Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  Cook also learned that natives called the island “Oonalaschka,” which he substituted on his chart for the earlier “Providence.” But the season was advancing and Cook couldn’t spare time to explore the island. Sighting a passage to the north, and favored by a southerly breeze, he sailed on, into the Bering Sea. For the rest of the brief summer, he fought steadily north, touching on the shores of western Alaska and northeastern Siberia. The English battled cold, “a nasty jumbling sea” (Clerke’s words), and fog so dense that men aboard the two ships had to beat drums, fire guns, and ring bells to alert each other of their positions. At times, Cook had no guide other than “the roaring of the Sea Horses,” or walruses. Their braying warned the fog-blind captain of the treacherous ice shelves on which the animals perched.

  These “sea monsters,” as one crewman called them, prompted a revealing dispute between Cook and his men. The captain dispatched boats to slaughter nine walruses, some of them almost ten feet long and half a ton in weight. Cook, characteristically, declared the walrus meat to be fine eating: “marine beef,” he called it, with fat as “sweet as Marrow”—far preferable to the ships’ dwindling rations of salt meat, which he promptly curtailed. Many of his men begged to differ.

  “Captain Cook here speaks entirely from his own taste which was, surely, the coarsest that ever mortal was endued with,” wrote midshipman James Trevenen. To Trevenen, walrus fat resembled “train-oil instead of marrow.” As for the flesh, another crewman termed it “disgustfull” and “too rank both in smell and tast as to make use of except with plenty of pepper and salt and these two articles were vary scarce.” The walrus meat caused some crewmen to vomit, leaving them with nothing to eat but their scant rations of bread.

  “At last the discontents rose to such complaints & murmurings,” Trevenen wrote, that Cook “restored the salt meat.” The captain, in other words, had almost provoked mutiny with his dietary fanaticism: another distressing sign that Cook was losing touch with his men and perhaps his own faculties.

  By this point, the men were also heartily sick of Arctic sailing. Cook had probed beyond 70 degrees north, well inside the Arctic Circle, and almost precisely the southern latitude he’d reached off Antarctica. Finally, encountering ice “which was as compact as a Wall and seemed to be ten or twelve feet high,” Cook decided to turn back, having now traversed more than 140 of the earth’s 180 degrees of latitude, as well as its entire longitude several times over.

  As the ships retreated south in late August, heavy snow fell and the temperature rarely rose above freezing. “Ice was seen hanging at our hair, our noses, and even at the men’s finger ends,” Lieutenant John Rickman wrote. “Hot victuals froze while we were at table.” Then the Resolution sprang a fresh leak. Cook had no choice but to return to the providential island of Oonalaschka where he’d stopped briefly before entering the Bering Sea.

  We spent our last night on the Tustumena in the bar. Since the trip’s inaugural gale, the passage had been relatively calm, much to Roger’s disappointment. “I was so looking forward to seeing you wan and feeble with seasickness. I’m going to be robbed of that experience.” The other passengers also roused from their torpor, and several joined us at the bar: oil workers, fishermen, birdwatchers frustrated by the mist and rain. I felt thwarted, too. Except for the fog and my brief forays ashore, I’d experienced little of the landscape or native culture Cook had encountered.

  Then, at eleven P.M., a vision appeared through the bar window: clear skies and a spectacular view of two peaks with the distinctive, cratered tops of volcanoes. A puff of steam drifted from one volcano, and its heat had melted the snow near its summit.

  “Combustible mountains!” I shouted. This was Clerke’s memorable phrase for volcanoes. Shuffling in my pack, I found English drawings that exactly matched our view, as did Cook’s journal entry. “A narrow cloud, sometimes two or three one above the other, embraced the middle like a girdle,” he wrote of the taller of the volcanoes, which rose more than nine thousand feet. “The Column of smoke rising perpindicular to a great height out of its summit and spreading before the wind into a tail of vast length, made a very picturesque appearance.” This was about as ripe as Cook’s prose ever got. After so much fog, he must have felt the same exaltation I did at actually glimpsing some scenery.

