Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  “No. I’m sorry. I can’t.” I edged past her. “I’m late. I’m meeting my wife—”

  “You could help me.”

  I kept walking as her voice pursued me from behind the pall of drifting smoke: “Help … it’s not much to ask. You’ve got the build for it, you see.” Her tone was composed and good-humored, as if we were conducting a flirtation. “It wouldn’t take a minute.”

  I found the grocery store, then, laden with shopping, stopped at the wharfinger’s house to pay harbor dues for the night. “I can’t deal with you now,” the woman said. “I’m waiting for the Lotto on TV. You’ll have to come in.” Her bungalow was full of cats: strolling cats, squirming cats, cats draped over chair-arms, cats asleep, cats bickering. The moment I entered, the entire pack was after the contents of my two bags of groceries, which I held up to my chest. The television blared.

  “It’ll be on in a minute or two,” the wharfinger said. “Six forty-nine.”

  Her Lotto tickets—evidently a major investment—were laid out on the floor in front of her chair.

  It was local news time; though viewed from Vananda, the news from the Vancouver area looked as if it came from some foreign capital.

  “That clock must be fast,” she said, then, at seven o’clock, she realized she had the wrong day for the Lotto results and turned off the television.

  “Henrietta’s Land …” I said.

  “Her. She’s not been taking her medicine.”

  “Where’s she from?”

  “Somewhere back east. She used to be a schoolteacher.”

  “England?”

  “Maybe. It was back east somewhere, I know that.”

  “You seem to have a lot of Northern Irish people in Vananda.”

  “Yes. We got them. We got a lot of Newfies, too.”

  Newfoundlanders—fugitives from another stricken corner of the world. Leaving the wreckage of the inshore fishery on the Grand Banks, they must have arrived in British Columbia just in time for the collapse of the salmon fishery here.

  I settled up, and the wharfinger opened her front door on a welcome draft of air that didn’t smell of cat. “And that’s another thing,” she said, stepping out with me. “Him in there”—she pointed to a weatherbeaten trailer, with KEEP OUT scratched into the paint on its door—“I haven’t heard anything of him in the last few days. We’re on the same water, and I hear him every time he uses it. He’s not had the water going, not since Tuesday.” She looked up at me, head cocked, to see if I was catching her drift. “Someone ought to take a look,” she said.

  First a dead goat, now a dead man.

  “I’m sorry. I’m late.” I wanted very badly to get back to my boat, and stay on it, out of harm’s way. “You’d better find one of his friends.”

  “He doesn’t have no friends that I know of.”

  Some guy is lying dead in there, and you are going to do nothing about it?

  “Sorry!” My feet had control now, and were marching me past the trailer and into the road that led down to the harbor. Vananda was altogether too interesting for comfort. I had planned to go to the scruffy pub-motel for dinner but had a strong premonition that some new relationship was awaiting me there, and that my immediate future would be greatly simplified if I spoke to no one and went early to bed.

  Everything on the boat was as I had left it. I sat out in the cockpit, glass in hand, watching the light die in the cove. “Vananda” would be, I thought, a useful word:

  vananda, n. A place where loose-ends naturally collect, and where lost objects are likely to be found. A port in a storm; a bolthole, an asylum.

  Shortly before eleven, in the pitch-dark, I heard the crunch of car tires on the stone chips of the harbor road. Whoever it was had stopped on the long mole overlooking the floats and was raking the water with a powerful flashlight. The roving beam came to a halt on my boat and stayed there for the best part of a minute. I listened for voices and heard nothing. Probably it was only the wharfinger checking on her domain, but it put sleep abruptly out of reach.

  I kept the reading lamp in the forecabin on all night, and dozed uneasily over Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags—his funniest novel, and the one I thought most likely to provide distraction from the anxieties of the moment. But Basil Seal, a genial terrorist, fighting his private war on the home front, kept fading out on me, replaced by images of men in berets and balaclavas with Armalites. At first light, I rose groggily and cast off my lines. I liked Vananda best as it fell securely astern.

