Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  The boat rolled like a barrel in the swell. Leaving Miles Inlet at oh-dark-thirty, I’d winched up the mainsail to help steady the boat on the crossing, but the sail flapped and banged in the lifeless air as I stumbled toward Egg Island, rolling 35° one way, then 35° the other, as measured by the pendulum-swing of the clinometer’s little black ball. Down below, everything was on the slide, led by a heavy toolbox, a bottle of olive oil, and a dozen fugitive books. I had no appetite for breakfast.

  To the west, the nearest land was Kamchatka, 2,700 miles away; the exhausted Pacific wave-trains were slopping up against the B.C. mainland and bouncing back, raising a steep, confused, but syrup-smooth sea. Behind me, a tug towing a bargeful of containers was exposing its rust-colored bottom paint to the sun, and I feared for the health of its cargo: the oceans are littered with twenty-ton containers, floating awash like uncharted aluminum reefs and plenty big enough to sink a boat the size of mine.

  Drawing level with Egg Island, I was overtaken by a purse-seiner, and struggled to focus it in the binoculars while it climbed briefly into view on the swells. Each time I found it, a fresh wall of water rose to curtain it from sight. Chirikof … Seattle. This was late in the season for a salmon boat to be making the run north; and from the look of its spanking cherry-red and sky-blue paintwork, it had been detained at Fishermen’s Terminal for artistic reasons. It fell into a hole in the ocean, then soared high above the mountaintops on the eastern horizon. At the back of the deckhouse, arms stretched wide, as if gripping a horizontal girder for balance, stood a beanpole man, too skinny for his clothes, with a curly grizzled beard and abundant gray hair swept back across his skull. The sea blotted him out. When it covered him again, I saw that a pipe was lodged in the left side of his mouth.

  The resemblance was dizzying. Weeks would pass before I got used to the fact that my father had shipped himself aboard half the boats in the Alaskan fishing fleet. He was the elderly hand, probably the cook, called Pop by the younger crew; they would bear with his stories of old times on the fishing grounds, and make fun of him behind his back.

  It was a strange career move for my father, whose passion for maritime history went hand in hand with a deep mistrust of the sea. When he was made vicar of a parish outside Lymington, on the Solent, he bought an ancient wooden dinghy and named it Sheltie, in honor of my mother’s seafaring Shetland ancestors. I remember three or four outings under sail, in gentle weather, each of them fraught with crises and alarms, before the boat was retired to a permanent berth in the shrubbery outside my father’s study window. So it was doubly surprising to find him resurrected as a hoary shellback on the fringes of the North Pacific.

  I watched Chirikof gain the shelter of Calvert Island, five miles or so ahead of me, while I stood braced at the wheel, contemplating a further hour at least of rocking and rolling through the swell. The motion was tiring, but not nauseating. Since childhood, I could hear much better through my left ear than my right, so that even on land my inner-ear system was busy balancing a life that appeared to be led continuously on the slant. My defective hearing made me too insensitive to be seasick—a happy discovery made at fifteen, in a North Sea gale, aboard the Aberdeen-to-Shetland packet. The ship’s dark corridors were slippery with passengers’ vomit, and I skated my way to the crew’s quarters, where, at midnight, I was fed bacon sandwiches until, to general disappointment, I was pronounced immune. When we docked at Lerwick, we were a company of sheeted ghosts, everyone pronouncing this the worst crossing in memory. For me, it was the best, most vivid part of my three-week holiday. Knowing nothing then of the causes of seasickness, I put my cheerful bacon-sandwich feast down to the salt in my veins and, gloating over the miseries of the landlubbers, swanked all over the ship.

  Discovery and Chatham made the crossing to Calvert Island on 10 August 1792, on a stiff easterly wind, with Vancouver in a low and irritable mood. He was a latecomer here. Between 1786 and 1788, three English fur traders—Captain Guise, of Experiment; Captain Duncan, of Princess Royal; and Captain Hanna, of Sea Otter—had named and charted the major islands and inlets to the north and west of Vancouver Island. Checking his own course against their notes and sketch-maps, Captain Van had cause to feel the essential futility of his expedition. An explorer of land already discovered, he could do little more than make marginal corrections to the work of his predecessors.

