Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  “You know how that steam smells?” he said.

  I did. Steam from a pulp mill in full production reeks like the intestinal gas of a giant on a badly balanced diet.

  “Well, the way they designed it, you never smell it in Crofton. Those chimneys carry it right up and over the hill there, so it all gets dumped round Cowichan Bay, where the rich and fancy live. Cunning, see?”

  He was keen to show off his boat, a marvel “made right here in B.C.” He led me through the engine-controls, showed me how the seats in the back folded into a double bed, and said, “Now, watch this.” He slid aside a panel to reveal a sky-blue plastic receptacle. “My little flushing shitter,” he said fondly. “Cunning, isn’t it?”

  I was glad to see his Filipino friend gingerly descending the cleated walkway in high heels, carrying the promised noodle-bowl in both hands. Grabbing Vancouver, volume 2, I took flight into town.

  Crofton was a very western settlement in the way that its great expectations had not been granted historical reality. The founding fathers had laid out a broad grid of streets on a cleared hillside overlooking Stuart Channel, but after more than ninety years of occupation the grid was still thinly sprinkled with fewer stores and houses than would have comfortably filled a single street. Most of Crofton was oily grass. While its fine view over the Gulf Islands might have attracted the tourist and retirement industries, the cathedral-like dominance of the pulp mill and the proletarian aspect of the surrounding houses made the town invulnerable to the northward march of chichi development on Vancouver Island. One couldn’t possibly mistake it for a fishing village ripe for prettying-up with a lick of paint, a tourist kiosk, and a few antique lamp standards. Crofton looked like a place where working people worked, smoked, tinkered with engines, and put forth gouts of noxious steam.

  At the Dockside Motel-Pub-Cafe, I plowed happily through the $8.95 turkey dinner. Vancouver was propped open between the ketchup bottle, verso, and the mustard-squirt, recto. Discovery and Chatham were moving up the mainland coast, about twenty miles due east of Crofton, following the mazecraft rule and keeping the starboard shore in sight. Vancouver’s mood—even as he tried to gloss it in his Petersham lodgings three years later, turning his logbooks into a literary production—was grim, and getting grimmer.

  He idolized Cook. His whole idea of captaincy was modeled on Cook’s example. Yet Vancouver was as far from being Captain Cook as I am from being Miles Smeeton.

  Part of Cook’s extraordinary appeal lay in the heroic obscurity of his social origins. The son of an itinerant agricultural laborer, James Cook at seventeen was working behind the counter in a haberdashery and grocery in Staithes, Yorkshire. He went to sea in a Whitby collier, then joined the navy, where at 27 he was a boatswain, at 28 a master, at 39 a first lieutenant, at 42 a commander, at 46 a post-captain—rising through the ranks by the force of his own maritime genius, a word often used in reports on Cook by senior officers.

  Portraits of Cook by various artists all agree on his great scimitar nose, his square-cut chin, the austere set of his lips, his large, deeply recessed eyes. It is a raptor’s face, like that of an osprey given human features; a useful visage on the quarterdeck.

  Cook had the knack of being able to simultaneously enthrall and terrify his juniors. He handled the stern mask of command like a talented actor, occasionally lifting it a few inches to disclose the face behind—a move calculated to inspire awe. One of George Vancouver’s fellow midshipmen aboard Resolution, James Trevenen, has left a sketch of Cook on a shore-excursion with his young gentlemen:

  Capt. Cook also on these occasions, would sometimes relax from his almost constant severity of disposition, & condescend now and then, to converse familiarly with us. But it was only for the time, as soon as we entered the ships, he became again the despot.

  Poor Vancouver: too young, too short, too plain, too lacking in self-control to act the part of Captain Cook. Yet that totemic figure—“that distinguished character,” “this great man,” with “his profundity of judgement” and “pre-eminent abilities”—haunts his disciple’s Voyage. Captain Van saw himself as cast in the same mold, and it was with deep injured chagrin that he came to realize that no one on his expedition could share with him this lofty self-image. The harder he tried to promote it—frowning darkly, exactly as Cook had frowned darkly—the more the midshipmen sniggered behind his back.

