ALASKA THE GREAT CHAPTER XIX In the early 18th century, under Peter the Great’s ambition

In the early 18th century, under Peter the Great’s ambition, Russian explorers led by Vitus Bering and Aleksei Chirikov set sail from Kamchatka to chart the North Pacific and determine if Asia was connected to America. These perilous voyages—fraught with storms, scurvy, treacherous discoveries, and tragic loss—unveiled land near the 55th parallel and the towering presence of Mount St. Elias. Despite the hardship and separation of their ships, their discoveries reshaped the map and legacy of exploration, marking Russia’s surprising presence on North American soil.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter nineteen. 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, Mure has

(00:20):
been the finest and is a world famous glacier, owing
to the charming descriptions written of it by mister John Muir.
For several years it was the chief object of interest
on the tourist trip, but early in nineteen hundred an
earthquakes shattered its beautiful front and so choked the bay
with immense bergs that the steamer spoken could not approach

(00:42):
closer then 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 nineteen o seven, however, a steamer entered
the bay, and, finding it free of ice, approached close

(01:04):
to the famed glacier, only to find it resembling a
grate castle whose towers and turrets have fallen to ruin
with the passing of years, where once shown its opening
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

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icy straits with the tides and winds. Rondeu, Carol Grand Pacific,
Johns Hopkins, Hugh Miller, and Geeky Frannan 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 nineteen

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o five, the Santa Anna 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 illusion aisles, the green, green owls, crusted with fire

(02:12):
and snow, that are washed on the north by the
waves of Bearing 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.

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The ice round and white, with the sunken nest of
the thunderbird on its crest. Mount edge comb 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 it,

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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. And 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

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me like an insult, and the throb of the steamer,
which had been a sensuous pleasure, pierced my exultation 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

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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 in to the breast. It
was terrible, and it was glorious. Those were big moments

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on the Texas of the Santa Anna. 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 in Texas, I was
assisted to my cabin, drenched, shivering. Happy, shut your door,

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said the captain, or you will be washed out of
your berth, and wait till tomorrow. 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, mant

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everything and everybody in it, then swept out again. As
the ship rolled to starboard, my traveling 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 Yacatat or Katala. She made one attempt to

(05:12):
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

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upon the stool where I had been washed and dashed
by the see and laughed. He made it at last.
He uttered no apologies and no adieus. 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

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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, complain 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

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come in at a decent hour after this. It is
small wonder that Bearing and Cherikov disagreed and drifted apart
in the North Pacific Ocean. It is my belief that
two angels would quarrel if shut up in a state
room in a Yakatad blow, than which only a Yakataga
blow is worse, and it comes later. I am convinced,

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after three summers spent in voyaging along the Alaskan coast
to Gnome and down the Yukon, that quarreling with one's
room mate on the law 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

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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 quarreling, too big
for all little petty human passions. A coward would have

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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

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and little actions. But when a ship goes down into
a black hollow of the sea, down down so low
that it's seems as though she must go on to
the lowest, deepest depth of all, and then lie still, shutters,
and begins to mount higher, higher, higher, to the very
crest of a mountainous wave. If God put anything at

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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

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to the decks and rigging in a freezing storm for
thirty six hours. There was a young girl on the
ship who was traveling 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

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went to pieces to lifight, 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 someone here to

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care for. I will stay. Better to be that brave
man's way battered and fish eating 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

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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

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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 Fairwether Range, and towered against the sky. No great
snow mountains rising from the land have ever effected me

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as did that long and noble chain glistening out of
the sea. They seemed fairly to thunder their beauty to
the sky from Mount Edgecomb. There is no significant break
in the mountain range four more than a thousand miles.
It is a stretch of sublime beauty that has no parallel.
The Farewether Range merges into the Saint Elias Alps. The

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Alps are followed successively by the chew Gash Alps, the
Keen Eye 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 Curial Islands

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complete the ring of snow and fire that circles around
the Pacific Ocean.