"I don't know what it is that keeps pulling me back to this country," said a man in the garb of a laborer, one day. He stood down in the bow of the steamer, his hands were in his pockets, his throat was bared to the wind; his blue eyes—sunken, but burning with that fire which never dies in the eyes of one who loves nature—were gazing up the pale-green narrow avenue named Grenville Channel. "It's something that you can't exactly put into words. You don't know that it's got hold of you while you're up here, but before you've been 'outside' a month, all at once you find it pulling at you—and after it begins, it never lets up. You try to think what it is up here that you want so; what it is keeps begging at you to come back. Maybe there ain't a darn soul up here you care particular about! Maybe you ain't got an interest in a claim worth hens' teeth! Maybe you're broke and know you'll have to work like a go-devil when you get here! It don't make any difference. It's just Alaska. It calls you and calls you and calls you. Maybe you can't come, so you keep pretending you don't hear—but Lord, you do hear! Maybe somebody shakes hands as if he liked you—and there's Alaska up and calling right through you, till you feel your heart shake! Maybe a phonograph sets up a tune they used to deal out at Magnuson's roadhouse on the trail—and you hear that blame lonesome waterfall up in Keystone Canyon calling you as plain as you hear the phonograph! Maybe you smell something like the sun shining on snow, all mixed up with tundra and salt air—and there's double quick action on your eyes and a lump in your throat that won't be swallowed down! Maybe you see a white mountain, or a green valley, or a big river, or a blue strait, or a waterfall—and like a flash your heart opens, and shuts in an ache for Alaska that stays! … No, I don't know what it is, but I do know how it is; and so does every other poor devil that ever heard that something calling him that's just Alaska. It wakes you up in the middle of the night, just as plain as if somebody had said your name out loud, and you just lay there the rest of the night aching to go. I tell you what, if ever a country had a spirit, it's Alaska; and when it once gets hold of you and gets to calling you to come, you might just as well get up and start, for it calls you and follows you, and haunts you till you do."
It is the pleading of the mountains and the pleading of the sea woven into one call and sent floating down laden with the sweetness of the splendid spaces. No mountaineer can say why he goes back to the mountains; no sailor why he cannot leave the sea. No one has yet seen the spirit that dwells in the waterfall, but all have heard it calling and have known its spell.
"If you love the sea, you've got to follow it," said a sea-rover, "and that's all there is to it. A man can get along without the woman he loves best on earth if he has to, but he can't get along without the sea if he once gets to loving it. It gets so it seems like a thing alive to him, and it makes up for everything else that he don't have. And it's just like that with Alaska. When a man has made two-three trips to Alaska, you can't get him off on a southern run again, as long as he can help himself."
It is an unimaginative person who can wind through these intricate and difficult sounds, channels, and passes without a strange, quickened feeling, as of the presence of those dauntless navigators who discovered and charted these waters centuries ago. From Juan de Fuca northward they seem to be sailing with us, those grim, brave spectres of the past—Perez, Meares, Cuadra, Valdes, Malaspina, Duncan, Vancouver, Whidbey—and all the others who came and went through these beautiful ways, leaving their names, or the names of their monarchs, friends, or sweethearts, to endure in blue stretches of water or glistening domes of snow.
We sail in safety, ease, luxury, over courses along which they felt their perilous way, never knowing whether Life or Death waited at the turn of the prow. Nearly a century and a quarter ago Vancouver, working his way cautiously into Queen Charlotte Sound, soon came to disaster, both the Discovery and her consort, the Chatham, striking upon the rocks that border the entrance. Fortunately the return of the tide in a few hours released them from their perilous positions, before they had sustained any serious damage.
But what days of mingled indecision, hope, and despair—what nights of anxious watching and waiting—must have been spent in these places through which we glide so easily now; and the silent spirits of the grim-peopled past take hold of our heedless hands and lead us on. Does a pilot sail these seas who has never on wild nights felt beside him on the bridge the presence of those early ones who, staring ever ahead under stern brows, drove their vessels on, not knowing what perils lay beyond? Who, asked, "What shall we do when hope be gone?" made answer, "Why, sail on, and on, and on."
From Queen Charlotte Sound the steamer passes into Fitzhugh Sound around Cape Calvert, on Calvert Island. Off the southern point of this island are two dangerous clusters of rocks, to which, in 1776, by Mr. James Hanna, were given the interesting names of "Virgin" and "Pearl." In this poetic vicinage, and nearer the island than either, is another cluster of rocks, upon which some bold and sacrilegious navigator has bestowed the name of "Devil."
"It don't sound so pretty and ladylike," said the pilot who pointed them out, "but it's a whole lot more appropriate. Rocks are devils—and that's no joke; and what anybody should go and name them 'virgins' and 'pearls' for, is more than a man can see, when he's standing at a wheel, hell-bent on putting as many leagues between him and them as he can. It does seem as if some men didn't have any sense at all about naming things. Now, if I were going to name anything 'virgin'"—his blue eyes narrowed as they stared into the distance ahead—"it would be a mountain that's always white; or a bay that gets the first sunshine in the morning; or one of those little islands down in Puget Sound that's just covered with flowers."
Just inside Fitzhugh Sound, on the island, is Safety Cove, or Oatsoalis, which was named by Mr. Duncan in 1788, and which has ever since been known as a safe anchorage and refuge for ships in storm. Vancouver, anchoring there in 1792, found the shores to be bold and steep, the water from twenty-three to thirty fathoms, with a soft, muddy bottom. Their ships were steadied with hawsers to the trees. They found a small beach, near which was a stream of excellent water and an abundance of wood. Vessels lie here at anchor when storms or fogs render the passage across Queen Charlotte Sound too perilous to be undertaken.
Fitzhugh Sound is but a slender, serene water-way running directly northward thirty miles. On its west, lying parallel with the mainland, are the islands of Calvert, Hecate, Nalau, and Hunter, separated by the passages of Kwakshua, Hakai, and Nalau, which connect Fitzhugh with the wide sweep of Hecate Strait.
Burke Channel, the second link in the exquisite water chain that winds and loops in a northwesterly course between the islands of the Columbian and the Alexander archipelagoes and the mainland of British Columbia and Alaska, is scarcely entered by the Alaskan steamer ere it turns again into Fisher Channel, and from this, westward, into the short, very narrow, but most beautiful Lama Pass.
From Burke Channel several ribbonlike passages form King Island.
Lama Pass is more luxuriantly wooded than many of the others, and is so still and narrow that the reflections of the trees, growing to the water's edge, are especially attractive. Very effective is the graveyard of the Bella Bella Indians, in its dark forest setting, many totems and curious architectures of the dead showing plainly from the steamer when an obliging captain passes under slow bell. Near by, on Campbell Island, is the village of the Bella Bellas, who, with the Tsimpsians and the Alert Bay Indians, were formerly regarded as the most treacherous and murderous Indians of the Northwest Coast. Now, however, they are gathered into a model village, whose houses, church, school, and stores shine white and peaceful against a dark background.
Lama Pass is one of the most poetic of Alaskan water-ways.
Seaforth Channel is the dangerous reach leading into Millbank Sound. It is broken by rocks and reefs, on one of which, Rejetta Reef, the Willapa was stranded ten years ago. Running