  Before long, the fog returned, enveloping the Tustumena for the duration of its wet but placid passage through the Bering Sea. We arrived at Dutch Harbor at six in the morning. In the dawn gloom, the port appeared eerie and industrial: a flood of orange light, fuel tanks, cranes rising through the mist, and massive container ships. Dutch Harbor was a commercial fishing boomtown, with an annual catch greater than that of any port in America. Roughly half of all fish caught in U.S. waters now came from the Bering Sea and passed through this remote harbor.

  From the dock, we made our way past fish-processing plants and turned down Salmon Way to the Grand Aleutian Hotel, a chalet-style monolith fronted by concrete pillboxes. During World War II, Dutch Harbor served as a major U.S. military installation and came under attack from Japanese aircraft. The hotel’s walls and floors swayed as we tottered to our room and collapsed. Waking that afternoon, I walked up the road to a car rental office, where I procured a rattletrap that looked as though it had clocked three times the fifty thousand miles listed on the odometer. Wind, salt, sea air, gravel roads, and snow-melting chemicals weren’t kind to Aleutian cars.

  I roused Roger for a trip across the short bridge to Unalaska Island, Cook’s “Oonalaschka.” When the Resolution and Discovery returned to the island after their wretched Arctic sail, the English found even clearer evidence than before that other Europeans were nearby. A native came aboard bearing “a very singular present considering the place,” Cook wrote, “a rye loaf or rather a pie made in the form of a loaf, for some salmon highly seasoned.” Cook guessed that this dish was a “present from some Russians in the Neighbourhood.” To find them, he dispatched John Ledyard, a young American marine whom the captain judged “an intelligent man.”

  The Connecticut-born Ledyard would later become one of the great solo adventurers of the eighteenth century, and his extraordinary trip across Unalaska may have inspired his later career. He set off with Aleut guides, unarmed except for bottles of wine and spirits as gifts for the notoriously bibulous Russians. On the first night, the party reached a village where Ledyard slept on fur skins, sharing quarters with several women who “were much more tolerable than I expected,” he wrote. “One in particular seemed very busy to please me.”

  The next day, Ledyard boarded a skin kayak in which the only passenger space was the vessel’s enclosed interior, between the two paddlers. After a long, cramped trip, during which he was unable to see out of the stuff-space, Ledyard was hauled from the kayak by two “fair and comely” Russians, the first European strangers he’d seen in two years. They fed Ledyard boiled whale and drank his rum “without any mixture or measure.” That night, Ledyard watched as “the Russians assembled the Indians in a very silent manner, and said prayers after the manner of the Greek Church.” The next morning, he joined the Russians in a steam bath, and promptly fainted. His hosts restored him with a swig of brandy and a breakfast of whale, walrus, and bear, which “produced a composition of smells very offensive at nine or ten in the morning.”

  Ledyard returned to the Resolution with three of the Russians. Although they lacked a translator, the English and Russians had a fine time comparing charts and astronomical instruments. Cook found the Russians “immoderately fond” of strong liquor, but he relished their company, as did his men, starved as they were for Western contact. “To see people in so strange a part of the World who had other ties than that of common humanity,” Lieutenant James King wrote, “was such a novelty, & pleasure, & gave such a turn to our Ideas & feelings as may be very easily imagined.”

  Cook later entrusted the Russians with a chart he’d made of his northern voyage, during which he’d surveyed some three thousand miles of coastli
ne, much of it never accurately mapped before. He also gave them a letter to the Admiralty, in which Cook wrote that he planned to resume his search for the Northwest Passage the following spring. “But I must confess I have little hopes of succeeding,” he wrote, noting several “disappointing” circumstances, including the scarcity of safe harbors and his suspicion that “the Polar part is far from being an open Sea.”

  Cook’s skepticism was well founded. A northwest passage did exist, but it wasn’t navigable for eighteenth-century ships. Not until 1906 would Roald Amundsen complete a three-year voyage across the top of Canada, via Baffin Bay and the Beaufort Sea. No commercial vessel made it through until 1969. As for the “Polar part” Cook referred to, this route was first navigated in 1958—by a nuclear-powered submarine, traveling beneath the Arctic icecap.

  In this sense, Cook’s third voyage proved a replay of his second. The Northwest Passage was an ice-bound fantasy, of no commercial use to eighteenth-century Britain, just as the fabled southern continent turned out to be a frigid, uninhabitable wasteland. Cook’s principal geographic achievement in the north would once again be negative discovery and the puncturing of myth—an appropriate legacy for so hardheaded a navigator.

