Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart

by Lynn Schooler

  Scholars have debated exactly where Chirikov’s men were lost for decades; navigation in the mid-1700s was often hit or miss, with errors of up to a hundred miles not uncommon. Various translations of Chirikov’s reports give the St. Paul’s position as 57° 15’ North, 57° 39’ North, and 57° 50’ North—a spread of thirty-five nautical miles, which is enough to place the ship in several locations that bear a resemblance to Chirikov’s description.* Both Lisianski Strait, a few miles from Cape Spencer, and the entrance to Peril Strait, fifty miles farther south, are possibilities. Both are openings into the coast through which the current flows with sufficient strength to threaten the unwary. On the ebb, strong tide rips can occur at the mouth of each. But for my money, the modus operandi of the place that engulfed the Russians is pure Lituya Bay.

  Neither Lisianski nor Peril Strait is particularly threatening on the flood, when the sea is crowding the entrance (with the caveat that Sergius Narrows, a rockbound dogleg several miles into Peril Strait, is exceedingly dangerous during the flood, but lies far enough into the strait for an experienced seaman to notice the speed of the current increasing and pull ashore before his craft becomes endangered). In calm seas, the other dangers in both areas are readily apparent to anyone approaching from seaward and easily avoided.

  The entrance to Lituya Bay, however, is deceptive. On the flood, from seaward, it appears wide and clear, with no visible obstructions. A stranger approaching from offshore sees a broad entrance marked only by a few current lines like those of a deep, swiftly flowing river. But just inside the entrance, running from right to left beneath the surface, lies a submarine berm of rocks and rubble bulldozed into place by the last advance of the glaciers. To pass through safely, a mariner must enter to starboard, on the right-hand side of the opening, then steer hard to port, crabbing and clawing across the swift current to remain within a narrow, safe channel that runs at an oblique angle inside the left-hand shore. To do otherwise—to follow one’s natural inclination and steer with the current—means being thrown against the hidden rocks.

  Beating through the waves as La Perouse Glacier fell behind me, I needed no great imagination to envision this happening to Chirikov’s shore party. Under the circumstances, it was nearly impossible to imagine the scene unfolding otherwise. It would require seamanship of a fairly amateurish sort to be drawn into and destroyed by the flood at the entrance to either Lisianski or Peril Strait, although the ebb, or outflowing, current can be dangerous at all three locations. And under conditions such as those the St. Paul met when it approached the coast (light winds and a smooth, glassy sea rolling in from the west), a tide rip of any magnitude or breakers over a reef would have been visible from a distance and easy to avoid. The crew of a small, oar-powered vessel approaching from seaward would have had to work exceedingly hard to row into a tide rip, as the current would have been working to thrust them out.*

  Nor, I told myself as a fusillade of salt spray broke across the Swift’s windows, was it likely that the Tlingit killed or detained Chirikov’s men. While a violent, warlike people, the Tlingit were also avid traders. Time after time, when encountering strangers, they would prove to be more interested in doing business than in attacking. During the 120 years in which Russia occupied Alaska, the Tlingit would repeatedly harry, burn, and slaughter the invaders in response to their thieving brutality, sometimes seizing the Russians’ own guns and cannons and using the weaponry against them. But a first encounter with musket-toting, cannon-firing strangers would have terrorized even the boldest warrior unfamiliar with the murderous thunder of gunpowder.

  More likely is a scenario wherein the crews of both Russian boats found themselves stunned and helpless as the current running into Lituya Bay seized their boats, splintered them against the rocks, and drowned the men. The Tlingit, watching from on shore as the tragedies unfolded and not wishing the drowned strangers to become kushtaka otter-men, would have done their best to recover the bodies for cremation. Slack water—that period of relative calm when the inrushing tide slows and prepares to reverse itself and run out again—lasts only ten to twenty minutes at Lituya Bay, which might explain the Natives’ haste when they yelled for Chirikov to join them; to tarry would have meant being trapped outside by the current.†

  A wave larger and more threatening than the rest reared up off the bow of the Swift, and I throttled back to meet it. Sunlight glittered across its face. There was a moment of silence, followed by a brief weightless feeling as the Swift dropped into the trough preceding it. I held my breath as the wave slammed into the bow. It broke like a dam collapsing. The sea and sky disappeared in a barrage of foam.