  Cook had the grace to come from nowhere; Vancouver the misfortune to come from a too easily identifiable somewhere. Cook’s rise in the world was a fabulous occurrence—a phoenix, born in smoke and ashes—and his high rank something the aristocracy could regard with complacent pride. Cook proved that there was room for wild untutored genius in the upper echelons of eighteenth-century England; he also proved that such genius, being extremely rare, was no threat to the system.

  Vancouver was a different matter. His tax-collecting father was prominently involved in local politics, in the Tory interest, and was known around King’s Lynn as Little Van; his mother, a younger daughter from a landed East Anglian family. The trouble with Captain Van—viewed from the acutely class-conscious angle of the quarterdeck—was that he was both too little and too much a gentleman. Issuing from the dangerous margin of genteel society, he was neither fish nor fowl. He had only to handle a sea-otter pelt for a superior midshipman to murmur “Trade!”—the most damaging epithet in the class lexicon. Thomas Manby, himself striving for the hand of the Marquess Townshend’s daughter, had Vancouver’s number:

  His Language to his Officers is too bad, and I am sorry to say what with his pursuing business, and a Trade he has carried on, are unbecoming the Character of an Officer in his Honourable and exalted station.

  Yet Cook bought skins at Nootka and always kept a weather eye out for likely opportunities of personal enrichment. Trade interested him keenly: he hadn’t worked in the shop in Staithes for nothing. After his death, his widow, Elizabeth, lived in much discussed grandeur in Clapham, complete with a liveried footman. But what Cook could get away with was no guide to what Vancouver’s junior officers would allow him. People warmed to the pirate in Captain Cook; the same people turned up their noses at what they saw as the moneygrubbing vulgarity of Captain Van.

  Working slowly up the coast, Vancouver wrote that he was “disappointed” by what he saw: it was “rugged,” “barren,”“dull,” “sterile,” “gloomy,” “dreary,” “comfortless.” Each of these words is used again and again. They were all the colors available on Vancouver’s verbal palette for the month of June 1792, and seem to describe the captain’s internal geography at least as much as they describe the mainland coast of British Columbia. The dripping precipice, the black firs, the mist and rain, the tumbled shale and rock, the powerful but irregular tidal currents might be the evergreen landscape of depression itself, the natural habitat of Black Dog, with whom Vancouver had a more intimate relationship than he did with any human being.

  Beneath the payphone at the Dockside was a blue Naugahyde couch that had died of stab wounds several years before. Sprawled among its bushy extrusions of stuffing, with a mug of beer at my feet, I dialed Seattle.

  There was an echo on the line. Though we were separated by only a hundred miles as the gull flies, it sounded as if we were talking across an ocean.

  It took some time for Jean to persuade Julia to come to the phone. “Hi, Daddy, we goed to Coe Park, I had spinach pie, I’m watching Mowgli on TV, you can talk to Mommy now, ’bye—” and she was gone.

  “She’s distracted,” Jean said. “She’s got The Jungle Book on the video.”

  “Am I in bad odor with her?”

  “No, she’s just distracted right now. I’m distracted too. There’s a whole bunch of crazy shit going on around here.”

  A violet fog of cigarette smoke eddied round the Dockside pool table, throwing the players into soft focus.

  “Where are you, anyway?”

  “Oh, a mill town on Va
ncouver Island. A lot of logs, some fish boats, a Canadian pub—”

  We talked baby-sitters. Jean’s job, as dance reviewer for the Seattle Times, required her to go out to concerts three evenings a week, and then to sit up over her computer, often till four in the morning, when the paper went to bed, hacking her overnight piece out of a chaos of phrases. For help with Julia she was raiding the pool of teenage girls who staffed the checkouts at Ken’s, our local supermarket. The girls tended to beg off at the last moment, because they had dates, or colds, or homework, or forbidding parents. That night, Jean had been scheduled to review a concert, but the baby-sitter had called at seven to say she couldn’t make it.

  And where was Julia’s father in all this? Jean’s tone implied. Out at the pub, with all the other deadbeat dads.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, to her tone of voice rather than to any particular accusation. My presence at the Dockside, on the slaughtered couch, seemed to me, too, to be an inexcusable defection.

