Horatio George Broke

“ Great was the excitement among our men: ‘There’s De Groff,’—‘and Callsen,’—‘and Dalton.’
We had hoisted our flag, but the halliards got entangled and the Stars and Stripes were an unsightly ball, omen perhaps of what was to befall us, for as we rounded the point at the end of the island, we kept a little too far out, the tide, ebbing [35] swiftly through the narrow channel, caught our bows, and we ran hard and fast on to a rocky shoal instead of sailing into the harbour known as Port Mulgrave. ”

“ Going leisurely, I reached at 11.15 the north-west extremity of the lake, putting up half-a-dozen geese as I went whose wildness argued considerable knowledge of man. I then meditated a return to camp, but my plans were suddenly changed by coming on tracks in the herbage which I believed to be those of the men. I followed them, first over a space where the wind had overthrown all the trees in every direction, [71] raising a natural abattis that presented most formidable obstacles, and then through some dense alder-scrub to the edge of the Guyot Glacier. ”

“ Gums pointed out a spot where he declared Schwatka halted the first day, but this disagreed with Seton-Karr’s account, and as it was yet early we pushed on in hope of at least finding a dry camping-place. In this, although the moraine of the Agassiz Glacier was now looming near at hand, we were doomed to be disappointed; and after two unusually deep and rapid crossings, in one of which Lyons lost his footing and emerged in a pitiable plight, though with nothing gone except his temper, we sought the shelter of the woods, thoroughly numbed by this ceaseless wading in ice-water. ”

“ Here the wind, though light, was in our favour, and we sailed peaceably up it, reaching its head about seven o’clock, and camped by a broad stream, along which we had at first thought we could make our way towards our mountain, which the Indian informed us was called Sha-klokh, or Spear-peak, but the bush in the valley was so dense that we struck straight up next morning, till in about four hours we got above tree-level, and pitched camp at a height of about two thousand feet close to a big bed of snow. ”

“ The south-west face is a mass of hanging glaciers. The brow on which they were is seen from below as a wall of snow fringing the top of the crater; on the other side this snow falls away rapidly to the glacier which winds down from the north-east to the head of the Tyndall Glacier. From there no route to the col could be made, as the ice is far too broken, and should any one force the Tyndall ice-fall his best course would be to cross the glacier to a low rock arête, which would take him to some snow-fields whence he might turn west and gain the huge north-west arête of the mountain. ”

“ A fine wind, increasing every moment, now sent us along at a grand pace, the water every now and then surging through the oar-holes, which we stopped as best we could by covering them with paddles. About seven to ten miles north of our camp is a very large glacier (the Grand Plateau?) , of which the centre, covered with moraine, comes almost, if not quite, to the sea, while on either side is a stream of pure white ice. ”

“ Hurriedly telling the Indians to keep quiet, I sneaked down to the tent, got H.’s big telescope (how I longed for a rifle!) and had a splendid view of them.
The first was the much-talked-of ‘blue’ bear at last. The body was slate-colour, much lighter on the back, with a very well-marked white crescent on the shoulders, while the head was nearly, if not quite, black. He was decidedly smaller than the other, which was an undersized cinnamon. The blue one was also much neater-looking and smarter in his gait, the pair resembling a park-hack followed by a cart-horse. ”

“ Their height did not impress us much at first sight, but we were greatly struck with the enormous mass of the Malaspina Glacier, the white upper part of which presented such a curiously regular appearance that at first we believed it to be a layer of cloud, till undeceived by the telescope. There was hardly any wind, but we crept round Cape Phipps at last, and came in sight of Yakutat. Once round the corner, the light breeze from the west sent us along faster, and we were soon abreast of the ‘ranche’ on Kantag Island. ”

“ At noon it began to rain steadily and kept on till five, when it kindly left off for a little, so we turned out and had supper. In spite of the rain, Finn had managed to bake some sour-dough bread in our tin plates, and he persuaded it to rise by covering it with our warm blankets. Though a good deal burnt in baking, it was quite excellent, and I particularly appreciated it as being the only crusty bread we ever had, but the men didn’t care for it. A crusty loaf is always an abomination to an American, and our preference for the outside always surprised our men. ”

