CHAPTER XIX

In rough weather, steamers bound for Sitka from the westward frequently enter Cross Sound and proceed by way of Icy Straits and Chatham to Peril.

Icy Straits are filled, in the warmest months, with icebergs floating down from the many glaciers to the north. Of these Muir has been the finest, and is a world-famous glacier, owing to the charming descriptions written of it by Mr. John Muir. For several years it was the chief object of interest on the "tourist" trip; but early in 1900 an earthquake shattered its beautiful front and so choked the bay with immense bergs that the steamer _Spokane_ could not approach closer than Marble Island, thirteen miles from the front. The bergs were compact and filled the whole bay. Since that time excursion steamers have not attempted to enter Glacier Bay.

In the summer of 1907, however, a steamer entered the bay and, finding it free of ice, approached close to the famed glacier--only to find it resembling a great castle whose towers and turrets have fallen to ruin with the passing of years. Where once shone its opaline palisades is now but a field of crumpled ice.

There are no less than seven glaciers discharging into Glacier Bay and sending out beautiful bergs to drift up and down Icy Straits with the tides and winds. Rendu, Carroll, Grand Pacific, Johns Hopkins, Hugh Miller, and Geikie front on the bay or its narrow inlets.

Brady Glacier has a three-mile frontage on Wimbledon, or Taylor, Bay, which opens into Icy Straits.

* * * * *

When, on her mid-June voyage from Seattle in 1905, the _Santa Ana_ drew out and away from Sitka, and turning with a wide sweep, went drifting slowly through the maze of green islands and set her prow "to Westward," one of the dreams of my life was "come true."

I was on my way to the far, lonely, and lovely Aleutian Isles,--the green, green isles crested with fire and snow that are washed on the north by the waves of Behring Sea.

It was a violet day. There were no warm purple tones anywhere; but the cool, sparkling violet ones that mean the nearness of mountains of snow. One could almost feel the crisp _ting_ of ice in the air, and smell the sunlight that opalizes, without melting, the ice.

Round and white, with the sunken nest of the thunder-bird on its crest, Mount Edgecumbe rose before us; the pale green islands leaned apart to let us through; the sea-birds, white and lavender and rose-touched, floated with us; the throb of the steamer was like a pulse beating in one's own blood; there were words in the violet light that lured us on, and a wild sweet song in the waves that broke at our prow.

"There can be nothing more beautiful on earth," I said; but I did not know. An hour came soon when I stood with bared head and could not speak for the beauty about me; when the speech of others jarred upon me like an insult, and the throb of the steamer, which had been a sensuous pleasure, pierced my exaltation like a blow.

The long violet day of delight wore away at last, and night came on. A wild wind blew from the southwest, and the mood of the North Pacific Ocean changed. The ship rolled heavily; the waves broke over our decks. We could see them coming--black, bowing, rimmed with white. Then came the shock--followed by the awful shudder and struggle of the boat. The wind was terrific. It beat the breath back into the breast.

It was terrible and it was glorious. Those were big moments on the texas of the _Santa Ana;_ they were worth living, they were worth while. But on account of the storm, darkness fell at midnight; and as the spray was now breaking in sheets over the bridge and texas, I was assisted to my cabin--drenched, shivering, happy.

"Shut your door," said the captain, "or you will be washed out of your berth; and wait till to-morrow."

I wondered what he meant, but before I could ask him, before he could close my cabin door, a great sea towered and poised for an instant behind him, then bowed over him and carried him into the room. It drenched the whole room and everything and everybody in it; then swept out again as the ship rolled to starboard.

My travelling companion in the middle berth uttered such sounds as I had never heard before in my life, and will probably never hear again unless it be in the North Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of Yakutat or Katalla. She made one attempt to descend to the floor; but at sight of the captain who was struggling to take a polite departure after his anything but polite entrance, she uttered the most dreadful sound of all and fell back into her berth.

I have never seen any intoxicated man teeter and lurch as he did, trying to get out of our cabin. I sat upon the stool where I had been washed and dashed by the sea, and laughed.

