From my position outside Lituya Bay I could see the point at which La Pérouse’s ships had faltered and begun to stagger toward disaster. On the eastern side of the entrance a dozen tawny sea lions sprawled atop Cormorant Rock, lorded over by a bull the size of a small forklift. By my calculations high tide was due, but I could still see swirls of current in the channel.
The Fathometer said there was twelve fathoms of water under me, but as I idled the Swift ahead, it jumped suddenly to eight, then five; the tide was still flooding in from the west, pushing me into the bay at a right angle to the entrance. Fishermen familiar with the bay and its entrance had warned me that a variety of influences could alter the calculated time of slack water by as much as an hour, and this seemed to be happening now.
I spun the helm and came about to move offshore again, growing impatient; I was tired of the pounding seas, and my hands were starting to cramp from gripping the wheel, but it was easy to imagine the panic on board the Boussole and the Astrolabe as the ships stalled and began to slide toward the foaming rocks. I decided to wait another half an hour, then try again.
Then out of nowhere came a sea that slammed into the Swift at an angle slightly different from the rest, a slab of water that seemed to pick the boat up and drop it like a football player performing a dropkick. The boat corkscrewed under me, slid sideways, and banged into the trough. Water gushed through the scuppers, and I cursed as I grabbed for a handhold to avoid being thrown to the deck. Behind me, the calm water inside the bay beckoned.
A minute later I was jockeying into position to make a run for the entrance. Lining up on a navigation aid installed by the Coast Guard after a series of accidents had left the broken remnants of several fishing vessels scattered along the spit near the mouth, I threw a last glance at the chart, where the blue delineating shallow water on each side of the channel was peppered with shoals marked “foul.” Then I eased the throttle forward and started in. The motion of the waves eased as the boat gained speed, running on the same “broad reach,” or right angle to the wind, that La Pérouse had enjoyed as he had approached the entrance.
The seabed climbed quickly, the Fathometer’s flashing orange light indicating that I had crossed the ten-fathom line, then rising to seven fathoms, six, five . . . if I strayed into less than three fathoms of water, I would be in trouble. I could see water foaming and swirling over submerged rocks on both sides.
Once the Swift was into the entrance, the chop settled into a smooth laminar flow with the appearance of calm water, but I could still feel the current wrestling for control of the helm. I had to adjust the steering constantly, first to port, then to starboard, then back to port again, to counter sucking, whirlpool hydraulics that had overwhelmed far larger and stronger vessels in the past and destroyed them. (It isn’t for nothing that Alaska’s fishermen call the entrance to Lituya Bay the Chopper; the body count in the twentieth century was in the dozens.) Even with enough power and speed to stem the current, I could feel the Swift’s hull squirming from side to side as if it were in the grip of a living thing.
La Pérouse had gotten lucky at the last minute. With the drifting Boussole only “half a pistol shot,” or twenty-five yards, from the rocks on the eastern point, an unexpected surge of countercurrent caroming off the right-hand shore had miraculously pushed both ships back into the channel and through the entrance. “During the thirty years that I have followed the sea,” he later wrote, “I never saw two vessels so near being lost; and to have experienced such an event at the verge of the world would have enhanced our misfortune.”
Just as I thought that I, too, had pushed safely through the entrance, there was a jolting impact that bounced me in my seat, and my heart leaped into my throat. For a moment I was certain I had struck a rock. Craning my head to look back at the boat’s wake, I saw that I had instead encountered a phenomenon I had been warned about by a fisherman. Lituya Bay is a bit less than nine miles long and two miles across at its widest point, with a surface area of approximately eighteen square miles. This means that during a fourteen-foot tide more than seven billion cubic feet of water must force its way through the channel in six hours.* During the peak of the tide the current runs at close to thirty million cubic feet per minute, and even during the last hour of the flood, as the tide slows in preparation for the brief period of calm before it reverses and starts out again, the flow averages ten million cubic feet per minute, or the equivalent of 1.25 million gallons every second.* With so much water trying to force its way over the shallows at the entrance, there are periods when the water level outside the harbor is appreciably—and abruptly—higher than that within the bay. The jolt I had felt was the Swift hurtling off this “step.” Looking back, I had the dizzying experience of looking up at sea level outside the bay.
