Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  These impeccable lives were being conducted right on the lip of the abyss. Past the lawn-statue of Cupid there yawned a world of frigid darkness, inhabited by slimy creatures with tentacles and fleshy suckers, of the kind that surface in exceptionally bad dreams. Did people know? Or was this a secret that realtors assiduously kept from their clients, like news of a projected neighborhood methadone clinic?

  At 900 feet below the sea, the pressure is thirty times the weight of the earth’s atmosphere—enough to rupture every organ in a drowned man’s body and, probably, to collapse his ribcage and spill his guts. It’s dark down there, though not so dark that one wouldn’t see (through the window of a bathysphere) the shadows of things, darker than dark, moving, with purposeful curiosity, close to one’s face. Five-hundred-pound halibut, big as doors, slither languidly through the murk. The soft black silt, stirred by rapid tidal currents, moves in swirls and billows, like tumbled clouds.

  The giant octopus searches the silt for prey with arms fifteen feet long. It has huge bedroom eyes, the great domed brainpan of a comicbook Martian, and a pert little parrot beak with a poisonous bite; an unfussy carnivore, it would polish off a human cadaver in no time at all. When Jacques Cousteau wanted to film the Dofleini, he based his ship in Seattle. Diving very close to shore, in five to ten fathoms, he met up with some small specimens—babies of ten to thirteen feet in diameter—and was moved by their grace, docility, and intelligence. Much bigger, older, craftier ones live in the deeps of Puget Sound, where they share their habitat with the even bigger cephalopod, the Pacific giant squid. Moroteuthis robusta has ten hooked tentacles, which it flings out, at dazzling speed, like a rodeo cowboy roping a calf.

  If I lived in that Richmond Beach bungalow, I’d keep a close eye on the dog.

  Every so often a bloated, decomposing tentacle would wash ashore. To the Indians who lived here, these occasional body parts were tangible evidence of a watery underworld where gigantic creatures reigned—and, if offended, would reach up to take their revenge. Should you happen, on a morning walk, to stumble on a fly-ridden chunk of Dofleini, you might willingly suspend your disbelief when you heard the Tlingit story, collected by John Swanton in Wrangell, Alaska, in 1904, about an octopus that destroyed a whole fishing village.

  At their summer fish camp, the villagers were drying a great haul of red salmon on wooden frames. The color of the salmon was reflected on the water, making it glow red. This bloody tinge drew the attention of a giant octopus, or “devilfish,” who lived in the deep. Rising to the surface, “looking very white” (as a dead tentacle does, though a live octopus does not), it extended a single mammoth tentacle, encircled the fish camp, and swept it into the sea, gorging itself on the people and smashing their canoes. When two men and a small boy returned from hunting in the woods, they saw the canoes floating in pieces on the water, and found that the remains of the houses and fish frames were thickly coated in “devilfish slime.”

  So the commuter, after a hard day on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, might return to Richmond Beach. The story, after all, concerns the two men and the boy (the only specific characters in the piece) more than the victims: it speaks to everyone’s fear of what might happen at home when you’re away at work. Devilfish slime comes in a multitude of guises.

  The water’s spooky depth, so very close to land, and its justified reputation as the lair of many large, powerful, and repulsive beings, were all the more sinister because it looked so innocent on the surface. It was sheltered (Puget Sound is never wider than four miles). Gales were rare. The sound, the most canoe-kindly of all the waters along the Inside Passage, could be safely paddled at any time of year; its salmon runs and shellfish beaches made for a life of easy pickings. No tribe in North America was able to feed itself so extravagantly, and with as little effort, as did the southern Coastal Salish on Puget Sound.

  Yet this tame-seeming, food-rich sea was full of menace. Dreadful, capricious creatures were known to haunt its lower depths, and Indians were treated daily to manifestations of submarine power—a reminder, if one was needed, that humans were, by comparison, foolish and puny.

  The previous September, I had been standing at the wheel when a killer whale breached about 75 yards from the boat. The sea was smooth as a pool of molasses. Twists of smoke rose from its surface in the chilly early-morning air. My propeller left a thick braid of wake that trailed from the stern for a quarter-mile, where it faded into mist. I had just put two eggs on to boil downstairs when the whale rocketed out of the water on the port beam—ten tons of patterned black and white, its dimpled skin like heavyweight PVC—and crashed back, raising a shock wave that rolled the boat half over.