He made it at last. He uttered no apologies and no adieux; and never have I seen a man so openly relieved to escape from the presence of ladies.

I closed the window. Disrobing was out of the question. I could neither stand nor sit without holding tightly to something with both hands for support; and when I had lain down, I found that I must hold to both sides of the berth to keep myself in.

"Serves you right," complained the occupant of the middle berth, "for staying up on the texas until such an unearthly hour. I'm glad you can't undress. Maybe you'll come in at a decent hour after this!"

It is small wonder that Behring and Chirikoff disagreed and drifted apart in the North Pacific Ocean. It is my belief that two angels would quarrel if shut up in a stateroom in a "Yakutat blow"--than which only a "Yakataga blow" is worse; and it comes later.

I am convinced, after three summers spent in voyaging along the Alaskan coast to Nome and down the Yukon, that quarrelling with one's room-mate on a long voyage aids digestion. My room-mate and I have never agreed upon any other subject; but upon this, we are as one.

Neither effort nor exertion is required to begin a quarrel. It is only necessary to ask with some querulousness, "Are you going to stand before that mirror _all day?_" and hey, presto! we are instantly at it with hammer and tongs.

Toward daylight the storm grew too terrible for further quarrelling; too big for all little petty human passions. A coward would have become a man in the face of such a conflict. I have never understood how one can commit a cowardly act during a storm at sea. One may dance a hornpipe of terror on a public street when a man thrusts a revolver into one's face and demands one's money. That is a little thing, and inspires to little sensations and little actions. But when a ship goes down into a black hollow of the sea, down, down, so low that it seems as though she must go on to the lowest, deepest depth of all--and then lies still, shudders, and begins to mount, higher, higher, higher, to the very crest of a mountainous wave; if God put anything at all of courage and of bravery into the soul of the human being that experiences this, it comes to the front now, if ever.

In that most needlessly cruel of all the ocean disasters of the Pacific Coast, the wreck of the _Valencia_ on Seabird Reef of the rock-ribbed coast of Vancouver Island, more than a hundred people clung to the decks and rigging in a freezing storm for thirty-six hours. There was a young girl on the ship who was travelling alone. A young man, an athlete, of Victoria, who had never met her before, assisted her into the rigging when the decks were all awash, and protected her there. On the last day before the ship went to pieces, two life-rafts were successfully launched. Only a few could go, and strong men were desired to manage the rafts. The young man in the rigging might have been saved, for the ones who did go on the raft were the only ones rescued. But when summoned, he made simple answer:--

"No; I have some one here to care for. I will stay."

Better to be that brave man's wave-battered and fish-eaten corpse, than any living coward who sailed away and left those desperate, struggling wretches to their awful fate.

The storm died slowly with the night; and at last we could sleep.

It was noon when we once more got ourselves up on deck. The sun shone like gold upon the sea, which stretched, dimpling, away for hundreds upon hundreds of miles, to the south and west. I stood looking across it for some time, lost in thought, but at last something led me to the other side of the ship.

All unprepared, I lifted my eyes--and beheld before me the glory and the marvel of God. In all the splendor of the drenched sunlight, straight out of the violet, sparkling sea, rose the magnificent peaks of the Fairweather Range and towered against the sky. No great snow mountains rising from the land have ever affected me as did that long and noble chain glistening out of the sea. They seemed fairly to thunder their beauty to the sky.

From Mount Edgecumbe there is no significant break in the mountain range for more than a thousand miles; it is a stretch of sublime beauty that has no parallel. The Fairweather Range merges into the St. Elias Alps; the Alps are followed successively by the Chugach Alps, the Kenai and Alaskan ranges,--the latter of which holds the loftiest of them all, the superb Mount McKinley,--and the Aleutian Range, which extends to the end of the Aliaska Peninsula. The volcanoes on the Aleutian and Kurile islands complete the ring of snow and fire that circles around the Pacific Ocean.