  There is a world of difference between being commissioned to find the needle in the haystack and being told to fork through the haystack to make sure that no needle is there. Vancouver did not believe in the existence of the Northwest Passage; nor did the Admiralty, nor the fur traders who’d sailed here before. The sorry task of the Discovery expedition was to ensure that there was no discovery to be made. Captain Van had been chosen as commander because of the very qualities his juniors found so oppressive: literal-minded and punctilious, he could be counted on to carry out his brief without cutting corners, as a more imaginative man would almost certainly do. Yet even the worm turns—as Captain Van was beginning to when he came into Fitz Hugh Sound. Before long, he would write frankly to his friend, James Sykes, in London, of being “entrap’d in this infernal Ocean.”

  The two ships anchored in Safety Cove on the east side of Calvert Island. That night, an intense depression came ashore on the Queen Charlotte Islands, bringing heavy rain and fierce southwesterly winds. Five small boats were equipped with a week’s provisions. Captain Van took command of one; Puget, Whidbey, Johnstone, and Humphrys captained the other four. This bedraggled flotilla set out on the morning of the 11th, in horizontal rain and a short, steep, breaking sea, to explore a new maze of dead ends.

  The depression barely moved. The rain kept coming, and the wind remained close to gale-force. The crews were soaked to the skin, the shoreline was a gray blur at fifty yards, there wasn’t a glimpse to be had of sun or stars. Sailing north by the compass in his yawl, Captain Van reached:

  as desolate inhospitable a country as the most melancholy creature could be desirous of inhabiting. The eagle, crow, and raven, that occasionally had borne us company in our lonely researches, visited not these dreary shores. The common shell-fish, such as muscles, clams, and cockles, and the nettle samphire, and other coarse vegetables, that had been so highly essential to our health and maintenance in all our former excursions, were scarcely found to exist here; and the ruins of one miserable hut … was the only indication we saw that human beings ever resorted to the country before us.

  In the afternoon of 14 August, the sun showed itself just long enough for Vancouver to capture it with his quadrant, establishing his latitude at 51°52′N. He rendezvoused with Johnstone, in Chatham’s cutter, and turned south to return to Safety Cove. The wind was blowing hard up Fisher Channel, the men hungry and exhausted; for 37 miles they rowed like galley slaves, reaching the parent ships a little after midnight.

  Puget, Whidbey, and Humphrys were still away, somewhere to the southeast, where the coast was most exposed and the wind and sea at their worst. For two days Captain Van fretted helplessly over the safety of his missing crews. On the 17th a strange brig, flying English colors, appeared at the entrance to the cove. Lieutenant Baker went off in the yawl to meet the visitor: Venus out of Bengal, a 110-ton fur trader.

  Captain Henry Shepherd must have been studiously taciturn, for Baker returned to Discovery with only the good news—that the expedition’s supply ship, Daedalus, had arrived in Nootka Sound, bringing stores from London, mail, and the newly appointed astronomer, William Gooch. From the beginning, Vancouver had begged the Admiralty for an astronomer; Cook, after all, had William Wales, his own revered instructor in celestial navigation. Now, with Gooch on his quarterdeck, he’d have the company of a kindred mathematical spirit, and the problem of exact longitude (a continuing disparity of up to ten miles between the chronometer and lunar-distance measurements) might finally be settled.

  By the hand of Captain Shepherd came a sealed letter, addressed to Captain
Van, from Daedalus’s master, Thomas New. According to Edward Bell’s journal, not until late in the letter did New come to the point: the ship’s commander, Richard Hergest, the astronomer Gooch, and an unnamed seaman had been murdered by Hawaiian natives at Waimea Bay, on the north shore of Oahu, where Daedalus had anchored to take on water. Their bodies had been dismembered by the mob. This had happened on 11 May, when Vancouver, in a dizzy upswing of mood, was discovering a new England on the banks of Puget Sound.

  Anxious for his missing lieutenants, sick of the desolate and inhospitable wilderness and its vile weather, Captain Van had no reserve of emotional capital on which to draw. Though he’d never met Gooch, he claimed Hergest as “my most intimate friend.” The news of the murders poleaxed him.