  The next wave jarred my spine. A third rattled the coffee cups on their hooks and banged a skillet to the floor. I flicked on the wipers to clear the spray from the windows and looked west, where the swells were coming from; streaks of pale haze filled the sky.

  I braced myself for the next lurching wave and tuned the radio to the weather channel. Recent upgrades to the marine weather-reporting system have made it possible to receive updates in most locations along the coast, and though I was beyond the transmission range of my boat’s low-powered radio, the digital voice of the automated forecast came through loud and clear. What it had to say made my stomach jump; instead of the decreasing winds that the early-morning forecast had promised, strong winds were now forecast to hit the coast that night.

  I pulled out a chart and spread it on the galley table to measure the distance to Lituya Bay. The Swift is equipped with a modern GPS, or global positioning system, but I prefer paper charts. Many of mine have been with me for decades. Some I have owned since I first went to sea on commercial fishing boats in my twenties, and they have accompanied me on a variety of sailing vessels, yachts, and tugs since, until winding up as an essential tool aboard the Swift. They are soft from years of handling, tattered along the folds, and stained with sea spray and drops of coffee. The margins are full of penciled notes—characteristics, I suppose, that may constitute wabi-sabi of a nautical, personal sort, but I know I should replace them, if for no other reason than that I may someday mistake a spot of mildew for a nonexistent rock. Still, they feel like old friends and can be trusted not to lie to me. What chart number 16720 now told me was that I was still twenty miles from Lituya Bay, and the weather was deteriorating.

  I did a quick calculation to estimate my time of arrival at the entrance. The battering chop had slowed me down. If I missed slack water, the ebb running from the bay could turn the swells into combers that would prevent the Swift from entering. Then I could either wait for the next period of slack water, jogging into the waves for six hours as the weather worsened, or turn tail and run, hoping to reach Cape Spencer before the gale struck. My mouth went dry as I tried to decide.

  An image of the Swift capsizing in a thundering breaker in the entrance to Lituya Bay flashed through my brain, and I felt my chest tighten. Then I imagined the anxiety the Tlingit must have felt when the St. Paul appeared on the horizon; what the strange white-winged apparition must have meant to their universe; how they must have wondered, with their hearts in their throats, what changes were coming as they watched the phantasm divest itself of canoes unlike any they had ever seen, manned by creatures who sat facing aft, pulling oars, instead of facing forward and paddling; then the horror of seeing the alien craft swept into the current and upended to the sound of screams in an unknown language.

  I thought of the courage it would have taken for the villagers to recover the bodies; of what trembling, willful hearts it would have required to handle the remains of such oddly dressed, lavishly bearded strangers in order to prevent their souls from becoming kushtaka; and of the terror of those who may have already been convinced the men were creatures from another world. And I wondered at the fortitude of the warriors who paddled out to the specter of Chirikov’s ship as it coasted back and forth on the horizon belching thunder.

  Taking a deep breath, I tried to relax my shoulders. The sea was pale gre
en and the mountains a breathless white. I rolled my neck and considered the early explorers: Vitus Bering never made it home to Russia. The leader of the Great Nordic Expedition died of exhaustion, huddled in the remains of the shipwrecked St. Peter on a small island off the coast of Siberia. He was sixty-two years old when he died. Chirikov was forty-four when he succumbed to consumption in Saint Petersburg. Captain Cook was murdered by the natives of Hawaii at fifty-one.

  I would turn fifty-three in a month.

