Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  The scattered people that Cook encountered during this long, dismal coasting seemed like freaks to the English. Natives stuck bones draped with beads through large slits cut beneath their lower lips. “This Ornament is a very great Impediment to the Speech and makes them look as if they had a double row of teeth in the under Jaw,” Cook wrote. One alarmed sailor, he added, “called out there was a man with two mouths.”

  Cook, however, admired the local attire: cloaks of beaver and otter fur. The inhabitants were unaware of their value in Europe. One chief accepted a single bead in exchange for ten skins that crewmen valued at several hundred pounds sterling, or roughly twenty times a seaman’s annual wage. “There is no doubt but a very beneficial fur trade might be carried on with the Inhabitants of this coast,” Cook concluded.

  As usual, he was right. Within a decade of his visit, British fur traders—including several men who had sailed on the Resolution and Discovery—would swarm the coast of Canada and Alaska, with grave consequences for both the coast dwellers and their furry game. Cook also anticipated this impact. “Foreigners would increase their [natives’] wants by introducing new luxuries amongst them,” he wrote, “in order to purchas which they would be the more assiduous in procuring skins.”

  As he pushed on, through “constant Misty weather with drizzly rain,” Cook would discover that this inexorable transformation was already under way.

  I woke sometime in the night, when a man stepped on my head. The gale had spilled me across the deck and hard against the bathroom door. I caterpillar-crawled in my sleeping bag so the man could get past. The ship shuddered and bucked. Sea spray soaked my bag; wind buffeted my face. I felt as though I were trying to sleep through the rinse-and-spin cycle at a Laundromat.

  After a few minutes I gave up and slumped against the ship’s rail. Roger, sprawled nearby, looked like a Mathew Brady photograph of the Gettysburg dead: limbs twisted, clothes scattered, mouth curled in a stunned O. At least he could sleep. I rummaged in my rucksack for a flashlight and Cook’s journal. “The gale increasing with a thick fog and rain,” he wrote of the Resolution’s sail through these waters. “A prodigious swell rolling in upon the shore.”

  I poked my head over the rail. Thick fog and rain, no doubt about that. The swell felt prodigious, but I couldn’t really tell. All I could see were whitecaps foaming atop black sea, like froth dollopped on espresso. The man who’d stepped on my head lurched out of the bathroom, gray-faced and trembling. There but for the grace of God…and the horse dose of Dramamine I’d swallowed before bed.

  I turned to Charles Clerke’s journal. As always, he played the everyman to Cook’s Übermensch. “We have now a very staggering gale,” he wrote, describing the same storm that Cook judged “increasing.” As for Alaska, neither the sea nor the land impressed the Discovery’s captain. “This seems upon the whole,” Clerke wrote, “a damn’d unhappy part of the World.”

  Dawn broke early and gray aboard the Tustumena. Tired but elated at having survived the gale, which died down at daybreak, I went to the bridge to see if I could chat with the captain. Several men occupied the large, glass-enclosed wheelhouse, checking banks of switches, computer terminals, and blipping screens. The helmsman offered to show me around, spouting acronyms for various guidance systems. A machine that looked like a heart monitor charted the depth and contour of the sea bottom. One fax spat out weather reports; another produced Coast Guard communiqués. “This gear will do everything except wash dishes,” the helmsman said.

  Tearing off a computer printout, he reported that the gale during the night had reached force seven on the twelve-notch Beaufort scale, with forty-five-knot gusts and a twelve-foot swell. “No big deal compared to what we often see out here,” he said. When I asked why conditions were so extreme, he pulled out a chart and swept his finger across the Pacific. “It’s wide-open sea all the way to Hawaii,” he said. “The wind and ocean have a long time to build up before slamming into us.”

  The Gulf of Alaska was also a cauldron for ferocious storms, created when cold Arctic air met warm Pacific currents. At the moment, we were steaming through the Shelikof Strait, a notorious wind tunnel between Kodiak Island and the Alaskan mainland. Ahead lay the Bering Sea, renowned for its unrelenting fog and frigid wind. The helmsman showed me a circular window set into the bridge’s front glass. It was designed to heat up and revolve, keeping a peephole clear when the rest of the windshield iced over.