  “Well, have a wonderful time,” Jean said, as if Crofton were Waikiki. “How’s the weather?”

  “Fine,” I said miserably, and we rang off without endearments.

  In a hangdog mood I went back to the boat. Crossing the railroad tracks in the dark, I stumbled and turned my ankle. Vancouver took a flying leap into the grass. Hobbling painfully to the wharf, I saw that Mr. Pyknic’s boat was still tied up there, with a light showing through drawn curtains. I crept past, dragging my bad ankle behind me as quietly as I could. Hauling myself aboard my own boat at the shrouds, I disturbed an owl perching on the mainmast crosstree. It clattered off into the night sky on creaking wings. From the Pyknic floating love-nest came the sound of muffled laughter.

  I was up soon after dawn, with a slight limp and a jumpy eagerness to put Crofton far astern. The fog was back. Mr. Pyknic’s boat was gone. I took my coffee mug out to the cockpit to watch the ferry leave and gauge the visibility on the water. With a long, sorrowful blast, the ferry pulled away from the dock and headed for Saltspring Island. Inside sixty seconds its colors paled, and its outline began to fuzz; in two minutes it was a gray ghost, and in three it was gone. At my best guess, visibility was roughly half a mile—just enough, so long as it got no worse.

  On the far side of the pontoon, a man and a boy were readying a gill-netter for departure. Since there was no net on the big aluminum drum, I asked the man if he was off on a pleasure jaunt.

  “We’re going beachcombing,” he said.

  His gill-netter, its powerful winch dominating the stern, was now a makeshift tugboat, and he spent his days cruising through the islands in search of logs that had escaped from rafts and booming-grounds—the floaters and deadheads that bedeviled my navigation of these waters. When he was in luck, he could assemble a sizable raft of truant timber, which he towed back to the pulp mill and sold by the meter-length. A single big fir fetched $150.

  “It pays the wages,” he said. “There’s more money in logs now than there is in fish.”

  With his spectacles and close-cropped hair, he looked like a lean, tan high school teacher, and he took a detached, teacherly view of what had happened to the fishing. Glancing at my limp and soggy British ensign, he said, “We like to blame the Americans, but that’s just trying to shift the responsibility. We’re all to blame for it. We were too greedy for too long. We wrecked the fishery. And now we’re beachcombers.”

  It wasn’t just in old men’s memories—of boats laden to the gunwales, sinking under the weight of their catch; of the entire surface of Juan de Fuca Strait torn and white with the splashes of leaping fish—that the great salmon runs of the past were now preserved. In the summer of 1990, a few months after my arrival in Seattle, Jean and I, on passage to Vancouver, ran into the salmon fleet off the mouth of the Fraser River. Trying to thread our boat between the floating nets of several hundred gill-netters was nightmare pilotage. For more than an hour we zigzagged, at half speed, through openings barely wider than the boat, sliding hull-to-hull past the fishermen, with Jean up on the bow yelling warnings, as we inched through a sea of white corks. I thought then that a salmon would have to be Houdini to evade the miles of suspended nylon mesh that barred its access to the spawning grounds upriver.

  I never again saw the inshore fleet in full fig. Most of those boats were now rotting to death in harbors up and down the coast, with FOR SALE signs glued to their forlorn windows. In Puget Sound, Juan de Fuca, and Georgia Strait, the sea had been fished clean out.

  “It’s the boys at the back of the class that I feel sorry for,” the beachcomber said. “They were never going to be rocket scientists, and fishing was their one big chance. They could make something of themselves when the fishing was good. It’s all right for people my age—we’ll make out somehow. But for him”—he nodded his head in the direction of his own boy—“it’s his future, gone, just like that. Round here, kids of his age, they’ve got nothing to look forward to now. That’s sad, and maybe dangerous, too.”

  “You were a teacher,” I said.

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “It wasn’t exactly an inspired guess.”

  I waved goodbye as they left on their scavenging. In seven minutes the gill-netter had dissolved into the fog. Then I followed them out, clinging to the massive chimneys of the pulp mill as a landmark and looking to starboard for ghosts.

