Passage to Juneau Read online

  When Captain Cook put into Nootka Sound, on the west side of Vancouver Island, the Indians offered him sea-otter pelts in exchange for iron tools. In his journal he remarked:

  Sea-otters, which live mostly in the water, are found here. The fur of these animals … is certainly softer and finer than that of any others we know of, and therefore the discovery of this part of the continent of North America, where so valuable an article of commerce may be met with, cannot be a matter of indifference.

  Cook’s ship, Resolution, had barely left Nootka for the north when the fur traders arrived. Like the fishermen prowling Seattle’s docks in recent decades, these freelance captains were out to make a killing. Buying sea-otter skins to sell on the Chinese market, they plagued the coast until the Indians had hunted the animal to extinction. The captains themselves survived, on the charts, as Meares Passage, the Kendrick Islands, Dixon Entrance, Barkley Sound, Grays Harbor. Their books were harder to locate than the long reaches of otterless water on which they’d left their names: I was still on the lookout for a copy of John Meares’s Voyages in the Years 1788–1789, from China to the Northwest Coast of America (London, 1790), and George Dixon’s A Voyage Round the World (London, 1789).

  Then came the first, lonely, white settlers. Often living many miles from their nearest English-speaking neighbors, they were dependent on the Indians for company and conversation; and keeping a journal, or writing a book, was a means of keeping at bay the psychological perils of the night. I particularly liked James Gilchrist Swan, who, in 1849, left his wife and children in Boston to join the California Gold Rush, then slipped north by ship from San Francisco to make a new life for himself on the Washington coast. Traveling with the Indians in their canoes, he learned their language and picked up much of their maritime lore. Though overfond of giving his native companions jocose titles such as “The Duke of York,” Swan on the whole was a modest, tenderhearted man; a good listener, a bit of a fusspot, a keen amateur ethnologist. He loved to be out on the water. He made sails for the Indians’ canoes and decorated them with designs admired up and down the Strait of Juan de Fuca. He was also a walking drugstore, and dosed the Indians with pills and patent medicines.

  He was 42 when he published The Northwest Coast: Or, Three Years’ Residence in Washington Territory in 1857. Eleven years later, the Smithsonian Institution brought out The Indians of Cape Flattery. Both books were full of the small voyages he’d made with the Indians, and conveyed—as no anthropologist has done since—the zigzag, stop-go pace of these journeys, the methods of aboriginal seamanship and navigation, the delicate skill of managing a dugout canoe in fast tides and heavy weather.

  Combing through Swan’s private diaries in the University of Washington library, in search of more canoe trips, I found myself becoming too intimate a witness to his miserable decline. In Port Townsend, at the top of Puget Sound, Swan became a justice of the peace, a correspondent for the eastern papers, and a morose whiskey-drunk. By the 1870s, his handwriting would go to pieces on him in the evenings, a jagged line of sepia ink betraying where his hand had skidded out of control on the page. Two shaky words—“Fat Billy,” every letter laboriously constructed, each looking like the outline of a collapsing shed—would pass for a day’s entry, and some pages were still crinkled with 120-year-old spills of booze.

  Yet the Indians with whom he had lived still visited, and took him on excursions in their canoes. Then he’d perk up, and his handwriting recover. Sitting in the stern sheets, or, camped out on Padilla Bay, wolfing down crabs and flounder caught by “Patrick Henry” and “The Duke of York,” Judge Swan would almost succeed in persuading himself that he was back in happier days. Returned—too soon—to his Port Townsend house, he would sit in his usual pew at Sunday church, where mothers of teenage daughters saw him as a dangerous old goat.