  A trim man with a graying beard joined us on the bridge. This was the captain, Bob Crowley, who had piloted the Tustumena for twenty-five years. In that time, he’d seen mountainous “rogue waves,” ships in distress, and even circus animals on the ferry getting sick. “On bad trips,” he said, “this looks like a hospital ship.” The crew had to make announcements asking passengers to use toilets and vomit bags so as not to clog the sinks and water fountains. Occasionally, conditions got so bad that passengers bailed out, disembarking at remote stops along the way. Others drank too much and had to be handcuffed to the bar. Two suicidal men had even jumped overboard; one of them drowned.

  I asked the captain if he ever thought about Cook, who had sailed these same waters in a wooden ship less than half the length of the Tustumena, without engines or weather reports or radio contact. He answered me by going to a computerized chart plotter and clicking a mouse. Our position, course, and speed flashed onto the color monitor. The computer also calculated the speed and direction of approaching vessels and the contour and distance of the shore. The captain shook his head. “What Cook did, it’s hardly even comprehensible,” he said. “This is a graveyard for ships. I wouldn’t risk a day sail out here without all these instruments.”

  Just before noon, the ferry stopped at a small port called Chignik, a native word for “big wind.” Ringed by towering, snowcapped peaks, Chignik could be reached only by ship or small plane. We had an hour to wander onshore while the ferry unloaded cargo. Roger and I stepped off the gangway and into the middle of a Chignik summer’s day: forty-five degrees, cold rain, and a howling wind. The old wooden pier led straight to a warehouse crowded with men hacking fish. This plant, and a nearby cannery, drew a few hundred seasonal workers to Chignik, which had a year-round population of only seventy.

  A Mexican worker leaned against the wall of the fish plant, smoking a cigarette. “Here, we just cut, gut, and head,” he said, adding that he earned $5.75 an hour, plus overtime, for working twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. He shared a bed, sleeping while his bunkmate worked. The man pointed out the workers’ quarters before returning to the line: barracklike buildings decorated with homemade signs saying “Hilton,” “Hyatt,” and “Waldorf.”

  We hiked through the rest of the village, across planks laid over mud. Most of the buildings were low and ramshackle; the only tall one, Chignik’s church, had blown over in a storm a few years before. At the town’s general store, I asked the shopkeeper what people in Chignik did for fun. “Fun?” he replied. “Wait for the ferry to come in.”

  We trudged back through the rain to the dock. Roger glanced up at the fog-shrouded mountains walling in Chignik. “The place is a gulag,” he said. “Not one concession to sentiment or aesthetics.” By comparison, the ferry now seemed luxurious, and we stretched out on our foam mats, munching peanuts from the general store. I went to the rail to snap a picture and returned to find Roger inside my sleeping bag. “I’m looking forward to becoming better acquainted with this,” he said, zipping himself in. “I’ll be like one of those Mexican workers, using the bed when you’re not.”

  In the afternoon we passed a point Cook had named Foggy Cape. I couldn’t see it through all the fog. Near here, the English had a strange encounter with natives in kayaks. “An Indian in one of them,” Cook wrote, “took off his cap and bowed after the manner of Europeans.” When sailors dropped the man a rope, he attached a small wooden box before paddling away. Inside the box was a paper covered in Russian script. None of the crewmen could read the writing, but they guessed
it was a message from shipwrecked sailors.

  In fact, as the English later learned, the note was a receipt for tribute, or tax, paid by the natives to Russian fur traders. Cook had reached the eastern edge of Russian influence in the region. After Vitus Bering died in 1741, having just sighted the Alaskan mainland, his sailors built a boat from their shipwrecked vessel and sailed home, carrying a rich load of seal, fox, and otter pelts. This sparked a frenzy among Russian fur traders, who spent the next three decades probing east along the Aleutians and onto the Alaskan peninsula.

