholly to accept Krusenstern's opinion, but he nevertheless calls
attention to the fact that Bering Bay is not correctly located. He
fixes Bering's landing place west of Kayak Island, and contends against
considering Mt. St. Elias as the promontory seen by Bering, something
which would seem quite superfluous.[76]
This uncertainty is all the more striking, as, from the beginning of
this century, there have been accessible, in the works of Sauer and
Sarycheff, facts enough to establish the identity of the island of
St. Elias with the present Kayak Island, and since the publication
of Bering's own map, in 1851, by the Russian Admiralty, there can no
longer be a shadow of a doubt. The map is found in the appendix of
this work, and hence a comparison between the islands of St. Elias and
Kayak is possible (Map IV). The astronomical situation of the islands,
their position with reference to the mainland, their surroundings,
coast-lines, and geographical extension, the depths of the sea about
both--everything proves that they are identical; and, moreover, Sauer's
and Sarycheff's descriptions, which are quite independent of the St.
Peter's journal, coincide exactly with the journal's references to
the island of St. Elias. Sauer says that the island, from its most
southerly point, extends in a northeasterly direction ("trend north
46° east"), that it is twelve English miles long and two and a half
miles wide, that west of the island's most northerly point there is a
smaller island (Wingham), with various islets nearer the mainland, by
which a well-protected harbor is formed behind a bar, with about seven
feet of water at ebb-tide,--hence just at the place where Khitroff,
as we have already seen, found an available harbor for the St. Peter.
The journal, as well as Steller, describes St. Elias as mountainous,
especially in the southern part, thickly covered with low, coniferous
trees, and Waxel particularly mentions the fact that off the coast
of the island's southern point, Bering's Cape St. Elias, there was a
single cliff in the sea, a "kekur," which is also marked on the map.
Sarycheff and Sauer speak of Kayak Island as mountainous and heavily
timbered. Its southern extremity rises above the rest of the island
and ends very abruptly in a naked, white, saddle-shaped mountain.
A solitary cliff of the same kind of rock, a pyramid-shaped pillar
("kekur," "_Abspringer_") lies a few yards from the point. Cook, too,
in his fine outlines of Kayak Island, puts this cliff directly south
of the point. If we then consider that the true dimensions of Bering's
island plainly point to Kayak, that his course along the new coast
is possible only on the same supposition that the direction in which
Bering from his anchorage saw Mt. St. Elias exactly coincides with
this mountain's position with reference to Kayak, that the soundings
given by him agree with those of Kayak, but do not agree with those of
Montague Island, which is surrounded by far more considerable depths
that have none of the above described characteristics, and which,
moreover, has so great a circumference that Khitroff could not possibly
have circumnavigated it in twelve hours, and finally, considering the
fact that everything which Steller gives as signs that a large current
debouched near his anchorage finds an obvious explanation in the great
Copper or Atna estuary, in 60° 17' N., then it will be difficult to
resist the conviction that _Kayak is Bering's St. Elias, and that
Vancouver's Cape Hammond is his Cape St. Elias_.
Moreover, the traditions of the natives corroborate this conclusion.
While Billings's expedition was in Prince William's Sound, says Sauer,
an old man came on board and related that every summer his tribe went
on hunting expeditions to Kayak.[77] Many years before, while he was
a boy, the first ship came to the island and anchored close to its
western coast. A boat was sent ashore, but when it approached land
all the natives fled, and not until the ship had disappeared did they
return to their huts, where in their underground store-rooms they found
some beads, leaves (tobacco), an iron kettle, and some other things.
Sarycheff gives an account of this meeting, which in the main agrees
with Billings's. These stories also agree with Steller's account.[78]
These facts have not before, so far as the author knows, been linked
together, but Sokoloff states, without proof, however, that Bering's
landfall was Kayak Island.[79] This correct view is now beginning to
find its way into American maps, where, in the latest works, Cape St.
Elias will be found in the proper place, together with a Bering Haven
on the northern coast of Kayak.[80]
FOOTNOTES:
[75] Note 57.
[76] Note 58.
[77] Note 59.
[78] Note 60.
[79] Bancroft, History of Alaska, p. 79, presents the same view: "The
identity of Kayak is established by comparing Bering's with Cook's
observations, which would be enough even if the chart appended to
Khitroff's journal had not been preserved. At first both Cook and
Vancouver thought it Yakutat Bay, which they named after Bering, but
both changed their minds. As late as 1787 the Russian Admiralty college
declared that the island Chukli (Montague of Vancouver) was the point
of Bering's discovery, but Admiral Sarycheff, who examined the journals
of the expedition, pointed at once to Kayak Island as the only point to
which the description of Bering and Steller could apply. Sarycheff made
one mistake in applying the name of Cape St. Elias to the nearest point
of the mainland called Cape Suckling by Cook."--TR.
[80] Note 61.