Passage to Juneau Read online

  A few minutes later, we passed a sailboat wallowing in confused seas off Marrowstone Island. It was on a close reach, under a double-reefed mainsail and a meager triangle of jib, spray pluming from its bow as it shouldered its way through the breakers. The captain gazed on it fondly through binoculars. “They’ve got three knots of tide under them through there, maybe a tad more. See how short and steep that sea is?”

  The face of the mate, above the wheel, was a study in deep habituated indifference. “I’ve always wanted to go to London,” he said.

  The captain, his binoculars still trained on the sailboat, said: “Someone isn’t happy on that boat.”

  “My dad’s family comes from somewhere over there,” the mate said.

  In a whining falsetto, the captain said, “If we ever get out of this alive, I’m never, ever coming out with you again.” It sounded like a verbatim quote from the captain’s own domestic life.

  Past the lighthouse on Point Wilson, to the west of the ferry’s course, the water seethed like a pan of boiling milk. High conical waves smashed into one another ceaselessly, raising a thick penumbra of spray overhead.

  “That’s a serious race,” I said.

  “Oh, we’ve got a lot worse than that over on the Canadian side. There’s a race off Trial Island, another off Race Rocks … there’ve been big ships lost in both of those.”

  “You ever see the race off Portland Bill in England?” I said.

  “I never did. That’s one I’d like to see, though—I read about it.”

  “You don’t need to. Your sea’s got everything.”

  And it was true. I loved the sense of being so close to the city, yet so far out on this magnificently eventful sea, with its wild creatures and mazy channels. I thought, if I lived in Seattle, I’d keep a boat of my own, and sail it to where the tide ran at sixteen knots at springs, and where there were whirlpools ten feet deep. I’d live on a sane frontier between nature and civilization, with one foot in the water, the other in a metropolis of restaurants and bookstores. I’d read and write in the mornings, and run away to sea in the afternoons.

  Within a few days of my Thanksgiving ride, I was busy turning every I would into I will.

  At dawn the next morning, every cloud was gone. The air seemed thin and rarefied. A range of serrated mountains far to the east stood out black against a rose-pink sky. A faint breeze from the west barely ruffled the water. Discovery and Chatham drifted slowly around, on grumbling anchor chains, to face the young flood tide.

  They were soon under way, ghosting down the Strait of Juan de Fuca under full sail, with tide and wind working in consort. To starboard, the low forested hills were rinsed and brilliantly green. The hills rose steadily into snowcapped mountains some twenty miles away, with glittering ice fields and jagged pinnacles of black rock. “Sterile,” wrote Vancouver, describing their appearance in his log.

  But the captain was relaxed and smiling. He presided over this unfolding new world as if he had conjured it from inside his hat. Usually secretive about even his most trifling plans, thinking it best to keep them shrouded in the mystery of command, he now chatted freely with his officers, inviting their opinions and making himself genially open to suggestion. Many people on board would remember this sunlit day as the happiest of the entire voyage. In his secret journal, Midshipman Thomas Manby wrote:

  Never was contrast greater, in this days sailing than with that we had long been accustomed to. It had more the aspect of enchantment than reality, with silent admiration each discerned the beauties of Nature, and nought was heard on board but expressions of delight murmured from every tongue. Imperceptibly our Bark skimmed over the glassy surface of the deep, about three Miles an hour, a gentle Breeze swelled the lofty Canvass whilst all was calm below.

  Sailing close inshore, the ships slid past pretty falls of timber, speckled forest glades, and a grassy clearing where a family of long-shadowed deer gazed back, unafraid, into the lenses of the officers’ telescopes. Encouraged by the captain, Midshipmen Sykes and Humphrys brought up their sketchbooks from below to record the passing Arcadian scene.

  Joseph Baker, on the port side of the quarterdeck, spotted a smooth-sided white peak that rose well clear of the line of mountains on the eastern horizon. Vancouver ceremoniously announced that he would give it the name of Mount Baker, in honor of his third lieutenant.