  Missionaries arrived with the settlers—men like the Dickensianly named Myron Eells, a Congregational minister whose physical deficiencies show up startlingly in his photograph. His eyes are magnified by a pair of thick-lensed, too-small, wire-framed glasses; his lips are thin and bloodless-looking; his beard, straining for luxuriance, achieves at best a tangled fluffiness. Eells’s parishioners were the Skokomish Indians on the southern crook of the Hood Canal, a side channel to Puget Sound. His task was to save them from their savage superstitions, and to police their consumption of alcohol. If his own account is to be believed, he once joined them (reluctantly, for Myron was no sailor) on a long canoe ride to a potlatch at Dungeness, on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, because they’d begged him to rescue them from the temptations of the bottle. Yet even as he set about on a root-and-branch destruction of the foundations of Indian culture, he meticulously documented what remained of the Skokomish customs when he arrived on the reservation in 1874. He collected and labeled a vast collection of artifacts, and wrote a thorough, if colorless, monograph entitled The Indians of Puget Sound.

  By contrast with James Swan, I found Myron Eells tough-going as a traveling companion. A strain of self-preening piety in his writing put my back up, and there was something too obviously anal about his collecting habit. But his book was useful, chiefly for that uncomfortable canoe voyage—on which the Indians drew his ire for getting down in the bottom of the boat, muttering un-Christian incantations, whenever they neared a tide race.

  En route through British Columbia, I hoped to supplement Eells by finding a copy of Thomas Crosby’s much jollier-sounding Up and Down the Northwest Coast by Canoe and Mission Ship. The missionaries, bent on stamping out one set of beliefs in order to impose another, must’ve tangled directly with stubborn fears and ideas of the water; and no one, Indian or white, is more prone to superstition than when at sea. I was also tracking two Catholic missionaries, Father Brabant and Father Blanchet.

  It was bad luck for the anthropologists, and their comparatively recent discipline, that the missionaries got to the Inside Passage first. By the time Boas and his colleagues reached the coast, there was no way of telling whether an Indian story about a great flood and the tribe’s rescue from it was generations old or just a garbled version of Genesis 8, or perhaps a bit of both. Had the Indians always believed in a creator—a sky god, the Great Spirit, the Transformer—or was this a recent idea, picked up at Shaker Sunday school, and merged with older native beliefs and stories? Did the totem pole, the most arresting symbol of Northwest Indian culture, date from time immemorial, or was it a product of fur-trade wealth and fur-trade leisure? In an unchronicled society, without writing, things that happened yesterday bleed into ancient history; and after a hundred years of rubbing up against explorers, traders, missionaries, and colonial administrators, the tribe members had ceased to be reliable authorities on their own traditions.

  Of all the tribal groups in North America, the Indians of the Inside Passage had left the richest body of ceremonial and domestic art, and the most voluminous oral literature. Their culture was the most nearly intact because it had been invaded late in the era of New World discovery. Yet even when, say, Franz Boas arrived on the coast, the day-to-day reality of aboriginal life had faded into blurred snapshots and conjecture. Much later, Claude Lévi-Strauss would write of the Inside Passage that it was a “stage … along whose entire stretch the actors of a play for which we do not have a script have left their footprints.”

  The recency of that loss, and the vast quantity of those footprints (visible on almost every mile of shoreline), made the Northwest coast a magnet for theorists, speculators, freelance intellectuals. On the boat I had the stimulating and disputatious company of Boas, Lévi-Strauss, Edward Sapir, Edmund Leach; also Wayne Suttles, a social anthropologist local to the area, a skeptical empiricist whose essays applied small, bright pins to the gas-filled balloons of received ideas about the Indians and their cosmology.

  The anthropologists, too, lived in the saloon. The aft cabin, a useful wedge of space behind the cockpit and the engine, and usually my daughter’s playroom, had been conver
ted for this trip into the Travel section. I’d kept Julia’s Dr. Seuss books, The Enormous Crocodile, Clifford the big red dog, Sleepy Bear, along with the Crayolas and Play-doh, because I couldn’t stand to send them into even temporary exile. (Besides, her animal stories chimed interestingly with Sapir’s in his Nootka Texts). But the cabin was largely taken over now with a black-vinyl artist’s portfolio of charts; with tide tables, pilot books, and tourist guides with titles like Gunkholing in the Gulf Islands and Live the Magic of the North Mile by Mile.