Drifting aboard the heavily loaded Boussole, La Pérouse might not have noticed the phenomenon—he makes no mention of it in his writing—but with the Swift’s engine at three-quarters speed I was traveling at several knots, and just as suddenly as the leap off the lip of the tide had startled me, I was out of the current; within a few dozen yards I was in calm water, inside the bay.†
The contrast between the roiling, open sea and the sheltered water inside the bay was breathtaking. Ahead of me lay a sheet of silver mercury so perfectly polished that it reflected the inverted image of the mountains ringing the head of the bay with a precision that might have induced vertigo were it not for the ripples of my own wake, which curved past me and shattered the mirrored surface into sparkling shards as I throttled down. La Pérouse was so exultant at his expedition’s survival and the scene before him that he called what I was looking at “perhaps the most extraordinary place in the world.”
“To form an idea of it,” he wrote that evening, “it is necessary to conceive a basin of water, of unfathomable depth in the middle, bordered by peaked mountains of great height, covered with snow, and without one blade of grass to decorate this vast heap of rocks, condemned by nature to eternal sterility.”
There was not a breath of wind to ruffle the surface, he wrote, and “nothing disturbs it but the fall of enormous masses of ice, which frequently separate from five different glaciers, while the sound is re-echoed by the distant mountains. The air is so calm, and the silence so profound, that the single voice of a man may be heard half a league [away], as may the cries of a few sea-fowl, which deposit their eggs in the hollows of the rocks.”
Two centuries later the “eternal sterility” that so moved the French explorer has been covered by an unruly green forest, but the eternal silence remains; when I stopped the boat and switched off the engine to go on deck and take in the scene, the air was so still I could hear the keening calls of a black-legged kittiwake colony on the side of Cenotaph Island, two miles away.
I took a deep breath, then another, and felt the strain of the passage across the gulf start to drain away. After the chaos of the open ocean the bay seemed a cozy sanctuary, even though the snow-covered flanks of the mountains embracing it were veined and smeared with the muddy tracks of avalanches and rock slides. Under the moderating influence of the sea, spring was more advanced here than it had been back in Juneau, and I caught a whiff of something new and green curling out from the band of alders and willows crowded between the forest and the water’s edge onshore. Behind me the boom of the surf was a muffled susurration.
I don’t know how long I drifted, just breathing and listening and letting the peace of the place ease into me. I spent a few minutes willing the knotted muscles of my shoulders to relax and the tension of the run from Cape Spencer to melt away, but for most of that time I was empty, my mind stalled, with no thought of what should come next. It wasn’t until hunger poked a bony finger at my stomach that I thought to get moving. I had not eaten since the small hours of the morning—ten hours, fifty miles, several thousand waves, and a gale warning earlier.
There was a piece of fresh king salmon in the ice chest and a sack of rice in a galley locker, so I sta
rted the engine, took a last look at the entrance, and headed deeper into the bay to find an anchorage.
Chapter 7
The Anchor Rattled over the bow, and I measured out 150 feet of chain and line before reversing the engine to drag the flukes into the muddy bottom. A lone sea lion rolled to the surface fifty yards from the boat, huffed at the commotion, and went down again. When he did not resurface, I tugged on the anchor line to make sure it was set before stepping into the cabin to shut off the engine and power down the radar, leaving the Fathometer running. Its readout said I was in six fathoms of water, fifty yards off the eastern shore of Cenotaph Island, in almost the exact spot where La Pérouse, after a brief stop near the entrance, had decided to shelter his ships for the duration of his stay. If the strong winds predicted to hit the coast that night arrived, the Swift and I would be protected. According to one Tlingit account of La Pérouse’s arrival in the bay, after Yéil came to a stop and folded his wings, the sound of the Astrolabe’s and the Boussole’s heavy anchor chains going over the side created a noise so harsh and grating that it “drove terror into the hearts of the wicked, but the good felt greater joy.”