  The present-day town of Unalaska, of which Dutch Harbor was an industrial extension, occupied the site of the Russian settlement that John Ledyard had visited by kayak. At first glance, Unalaska didn’t look un-Alaskan at all. It was cold, damp, and gray, with the same frontier feel as the villages we’d visited on the ferry. The small downtown resembled the set of a John Wayne Western: wide main street, peeling wooden shop fronts, a few saloons, and unpaved side roads lined with makeshift houses. One incongruous building towered above the rest: an onion-domed Russian Orthodox church. Its graveyard was filled with triple-barred Orthodox crosses that were inscribed with surnames like Tutiakoff and Shishkin. A plaque on the redwood building, part of which dated to 1808, labeled it the oldest Russian-built church still standing in America.

  Orthodox monks and priests first arrived at the Aleutian fur-trading camps fifteen years after Cook’s visit. In contrast to Christianity’s impact on Polynesia, Orthodoxy proved a welcome salve to the oppressed Aleuts. Churchmen condemned the harsh practices of the fur traders, who had, until then, operated under the creed, “God is in his Heaven and the czar is far away.” A remarkable reverend, Ioann Veniaminov (later canonized as St. Innocent), created a Cyrillic-style Aleut alphabet, translated the liturgy, and opened a school. Once baptized, Aleuts exchanged native names that translated as “Made the Mammal Bleed” or “Covered with Grass While Sleeping” for Russian ones; the use of Russian names survived, with the Orthodox faith, to the present day.

  We arrived at the church just as Saturday vespers was about to begin. The churchwarden, Moses Gordieff, showed us around the interior, which seemed at once ornate and austere: the floors were of plain wood, there were no pews, and the walls glittered with gold-leaf icons. Moses lit brass candelabras and led us to a few icons painted by Aleut artists in the early nineteenth century. In one, of the Apostle Mark, the artist had to imagine a cow, since he’d never seen one. The creature’s head looked like a seal’s. Another icon, of St. Andrew, substituted bare volcanoes for trees and mountains, making the background true to the stark Aleutian landscape.

  Moses was soon joined by an elderly man and three middle-aged women who acted as lay readers; the church’s itinerant priest was currently visiting another island. The women hunched over a prayer book while we stood to the side. Moses explained that congregants stood during services—hence the absence of pews—and men and women worshipped separately. The brief service consisted of dirgelike chants and a liturgy that incorporated English, Unangan (the island’s Aleut dialect), and Slavonic, or church Russian.

  On the ferry, I’d read an account by the nineteenth-century priest Veniaminov, about his years in Unalaska. “Aleuts are not very talkative,” he wrote. “They can spend a whole day or days with you without speaking a word.” The Aleut character evidently hadn’t changed much. After the service, I tried to ask the few congregants about the church and the community. They answered me with polite nods, or a simple yes or no. “Please come again,” Moses said, closing up the church. “When the weather is nice like this, we don’t get many people. They prefer to be outside.”

  We stepped back into the cool, misty evening. Roger lit a cigarette. “God can see me in there,” he said, “and doesn’t like what He sees.” Roger nodded suggestively at a tavern across the road. It was Saturday night, prime time at Unalaska’s notorious bars. My Rough Guide to Alaska reported that the town’s premier nightspot, the Elbow Room, had been named the second roughest bar in America, and was famed for “near-constant fights and people left bleeding out in the snow.”

  We found the Elbow Room, an A-frame antique of purple clapboard, on an unpaved lane by the water. The interior was utterly functional, like almost every other structure we’d seen in the Aleutians: low ceiling, cheap panel walls, dartboard, a few booths, and a dozen bar stools. The one aesthetic touch seemed a joke, given the context: a painting behind the bar of a classical nude, reclining on a day bed and illuminated by a museum-style down light. Just beneath this work stood bottles of every liquor known to mankind.

  We perched at the bar beside several brawny men in peaked caps and stained overalls. They were talking about fish. One wore a sweatshirt cut off at the shoulders. Another was a human tattoo. I asked them a few questions about fishing, and offered to buy a round. The men shrugged and ordered refills of Coke.