  After the Indians, the explorers, the fur traders, the settlers, the missionaries, and the anthropologists, tourists came to the Inside Passage, and witnessed the sea in their own terms. In 1879, John Muir, the Scottish-born naturalist, explored the northern reaches and, in his own brand of lyrical, solemn, ringing prose, conquered them for the high-Romantic Sublime. The modern tourist brochure, with its majestic peaks and pristine fjords, harks straight back to Muir:

  Sunshine streamed through the luminous fringes of the clouds and fell on the green waters of the fjord, the glittering bergs, the crystal bluffs of the vast glacier, the intensely white, far-spreading fields of ice, and the ineffably chaste and spiritual heights of the Fairweather Range, which were now hidden, now partly revealed, the whole making a picture of icy wildness unspeakably pure and sublime.

  This rendering of the land and sea as a transfiguring religious experience did for southeast Alaska what Wordsworth’s poems had done for the English Lakes: it called forth, from the Lower 48 and beyond, boatloads of would-be worshipers armed with cameras and sketchbooks, eager to take home some epiphanic fragment of the wilderness.

  As Wordsworth’s Lake District was populated with figures of antique rustic wisdom—toothless shepherds, leech-gatherers, idiot boys—Muir’s Inside Passage was full of noble red men in canoes, invariably described as “venerable,” “serene,” or possessed of “grave dignity.” When these Indians talked, via interpreters, they speechified, in ornate Victorian English, with sonorous periods and overextended similes drawn from the natural world. The John Muir Indian was a lineal descendant of the Fenimore Cooper Indian.

  I am an old man, but I am glad to listen to those strange things you tell, and they may well be true, for what is more wonderful than the flight of birds in the air? I remember the first white man I ever saw. Since that long ago time I have seen many, but never until now have I ever truly known and felt a white man’s heart.… It has always seemed to me while trying to speak to traders and those seeking gold-mines that it was like speaking to a person across a broad stream that was running fast over stones and making so loud a noise that scarce a single word could be heard. But now, for the first time, the Indian and the white man are on the same side of the river, eye to eye, heart to heart.…

  It was John Muir Indians whom Edward S. Curtis, the Seattle-based photographer, pictured in the five volumes he devoted to the Inside Passage in his epic series, The North American Indian. His posed sepia studies, with every trace of the modern artfully banished from the frame, exult in the romance of the primitive. Most of Curtis’s photos were taken between 1900 and 1916; he traveled, by railroad and steamship, through a world dominated by the mission school, the cannery, the timber mill, the Model-T, the phonograph; though you’d never guess that from his pictures, which show the Indians living in a state of primeval dignity and simplicity, their misty landscapes miraculously untouched by the logging crew and their traction engines.

  Muir and Curtis between them manufactured the essential images needed by the twentieth-century tourist industry. By the time I arrived in the Northwest, fleets of white cruise ships were on regular patrol up and down the Inside Passage, and the sea had become a medium through which passengers could scan what Muir called “the glorious pages of Nature’s Bible.” As a copywriter for a cruise line put it:

  You cruise this enchanted waterway, and each vista surpasses the one before. Your ship threads her sure course past forests, islands and inlets, surrounded by silence. You glimpse a deep fjord penetrating the wilderness. To the east the sun glints on snowcapped peaks. An incredible voyage.

  Watch, awestruck, as a pinnacle of ice cracks off the glacial cliff and crashes into the sea.… Harbor seals sun on an iceberg. Mountain goats are spied, high on the cliffs. You might see a humpback whale breaching, a school of leaping orcas. Maybe a black bear scavenging along the shore.…

  To the irritation of all the tugboat captains, gill-netters, and trollers who worked these constricted channels, the nature-loving cruise ships were joined by nature-loving kayaks, motor cruisers, and sailboats like mine—“yachts and crap,” in the gloomily derisive phrase of the captain of a log-tow on which I once spent a slow-moving week.