“ Alaska glaciers are all rapidly receding, this must have been a very long time ago, for a hundred years back, when the country was first visited, there was far more ice than there is now, Vancouver having been unable to enter Glacier Bay for the ice, while Icy Bay, even on modern charts, is represented as being of a V-shape from the glaciers running out on either side, whereas it now hardly deserves the name of a bay at all. ”

“ After lunch I set to work to prepare a sumptuous supper, as I expected the others back that evening. I made a pudding by boiling rice and dried peaches together, and even added some sugar, which had become a rare and precious commodity, so that I did not use it while the others were away. I then left the pot in the snow to cool, put a goose to stew on a slow fire, and wandered up a little way beyond camp to make a sketch of the glacier. About five o’clock the weather improved, the clouds gradually disappearing and the sun being pleasantly warm. ”

“ Ned was himself a smart-looking fellow, and they made a handsome pair, though, like nearly all these coast Indians, their legs were deformed from the continual canoe life. All the women of these parts, and a good many of the men, black their faces in summer, partly to preserve the complexion, and partly to [150] keep off mosquitoes. They used to employ a mixture of soot and seal-oil, but now that the advance of civilisation has introduced them to blacking, they much prefer that. My watch now took to going all right again, the fine glacier mud apparently dropping out as it dried. ”

“ He brought the news that the body of a white man had been found at Point Manby, thrown up with a fishing dory. The poor fellow must have got among the breakers at night, and he had thrown out a drag to keep the boat head on to [113] them, but must have swamped as he reached the shore. From the tracks they saw that he was able to crawl up the beach on his hands and knees into the bush, and whether he died there from exhaustion or was killed by a bear no one could say, but it is to be hoped he was dead before the bear got him. ”

“ After leaving the cache we went on up stream [56] for about a mile, sometimes on little strips of beach, but oftener driven by the river on to the face of the moraine, which was covered with dense alder scrub, offering terrible difficulty to the laden packers, as the boughs, pressed down by the winter’s snow, mostly sloped down-hill, while the foothold on the slope itself was of a most precarious character. Eventually we left the river and steered to the east, hoping to get through to bare ice, but the bush seemed to grow thicker and the ubiquitous devil’s clubs more numerous at every step. ”

“ The blue had gone with his heel down the whole time, like the black bear, while the brown’s tracks only showed the print of the fore-part of the foot. From this and from the general appearance of the animal, I have but little doubt that these blue ones are a variety of the black bear. No doubt, as in the case of the black bear in other parts of America, they will breed with the brown ones, and hence puzzling variations are met with, such as a skin I afterwards saw at Yakutat, which had been obtained near Dry Bay, and was of a uniform yellowish grey. ”

“ Shorty, who was always on the safe side strongly urged our going ashore, pointing out that there was no landing between Point Manby and Icy Bay, a distance of over thirty miles, and that, [41] should it come on to blow from the south-east, it would probably be impossible to land through the surf by the time we reached the latter place; we should be unable to turn back against the wind, and our only chance would be to run right on before it, in which case we should be carried on to Kayak unless we swamped by the way. ”

“ On the other side we found a charming camping-place on a sort of raised beach, marking, presumably, the height of the river in some former flood, but now covered with flowers, among which I recognised a large blue lupin, mimulus, two kinds of spiræa, and three of willow-herb. Mosquitoes were also abundant. After supper we held a consultation and decided to keep Billy and Jimmy with us while the rest of the men were to return to the beach for another load, and in the meantime we would coast along the east side of the Chaix Hills. ”

“ Now, from Yakutat it is clear at once that this col is barely half-way up the mountain. Secondly, as I went down the coast in the canoe the weather was absolutely perfect, and Mount St. Elias clearly in view till the third morning, when we lost it by getting behind Cape Fairweather. I can clearly recollect how, as we were pulling in to the landing-place north of Cape Fairweather on the second evening, the peak stood up clear and sharp against the sunset sky, with at least a third of its bulk above the horizon. ”

“ Mount Wrangel could not be seen, but Fairweather was distinctly visible. On their descent they found the snow and steps much worse. They left Mrs. Haydon’s flag in a meat-tin under a pile of stones at the foot of the sandstone rocks where they made their first lunch, as above this there was no place of security, and got back to camp about nine o’clock.
Next day they crossed over to Camp I, and on the Saturday descended to G, going, at Shorty’s suggestion, all along the Tyndall Glacier, but came to the conclusion that it was not an improvement. ”