  “I drank so much booze here in the seventies and eighties that I’m still trying to clear out my bloodstream,” explained a Caterpillar mechanic named Paul. In those days, Unalaska had been in the throes of a king crab boom, with boats harvesting tons of the pricey crustaceans. Deckhands could earn tens of thousand of dollars in a week, if they were willing to endure a grueling job with the highest death rate of any in America. Boats often iced over and sank; waves swept men overboard; 750-pound crab pots crushed limbs and skulls.

  “You had guys coming in here with twenty thousand bucks in their pockets, feeling an inch from God,” Paul said, “desperate to see how much of it they could blow on drink, drugs, and cards before going out to risk their lives again.” The scarcity of women heightened the tension. Paul told us the standing joke in town: “There’s a willing woman behind every tree in Unalaska.” Earlier in the day, we’d passed three wind-bent spruces planted by the Russians—trees whose existence here was so remarkable that they’d been designated a national historic landmark. “You’d see knifings, guys shotgunned off bar stools, people stuffed in crab pots as bait,” Paul went on. At one time, the Elbow Room’s few windows were covered in plastic sheeting rather than glass, to diminish the damage when men flew through them.

  Things had calmed down considerably in the past fifteen years. King crab had been so heavily fished that the crab season lasted only a few days now. Most boats fished instead for halibut and a codlike species called pollock: still dangerous work, but nothing like crabbing. Unalaska had also become a factory town, filled with fish-processing workers, most of them Asian and Latino. “They prefer Carl’s,” Paul said, referring to a pub down the road. “It gets busy there around midnight, then when Carl’s closes at three, everyone comes over here. If you want to see some action, that’s the time to come.”

  It was only ten o’clock. We decided to pace ourselves, and took a long, bracing walk through the cool air. At midnight, as we headed for Carl’s, Roger looked longingly in the direction of our hotel. “I could be sleeping, which I haven’t done in a week, instead of going to talk to another pack of wild men about fish.”

  “We’ll ask them about Cook,” I said.

  “You’ll be met with complete indifference. ‘Cook? Did he fish?’”

  Carl’s was a cavernous joint crowded with men and a handful of women. Almost everyone wore jeans, heavy boots, and caps and jackets bearing the names of fish plants and crane operato
rs. Roger went to order a beer and was instantly corralled by a drunken man who began shouting in his ear. The only word I caught was “halibut.”

  Leaning against the bar, I chatted with a black man named Luther. He worked the sanitation crew at a cannery, hosing fish guts twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for a $550 paycheck plus room and board at a drafty company bunkhouse. The way Luther described it, the “slime line” at fish plants drew workers from the dire side of the global economy: Vietnamese and Somali refugees, Mexican grape-pickers, busted gamblers, men on the run from the law and their families in the Lower Forty-eight.

  Luther’s background was different. He’d been born in New York and was six when his father announced that the family was moving to Alaska. “I asked my mom, ‘Are we going to live in an igloo and eat fish?’” He laughed. “I wasn’t far off.”

  Luther had tried fishing, on offshore trawlers that were little more than seaborne sweatshops. “Slave ships, what we call them,” he said. The constant, repetitive labor of cutting and gutting fish caused a painful affliction known as “claw.” Men’s hands cramped so tight they couldn’t uncurl them. On his first day out, Luther noticed baseball bats in the bridge and remembered thinking, “That’s cool. We’ll have a ball game on some island.” Then he learned that the bats were for beating ice off the windshield and deck. His first season out, fourteen boats sank, and the seas were so rough that they broke the windows on his boat. A few months before my own visit, a fishing boat left Dutch Harbor and sank with all fifteen hands aboard, the worst single accident on an American fishing vessel in fifty years.

  When Luther headed for the bathroom, I freed Roger from a fish filleter at the bar who’d been lecturing him about pollock. As we stepped outside, Roger told me that most of the pollock became surimi, the processed meal used to make fake crab, fishcakes, and fast-food products. He’d also learned that a Samoan drinking at Carl’s had recently beaten someone to death with a bar stool. “He was probably sick of hearing about fish,” Roger said. “I’ve never so not enjoyed drinking. This town will get me off the piss, like that Coke-sipping mechanic we met.”