  The event had the sudden violence of a car bomb going off in a quiet city street. It changed the world. Within moments, there seemed to have been an abrupt ten-degree drop in temperature. The adrenaline of the explosion was fizzing in my nervous system; and when I tried to write, the ballpoint slewed out of control on the slick surface of the page. Minutes later, when the water had glazed over the turmoil, the ensuing calm was strangely calmer, the windless quiet more intense, the air charged and sulphurous with the memory of the whale’s passage.

  It’s one thing to see an orca breach from a crowded, camera-ready excursion boat; quite another out of nowhere, when you’re alone. To the solitary Indian fisherman, tending his halibut line of twisted cedar bark, the appearance of the whale was a warning visitation from the powers below, where Komogwa (his Kwakiutl name), the Wealthy One, Master of the Seas, ruled from his underwater treasure palace of beaten copper. Komogwa—represented in carvings as a fat man with see-all protruding eyes—could show himself in the form of a loon, a seal, an octopus, a spiny-finned bullhead; in whirlpools, and in the movement of the tides. But it was in the massive bulk and gleaming musculature of the killer whale that one came closest to meeting him in person—and, in that eruption of alien, careless power, came face-to-face with the brutal splendor of the sea itself.

  There was high gothic humor in this conception of Komogwa as a bloated plutocrat, avatar of malevolence and greed, lord of oceanic disorder and chaos. A canoe is lost to a tide race: put it down to Komogwa. A canoe is swamped by a surfacing whale: Komogwa’s doing. A cargo of valuable blankets topples overboard: gone to Komogwa’s treasure chest. At winter dances, the insatiable Komogwa was a favorite character. The dancer who took his part wore a mask painted in green for the color of the sea, black for the hidden depths in which he dwelled. Many of these Komogwa masks represent his bulging cheeks as the suckered tentacles of Dofleini, the slimy grasper whose eight-armed embrace awaited the unfortunate visitor to Komogwa’s underwater estate.

  At four o’clock, lights were coming on in the windows of the houses along the shore and the sea was turning to ink. It was a little disappointing to still be in the Seattle suburbs at the end of the day; I’d hoped to get farther. Still, as the boat rounded the line of oil tanks on Edwards Point, I had 105 fathoms under the keel, and at that depth anyone should feel a good long way from home. I put into the marina at Edmonds, only a 25-minute cab ride back to the house. I reminded myself severely that, having made my departure, I must stay departed. I lit the lamps, put a fresh cassette in the tape recorder, propped the mike on the saloon table, and read the story of Eeyore’s birthday from Winnie the Pooh.

  “Eeyore, the old grey Donkey, stood by the side of the stream, and looked at himself in the water. ‘Pathetic,’ he said. ‘That’s what it is. Pathetic’…”

  Guessing at the postage, I mailed the tape to Julia, along with a postcard of a leaping killer whale.

  On 29 April 1792, in thick and rainy weather, with wind gusting from the southeast and visibility down to less than three miles, HMS Discovery, closely followed by her ungainly tender, Chatham, rounded Cape Flattery, skirted the craggy rockpile of Tatoosh Island, and entered the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It was a happy day on an unhappy ship.

  The men were thirteen months away
from home. The expedition had set sail from Falmouth in Cornwall on 1 April 1791—a date unfondly remembered in too many shipboard jokes. Discovery and Chatham had tacked down the width of the Atlantic, put in at Cape Town, sailed across the Indian Ocean to southwest Australia and Tasmania, crossed the Tasman Sea to New Zealand, then made their way north to Tahiti and Hawaii. On 16 March 1792 they left Niihau, the westernmost of the Hawaiian Islands, on passage for the northwest coast of America. On 17 April, in latitude 39°20′N, they noted signs of impending land—pieces of driftwood, floating grass and seaweed, shags, puffins, and a faint, brownish discoloration of the sea. Visibility was poor, and Captain Vancouver ordered the leadsman to take up his position on Discovery’s port bow. The ships came into soundings, abruptly, at 53 fathoms, with the tallow on the base of the lead showing a soft brown sandy bottom. Minutes later, land was sighted—a ragged line of surf, breaking on an indefinite shore. Night was falling, so the ships turned west, back into deep water, under shortened sail. Next morning, Vancouver was reasonably certain that a distant headland away in the northeast was Cape Mendocino, two hundred miles north of the Spanish garrison of San Francisco.