“ Our next expedition was to Kruzoff and Mount Edgcumbe, and this time we had rather a sickener. As we had about fifteen miles of much more open sea we took a bigger canoe, and had to pull the beastly thing all the way, so landed in the first place which came handy, a very awkward landing with a lot of big rocks about. From the appearance of clouds of mosquitoes in the evening Dick prophesied bad weather, and he was right, for it poured the whole of the next day, most of which we spent in the tent. ”

“ Our men had had a fair time among the flesh-pots on the shore, as, though the Indians had got no more seals, they had shot several swans and geese. The men came up in two days, making a camp as before at the place where the river issues from the ice, but succeeded in getting down in one day of sixteen hours. The water was very high, and they had to make a raft before they could cross one creek. After lunch Lyons and I went after ptarmigan with our pistols; Shorty also started with the rifle which had been brought up from the first cache, but his leg was too bad and he had to go back. ”

“ Meanwhile I took my ptarmigan on to the glacier, to avoid the flies, and tried to skin it. This was not very easy, as the [101] bullet had smashed both shoulders, but I managed it in a sort of a way, and then went for a bit across the glacier towards the Chaix Hills to get some idea of the lie of the crevasses. We had an excellent supper, and the men displayed marvellous appetites, eating the whole of their goose, the legs of my bird, and two goes of rice-pudding, but I think they were then tolerably crowded. ”

“ Being white and a good deal about the ice in winter, some have supposed it to be a variety of polar bear, but the zoologists dispute it.’ My own impression is that these bears are the same, the white variety not being an albino, but the blue bear with his winter coat on. I could only hear of two of these white bears having been killed—one at Chilcaht, the other on the Taku Glacier, near Juneau, and this latter was described as having been almost white. ”

“ Other Indians when dead are cremated, but the doctors are buried in a little wooden hut in some isolated spot, or on a point of rock overlooking the sea; and of late years these huts have been ruthlessly ravaged for curios, since the doctor’s charms and other implements are always buried with him; but if the sacrilegious prowler was caught it would be very awkward for him in a wild place like Yakutat. The common American term for these medicine-men is shaman, apparently a corruption of the Russian shawaan, but the Tlinkits themselves use the word icht. ”

“ After lunch (bread and chocolate) we took about twenty and the men about forty pounds each, and set out to make a cache further up the stream; H., in addition to his burden, attempted to carry the coal-oil stove, a most detestable fardel, but dropped it when he had gone about half a mile. For the first three miles our going was fairly easy, along the landward side of the stream, but we then came to a glacier lake, where we surprised a small flock of geese, at which H. and I fired our revolvers unavailingly. ”

“ This is even finer than the Rockies, owing to the greater size of the snowfields and glaciers, and the view from Glacier House, where we stopped for lunch, the grades in the mountains being too steep to allow of a dining-car being attached, was magnificent in the extreme. At this point the great Illecillewaet glacier descends into the valley, backed by the superb spire of Mount Sir Donald, [9] and the C.P.R. have most obligingly built a summer track outside the snow-sheds to enable the passengers to see it in comfort. ”

“ At this point they were above the col joining Haydon Peak to Mount St. Elias, but could not see the col itself. They could see, however, that the final peak, which they then estimated as being some six thousand feet above them, would be difficult and perhaps impossible from this col. On the further side it would first be necessary to climb east to avoid an overhanging glacier; then to ascend over rocks, snow, and some green ice which might perhaps be avoided by some steep rocks to the left, but all the climbing up this first thousand feet would be very severe. ”

“ The result of Ned’s potations was that we gybed with some frequency, and, apparently becoming aware of this, he transferred the steering-lines to his young brother Jack, who, with Ned’s wife and another Indian named Frank, made up the crew, and composed himself to sleep. We sailed steadily on all day, keeping five or six miles from the shore, which is here a low sandy beach on which the Pacific surf continually breaks, so that it is always difficult to land, and in bad weather becomes quite impossible, and therefore this was the most dangerous part of our canoe journey. ”