  The early traders were a brutal lot. They seized women and children as hostages until native men hunted furs for the Russians. This custom gradually evolved into a tribute system, paid in pelts. When natives resisted, by attacking small trading parties, the Russians retaliated by slaughtering them by the hundreds with musket and cannon. By 1778, when Cook arrived, the natives had become sub-Arctic serfs. The men who paddled out to the Resolution were probably fearful that the visitors were Russians, coming to extract more tax. Hence their “acquired politeness,” as Cook called it, and their tendering of the receipt for tribute already paid.

  This wasn’t the first time Cook had encountered Pacific peoples who’d seen Europeans before. But in other places Cook had visited, that contact had been very limited; some of it had occurred more than a century before Cook’s arrival. In Alaska, Cook, for the first time, met natives in the early throes of the upheaval wrought by sustained European contact. The picture he and his men came away with proved a melancholy preview of what lay in store for the societies Cook himself had opened to the West.

  At ten o’clock on our second night at sea, the Tustumena arrived at Sand Point, a larger and somewhat more salubrious outpost than Chignik. A Little League team awaited us on the dock. They would ride the ferry to the next stop for a game, then wait for the ship’s return trip to travel home four days later. A crewman said that residents of these remote, scattered settlements also timed high school proms and other occasions for the ferry’s monthly round-trip. The communities were too small to stage such events on their own.

  We hiked a half mile to the center of Sand Point, which was dusty and silent, except for a shedlike tavern with a corrugated metal roof and a sign by the door: NO WEAPONS. Inside, a dozen men hunched around the bar, where they’d obviously been for some time. A woman with a black eye played pool with a man clad in the local uniform: duckbill cap, dirty quilted vest, flannel shirt, and blue jeans.

  “Lemme buy you boys a beer!” a man slurred as soon as we reached the bar. The others quickly competed for our company. Strangers were obviously a welcome novelty in Sand Point. After several incoherent conversations, I was relieved to find a half-sober patron named Ken Cheek, a broad-shouldered, ponytailed man with broken teeth. He turned out to be the bar’s bouncer. On most nights, Ken said, he had to muscle a troublemaker or two out the door. Repeat offenders risked banishment from the bar for a year—a dreadful fate in a settlement offering few other diversions. “There’s a hamburger joint called Bozo’s,” he said, “and twelve miles of paved road to drive. That’s about it.”

  Ken said the others at the bar were salmon fishermen, currently on strike because the price paid for their catch had fallen by half, to only forty-five cents a pound. (Fish farms in countries such as Chile and Norway had glutted the market.) Given the dangers of fishing in these waters, it wasn’t worth risking a trip for a wage that barely covered expenses. “So they sit in here all day,” Ken said. “If you stick around another hour, you’re sure to see a brawl.”

  Instead, I disentangled Roger from the grip of a babbling man and headed back to the ferry. It was midnight, still light outside. “It’s a permanent Dark Age back there,” Roger said. “I’ve never met such basic Homo sapiens.”

  We weren’t in much better shape, curling on the cold deck for another night at sea. At least there was no gale this time, and I managed a few hours of fitful sleep before the ship stopped again, at six A.M., at a place called King Cove. I prodded Roger awake for a walk onshore, but he shook his head and climbed in my sleeping bag. Almost no one else bothered to disembark, and it was easy to see why. The wind blew so hard that I was almost crawling on all fours by the time I reached the end of the long pier.

  Taking refuge in the first building I came to—the harbor office—I found four men sipping coffee and staring out the window. They had jet-black hair, small black eyes, and high cheekbones. “A bit fresh out today,” I said, as a conversation starter.

  One of the men looked at me strangely. “This is a nice day today,” he said. “Last month we clocked the wind at a hundred and thirty-seven miles an hour.” A radio crackled: the Coast Guard reporting that a fishing boat was in trouble. “Second this week,” the man said. “They’ll fish ’em out with a helicopter.”