  It took twelve long days for the two ships to make their way up the coast, dogged by northwesterlies alternating with light airs, and by rain and fog that made it hard to pick out landforms, even though they were sailing as close inshore as they dared, trying to keep in view of the surfline. They were, frustratingly, committed to mapping this section of the American coast, about which the published charts were in hopeless disagreement. But the real interest of the officers lay in the waters ahead, in that “expansive Mediterranean ocean,” as Vancouver called the rumored sea that would eventually be named the Inside Passage.

  The long dull haul northward from Mendocino to Cape Flattery was made more trying by the corrosive atmosphere on Discovery’s quarterdeck. Vancouver was governing his little society of 99 men (45 more aboard Chatham) by force of his naval rank alone, and by punishments that his rank entitled him to inflict on subordinates. His by-the-book efficiency, along with his punctilious skill as a navigator and chartmaker, earned him a continuing, if lukewarm, respect from commissioned officers who long since had lost any real sympathy or affection for the man. But the “young gentlemen”—of whom there were fifteen on Discovery, variously enrolled as midshipmen, able seamen, and master’s mates—loathed him. These well-connected patrician adolescents regarded their captain with a mixture of raw fear and snobbish disdain.

  At 34, Vancouver wasn’t a naturally commanding figure. He was a short man, glandularly fat, whose weight was increasing noticeably during the voyage. He had lost most of his hair. He had protuberant, thyroidal eyes. He sweated a lot. In gentle weather, Vancouver’s rattling graveyard cough made itself heard from bow to stern. His explosions of temper were frequent, and famous: puce-faced and bawling, he seemed possessed and transformed by some inner demon. In a period when symptoms of extreme psychological disturbance usually could pass as acceptable eccentricity, several gentlemen aboard Discovery diagnosed Vancouver as suffering from fits of temporary insanity.

  Vancouver’s lieutenants on Discovery—Zachary Mudge, Joseph Whidbey, Joseph Baker, and Peter Puget—were regular naval types, for whom the successful completion of the voyage would bring promotion to commands of their own. Along with the ship’s naturalist and surgeon, Archibald Menzies, they found themselves in the delicate and uncomfortable position of having to mediate between the young aristos of the midships and their prematurely aged, bald, fat, apoplectic captain.

  Discovery was a few inches short of one hundred feet long. Cramped and smelly at the best of times, it was far too small to contain the bitter class war that now smoldered aft of the mainmast. The quarterdeck—an area reserved for gentlemen of all ranks—was roughly 28 × 30 feet; it was also the ship’s farmyard. One could hardly take a step without tripping over a piglet or a chicken, or colliding with a bony goat. This cluttered and constricted space had been made even smaller by the addition, on the orders of Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, of Mr. Menzies’s “garden”—a glass greenhouse, 8 × 12 feet, in which newly discovered plants could be returned, alive, to England. Vancouver considered the garden a lubberly profanation, and abused it, profanely, at every possible opportunity. By this point, Menzies could raise the issue of the garden with his captain only by sealed letter, even though he regularly visited Vancouver’s cabin to dose him with medicines for his puzzling illness.

  With five commissioned officers, a dozen or so animals, and the greenhouse, the quarterdeck was already overloaded. But Discovery had taken on an unprecedented number of young gentlemen, aged from 16 to 22. All fifteen had “pull”; a family connection with an ear at the Admiralty. Voyages such as this promised to be novel and adventurous versions of the Grand Tour, and these boys would see Natural Man in his wild habitat, the scenery of the Sublime, the grandeur of Ocean in all its moods … Discovery would be a finishing school on an epic and glorious scale, an education in leadership, navigation, geography, nature, and anthropology.

  Lord Bute sent his son, the Honourable Charles Stuart; Lord Camelford, cousin to the prime minister, sent his son, the Honourable Thomas Pitt. The Marquess Townshend engineered a place for his young friend Thomas Manby. The Earl of Hardwicke did the same for Spelman Swaine. Sir Alan Gardner got two of his nephews, Robert Barrie and Henry Humphrys, aboard. And so it went. Discovery was swollen with the languid young scions of the Upper Ten.