  Next morning, Puget, Whidbey, and Humphrys sailed into the cove in consort, to find the ships strangely quiet, their colleagues nervous and on edge. Vancouver’s graveyard cough had worsened greatly with the weather: when he breathed, loud gulls cried in his chest. He was white-faced, withdrawn, monosyllabic, and thought likely to explode at any moment. He received the lieutenants’ reports—of inlets that went nowhere, of a large village of Indians who in Puget’s words “behaved in a most daring and insolent way”—then tersely announced that the coastal survey was finished for the year. The expedition would return here in the spring of ’93, and continue its explorations northward.

  On 19 August, a Sunday, came “a pleasant breeze from the S.E. with serene and cheerful weather.” Discovery and Chatham got their anchors and set sail for Nootka.

  Once Cape Calvert was safely rounded, Vancouver retired to his quarters. To the sounds of the ship, on a beam-reach to Cape Scott, was added the rumbling thunder of his cough.

  Menzies, who doubled as the expedition’s doctor and naturalist, had come to so dislike the captain as to find it hard to wish him well. Professionally, though, he was seriously worried about Vancouver’s coughing fits, his increasingly bloated appearance, and his extreme shortness of breath. Menzies couldn’t put a name to the disease, but he was now sure that Captain Van was dying of it.

  I had penciled a circle round Namu, 27 miles up Fitz Hugh Sound, and the only marked settlement in the 1,500 square miles of land and water covered by the chart. Cannery, store, P.O., tel., read the chart; and Sailing Directions added the promising word cafe.

  Off Safety Cove, where Discovery and Chatham had sheltered in an anchorage too large and deep for me, I crossed paths with a sleek white cruise ship flying the Red Ensign, Cunard’s Sea Goddess II. It was followed closely by an ugly giant, the parrot-beaked P.&O. Regal Princess, 70,000 tons and honeycombed with a thousand windows. Both ships inched through the water, leaving barely a ripple of wake, turning the Inside Passage into a slowly unspooling diorama.

  John Muir might have been writing advertising copy for Cunard and P.&O. when he described how he and his fellow passengers (most of them Methodist missionaries bent on converting the Chilkat Indians) stood on the deck of their chartered steamer, Cassiar, in 1879:

  Cares of every kind were quickly forgotten, and though the Cassiar engines soon began to wheeze and sigh with doleful solemnity, suggesting coming trouble, we were too happy to mind them. Every face glowed with natural love of wild beauty. The islands were seen in long perspective, their forests dark green in the foreground, with varying tones of blue growing more and more tender in the distance; bays full of hazy shadows, graduating into open, silvery fields of light, and lofty headlands with fine arching insteps dipping their feet in the shining water. But every eye was turned to the mountains. Forgotten now were the Chilcats and missions while the word of God was being read in these majestic hieroglyphics blazoned along the sky.…

  With binoculars, I raked the decks of Goddess and Princess for signs of the “earnest, childish wonderment” that Muir commended as the fitting response to this landscape, but apparently it was nap-time on board.

  The wilderness that led Vancouver to desolation and prompted Muir to flights of histrionic rapture had become, in the late twentieth century, a soothing, therapeutic wallpaper for cruise-ship passengers. Compared to the tropical excitements of the Caribbean or the Mexican coast, the Inside Passage worked like a course of Prozac with its calm seas, muted colors, and diffuse, angled lighting. What it chiefly offered was emptiness on a luxurious scale—mile after indistinguishable mile of gray rock, gray water, and sludge-green forest, not a house or road in sight. In an overcrowded world, simple absence of population was enough to render this a compelling tourist attraction; and the cruise ships, floating cities with their own shopping malls, lingered greedily over these long empty reaches, inviting passengers to feast their eyes on an epic sweep of tenantless waterfront property.

  Aboard each ship, a resident naturalist kept up a running commentary over the P.A. system, fragments of which came to me over the water: “red cedar … spruce … bear … wolf … mountain lion …” You wouldn’t see much wildlife from a stateroom window; but the near proximity of mammals capable of killing and eating humans was a cruise-feature that figured importantly in the brochures. The ship’s naturalist was employed to fill the forest with creatures red in tooth and claw, so that passengers could invest the passing undergrowth with action sequences worthy of the Discovery Channel. Deep in the brush, bears lunged; wolves ganged up on mountain goats; cougars sank their fangs into squealing mule deer; moose bellowed; and the long-eared lynx stalked the unknowing snowshoe hare. On B Deck, within a sand wedge of the dangerous wild, gentlemen obedient to the cruise-line dress code tightened their cummerbunds and eased themselves into white tuxedos, preparing to sink their own fangs into the five-star dinner.