  Close to ten o’clock, ship’s time, the moon rose in the northeast, where it hung in the blue like a smudge of pale ash. To Vancouver, and to the ship’s master, Mr. Whidbey, the two real navigators on Discovery, the moon’s arrival was the high spot of this perfect morning. With the sea as flat as a lake, and the sun and moon simultaneously visible in the clear sky, they could find their true longitude and check the mounting error in the ship’s chronometers.

  In 1792, more than thirty years after John Harrison unveiled his marine chronometer, longitude was still a much more troubling problem than most popular books on the subject (like Dava Sobel’s Longitude) have generally conveyed. The new chronometers worked well on short voyages of three or four weeks; but on longer ones they fell so far out of sync with Greenwich Mean Time as to be useless, unless they were continually corrected by some other means of ascertaining time.

  One of Vancouver’s commissions on the voyage south from Falmouth to Cape Town had been to experiment with a new method of determining longitude that was being touted around the Admiralty. This involved measuring the exact magnetic variation of the compass at a given latitude and locating it on a chart of all the variations observed on a particular ocean. Vancouver tested this cheap and easy solution, and found it foolhardy and dangerous. That the Admiralty should be promoting it at all, so late in the navigational day, says a lot about the dubious reliability of the Harrison clock.

  There remained an ingenious and reliable method known as “lunar distance.” Because the sun and the moon travel around the earth on different orbits and at different speeds (it is the navigator’s necessary fiction that the sun, like every other heavenly body, circles the earth, and not vice versa), they can be thought of as a pair of clock hands. By calculating the distance between them at any given moment, you can find the exact time at Greenwich, and therefore your longitude.

  The working of a lunar distance was the navigator’s pièce de résistance. It required very accurate sights with a quadrant or sextant, followed by some horrible arithmetic. Midshipmen dreaded the exercise, and few captains were confident of their mastery of it. George Vancouver excelled at lunar distances, their finical quadrant-handling and abstruse mathematics. When he wrote about his “lunars” in his Voyage, he did so in the tone of an evangelist. “I hope to see the period arrive, when every sea-faring person capable of using a quadrant, will, on due instruction, be enabled by lunar observations to determine his longitude at sea.”

  All the young gentlemen aboard Discovery were drilled by their captain in the lunar method; it was his great claim to intellectual prowess, and he enjoyed berating his better-educated juniors as they got lost in the miserable thicket of secants, cosines, and tangents.

  Vancouver had learned how to work lunars when he was a midshipman aboard Captain Cook’s Resolution (“a Quiet inoffensive young man,” as Cook described him then), and had attached himself to William Wales, the expedition astronomer. Wales—a gifted teacher who went on to take charge of the Mathematics School at Christ’s Hospital, where his pupils included Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and S. T. Coleridge—had taken young George in hand, coaching him until he was as proficient in celestial navigation as any officer on the ship. Wales had been Vancouver’s one-man university, and Cook his ideal model of captaincy.

  So when the washed-out moon began its steady climb through the eastern sky, Vancouver’s good humor brimmed over. Here was a heaven-sent opportunity to teach these boys a much-needed lesson. He waited patiently for the moon to attain a sufficient altitude for a good sight, then set his young gentlemen to
work.

  At nearly noon, ship’s time, the moon bore 096°/T. Its observed altitude, by quadrant sight, was 29°04′. The sun bore 179°, at an altitude of 54°50′. Now came the brain-cudgeling part. (Pay attention, Sykes! Are you listening, Humphrys?) You had to solve a devilish spherical triangle. Your ship lay on a latitude just short of 49°N. The sun, reduced to its zenith point on the earth’s surface, lay on a spot in mid-Pacific, roughly 2,700 miles west of Costa Rica. The moon lay—more roughly still—somewhere close to Providence, Rhode Island. Your job was to calculate the distance between those two geographical points, along with all the angles in the triangle formed by the ship, the moon, and the sun.

  tan θ = tan b cos c

  cos c = cos b cos (a — θ) sec θ

  Poor Sykes. Poor Humphrys. But Vancouver scribbled for a couple of minutes and had the answer.

