Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  In the evening, when Vancouver was back on Discovery, a Spanish rowboat arrived in the British anchorage to present a sack of cabbages and a churn of milk from Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra’s farm at Nootka, with the compliments of lieutenants Galiano and Valdés. These tastes of home were much enjoyed at the officers’ long table on Discovery, though some of the diners were able to interpret the barbed message in the gift.

  The cabbages and milk announced that the English were trespassers here, where the Spanish had already established a successful farm. Quadra, governor of Nootka, Knight of the Order of Santiago, was a famous bon vivant who had made a big splash on the outer coast. He liked to be greeted with expensive and deafening 21-gun salutes. In return, he threw lavish dinner parties for visiting ships’ captains and their officers: venison on crested silver platters, vintage Spanish wine in silver goblets, followed by toasts and after-dinner speeches. Naval explorers and fur traders were dazzled by the amenities of Quadra’s country seat in the far west. At Friendly Cove he raised cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, and chickens. His extensive gardens were planted with European vegetables. His servants ran a bakery near the house. Each morning, Quadra sent out a boat to deliver hot rolls and milk to all the ships in the cove.

  Under the terms of the Nootka Convention, he was required to hand over his estate to the British, whose claim to Nootka, though legal in the narrow sense, seemed tenuous when set against Quadra’s industrious and popular occupation of the land. The milk and cabbages made the point, with refined irony. How could Captain Vancouver presume to evict the hugely hospitable and courteous Governor Quadra from his fruitful acreage?

  But Captain Van was not tuned to nuances. He drank his milk and ate his cabbage, then went off to write about “these new and unexpected friends.”

  The lifting fog uncovered Kuper and Thetis islands, and their offlying string of sawtooth reefs and islets. A mild southerly breeze blew into the face of the weakening ebb, chipping the surface of the water into small, flint-gray waves. Trying to make Dodd Narrows before the flood tide turned it into a breakneck slalom run, I had the headsail out and the engine running hard.

  As one traveled north and west, the tidal passes grew more numerous, more turbulent, and more interesting. Dodd, where the sea spilled through the 225-yard gap between Vancouver Island and Mudge Island at speeds of up to nine knots, was faster than Deception Pass, but little more than a premonition of the horizontal cataracts of Seymour Narrows (fifteen knots) and Nakwato Rapids (eighteen knots). The names of the passes—Arran, Yuculta, Dent, Hole-in-the-Wall, Greene Point, Whirlpool—were for me the most evocative by far of all the names on the coast. Each set of rapids had its own haunting character. If I went through a pass once, the whole face of the water left its features printed on my memory, from where it was likely to sneak into my dreams.

  Also filed in memory, under the same rubric as the passes, was a painting by Lucian Freud of a dripping tap on the wall of his London studio. The form taken by the water in the painting was of a disorderly braid—a badly tied pigtail of escaping wisps and strands. I’d seen the picture in two exhibitions of Freud’s work and been arrested by it for many minutes at a time. It answered beautifully my own obsession with the chaotic motion of fluids when they meet an obstruction—whether a defective tap-washer or the giant leg-and-boot of Portland Bill as it dangles into the English Channel and kicks up a maelstrom in which many ships have foundered. Freud, who works with legendary patience, must have spent weeks gazing at that twisting thread of water as it leaked into the sink below in a spindly, disheveled double helix. Unique to that tap, that wall, that sink, Freud’s Drip was a natural wonder as unreproducible as Seymour Narrows or the Arran Rapids; an exquisite domestic Niagara.

  I reached Dodd Narrows in good time, the last few minutes of the ebb tide still in hand. From the south the pass showed as a tapering funnel, leading to a low, impenetrable tangle of brambles and alders at the far end. The water was laced with greasy boils and eddies, in which big chunks of scum, like pieces of yellowed foam upholstery, revolved slowly. The air stank of salty putrescence.

  Out in the middle, a slovenly army of herring gulls was snacking on tidbits thrown up by the flux. They yelled and jostled, fighting over whatever loose body parts had been left behind by such submarine scavengers as the dogfish and squid: an old anemone tubercle, half a flatworm, a bit of decayed starfish arm, a fibrous morsel of rancid crabmeat.