Amid the fear and excitement of Yéil’s arrival, Yeahlth-kan, the wise uncle, decided that preparations must be made to go out and greet him.* Calling the people in from their hiding places, he sent the women to one clan house and gathered the men in another. Then he dismissed any of the men who had lain with a woman within the last four days. This left only a handful of young men, and he selected four of the bravest to accompany him. Together they purified a canoe, put on coats of heavy leather with wooden collars, donned fighting headdresses, and armed themselves with spears and copper knives. But no sooner had the delegation shoved off from the beach than a cloud of smoke arose from Yéil’s great body, followed by a thunderous boom. The smoke and noise of the signal cannon La Pérouse fired to salute the young warriors terrified them so much that their canoe overturned.
As told by Kaawa.ee, a Tlingit chief from the Juneau area who later heard the story from the immediate descendants of the clans who were there, after the canoe overturned, “one nearly blind old warrior [Yeahlth-kan] gathered the people together, and said that his life was far behind him and for the common good he would [go alone] to see if Yéil would turn his children to stone. So he told his slaves to prepare his canoe, and putting on a robe of sea otter fur, he embarked and paddled out.”
To the Tlingit onshore, it appeared as if the old man was magically taken up into the air when the crewmen on board the Boussole lowered ropes and hoisted him and his canoe onto the ship’s deck.
Once he was on board, the old man and the French sailors began sizing each other up. The old man was puzzled that Yéil could have a white face and go about in bare feet, or have eyes that were gray or blue, until someone wearing finer clothes and carrying himself with the bearing of a chief came on deck. Thinking that this might be Yéil, the old man stretched out his arms and asked that mercy be accorded to his family and friends onshore.
The officer responded by speaking in a strange language to a sailor standing nearby, who hurried off and came back a minute later with a plate of ship’s biscuit, or pilot bread—a type of large, dry cracker that could be stored for months and remain edible. The old man, thinking the pilot bread looked like something made from human skulls, refused to take it. Again the sailor was sent to the galley, and he came back with a bowl of rice. This the old man also refused, thinking it was a bowl of maggots. A tumbler of wine he rejected as blood.
Finally a man dressed all in white appeared, carrying a brass bell, which he rang a time or two before presenting it to the old man. Then the man in white crossed his hands twice in the air, making the universally recognized sign for trade, and all of the old man’s trepidation disappeared; gods, after all, seldom indulge in simple business transactions. These beings, though strangely colored and oddly dressed, were only people like himself.
In short order, the old man had traded his sea otter cap for the bell and his robe for a metal plate and a strap of iron, which could be forged into a knife superior to the one he carried, made of soft copper. Stark naked, he went over the side in his canoe and paddled ashore, carrying his prizes and a bucket of rice the men had insisted he take to share with his people. None of his family or friends would eat the rice either.*
My own rice was fine. It came off the stove just as the king salmon was ready in the oven. I heaped food on a plate and went on deck to enjoy it, grabbing a beer from the cooler as I went. The salmon fell into buttery flakes at the touch of a fork, and the beer was the perfect temperature. I ate slowly, leaning against the rail and losing myself in the immense solitude of the scene, savoring the flavor of the lightly herbed and buttered salmon. As soon as Yeahlth-kan had returned to shore, after all of his people had touched him to be sure he had not been turned to stone and had inspected his invaluable piece of iron, a tremendous trading frenzy had broken out between the Tlingit and La Pérouse’s expedition. At first salmon was a major commodity. The fish was a godsend to the Frenchmen, who had been without fresh provisions (or as La Pérouse put it, “salubrious and agreeable items”) since the last of their pigs had died three weeks after they’d left Hawaii.
From where the Swift lay at anchor, I could see the mouth of a small creek that would be plugged with salmon by July. This would draw bears, eagles, seals, and sea lions to feed on the spawning fish, but in early May little was stirring within the bay with the exception of an abundance of seabirds. Harlequin ducks and kittiwakes dove and fluttered around the boat nonstop. It was almost nine o’clock at night, but I was at latitude fifty-eight degrees north, eight degrees short of the Arctic Circle, and twilight would not set in until after ten.