  Namu was tucked into a sheltered corner of Whirlwind Bay, named for the williwaws that fell into it from the surrounding mountains in autumn and winter, when Sailing Directions warned that the bay should be avoided. On a July afternoon, light airs gently teased the water in a shallow, protected basin, perfectly suited to my needs, but Namu itself was in ruins.

  Trees grew through the collapsed roofs of bunkhouses. The raised boardwalks had sprung apart in a tangle of flailing black linguine. A stump-field of rotting pilings was all that was left of Namu’s docks. A single tipsy float, missing half its boards, led to a blackberry jungle. There was no store, no tel., no P.O., no cafe. In another year or two, the whole settlement would be swallowed by the woods.

  The first whites came here in 1893, in the boom years when sawmills and canneries dotted the shores of every inlet. During salmon season, the anchorages and docks were crammed with boats rafted together hull to hull: disreputable floating villages, loud with whiskey and concertinas. Now all these sprawling centers of industry and population were going the way of Indian shell-middens and fish-weirs, and the Inside Passage was even emptier of people than it was when Vancouver and the fur traders first showed up. The seeming wilderness was full of Namus; the forest carpeted with rusty bits of logging machinery, fallen joists and window frames, tar paper, tractor tires, tin cans. The bears had the run of the place, making their dens in the overgrown ruins of enterprises that had thrived only ten and fifteen years before.

  I could safely have put an anchor down in Whirlwind Bay, but had no appetite for watching night fall over the dismal remains of Namu, a memento mori disquieting enough even in full daylight. So I swung the boat around and headed for Bella Bella, an Indian village 25 miles farther northwest. That Bella Bella would still exist seemed fairly certain: the 1991 edition of Sailing Directions listed a grocery store, post office, bank, laundromat, marine hardware store, hotel, liquor store, school, churches, and a hospital operated by the United Church of Canada. I doubted the hungry forest could’ve consumed quite that amount of civilization in five years flat.

  Leaving Whirlwind Bay, I passed the entrance to Burke Channel, snaking its way northeastward from the wooded promontory of Edmund Point. Here, Captain Van had spent a miserable two days in the wind and rain of August 1792, pitching his ten
t in an area so dreary that even the Indians appeared to have deserted it. Eight months later, when his expedition returned to the Northwest coast, he named it Burke’s Channel.

  Was this a unique sample of Vancouver’s black humor? He probably meant only to honor Edmund Burke as the elder statesman of English conservatism—and perhaps to pay homage to the memory of his father, Little Van, the dapper party-worker for the King’s Lynn Tories. That he knew Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful seems unlikely, though Menzies and some of the younger officers and midshipmen were on nodding terms with it. I think it was more by happy accident than deliberate wit that Captain Van christened one of the most gloomy and forbidding channels in British Columbia after the aesthetic champion of terror, privation, darkness, depth, and vastness. Burke Channel—narrow, tortuous, flanked by precipices, sun-starved—perfectly embodied Burke’s theory of the Sublime.

  I had, it seemed, arrived just in time. Though Bella Bella still existed, some kind of major exodus was going on. Sunset darkened the village on the west bank of Lama Passage, and gilded the broad pool of water at its doorstep. A convoy of small boats was disappearing around the headland to the east. Curious, I attached myself to the tail end to see where everyone was going.

  Each boat was packed with people perching on one another’s knees. Radios were playing at full blast, all tuned to the same soft-rock station, with bass and drums bouncing back—thump-thump-thump-thump-thump—from the surrounding cliffs. The passengers matched the music in period flavor—the young men in shaggy Beatle cuts, the young women dressed to kill with flouncing skirts, plunging necklines, and bangles that flashed wickedly in the last of the sun. All sported the tribal uniform of a silver nylon windbreaker, emblazoned on the back with a scarlet killer whale. Fully provisioned with cigarettes and six-packs, the boats gave off an air of reckless Saturday-night hedonism. They charged across their rivals’ wakes like bumper cars, trading loud insults over the darkening water.