Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  Having come from a country logged out completely by the mid-sixteenth century, I realized I’d been living under a considerable misapprehension myself. By the new standards I was trying to master, England had no nature at all. The consuming activities of my childhood—bird’s-nesting, fishing, butterfly hunting, pressing wildflowers between the pages of old books—had been, as Mary Baker Eddy would have said, a case of Error. The countryside I had mistaken for nature was in fact so managed and cultivated as to amount to nothing more than a sprawling allotment or pea-patch.

  My Englishness, in part, made me a poor reader of such modern Northwest writers as Gary Snyder, Barry Lopez, and Richard Nelson, who celebrate their at-oneness with the habitat of the wild. They owe more to Emerson than Wordsworth—and to Emerson at his most vatic. In “Nature,” what Emerson wrote of the forest—

  Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs all other circumstance, and judges like a god all men who come to her.

  —might serve as an epigraph to a long shelf of books about the prayerful relationship between the writer and the woods. Rooted in Native American lore and Zen Buddhist teaching, the Northwest school’s dominant tone is solemn, lyrical, minutely observant. In wilderness it discovers not chaos but transcendental order. Watching the riddled surface of the McKenzie River as it drifted past his Oregon forest home, Barry Lopez wrote, in “The Whaleboat”:

  Sunlight flexes too rapidly, too completely, on the river’s skin for the eye to spot a recurrent pattern in it, from bench or window, but I believe one is there. It’s not anything I feel compelled to find; I don’t believe I must know its meaning. I know that the design inherent in such things is orderly according to some logic other than the ones I know. It is akin, I think, to the logic that makes one’s life morally consistent.

  Lopez was too good for me. Perhaps I was disqualified from following him because I had led a morally inconsistent life. Turner’s whirling abyss seemed to me a true picture of reality as I generally experienced it; Lopez’s version struck me as improbably tidy and benign. A “design inherent” in nature implied a designer, in whose existence I had no faith at all. “Logic” was, I thought, a useful word so long as it meant logic, not some vapory, intuited life-force. That there might be many coexistent “logics,” as Lopez suggested, was news to me, knowing only one. I saw chaos where he saw order—a “pattern” with a discoverable “meaning,” whose actual discovery could be put off to another day, another essay.

  Reading the Northwest nature writers, I found myself an agnostic in their church; embarrassed, half-admiring, unable to genuflect in the right places. I wished there were more jokes. But humor was not their line. I liked the microscopic particularity of much of their writing, their intent and well-informed gaze, as they tried to penetrate the veil of the natural world. I thought individual passages were beautiful. But I couldn’t join in their hymns, and after a few pages I grew restless and began to ache for more profane company.

  The survey boats came back from their labyrinthine wanderings with crucial information. A few miles beyond where the ships lay at anchor, the ebb tide ran out to the northwest, proving that the explorers were on the inside of an enormous island. The tide gushed at tremendous speed through several narrow ravines, in a mass of rips and whirlpools. Indian villagers had shown the Englishmen how they could safely transit the rapids in canoes at slack water—though the water there was never truly slack, with mushroom-boils and fierce eddies lasting through the end of one tide into the beginning of the next. The surveyors reported that the Indians not only had iron-tipped spears and arrows but also carried muskets, pistols, and cutlasses for which they had traded furs with a man in a ship from Boston. So the rumor of Robert Gray’s passage through the straits in Lady Washington was now confirmed.

  At first light on 13 July, Discovery weighed anchor and sailed out of Desolation Sound on a breath of wind from the north. Sutil and Mexicana, their commanders still asleep, rode to their cables, while the foredeck crew of Chatham wrestled with a snagged anchor, slackening the cable, then quickly jerking it in on the capstan—an exhausting business that went on for nearly four hours before the anchor was freed and Chatham able to follow Discovery out of the sound. The night before, it had been agreed that the British would go through the pass nearest to the big island, while Galiano and Valdés, known as the Dons for short, would make their way seaward via passes closer to the mainland.