  Rick Koso was a fisherman. In King Cove, as in Chignik and Sand Point, fish was the only game in town. “You can drive a few miles in one direction and four in the other,” Rick said of the village, which was enclosed on all sides by mountains.

  “What about hiking?”

  “It’s all pretty steep,” Rick said. “Plus there’s bears. One mauled a little kid a few years ago, right down the road. People haven’t gone out much since then.”

  “Don’t you get cabin fever?”

  Rick smiled. “You mean the Aleut stare? You get that. Wind at a hundred clicks, driving rain, day after day. You get sort of wigged out.” He assumed a blank, haunted expression. “That’s the Aleut stare.”

  I was curious to learn more, but I had to crawl back down the pier in time for the ship’s departure. A heavy fog settled in, and there was nothing to do but take turns in the sleeping bag and watch for occasional glimpses of the distant, treeless mountains. “This country is more broken or rugged than any part we had yet seen,” Cook wrote of this landscape. “Every part had a very barren appearance.” Roger studied the same scene and declared: “It’s monstrously dull. We’ve been out here two days. Cook did this for months, with nothing to do but think up names.” A desolate inlet emerged from the mist. “Buggery Bay,” Roger christened it, “because there’s bugger-all there.”

  After a momentary stop at another bleak outpost called Cold Bay, of which I learned nothing except that the settlement merited its name, we pulled in to the village of False Pass. This marked the true beginning of the Aleutian chain. Before leaving home, I’d consulted several atlases to plot the ferry’s course. The Aleutians stretched so far west that most maps of America didn’t even include them, unless with a small box in the corner of the page for Alaska.

  False Pass appeared deserted. I toured the settlement’s clump of low buildings and found little except a sign on the locked schoolhouse: “Please make sure the door latches. We don’t want the wind to tear it off.” The nearby library had a light on inside. I poked my head through the door and found an Aleut teenager studying a rack of months-old magazines. She looked at me through thick round glasses, a bit startled, as if a bear had wandered in.

  “I’m from the ferry,” I said.

  “Oh.” She fussed with her hair and introduced herself as Jana. She told me False Pass had eighty residents, including thirteen students. Jana, at seventeen, was the only one of high-school age.

  “Do you get lonely?” I asked her.

  “In summer, some fishermen come here who are about my age,” she said. “But it’d be nice to have a girlfriend I could talk to about them. Someone I could ask, ‘What do you think they’re thinking?’” She blushed. “But I like it here. If you want to get away from other people, all you have to do is walk for five minutes.”

  This was certainly true. Still, I wondered if Jana longed for the world she read about in the library’s magazines. “One thing, yes,” she said. “I wish we had gardens here, like in other places. But it’s hard to grow things. All we have are wildflowers.” She plucked a gardening magazine from the rack to take home, then turned off the lights. I sprinted back to the ferry just in time for i
ts departure, unsure whether to feel sorry for this solitary teenager at the end of the world, or to envy her remove from the pop culture and brand-name junk that mesmerized so much of adolescent America.

  On June 26, 1778, sailing blindly through fog, Cook was “alarmed at hearing the Sound of breakers on our larboard bow.” He quickly brought the ship into the wind and dropped anchor. When the gloom cleared, the English discovered that they’d narrowly avoided wrecking against rocks, and now lay beside a grassy island. “Very nice pilotage,” Clerke wryly observed, “considering our perfect Ignorance of our situation.” Cook, echoing the relief he’d felt at escaping the Great Barrier Reef eight years before, wrote in his journal: “The Island we were now at I called Providence from the providential escape we had in first making it.”

  Short of fresh water, Cook sailed along the coast until he found a harbor. Men paddled kayaks out to the ships, and one of them overturned. The English fished out the kayak’s occupant and brought him aboard the Resolution. Cook took him to his own cabin for dry clothes. “He dressed himself with as much ease as I could have done,” Cook wrote, adding that the man’s own garb—a shirt made of whale’s gut, and an undergarment of bird skins with the feathers worn against the body—had been patched with cloth of “European or such like manufacture.”