  Dodd Narrows had a shallow, uneven bottom. When the tide was going at full tilt, even the heaviest objects trundling along the seafloor would be flung to the surface as they were sucked into the turmoil of the race. Stay long enough around Dodd Narrows and all kinds of pale, submerged horrors would no doubt come to light.

  So the bickering gulls stabbed at shadows and leapfrogged over one another’s backs to snatch at any lump of solid matter that boiled up from the bottom. Did gulls ever gag on what they ate? Was there some final, repulsive stage of decomposition at which a herring gull would draw a fastidious line?

  A tug suddenly materialized out of the bushes, followed, seconds later, by its attendant raft of logs. The channel—which had a dogleg in its narrowest part—evidently lay a good hundred yards to the left of where I’d placed it. I hung back in the tail of the race, waiting for the tug to clear the approach and the tide to turn in my favor.

  Then, taking aim on a notional gap in the alders, I drove the boat into the palpitating mass of gulls. Outstretched claws hanging straight down, wings throbbing, the birds rose to the level of the cock-pit-coaming, screaming and fixing me in the indifferent glare of their yellow button-eyes. “Hi ya! Hi ya!” It was like pushing through a mob of lager-louts. Dead, I would’ve made a fine feast for the gulls, but as it was they could only sink resentfully back into the boat’s wake and continue their pursuit of tastier, more seasoned flesh.

  When I reached the alders, the flood had picked up speed, and I was poured smoothly through the neck of the pass by the new tide. The rank, low-water smell of Dodd Narrows lingered in my nose long after I had left the place astern. I tried lighting a cigarette, but the week-old-fish taste of the tobacco was too much, and I had to flip it overboard.

  Dodd greatly impressed me, winning a secure position in my private pantheon of tidal passes. That it lay five miles downtide of the city of Nanaimo, and a mile and a half downtide of the Harmac pulp mill, accounted for much of its memorable personality: it was a gargantuan flush-toilet.

  I had thought of stopping for the night at Nanaimo, but with five hours of daylight still to go, and a friendly wind from the southeast, it seemed silly not to go on and catch up with the Vancouver expedition on the far side of the Strait of Georgia, 25 miles to the north. I cranked up the mainsail, made a late lunch of cheese and Marmite sandwiches, and loafed in the cockpit, watching the shore of Vancouver Island fade into the haze at six miles’ distance. To be out of sight of land at last, with a force 3–4 wind in the sails, an easy swell, and the boat, under autopilot, weaving around its set course of 323°, was a pleasure. I had a circle of sea, twelve miles in diameter, entirely to myself.

  The ten-day exploration along the mainland coast of Georgia Strait sharpened the division between Vancouver and his younger officers and midshipmen. Probing the great steep-sided inlets of Howe Sound and Jervis, with their high snowcaps, thundering waterfalls, and stunted pines on rocky ledges, Captain Van saw a landscape that was ugly, intimidating, inhospitable, and useless. He instinctively recoiled from the sight of the dizzy precipice and the toppling crag: affronts to his taste for order. In Discovery Bay and Puget Sound, the low hills and forest clearings fitted nicely with Vancouver’s conservative preconceptions of how nature should be arranged. But in the wild—and getting wilder—geology of the northern end of Georgia Strait, he was lost. He deplored the “unfathomable” depths, complained that the roar of the cascades drowned out the birdsong, and was disappointed by the scant, dwarfish vegetation.

  In
this, as in much else, Captain Van was out of step. The landscape he found merely depressing roused great excitement among the Grand Tourists, who felt that they were actually entering the awe-inspiring realm of the eighteenth-century Sublime—a word never far from the midshipmen’s lips as they rowed, in a perpetual dank twilight, between beetle-browed cliffs, while the sun lit up snowfields thousands of feet above their heads.