  On the morning of 22 June, in a hazy calm, Captain Van was seated in the sternsheets of the cutter while the men pulled at their oars, rowing south to Birch Bay, where Discovery and Chatham lay at anchor. He was on the return leg of a ten-day survey trip that had taken him more than eighty miles to the north and deep into a succession of gloomy, dead-end inlets. The days had been long and weary; hour after hour of sounding, taking sights, charting, naming.

  The world we live in is the words we use, wrote Wittgenstein—and the world through which the cutter now moved under oars was one freshly recast in English words, and a Who’s Who of the 1790s king’s navy. The “extensive sound” with its “rugged snowy barrier” to the north was now Burrard’s Channel, named for Sir Harry Burrard. The “dreary and comfortless” reach beyond it was Howe Sound, after Admiral Earl Howe. Another “equally dreary” fjord, fifty miles farther north, had take the name Jervis Inlet, after Admiral Sir John Jervis.

  Even in exhaustion and depression, Vancouver was understandably complacent. In ten days he had brought a great lonely tract of dark and foggy wilderness into the orderly ambit of English civilization. He now trained his spyglass on Point Grey, named nine days earlier after Captain George Grey, the younger son of the first Earl Grey. The low, thickly wooded promontory ended in a pale, curving bluff, off of which lay two strange European ships, a small schooner and a brig.

  Trespassers.

  The cutter altered course. The captain snapped at Peter Puget to get the oarsmen to increase their striking-rate. Nearly ten minutes passed before Vancouver was able to make out, through the glass, the flags of the Spanish navy.

  It was a devastating moment. Captain Van had known, of course, that the Spanish were on the outer coast; indeed, part of his commission was to reclaim the Spanish garrison at Nootka on behalf of His Britannic Majesty, in accordance with the treaty signed in 1789 at the Nootka Convention in Madrid. But he hadn’t expected to find Spaniards poking around in his “mediterranean ocean.” Since entering the Strait of Juan de Fuca in May, he had been secure in the sense of his own originality, as the first white man ever to burst into this particular silent sea. Now the spyglass revealed that he was just another European visitor to a land already discovered, and by a foreign power.

  As he would find out later that day, the Spanish had already sounded, charted, and named the very waters that Captain Van had been exploring for the last week and a half. Point Grey showed on their charts as Punta de Langara.

  The world we live in is the words we use.

  Point—Punta. Grey—Langara. Vancouver’s names were su
ddenly robbed of their authority by their Spanish alternates. Where they had sounded natural and inevitable, they now seemed pert and capricious. In his Voyage, he confessed the humiliation caused by the first true discoverers of the Strait of Georgia:

  I cannot avoid acknowledging that, on this occasion, I experienced no small degree of mortification in finding the external shores of the gulf had been visited, and already examined a few miles beyond where my researches during the excursion, had extended.…

  Yet aboard the brig Sutil and the schooner Mexicana, Vancouver found unexpected balm for his prickly soul. The two Spanish lieutenants in charge, Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and Cayetano Valdés, met Vancouver with a show of elaborate deference to his superior rank. Galiano spoke English, and laid on a fine breakfast in the main cabin of the schooner. The beautiful drawing-room manners of the Spanish officers, their quickness to concede Vancouver’s every point, were in sharp contrast to the treatment he was used to receiving aboard his own ship. Over breakfast, Galiano expressed polite surprise that Captain Van had failed to discover the Fraser River, known to the Spanish as Rio Brancho, and Vancouver appears not to have noticed that his diligence as an explorer was being subtly called into question.

  He loved being in the Spaniards’ company—both here and, later in the voyage, at Nootka and in Monterey. As a man from the uneasy middle of English society, he was chronically uncomfortable with countrymen who came from grander backgrounds than his own—especially when they were under his command. But in a mess room full of foreigners, bound by the rules of international naval protocol, Vancouver flowered. He even managed to charm his hosts, though he couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. To the Spaniards, Captain Van was the commander of the British expedition, and the designated representative of William Pitt and King George. They were not interested in his accent, or his father’s occupation, or his failure to get along with his highborn midshipmen.