  Some work on the nascent, partially drawn chart, with soft pencil and boxwood parallel ruler—and there you were. Latitude: 48°13′N. Longitude: 235°59′E (Vancouver always measured his Pacific longitudes by going eastabout from Greenwich). Most important of all, the time at Greenwich when the observations were taken turned out to have been exactly 8.13′.06″ P.M. After thirteen months at sea, Discovery’s main chronometer, made by Larcum Kendall of London, was running fast by 45 minutes and 46 seconds.

  Flushed and ebullient with his textbook demonstration, knowing now precisely where he stood, Vancouver was in high form, strutting the quarterdeck like a plump rooster fluffing out his feathers. Fine on the starboard bow, a long sandspit topped with thin grass projected out for a mile or more from shore, its beach littered with dead pine trees thrown up by the westerly storms. The tide boiled past the end of it, where the water was marbled with rips and eddies. Vancouver proclaimed that the spit bore a quite remarkable resemblance to Dungeness as it reaches out a long, shingled arm into the English Channel from Winchelsea and Rye. This likeness was lost on most of the gentlemen on deck, but they nodded in polite agreement when Vancouver ordered the name New Dungeness to be written on the chart.

  In the next few months, he’d find a thousand names. The established ritual of colonial possession required that every mountain, bay, promontory, pass, and headland be given an English name; and it was the privilege of the captain to leave his private fancies on the land that he explored. Vancouver named his land- and sea-marks after high-ups at the Admiralty, whose goodwill might lead to his promotion; after old friends and mentors, like William Wales; out of the Royal Kalendar, a much-thumbed, fusty red book of dates and personages that Vancouver kept in his cabin; after his ships, his officers, and his family; after incidents on the voyage; and after his own bipolar mental states. Most of his names stuck. Two hundred years later one could read the charts of the Northwest coast as a candid diary of Vancouver’s expedition; a map of his mind, in all its changing moods and preoccupations.

  Now his mood was one of serene if strangely elevated nostalgia, and his officers were foxed by this sudden new aspect of their captain’s character. The next seven days, of uninterrupted sunshine and light airs, seemed a reflection of Captain Van’s unprecedented internal weather. The quarterdeck remained wary. Some saw a bad omen in the captain’s impervious sweet temper—the calm before the storm, the uncanny stillness in the air before the crack of thunder and the lightning bolt.

  In 1797, when he was a half-pay captain living in the Thames-side village of Petersham and writing up his journals for publication, Vancouver re-created these first days as an idyll. He was in a state of dazzled infatuation with the land into which he’d sailed. Everything he saw, he praised, and in terms that gave a great deal away about his character.

  With Discovery and Chatham at anchor inside the sheltering arm of New Dungeness, the small boats—two cutters and a yawl—were lowered and the officers set out on a sailing tour of the nearby coast. Vancouver reclined in the sternsheets of the yawl: in knee-breeches, silver-buttoned yellow waistcoat, wig, and cocked hat, he was the picture of a genteel Englishman, equipped for a pleasant Sunday ramble around his estate. Six and a half miles east of the anchorage, the yawl grounded on the sandy beach of a steep-sided island, and the party scrambled up the cliff to get a better view of the surrounding countryside.

  “Our attention,” wrote Vancouver,

  was immediately called to a landscape, almost as enchantingly beautiful as the most elegantly finished pleasure grounds in Europe. The summit of this island presented nearly a horizontal surface, interspersed with some inequalities of ground, which produced a beautiful variety on an extensive lawn covered with luxuriant grass, and diversified with an abundance of flowers. To the northwestward was a coppice of pine trees and shrubs of various sorts, that seemed as if it had been planted for the sole purpose of protecting from the N.W. winds this delightful meadow, over which were promiscuously scattered a few clumps of trees, that would have puzzled the most ingenious designer of pleasure grounds to have arranged more agreeably. Whilst we stopped to contemplate these several beauties of nature, in a prospect no less pleasing than unexpected, we gathered some gooseberries and roses in a state of considerable forwardness.

