Part 25 (1/2)
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 s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sions. 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 s.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+p who was travelling alone. A young man, an athlete, of Victoria, who had never met her before, a.s.sisted her into the rigging when the decks were all awash, and protected her there. On the last day before the s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p.
All unprepared, I lifted my eyes--and beheld before me the glory and the marvel of G.o.d. 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 n.o.ble chain glistening out of the sea. They seemed fairly to thunder their beauty to the sky.
From Mount Edgec.u.mbe 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.
CHAPTER XX
Our s.h.i.+p having been delayed by the storm, it was mid-afternoon when we reached Yakutat. A vast plateau borders the ocean from Cross Sound, north of Baranoff and Chicagoff islands, to Yakutat; and out of this plateau rise four great snow peaks--Mount La Perouse, Mount Crillon, Mount Lituya, and Mount Fairweather--ranging in height from ten thousand to fifteen thousand nine hundred feet.
In all this stretch there are but two bays of any size, Lituya and Dry, and they have only historical importance.
Lituya Bay was described minutely by La Perouse, who spent some time there in 1786 in his two vessels, the _Astrolabe_ and _Boussole_.
The entrance to this bay is exceedingly dangerous; the tide enters in a bore, which can only be run at slack tide. La Perouse lost two boatloads of men in this bore, on the eve of his departure,--a loss which he describes at length and with much feeling.
Before finally departing, he caused to be erected a monument to the memory of the lost officers and crew on a small island which he named Cenotaphe, or Monument, Isle. A bottle containing a full account of the disaster and the names of the twenty-one men was buried at the foot of the monument.
La Perouse named this bay Port des Francais.
The chronicles of this modest French navigator seem, somehow, to stand apart from those of the other early voyagers. There is an appearance of truth and of fine feeling in them that does not appear in all.