  Twists of steam from the chimneys of the Powell River pulp mill climbed straight up into a windless sky. The sea, scored with current-lines, was like an ice rink imprinted by the tracks of figure skaters. This northern corner of Georgia Strait was choked with islands—from big, bold, wooded hills like Harwood, Savary, and Hernando, down to unnamed chunks of bare granite used as fishing platforms by ospreys and bald eagles, stained white with birdshit. Vancouver called it a “very unpleasant navigation … on every side encompassed by islands and small rocky islets; some lying on the continental shore, others confusedly scattered, of different forms and dimensions.”

  Discovery and Chatham sailed out of Malaspina Strait in company with Sutil and Mexicana. The Spanish thought that a passage to the ocean probably lay somewhere ahead, in which case the mountains to the west would prove to be an island. Indians interviewed the previous year had said this was so, and there was a more doubtful rumor that Robert Gray, the American fur trader, in the sloop Lady Washington, had found a route through the mountains to the open sea.

  From here, it seemed improbable. The Strait of Georgia appeared to end at a black wall of mountainous country. Peaks crowded thickly on peaks. In the far distance, the snowline looked unbroken. Nor did the tide—as yet—suggest that an opening to the sea might be concealed there. That the ebb continued to flow east and south, back to Juan de Fuca Strait, tended to confirm the explorers’ fears that they were up another blind alley.

  At dead low water, running before a light wind from the east-southeast, the four ships passed inside of Harwood Island (named by Vancouver for Edward Harwood, a naval surgeon who served under Captain Bligh) into a tricky and deceiving reach of sea. The surface was sprinkled with isolated rocks, as if these were boulder-strewn flats, barely covered by the tide. Yet the leadsmen went on calling bottom at sixty and seventy fathoms, even as the rocks drew alarmingly close. Double lookouts were posted at the masthead and the bows to watch for submerged reefs. But the dull light and wind-ruffled water made this an impossible assignment. The rocks appeared to sprout from nowhere. Their cousins might be anywhere, a few inches out of sight. The ships reduced their sail and crept forward yard by yard, waiting for the crunch.

  My Canadian Hydrographic Service chart showed a weird underwater topography of hidden cols, pinnacles, and crevasses, the blue contour lines a busy scribble of loops and whorls. Any fool could now safely plot a course through here, but before sonar chartmaking this must have been a hideous passage, capable of driving the coolest navigator to fits of nervous panic. Captain Van was not the coolest navigator. On the quarterdeck of Discovery, no one dared speak. Except for the creaking of ropes in the blocks and the whisper of water around the hull, the ship moved on in a tense bubble of apprehensive silence.

  I got the jitters, too, but for a different reason. A few feet off the port bow, I saw a circle in the water, like the dimple of a rising fish. I slammed the engine into reverse, and the thing slid by along the beam—a huge deadhead, the waterlogged trunk of a tree, floating vertically in the water, its top end grazing the surface. This wasn’t a Puget Sound peckerpole, a foot to eighteen inches in diameter. An old-growth Douglas fir, four feet across, it might well go down sixty feet into the sea. Hit it and you’d sink as surely as if you had impaled your boat on a pinnacle of solid rock. I had missed it by inches, and for the next hour or so my lookout was as anxious as that of Vancouver’s men up in the y
ards. Every small fish was a deadhead. Seals were deadheads. The hole left in the water by a diving loon was a deadhead. I carefully steered wide of them all.

  The tows that came steaming out of the mountains at half-hour intervals kept me vigilant: the logs that made up their rafts were all of a size to match my monstrous deadhead. In British Columbia, unlike Washington State, timber companies were still hacking down ancient forests; a measure of the power of the provincial government to resist the calls for environmental restraint that came down from Ottawa. The British Columbians saw the western wilderness as their property, to dispose of as they pleased. Paul Bunyan, quietly dropped from the pantheon of American heroes, appeared to be enjoying an active retirement up here in B.C. His blue ox, Babe, had been replaced by the orange twin-rotored helicopter I saw en route from Powell River to some luckless old-growth patch up a remote mountainside; its garish lifeboat color was presumably meant to make its wreckage easier to spot.