  On the conventional Grand Tour, the Alps had an important place on the route, as the gentlemen and their tutors went south in search of the Italian Renaissance. For Swiss excursions, the recommended reading was Edmund Burke’s 1757 essay “On the Sublime and the Beautiful,” in which he carved out an intellectual space for wild nature, as one might encounter it in the English Lake District, the Alps, a tempest at sea, or vast uninhabited tracts of desert and prairie. According to Burke, appreciation of the Sublime began in terror.

  Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.

  The ocean—especially in a storm—was the archetype of sublimity in nature.

  A level plain of a vast extent on land, is certainly no mean idea; the prospect of such a plain may be as extensive as a prospect of the ocean: but can it ever fill the mind with anything so great as the ocean itself? This owing to several causes; but it is owing to none more than this, that the ocean is an object of no small terror. Indeed, terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.

  Burke went on to describe how physical pain and mental terror combined to induce feelings of sublimity in “The Finer Organs.”

  They are capable of producing delight; not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror.

  Burke’s essay was useful because it gave a name and an explanation to a new response to wilderness that was gaining ground in mid-century writing and painting. In 1739 Thomas Gray and Horace Walpole visited Grand Chartreuse, a mountaintop monastery near Grenoble. Gray wrote to a friend:

  In our little journey up to the Grand Chartreuse, I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation, that there was no restraining: Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other argument. One need not have a very fantastic imagination to see spirits there at noon-day.…

  The young poet’s unbridled enthusiasm for torrents, cliffs, and precipices would have shocked his elders. Burke’s theory of delightful horror, of commingled pain and pleasure, allowed one to take the old-fashioned view of mountains as “frightful,” “barren,” and “monstrous”—the words of Daniel Defoe, describing the Lake District in 1726—even as one reveled aesthetically in their most horrid qualities.

  By the 1770s, the rage for the Sublime was in full swing in the English countryside, where landscape gardeners contrived delicious terrors for their patrons. Sir Richard Hill, lord of Hawkstone in Shropshire, finding himself in possession of a newly fashionable precipice with a six-county view, turned his estate into a Sublime theme park. The ocean made its appearance, far inland, with a statue of Neptune seated inside the ribs of a whale, and with a “Scene from Otaheite” based on illustrations in Captain Cook’s Voyages. A mobile waxwork druid resided in a grotto. But the great draw remained “the precipices.” Dr. Johnson lugged himself up to the summit, where he drew on Burke’s essay to describe his excited state of mind.

  He that mounts the precipices at Hawkestone wonders how he came hither, and doubts how he shall return.… He has not the tranquillity, but the horror of solitude, a kind of turbulent [my emphasis] pleasure between fright and admiration. The Ideas which it forces upon the mind, are the sublime, the dreadful, and the vast.

  This was the movement that had passed Vancouver by. Here on the Northwest coast, where the ocean sucked and grumbled at the bottom of precipices many times the height of those at Hawkstone, Captain Van was nearly at the heart of the modish Sublime, but nothing in the landscape stirred him to poetry. He found it simply alien, and ideas of the Sublime suspect and pretentious.

  In the same months that the English were sailing up the coast, an American fur trader, Joseph Ingraham, in command of the 72-ton brigantine Hope, was sailing southward through the Queen Charlotte Islands, buying skins from the Indians to sell in China. (Vancouver and Ingraham would soon meet, at Quadra’s table in Friendly Cove.) Four years younger than Captain Van, Ingraham was in boyishly high spirits, cruising for his own pleasure and profit. On the night of 31 July, he sounded his way around the Copper Islands and into the lee of Burnaby Island—a heart-in-mouth passage even with an engine and a modern chart. According to his journal, Ingraham worked his ship through the darkness in a state of exalted aesthetic wonder:

  There was something awfully sublime in entering this dreary port at this hour of the night. The surrounding high mountains threw an additional gloom over the face of the deep whose vast silence was at times interrupted by the hollow surge of the sea on the surrounding rocky shores or the gamboling of immense whales. On shore the scene afforded a subject which I lament my inability to do justice to. It seemed to inspire a reverential awe for the Almighty, Who presides in all places; but none I believe display His grandeur, power, and elegance more conspicuously than occurrences of the mighty deep.