  We all carried Muir, of course, along with a rack of yachtsman’s guides—books with a distinctive late-Romantic rhetoric of their own. The guides competed with one another to describe anchorages so remote, so eccentric, their entrances so tide-encumbered and rock-strewn, that anyone brave enough to reach them was guaranteed absolute solitude. They harped, in beguiling technical detail, on close encounters with tide races and whirlpools. They made much of the few stretches of open ocean, their thirty-foot swells, sudden gales, treacherous tidal sets, and proven shipwrecking abilities. Dangers and difficulties were talked up as part of the voyage’s allure. The writers referred to their reader as “the mariner,” as in “The mariner will be well-advised to consult Egg Island lighthouse station on VHF Ch. 9 …” Their Inside Passage, especially in its outer reaches, was a solitary, self-reliant adventure in a watery wilderness untouched by spoiling human hands.

  When the boat was under way, my still very incomplete library took on a shuffling, drunken life of its own. The books slammed and swayed on the shelves, bulged against the restraining belts of shock-cord, and sometimes liberated themselves and took flight through the boat like so many heavyweight pigeons. After a rough passage, I’d find Edmund Leach, Evelyn Waugh, George Vancouver, Kwakiutl Art, Anthony Trollope, The 12-Volt Bible, Homer, and Oceanography and Seamanship in an unlikely tangle on the saloon floor, their pages gaping, their jackets half-off; Hannah Arendt in the sink with Myron Eells. I liked these chance couplings and collisions, and hoped that on the long trip north the entire library would be shaken, pitched, and rolled into a happy, interdisciplinary ragout.

  Narcissus stares into the pool, and there discovers a face whose expression of wonder and yearning is a miraculously perfect match to his own; a smart move by Nemesis, to send Narcissus to the fountain. The refractive property of water ensures that when we look in deep, we see shallow. When we gaze down, searching for some shadowy profundity below the surface, what usually comes back to us is merely us.

  Once, people looked at the sea with a religious abhorrence. It was chaos, the flux, the vast desert of waters; the inchoate abyss from which God had raised man and his fragile, precious civilization. As the creation story begins:

  The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters …

  W. H. Auden wrote that in the Bible the sea “is so little of a friendly symbol that the first thing which the author of the Book of Revelation notices in his vision of the new heaven and earth at the end of time is that ‘there was no more sea.’ ”

  Later, in the Renaissance, the sea was seen as pure inviting space, a tabula rasa on which to inscribe new routes of trade, exploration, and imperial conquest. Cartographers decorated it with spouting whales, ruled compass-courses, ships bustling importantly under sail, navigational instruments—quadrants, dividers, hourglasses. Like a full-dress portrait by Titian or Veronese, the mapmakers’ sea reflected back the glory of the merchant prince, his fleet of ships and hired adventurers. On this sea made for exploitation, set an argosy afloat and it would return, low in the water, with a cargo of gold.

  Later still, under the influence of German Romantic philosophy and En
glish Romantic poetry, the sea came to be regarded as the quintessence of the Sublime in nature: violent, beautiful, coldly indifferent to mankind. “The eternal sea,” or “the immortal sea,” apostrophized by Byron—“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!”—and by Tennyson—“Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O Sea!”—was a morbid deity. In Melville’s Moby-Dick, when the water at last closes over the smashed remains of Pequod, “the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” In a secular, industrial age, we found in the sea a symbol of our own need for something that would mightily transcend us.

  That mirror image had its day, and still survives, though it is being displaced by a counterreflection. By the 1960s, people were looking at the sea in a mood of chastened self-recrimination, seeing in it their own greed, improvidence, and wastefulness. They had treated the sea as a toilet. Now full of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and polychlorinated biphenyls, fouled with oil from grounded tankers, fished-out, its clams poisonous, its Dover sole riddled with liver cancers, its species dying out in catastrophic numbers, the polluted ocean held up a looking glass to the heedless, stupid face of humankind.

  Slivery, partial images like these danced continually on the surface of the water, changing places, dissolving into each other, reigning for a moment, then suddenly losing their sharpness. I thought it might be possible to think of a sea as the sum of all the reflections it had held during its history. You’d never know the half of them, of course; but in the clashes and contradictions of image against image, you might at least catch something of the provocative power of the sea, which has meant so much, so variously, to us.