  Vancouver escaped Desolation by the same entrance through which he had come in. He was at last on the move again, in a fair wind, the hateful waterfalls and precipices receding behind him. The oyster-pink sunshine at six o’clock penetrated his psyche, and he was able to smile for the first time in weeks. He enthused about the landscape of low islands and sandspits fringed with pleasant, familiar trees—alder, poplar, maple, hazel, willow, silver fir. “They presented an appearance infinitely more grateful than that of the interior country.” He was even charmed by the local marine wildlife. “Numberless whales enjoying the season, were playing about the ship in every direction, as were also several seals.” From Captain Van, this was a rapturous appreciation of nature.

  All sails up, Discovery ghosted through a deep-water gap between islands that Vancouver named Baker Passage, after his third lieutenant, toward a long headland trending southward like an extended forefinger; this he called Cape Mudge, after his first lieutenant. When he put away the Royal Kalendar and the Admiralty list and began naming things in honor of his own officers, it was a sure sign that the captain’s spirits were rising steeply. The officers themselves had learned to be wary of Vancouver’s fits of twinkling bonhomie. When he prattled sentimentally about the antics of whales and scattered his shipmates’ names over the surrounding land, the response on the quarterdeck was to run for cover.

  Eight miles up Discovery Passage (Vancouver was feeling warmly toward his ship as well) the tidal pass now known as Seymour Narrows lay on the inside of Cape Mudge; a dark gorge, half a mile wide, between 900-foot bluffs, where at mid-tide the water boiled and broke in fleecy overfalls. Discovery and Chatham took advantage of the northgoing ebb and hurtled through the rapids, whose entire surface was bomb-cratered with whirlpools. Thomas Manby described how the two ships “stood through the narrow pass, the tide rushing along like Lightning, it running at least ten knots an hour.”

  As soon as the passage widened and the tide slowed, canoes put out from shore to approach the visitors. “A great many skins were bought by the rich Merchants on board,” Manby wrote, “and from a party of Fishermen we purchased Two hundred Salmon, at the price of two buttons each.”

  Several miles further on, the ships stopped at a large village, where more than a hundred canoes awaited them, each with a cargo of sea-otter pelts for sale. Here Manby gave vent to his loathing of his captain:

  a vast quantity of all kinds of skins were purchased, those people who were intrusted with the various Articles sent out by Government, made to their disgrace an amazing harvest—Bales of Cloath and blankets were sold with lavish hand for Skins, at a time when many … of our own Crew were shivering with cold from the want of woolen cloathing.

  Vancouver was purser of the expedition as well as its commander, so “those people” are really one person. The “disgrace,” Manby implies, was Vancouver’s alone, as he heartlessly feathered his own nest, at taxpayers’ expense, while his crew shivered in rags.

  This episode also fueled Manby’s condemnation of Vancouver in a letter he wrote to a friend, six months later, from Monterey. “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 Honorable and exalted station.” The word “trade,” first attached to him by Manby, would stick permanently to George Vancouver’s public reputation.

  In Gillray’s 1796 cartoon of the scene in Conduit Street, when Vancouver was thrashed b
y Midshipman Thomas Pitt, now Lord Camelford, trade cuts right to the heart of the matter. Captain Van—fat, popeyed, blubber-lipped—has stepped out of a shady-looking establishment whose sign reads: THE SOUTH SEA WAREHOUSE, From China! Fine Black Otter Skins (No Contraband Goods Sold Here). Crucified pelts hang in the door and window. Vancouver’s curious cape is labeled, This Present from the King of Owyhee to George III forgot to be delivered. The tall young baron, whose clean-cut features contrast wholesomely with his former commander’s ugly pudding of a face, towers over the dwarfish captain, his stick raised over his shoulder. In the balloon issuing from Camelford’s mouth, the words are: “Give me Satisfaction, Rascal!—draw your Sword, Coward! what, you won’t?—why then, take That, Lubber!—& that! & that! & that! & that!”

  Gillray’s reactionary satire holds that Vancouver amply deserves his thrashing for the simple reason that he is no gentleman. The cartoon is dedicated “To the Flag Officers of the British Navy”—those admirals who unwisely promoted the parvenu, and whose reputation has been besmirched by the low, moneygrubbing behavior of their ill-bred protégé.