  A feeling of doubt rose within me, and for a moment it was easy to imagine myself in Chirikov’s boots, with the question of what I was doing so far from home washing over me, rising and falling to the rhythm of the waves. My internal bearings grew as hazy and uncertain as the Russian commander’s navigation; how, I wondered, had the early explorers traveled into the unknown for years on end without yielding to the gnawing hunger of homesickness? When Napoléon retreated from Moscow, half his army died trying to claw its way out of the bitter Russian winter, and many of the deaths were attributed to nostalgia, or “home-ache.” The exhausted, disheartened soldiers simply gave up and lay down by the road to die.

  I watched the waves roll toward me and considered turning back again. Running southeast toward Cape Spencer with the seas behind me would eliminate the incessant pounding, and home was calling. I thought a bit longer, then put my hand on the throttle and eased it forward; I could still reach Lituya Bay by slack tide.

  Chapter 6

  Two Hundred and twenty years before I waited, pitching and rolling in the chop off the mouth of Lituya Bay, for the tide to turn, a group of young Tlingit hunters on the shore near the mouth spotted something unusual far out to sea. Inside the bay nearly three hundred people were picking berries, catching halibut, and hunting seals, working to put away enough food for the coming winter. Unlike on the day I arrived, the sea the young hunters walked beside was smooth and glassy. A gentle breeze blew in from the west. But the people occupying the temporary summer camp inside the bay were already on edge. Only a few days earlier a group of four canoes arriving from Kaax’noowu, a village one hundred miles away on Icy Strait, had been caught in the tidal maelstrom at the entrance and had overturned. Several people had drowned, including a prominent chief. And not long before that disaster a flotilla of seven trading canoes paddling south from the land of the Aglegmute and Chugatsch Eskimos, west of Yakutat, had been swamped, again with a terrible loss of life. With so many recently severed souls to mourn and the increased threat of kushtaka lurking in the area, it did not take long for alarm to spread when the young men ran toward their uncle’s hut shouting, “Come quick! There is something on the horizon we have never seen before!”

  The uncle, Yeahlth-kan, was a wise man, one of the camp’s leaders, and he rose from where he was sitting in front of his family’s simple shelter and followed his nephews to the water’s edge. What he saw there disturbed him: An enormous black being with broad white wings was moving slowly along the horizon, traveling first in one direction, then in another with a flap of its great wings. In a flash he decided it must be Yéil—Yéil, the Creator, who in the form of a raven had brought light to the world and created all living things. After creating the world, Yéil had flown away, but only after promising to return someday from the direction of the setting sun. And now here he was, flying southeast on wings that flapped and rose with every puff of the western breeze.

  Panic broke out among the people. Men with guilty consciences drove copper blades through the skin of their breasts and stood rigid, awaiting Yéil’s judgment. Others with less to fear ran to clean their houses and paint their faces to be ready to receive him. Fires were built and covered with sweet grasses in order that the children might be passed through the smoke and purified. It was well known that looking directly upon Yéil’s radiance could turn a person to stone, so the uncle instructed everyone to cut skunk cabbage leaves, roll them into tubes, and use these to view Yéil safely.

  The alarm and confusion that raced through the Tlingit camp are understandable, but in truth they had little to fear; it wasn’t a vengeful Maker of the Universe coming over the horizon but a short, rather pudgy Frenchman bearing the melodious though somewhat cumbersome title of Jean-François de Galoup, Comte de La Pérouse, a rear admiral of the royal French navy. The two ships under his command were the entirety of an expedition billed by its patron, Louis XVI, as “the Greatest of All Voyages.” It was July 3, 1786, and La Pérouse’s ship, the Boussole, and its consort, the Astrolabe, captained by La Pérouse’s good friend Fleuriot de Langle, had departed Brest eleven months earlier on a mission to discover new lands and economic opportunities for France. The king was a fan of the Romantic notion, often attributed to the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that held that primitive peoples, uncorrupted by the pressures of modern society, existed in a state of natural grace, and among his more than two hundred pages of excruciatingly detailed instructions to La Pérouse was a mandate that the commander and his crew were to pursue a policy of pacifique, or “peaceful,” relations with whatever natives they encountered.* All contact was to remain as friendly as possible and be of benefit to the indigènes. In a further doff of his crown to the growing humanitarianism of the Age of Reason, the king also insisted that there be no deaths from either violence or disease among the Boussole’s and Astrolabe’s crews, which was a remarkable policy given that for the past two centuries the English, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and Russian expeditions spanning out to claim the globe had often suffered casualty rates as high as 75 percent.