  Still red-faced and out of breath from the climb, his wig (he wore it habitually, to hide his balding skull) a little askew, Captain Van picked wild roses, to the astonished amusement of his companions.

  Just inshore of this delightful island opened a deep bay, and the yawl sailed to investigate it. Once inside, Vancouver was again enraptured by what he saw. A reliable supply of water was “the only great object necessary for constituting this one of the finest harbours in the world.” The yawl picked its way along the edge of the beach while Vancouver searched for the outlet of a creek. “Almost despairing of success, I suddenly fell in with an excellent stream of very fine water.” Next morning, the ships weighed anchor and sailed the nine miles to the bay, to which Vancouver gave the name Port Discovery.

  The passage took three enjoyable hours.

  The surface of the land was perfectly smooth, and the country before us exhibited every thing that bounteous nature could be expected to draw into one point of view. As we had no reason to imagine that this country had ever been indebted for any of its decorations to the hand of man, I could not possibly believe that any uncultivated country had ever been discovered exhibiting so rich a picture.

  The captain was no great shakes as a writer. He loved the hard clarity of numbers and disliked the arbitrary, indefinite quality of words. He had to sweat to make them say what he believed he meant, and his grammar had a habit of wriggling out of control. (One of his midshipmen, Robert Barrie, would dismiss his great Voyage as “one of the most tedious books I ever read.”) Struggling to hit the right lyrical note in his Petersham lodgings, Vancouver aimed high, and fell short.

  The land … rose … in a very gentle ascent, and was well covered with a variety of stately forest trees. These, however, did not conceal the whole face of the country in one uninterrupted wilderness, but pleasingly clothed its eminences, and chequered the vallies; presenting, in many directions, extensive spaces that wore the appearance of having been cleared by art, like the beautiful island we had visited the day before. As we passed along the shore near one of these charming spots, the tracks of deer, or some such animal, were very numerous, and flattered us with the hope of not wanting refreshments of that nature, whilst we remained in this quarter.

  A picture so pleasing could not fail to recall to our remembrance certain delightful and beloved situations in Old England.…

  From someone still under forty, writing at the very end of the eighteenth century, Vancouver’s way of looking at landscape was old-fashioned to the point of being fogeyish. His vocabulary belongs to the Augustan and Palladian years early in the century; harks back to the landscape gardens of William Kent and the poetry of Alexander Pope. Vancouver made the western wilderness conform to an idealized sylvan scene of glades and groves, of checkered shades and green retreat
s, in an attempt to conjure a landscape like that of Pope’s Windsor Forest, written in 1713—

  Here Hills and Vales, the Woodland and the Plain,

  Here Earth and Water seem to strive again,

  Not Chaos-like together crush’d and bruis’d,

  But as the World, harmoniously confus’d:

  Where Order in Variety we see,

  And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree.

  In landscape, as aboard ship, Vancouver’s preference was for order and subordination. Views with a receding perspective. Everything balanced and in its place. “Nature” was all well and good, but to mold it into a pleasing hierarchy of colors, forms, and spaces required “art.” Gathering rosebuds on the “lawn” atop Protection Island, Vancouver saw a landscape that needed only the addition of a few urns, an obelisk or two, some classical statuary, a pagoda and perhaps a temple of Apollo to bring it into line with the pleasure grounds of Hampton Court and Chiswick House (both, as it happened, within walking distance of Petersham).

  No wonder he was so at odds with the young gentlemen, with their hopeless arithmetic and their loose talk of the Sublime. They were excited by the modern rage for wilderness and solitude, by landscapes that inspired feelings of awe, dread, or, in Edmund Burke’s phrase, “delightful horror.” Such ideas were anathema to Captain Van, who saw in them the seeds of insurrection and chaos. They threatened the good order of his ship, as of the world.

  Isolated from the crew by his narrow and conservative taste, Vancouver at 34 might have been seventy. Yet in this mild and sunny first week of May, officers and midshipmen alike were stirred by the new landscape, even though they understood it in very different terms.