  Picking their route through the rocks and islets, the ships sailed so slowly that it was 9:30 P.M., nearly dark, and sixteen miles on when the flotilla arrived at a gap in the mountains a mile and a half wide. The leadsmen had been calling ever-increasing depths, and the water was now fathomless. A thin, persistent drizzle had fallen since mid-afternoon, thickening the visibility and dampening the spirits of the explorers. Discovery was the first to ghost through the entrance, which opened on a strange, watery crossroads of black precipices and inky canals, leading off in every direction like the arms of a starfish. The ship drifted more than sailed to within a cable of the continental shore, under a towering cliff. No bottom was found. I could see, as they could not, that they were floating over a sheer-sided submarine valley 1,500 feet deep.

  The landlocked wind, confused by the mountains, came in feeble scurries—now from the north, now from the east, now from the south—and repeatedly took the ships aback. “The night was dark and rainy,” Vancouver recalled, “and the winds so light and variable that by the influence of the tides we were driven about as it were blindfolded in this labyrinth.”

  This labyrinth. When Vancouver wrote the sentence—or at least polished it for publication—his lodgings at Petersham were a pleasant four-mile walk from the famous labyrinth at Hampton Court. The hornbeam hedge-maze, planted in 1690 for William of Orange, the scourge of the Irish and the Protestant victor of the Battle of the Boyne, had, by the 1790s, taken on a kind of legendary antiquity. A controlled theater of disorientation, the maze was an allegory of the operation of chance and choice in human life, and a tourist attraction with which Captain Van was certainly familiar. Like other ornamental mazes of the time, it was known as “the wilderness.” Trying to convey his helplessness as he drifted through pitch darkness in eerily deep water at the whim of the tide, Captain Van saw the bleak Pacific Northwest wilderness dissolve into the maze at Hampton Court—that play-space in which people liked to lose themselves, on sunny afternoons, for fun.

  He was rescued from his distress by the Spaniards. Galiano, on Sutil, had been patiently sounding around the high conical island, and its two satellite islets, at the center of the crossroads. On its north side he found an uneven rocky shelf at depths of thirty to fifty fathoms. Here, at midnight, the four ships gathered to drop anchors. The cables rattled down from the capstans into nearly 200 feet of water—an uncomfortably deep anchorage by normal standards, but a solace in this miserable darkness walled-in by looming, shadowy mountains. With each ship laying out 600 feet of cable, the vessels spent the night wandering in vague circles, the watches calling to one another over the water as they came close to collision, then drifted safely off again.

  At daybreak on Tuesday, 26 June, Vancouver was able to see the true character of the maze. In the sullen morning light, it appeared no friendlier: the sides of the channels, black with pines, were nearly vertical, rising to heights of close to 6,000 feet; the water, starved of sunlight, looked peculiarly dark and dead, as it borrowed the furry, tenebrous color of the trees. The whole place dripped. Small cataracts, pouring from rock overhangs, echoed monotonously inside the canyon-like walls. A landscape of appalling, ungraspable dimensions, it belittled the ships floating like toys on the lip of the submarine abyss.

  Two major channels led away from the crossroads—one to the northwest, the other to the east-northeast. But from the deck, Vancouver could see bifurcations in both channels that might take them anywhere in this serpentine conglomeration of mountains and islands. Survey boats would have to be sent up every arm and corridor, leaving no possible opening unexplored; and it looked as if they might usefully be equipped with a clew of thread, the standard mazecraft accessory to guide the lost traveler back to his starting point.

  Lieutenant Broughton went off in Chatham’s gig to find a better long-term anchorage. Puget, Whidbey, Johnstone, and Swaine (the most senior of the midshipmen) were put in charge of the four survey crews. Captain Van himself declined to participate, explaining in his journal that he couldn’t leave Discovery because he needed “to produce some observations of the longitude.” He was visibly unwell. Menzies was concerned about the deep bronchial rattle of his worsening cough. Unable now to sleep without heavy drafts of laudanum, the captain, whose habitual manner was of close, secretive abstraction, sometimes appeared to be close to dementia.