The air was preternaturally still, and it was easy to imagine La Pérouse’s ships, appearing puny against the backdrop of towering mountains, with a stream of canoes hurrying back and forth in pursuit of trade. “We were,” wrote La Pérouse, “constantly surrounded by the canoes of the savages, who in exchange for our iron, offered us fish, otter skins, and various small articles of their apparel.” Unaware that the Tlingit were accustomed to trading—and raiding—as far south as what is now the coast of Washington, Oregon, and perhaps even California, and in the interior of Canada, he added that “to our great astonishment, they appeared perfectly accustomed to traffic, and made their bargains with as much address as the most able dealers of Europe.”*
He was amazed that the Tlingit had no interest in the glass beads, tin pots, and other knickknacks that explorers had long been used to pawning off on various bands of Natives; iron was paramount, “gold itself [being] not more eagerly desired among Europeans than iron in this part of America.” For their own part, after a few meals of fresh salmon and halibut, the Frenchmen cared for nothing but sea otter skins, which they planned to exchange for a fortune in China. Only a year earlier a sixty-ton brig under the command of an Englishman named James Hanna had sailed from Nootka Sound, on the rugged outer coast of Vancouver Island, to Macao with a cargo of five hundred sea otter hides that had earned him the enormous sum of twenty thousand dollars.
In the 1700s the Pacific Coast of North America teemed with sea otters. From California to the distant reaches of the Aleutian Islands and the coast of Siberia, hundreds of thousands of this largest member of the weasel tribe fed and swam. The tremendous commercial potential of the animals’ thick, gleaming fur was not truly realized until Captain Cook’s third and last voyage, in 1780, when members of his crew traded with the natives of British Columbia for a few skins that they subsequently peddled for a handsome sum when they made port in Canton, China. After word of Hanna’s enormously profitable voyage spread, the market exploded so rapidly and voraciously that by the time La Pérouse reached the Pacific, the Spanish were already pushing north from California toward British Columbia, plundering as they went, and the Russian fur traders, or promyshlenniki, were swarming into Alaska from the west, murdering and enslaving the local
tribes as they encountered them.*
La Pérouse’s “Port des Français” lay squarely in the middle of the only unexploited region left. In his report to Louis XVI the explorer stated that he “would not be surprised if a factory, extending its commerce only about forty or fifty leagues along the coast, should collect annually 10,000 skins of that animal.”
Within days the trading reached a fever pitch as word of the French ships and their barrels of nails, iron, and metal fittings spread along the coast. La Pérouse estimated the number of Tlingit residing along the bay on his arrival at three hundred, but concluded that during the expedition’s stay the Boussole and the Astrolabe were visited by at least five hundred more. The weather was so settled, he noted, that canoes were constantly coming and going through the entrance with every tide.
“Every day we observe a fresh succession of canoes entering the bay,” he wrote in his journal, “and ever day we beheld [sic] entire villages remove, and yield their place to others. The Indians apparently dread the channel, and never trusted themselves but at slack water; and we could distinctly perceive with our glasses, that when they arrived between the two points, their Chief, or at least the most considerable personage among them, rose up and stretched his arms toward the sun, as if addressing a prayer to him, while the rest paddled with all their strength.”
In ten days the expedition managed to acquire 3,231 hides, pieces of skin, tails, and garments made of sea otter fur—a silken haul that La Pérouse estimated would bring the crew 41,063 Spanish piastres in China.*
In the end, however, the “savages” proved to be the sharper traders; the Astrolabe and the Boussole were lighter by several hundred pounds from the loss of iron when they departed, but when the Frenchmen sold their furs in China, the majority of the skins turned out to be inferior. The entire trove brought only ten thousand dollars. A few of the best were sent from Macao to France, where they were presented as a gift to Marie Antoinette.
Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart Page 6