  If only Ingraham could have supplied a few grams of whatever he was on to poor Vancouver, Discovery would have been a very different vessel. Ingraham’s commonplace delight in sublimity was a necessary precondition for explorers of this coast, and Vancouver didn’t have a trace of the stuff.

  This was probably what his juniors meant by twitting him for not being “an educated man.” The accomplished nautical astronomer, fogeyish about the ordinary manners and fashions of his time, could not connect with the bizarre enthusiasms and catchwords of the midshipmen, to whom he appeared cloddish and philistine, a gray man of numbers, a body without a soul.

  The midshipmen’s own response to the landscape is read most clearly in their drawings. Because no official artist had been assigned to the expedition, John Sykes, Thomas Heddington, and Henry Humphrys were kept busy with their soft pencils and watercolor boxes, under orders to supply a visual record of the country as it unspooled past the ships. Unfortunately, the London engravers tampered with the midshipmen’s originals, making the illustrations to Vancouver’s Voyage look more conventional than the sketches on which they were based. A drawing by Harry Humphrys, of towering black mountains rising from an empty sea near Port Dick, was improved by the engraver’s addition of a fleet of 38 native kayaks, turning a scene of lonely and romantic vastness into a Saturday afternoon regatta. But even in their touched-up state, the illustrations—especially those by Heddington—are full of images of the Sublime: gaunt crags and precipices; snowcapped mountaintops wreathed in coronae of swirling mist; lone eagles in the sky; the brooding ocean. The ghost of Salvator Rosa, hugely popular in England at the time, hangs over the midshipmen’s efforts as they labor to translate the giddy heights and vacant solitudes of the Northwest into familiar pictorial terms.

  Even Vancouver couldn’t escape the use of the word “sublime,” but he handled it as though he were picking it up, unwillingly, with a pair of tongs. Writing about his grim excursion up Howe Sound, with the fashionable chatter of the young gentlemen still in his ears, he admitted that he’d seen “a sublime, though gloomy spectacle.”

  Lasqueti and Texada islands were fifteen minutes late, by my reckoning. There was a clear horizon where the southern tips of both islands should have bee
n, so I switched on the radar and left it to warm up. Under sail and engine, the boat rolled in the swell as the dying wind came in fitful puffs and wheezes. In the distance, about five miles off, a large oceangoing tug was pulling a pair of barges across my path.

  When I went downstairs to check the radar screen I found three blips of light, well inside the one-mile ring. Fooled by fog again. The tug wasn’t big, just much closer than I’d thought; and when I stepped up into the cockpit, I could hear the whump-whump-whump of its diesels across the water. For the next ninety minutes, in thickening fog, day fading into night, I played blindman’s buff with a string of unseen islands—shuffling over the sea at three knots, using the radar, the Garmin, and the depth-sounder for a white cane. Visibility was down to less than a quarter-mile as I groped toward a cleft in the bluffs on the mainland shore. The fog suddenly parted around a wall of black rock to reveal cormorants on a ledge, a madrona clinging by its toes to a niche, and a dripping pinnacle surmounted by a happy navigation mark—a large board on which SECRET COVE → was painted.

  I was just in time for dinner at the Jolly Roger Resort. A whimsical developer must have sometime passed this way, scattering names like Buccaneer Bay and Pirate Cove on the chart. This coast had a perfectly good history of its own, but its own evidently wasn’t good enough: it craved for the sentimental yo-ho-ho of Captain Kidd, and the skull-and-crossbones, and revenue men in cloaks and tricorn hats. The homesick preference for the ersatz-European over the far-western real was, I thought, more a Canadian than an American affliction, producing pubs with horse brasses and plastic Tudor beams. So the eighteenth-century explorers and fur traders were passed over in favor of pirates and smugglers from the banal imaginary history of Merrie England. Done with a giggle and meant to be cute, it betrayed the everlasting provincial anxiety that one’s own experience, one’s place and one’s past, are somehow less real than those of people nearer to the center of the big world.