  As arrangements for the survey expeditions were being made, under a sky that promised only rain and wind, Vancouver spoke of the urgent necessity of setting up an observatory tent onshore so he could take lunar distances. Yet almost anywhere on the coast would have provided a better site for the calculation of longitude by astronomical observation: here, the view of the sky—if the clouds ever cleared—was badly obstructed by mountains. But Captain Van, lost in his own black maze, turned instinctively to astronomy, as he always did when he felt his grip on reality starting to weaken. Lunars would show him where he was. When the boats were gone, Vancouver would use his quadrant to find himself.

  At noon, it began to blow hard from the southeast and the ships, catching the brunt of the wind, strained against their anchors, lifting a hundred feet of cable and more off the bottom. Broughton came back in the gig to announce a better, more protected anchorage six and a half miles to the northwest. He had barely pointed the place out to Vancouver before Discovery dragged her anchor clean off the shelf, the cable now dangling uselessly into the abyss. Scudding before the wind, with the men on the capstan still recovering the anchor, the ship plowed up channel to her new quarters at the foot of a vast, shaggy cliff of tobacco-brown rock-faces and stunted evergreens. In Vancouver’s opinion, the anchorage was “equally dreary and unpleasant,” though it had one merit. Half a mile across the water, to the south, an apron of level land skirted a nodule-like point: a good place to pitch a tent, find Greenwich time, and fix the longitude.

  One by one, the launches and cutters were lost to sight in the rain squalls. Valdés went off with a crew of Spaniards, aboard Mexicana’s launch. Vancouver and Galiano remained behind. Their friendship had its rough edges and the two commanders continued to name jointly discovered land in rival languages. Vancouver called the points on each side of the labyrinth’s entrance after his sisters; Sarah to the east, Mary to the west. Galiano promptly redubbed them Punta de Sarmiento and Punta de Magellanes, allowing the initial letters of the sisters’ names to survive.

  Yet Galiano, with his strongly accented, diplomatic English, was the one human being to whom Vancouver could now turn for company. For the next two and a half weeks, the ships anchored under the forbidding precipice, Vancouver took his meals alone, locked in his private cabin on Discovery, emerging from his den only when Señor Galiano came visiting. He accepted invitations to dine aboard Sutil, where they drank and conferred together, commander to commander. With Galiano he was able to share the multitude of “observations” that he was making in the tent ashore.

  Though the sky was rarely clear enough for nautical astronomy, Vancouver was eventually able to take ten sets of
lunars, dragging the images of the sun and moon down from the heavens to kiss their reflections in the mercury pan of the artificial horizon. On average, the readings gave him a longitude measured eastabout from Greenwich of 235° 5′30″—accurate to within less than a third of a mile to the position of what is now Joyce Point as it juts out into Lewis Channel. Given the terrain, the weather, and the difficulty of the calculations, this was a brilliant result.

  There was nothing crankish in Vancouver’s fondness for the lunar-distance method. While he worked away in his tent, the fur-trading Joseph Ingraham, charting the Queen Charlotte Islands for his own purposes, was also getting his longitude by lunars, even though he was no great mathematician. It’s a fact worth repeating that in 1792, this far out from Greenwich (or any other port where chronometers could be synchronized), the sky still provided a more reliable clock than the one devised by John Harrison.

  Vancouver wasn’t happy with his Joyce Point lunars. He thought ten insufficient, and the results disagreed with the longitude suggested by the ship’s chronometers. Not knowing which to trust, the quadrant or the clock, Captain Van found himself doubting his own accuracy. He talked to Galiano. And, when drawing his position on the chart, he went by the chronometer and put himself more than ten miles farther inland than he actually was. This mistake—made after a feat of textbook navigation—was a measure of his shaken self-confidence.

  Next he tackled the usually simple problem of finding the local magnetic variation, measuring the azimuth angle between true north and magnetic north as it was shown on the ship’s compasses. With correction tables and a series of good sights of the Pole Star, a competent midshipman should have been able to come up with a reasonably precise figure. But again Vancouver couldn’t get his results to agree. He took angles from Discovery’s quarterdeck, then from the observatory tent ashore. The numbers were all over the place. The easterly variation lay somewhere between 14½° and 23°—a wide discrepancy. Vancouver had to settle for two fudged averages, 16° aboard the ship and 19° ashore.