  So far the king’s enlightened policies had paid off; in the ten months since the Boussole and the Astrolabe had left France, the expedition had not lost a single man, and La Pérouse had won the undying affection of his men for his concern for their welfare.

  In short, he wasn’t the sort of person to turn anyone into stone. When a lookout saw the columns of smoke from the purifying fires onshore, he ordered the ships to tack and head in. As they drew nearer, the outline of Lituya Bay became clear, and at two o’clock in the afternoon the entrance was spotted between a cluster of rocks awash in rolling surf on one side and a low, boulder-covered spit on the other. Behind the spit, La Pérouse noted in his journal, lay a “very fine bay,” so large that “nature seemed to have constructed in the remotest part of America a harbour resembling that of Toulon, but on a gigantic scale, adapted to her ampler powers.”

  This was exactly what he had been hoping for ever since they had popped out of the fog and spotted the hulking white tower of Mount Saint Elias north of Yakutat on June 23, ten days earlier. Turning southeast to parallel the coast, they had tried twice to send boats ashore for wood and fresh water—once, it is now presumed, near the southern entrance to Yakutat Bay and again at the mouth of a large, shallow body of water filled with breakers that La Pérouse dubbed the “Behring River,” which was almost certainly the mouth of the Alsek River, at Dry Bay. Both efforts had been foiled by fog and dangerous surf. Now the calm water he could see behind the low spit appeared to offer an opportunity to refill the water casks and gather firewood in safety.

  What the Tlingit saw was Yéil turning slowly toward them as if drawn by the smoke of their fires. The ships tacked, their sails flapping like great wings, and Yéil crept closer. To the watching Natives, the seamen climbing through the rigging in response to the whistled signals of the bosun’s pipe looked and sounded like capering crows. Most of the Tlingit fled into the forest; only a few stayed behind to snatch awestruck glances through their viewing tubes.

  It must have been torturous for Tlingit and Frenchmen alike to have the Boussole and the Astrolabe creep to the entrance in the light winds, only to see the tide change and the current that suddenly began flowing from Lituya Bay thrust the ships back out to sea again. Alarmed by the speed with which the current had arisen, La Pérouse began to worry that if his ships did get into the bay, they might have difficulty getting out. The harbor could be a trap, requiring an unlikely combination of wind and
tide to escape. The cataract pouring from the entrance, he admitted, “abated my eagerness to put into the harbor,” and he ordered the ships to stand out to sea again.

  Throughout the night the Boussole and the Astrolabe stayed side by side as La Pérouse and de Langle conferred back and forth on a course of action. By morning de Langle and La Pérouse’s other officers had convinced him that this was a chance for French glory; the bay was on none of the maps drawn by Captain Cook, and it would be the expedition’s own discovery. An exultant La Pérouse promptly named it Port des Français.

  At six in the morning both ships stood in toward shore, timing their arrival at the entrance to coincide with high tide. Boats were put over the side with orders to take up stations on each side of the channel. The wind was steady from the west and southwest, perfect for a broad reach into the north-and-south-running entrance. The inrush of the flood was easing just as the Astrolabe pushed into the opening.

  Then the wind suddenly veered ninety degrees, chopping around to the northwest, and, in La Pérouse’s words, “it became necessary to throw the ship up in the wind and lay all aback,” meaning that the only way to avoid being driven onto the rocks by the sudden shift in the wind was to turn upwind and allow the sails to blow back against the rigging in a desperate attempt to turn the ships around within the narrow confines of the channel. But with the sails pinned against the shrouds, both ships lost all steerageway. Caught in the current, the Boussole and the Astrolabe spun out of control.