  Poor Vancouver. Of Dutch extraction, from King’s Lynn in Norfolk, where his father was a prominent local Tory and assistant collector of customs, Captain Van, as he was called, though never to his face, was miserably incapable of serving as mentor to the immature finery of fashionable England.

  As the ship inched past Tatoosh Island, its crew felt the inevitable current of excitement at having at last arrived at the object of a yearlong voyage—an excitement greatly heightened by the prospect of escape, however temporary, from the personal and social tensions of the quarterdeck. From now on, there’d be shore parties, to set up the astronomical observatory, to meet and barter with the natives, and to brew spruce beer. There’d be survey parties in the small boats, to explore the coast and its waters in fine detail. Whole days might be spent without once having to meet the bugged-out eyes of Captain Van.

  Clawing their way forward against the wind and the ebb stream, Discovery and Chatham made short tacks along the southern shore of the strait. They passed an Indian village (now Neah Bay): a jumble of wooden huts set back from the water behind a line of low dunes, with canoes drawn up on a crescent of sandy beach. Vancouver considered this for an overnight anchorage, but decided against it. At seven o’clock, three miles farther on, he found a nook tucked between two cliffs of dripping pines, and the ships dropped their anchors in 23 fathoms, on a bottom of black sand and mud.

  From the forecastle came the thin, wheezy notes of “Spanish Ladies” played on a fife. Grog was issued, and the men went to their messes for an unenviable supper of ship’s biscuit and burgoo.

  A glass of Fetzer Chardonnay and the blue plate special—ling cod with asparagus and baby red potatoes—were placed before me at Anthony’s, the Edmonds marina restaurant, where I had a window table and a fine view of the matte-black hump of Whidbey Island, looming over the fork between Puget and Possession sounds. In the dark space between Edmonds and Kingston, on the Kitsap Peninsula, a commuter ferry hung suspended like a Japanese lantern. Tumbled clouds occupied most of the sky, though in a rift over Admiralty Inlet a single fuzzy star shone wanly.

  I had discovered this labyrinth of islands and inlets by a stroke of idle luck. In 1989, a chance conversation with a businessman in rural Alabama led me to post myself to Seattle for six weeks, because it sounded like an interesting city in which to set a chapter of the book I was writing. Facing a lonely Thanksgiving Day in a rented room on Second Avenue, I took the ferry from Seattle to Victoria, B.C. It was a blustery mor
ning, the empty streets streaming like rivers, stoplights tossing on their overhead wires. Elliott Bay was close-ribbed with whitecaps. A perfect day for seagoing, if you were boarding a vessel as big as Vancouver Island Princess, a waddling tub of a ship, built in Glasgow in 1955 and a salt-caked veteran of heavy weather.

  As soon as we were clear of the city, I clambered up the outside companionway to the wheelhouse to bother the captain. But it was like the meeting of Bouvard and Pécuchet. No sooner had we exchanged names than we were reaching into our wallets for snapshots of our respective sailboats. The mate, evidently used to his boss’s strange addiction, took over the brass wheel and nursed the ferry through the chop, while the captain began to dig through the shallow drawers of the chart table, pulling out a dozen charts on which to show me the delights of his home waters.

  There—he rapped the paper with a meaty forefinger—the tide ran at sixteen knots at springs. There he’d ridden on the lip of a whirlpool three meters deep. Here was a favorite winter anchorage. There were miles of estuarine shallows, where the sea kicked up in southeasterly winds, and where he once nearly lost his boat. I had never seen charts on which land and sea were so intricately tangled, in a looping scribble of blue and beige.

  The captain took his annual vacation every February, he said, because it was the best month for reliable winds. He sailed alone. His wife, who no more shared his taste for this stuff than did the mate of the Princess, flew off for a Hawaiian holiday while he went gunkholing around the islands.

  He’d just broached the interesting topic of inflow and outflow winds when he spotted a pod of orcas cavorting in the murk, a mile or so off the port bow. After instructing the mate to alter course, he announced the whales over the ferry’s P.A. system. The rush of passengers to the windows gave the ship a sudden ten-degree list as we stumbled through the sea to take a closer look.