  Yet Vancouver—in this, as in other things, the earnest disciple of Captain Cook—saw no shame in his trading activities. In the Voyage, he mentions the incident in passing: “Our visitors … brought us the skins of the sea otter, of an excellent quality, in great abundance, which were bartered for sheet-copper, and blue cloth; those articles being in the highest estimation among them.” Only the use of that passive verb betrays a hint (if hint it is) of embarrassment.

  For a man with no fortune of his own, soon to be retired on half pay, the pile of sea-otter pelts in his cabin was a hard-earned pension fund. Their soft, thick, chocolate fur meant comfort and security in his old age. On the Chinese market, a single pelt, properly cured and with its guard-hairs removed, fetched $100, about £25. As purser and commander, Vancouver was eventually paid at a rate of eight shillings a day, so a prime otter skin equaled two months’ salary. He cannot have sold many; a year after Discovery returned to England, Captain Van was in debt and harassed by duns.

  The trade he fails to mention is one that went on continuously as the expedition moved slowly up the coast. Manby (writing here about the Kwakiutl Indians, met in Discovery Passage) described it in his journal:

  The women … wore a narrow strip of skin tied round their middles, some wore twisted rushes in its stead, tho’ barely sufficient to conceal their sex, some of them were tolerably featured, and could they have been cleansed from their filth and dirt, might be termed passable. When absent from the eyes of the men, they readily accepted the embraces of anyone, that would bestow a glittering trinket for the favour.

  That the women of the Northwest coast were “filthy” was an old complaint from English sailors, who themselves must have stunk like polecats. In 1778, when Cook’s Discovery was anchored in Nootka Sound, David Samwell, a surgeon’s mate, gave a gloating account of how the young gentlemen bathed Nootka girls before having sex with them:

  Hitherto we had seen none of their young women though we had often given the men to understand how agreeable their company would be to us & how profitable to themselves, in consequence of which they about this time brought two or three girls to the ships; tho some of them had no bad faces yet as they were exceedingly dirty their persons at first sight were not very inviting; however our young gentlemen were not to be discouraged by such an obstacle as this which they found was to be removed with soap & warm water; this they called the Ceremony of Purification, and were themselves the officiators at it & it must be mentioned to their praise that they performed it with much piety and devotion.

  Their fathers who generally accompanied them made the bargain & received the price of the prostitution of their daughters, which was commonly a pewter plate well scoured for one night. When they found that this was a profitable trade, they brought more young women to the ships, who in compliance with our preposterous humour spared themselves the trouble of laying on their paint & us of washing it off again by making themselves tolerably clean before they came to us, by which they found they were more welcome visitors and thus by falling in with our ridiculous notions (for such no doubt they deemed them) they found means at last to disburthen our young gentry of their kitchen furniture; many of us after leaving this harbour not being able to muster a plate to eat our salt beef from.

  Sailing up Discovery Passage and into Johnstone Strait, where Kwakiutl villages crowded along the shoreline, the men on the quarterdeck were contented summer tourists. The weather stayed fine. The captain’s manic good humor at least meant that he made no attempt to interfere with the young gentlemen’s amusements, on board and off. They got laid as often as they pleased. Each day they dined on fresh salmon or venison, finishing the meal with wild strawberries and blackcurrants. They stashed away sea-otter pelts by the score, and became avid collectors of native artifacts: baskets and conical hats, woven from twisted threads of the inner bark of the cedar and quaintly decorated; painted chests inlaid with abalone shell; masks, rattles, clubs, charms.

  Meanwhile the currency given in exchange for these services and souvenirs—iron tools, beads, buttons, fabrics—provided the means for a spectacular explosion of Kwakiutl art, as the carvers and weavers incorporated European techniques and materials into their work. The iron chisel, in particular, enabled the Indians to do fast and easily what they had achieved only slowly and with great difficulty using tools of bone, shell, and stone. With their new technology, and with copper, mirrors, sacks of colored trade-beads, Kwakiutl craftsmen were liberated into a new world of imaginative expression.

  The Indians were equally impressed by the arts of the visitors—especially by the carved and painted figureheads on their ships, whose meaning and totemic power were much discussed. Interestingly, no one on the Vancouver expedition mentioned seeing a totem pole, nor is one shown in any of the midshipmen’s drawings of native villages, though carved house-posts were observed almost everywhere. The fur trader Joseph Ingraham, cruising the Queen Charlottes in 1791, was taken to see “two pillars … about forty feet in height, carved in a very curious manner indeed, representing men, toads, etc.” But the Haida Indians on these islands had been regularly visited by American and European traders for more than seventeen years by the time Ingraham arrived; they were the most cosmopolitan of the Northwest tribes. By the 1820s, totem poles were seen everywhere along the Inside Passage: a product of fur-trade wealth and leisure, iron chisels and gouges—and possibly the example of figureheads on white men’s ships.

  While all these transactions between the two cultures were taking place, the crews of Chatham and Discovery were keeping afloat on their newly matured supply of spruce beer, brewed ashore during their stop at Desolation Sound. Sprigs of fir were boiled in a vat for several hours; the bitter, greenish residue was strained through cheesecloth; then water, molasses, and yeast were added, and the mixture was left to ferment in the cask for a week. I haven’t tested this recipe, which comes from the late Admiral Bern Anderson of the U.S. Navy; I’m still waiting for the right mood, of cheerful self-destruction, to descend on me. The appeal of spruce beer was that, unlike the daily rum issue, it was freely available to the sailors whenever they fancied. Since it was medically recommended for its power to ward off scurvy, a pleasant sense of virtuousness attended the experience of getting drunk on it.

  It was a balmy interlude in a spooked voyage, these days of unrestricted sunshine, food, drink, sex, and fur trading, with deep water to sail in by day and comfortable village-anchorages at night. An air of vague, beery good humor infects the narratives of everyone on board between 13 July, when the expedition quit Desolation Sound, and 7 August, when Discovery, soon followed by Chatham, ran aground in the rocky shallows of Queen Charlotte Strait.

  I took the Dons’ route, through the jumbled mosaic of islands to the north and east of Discovery Passage. As the channels narrowed and the tide began to quicken, the windless water change
d character. Sinewy, fibrous, braided, gathering itself for the rapids ahead, it had the color and apparent consistency of black molasses.

  Where Stuart and Sonora islands squeezed up against the British Columbian mainland, they formed a slender Y-valve through which an immense quantity of water had to pass on its way to and from the open sea. To the northeast, Bute Inlet—more than thirty miles long and 2,000 feet deep—drained, on the ebb, through the Arran Rapids, a 250-yard gap between Stuart Island and the mainland. From the south came nearly all the water in the Desolation Sound labyrinth, funneled through the Yuculta Rapids between Stuart and Sonora. The two streams met and mingled in a cauldron-like basin of violent rips and whirlpools, before they shot, in consort, through the Dent Rapids into the broad reaches of Cordero Channel and Johnstone Strait, and out into the ocean at the north end of Vancouver Island. Arran, Yuculta, and Dent, named like a firm of attorneys, were the Scylla and Charybdis of the region—though far more ferocious and powerful than the modest swirls to be found in the real-life Strait of Messina, and famous for gulping down canoes, tugs, and fishing boats. At any time other than slack water—a five-minute pause in the turbulence—these rapids could upend even large craft, then swamp them by the stern or hurl them into the rocks with their serpentine ten-knot currents.

  Mexicana and Sutil waited for slack water at the northern entrance to the Arran Rapids, called by them Angostura de los Comandantes, surrounded by a troop of excited advisers in canoes. The Indians pointed to a distant mountaintop and indicated that the safest time to run the rapids would be when the sun was in transit over the peak: four o’clock in the afternoon, ship’s time. José Cardero, the expedition artist, was almost certainly author of the anonymous published account of the voyage, in which the frightening passage through Arran and Dent is described.