USA > Alaska > Our Arctic province, Alaska and the Seal islands > Part 16
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This great island in olden times was the one most densely populated by the Aleutes. The excesses and terrible outrages of Russian promishlyniks, followed by the wholesale work of death wrought by small-pox, have utterly eliminated every human settle- ment from the length and breadth of Oonimak, upon which no one las resided since 1847. Ruins on the north shore show the aban- cloned sites of numerous large hamlets ; one was over four thousand
* Bishop Veniaminov, who witnessed one of these eruptions in 1825, describes the occurrence : "On the 10th March, 1825, after a prolonged sub- terranean noise resembling a heavy cannonade, that was plainly heard on the islands of Oonalashka, Akoon, and the southern end of the Aliaska Peninsula, a low ridge at the northwestern end of Oonimak opened in five places with violent emissions of flames and great masses of black ashes, covering the coun- try for miles around ; the ice and snow on the mountain tops melted and descended in a terrific torrent five to ten miles in width, on the eastern side of the island. The Shishaldin crater, which up to that time had also emitted flames, continued to smoke only. ""
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two hundred feet in its frontage on the beach. The fear and superstition which those tragedies of early Russian intercourse produced in the simple minds of the natives, who belonged by birth to this great island, became at length so potent as to cause the entire and permanent abandonment of their desolated villages, which were once so populous and well satisfied.
The craters, and outflow therefrom, on Oonimak have been, from time immemorial, resorted to by the natives as their storehouses for sulphur, and that shining obsidian with which they tipped their bone-spear and arrow-heads ; of it, also, they made their primitive knives, and traded the surplus stock to those Aleutes living else- where. They used the sulphur with dried moss in making fires, which they started with the fire-stick and by rocky concussions .*
Before entering the straits of Oonimak, we had a fine view of the entire sweep of the Krenitzin group, that presents a succession of the wildest and most irregular peaks and bluffs, everywhere seem- ing to jut up and fall into the sea, without a gentle slope for a human landing, as they face the Pacific billows dashing so inces- santly upon their basaltic bases ; the extreme eastern islet of the group is Oogamok, and it forms the opposite land from Cape Heet- hook on Oonimak, directly across the straits. A swarm of sea- parrots fly out from its rocky bluffs on the south shore, stirred into unwonted activity and curiosity by the near approach of our vessel, while a dozing herd of sea-lions suspiciously stretch their long necks into the air, smell us, then simultaneously and precipitately plump themselves into the foaming breakers just below their basking-place above the surf-wash.
It is very difficult to adequately define or express those varying impressions which are inspired by a panorama of these Aleutian Islands, such as unfolds itself to your eye when rapidly sailing along under their lee on a clear day. The scene is one of rare beauty. The water is blue and dancing until it strikes in heavy waves upon the rocky curbing of the islands, dashing up clouds of spray in white, fleecy masses against the dark-brown and reddish cliff-walls rising over all. The slopes and the summits of everything on land,
" A flat, flinty rock-upon it a layer of dried moss or eider-down was spread, then a sprinkling of powdered sulphur was cast over the moss or feathers, then a large quartzite stone was grasped in the native's hand, who struck it down with all his force upon this preparation. The concussion pro- duced fire, and, when feathers were used, a terrible smell.
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save the very highest peaks, are clothed in an indescribably rich green and golden carpet of circumpolar sphagnum ; exquisitely- colored lichens * adorn the stony sea-bluffs and precipices inland. Every minute of the ship's progress in a free, fair wind shifts the fascinating scene-a new peak, another bold headland, a narrow pass, unfolds now between two islets that just before apparently were solid and as united as one island could be ; a steamy jet of hot-spring vapor rises from a deeper, richer mass of green and gold than that surrounding it, and a dark-brownish column of smoke that issues from a lofty, cloud-encircled summit in the distance is the burning crater of Akootan.
Everything is so open here, is so plain to see, that when you try to find some points of resemblance to that picture which has chal- lenged your admiration in the Sitkan archipelago, you find noth- ing-absolutely nothing-in common effect. It is, nevertheless,
* The range and diverse beauties of the numerous mosses and lichens on these islands must serve as an agreeable and interesting study to anyone who has the slightest love for nature. They undoubtedly formed the first covering to the naked rocks, after these basaltic foundations had been reared upon and above the bed of the sea -- bare and naked cliffs and boulders, which with calm intrepidity presented their callous fronts to the powerful chisels of the Frost King. Rain, wind, and thawing moods destroyed their iron-bound strongness ; particles larger and finer, washed down and away, made a surface of soil which slowly became more and more capable of sustaining vegetable life. "In this virgin earth," says an old author, " the wind brings a small seed, which at first generates a diminutive moss, which, spreading by degrees, with its tender and minute texture, resists, however, the most intense cold, and extends over the whole a verdant velvet carpet. In fact, these mosses are the medicines and the nurses of the other inhabitants of the vegetable king- dom [in the North]. The bottom parts of the mosses, which perish and moulder away yearly, mingling with the dissolved but as yet crude parts of the earth, communicate to it organized particles, which contribute to the growth and nourishment of other plants. They likewise yield salts and un- gninons phlogistic particles for the nourishment of future vegetable colonies, the seeds of other plants, which the sea and winds, or else the birds in their plumage, bring from distant shores and scatter among the mosses." Then the botanist needs no prompting when he observes the maternal care of these mosses, which screen the tender new arrivals from the cold and imbue them with the moisture which they have stored up, and "nourish them with their own oily exhalations, so that they grow, increase, and at length bear seeds, and afterward dying, add to the unguinons nutritive particles of the earth ; and at the same time diffuse over this new earth and mosses more seeds, the earnest of a numerous posterity."
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just as attractive, just as grand ; but how different ! All is laid perfectly bare to inspection here-no dense forests and tangled thickets to conceal the surface of the diversified uplands and moun- tain slopes, or to hide the innermost recesses of the deep ravines and narrow valleys. While there is a vast variation in the islands, yet there is, to the mind of him who views them for the first time, the most lielpless inability on his part to distinguish or even recog- nize them apart when he happens to revisit them. They are seldom ever clearly defined, being more or less obscured in fog and heavy rifts of cloud. The top of a headland peeps aloft, sharply out- lined, while all below is lost in the mists and banks of fog that roll up there from the sea. Then, in remarkable contrast, only a few miles beyond, the rocks at sea-level and foothills of the next island will be entirely plain to your sight ; while everything above is con- cealed, in turn, by a curtain of the same moist and vanishing misty fog. Fog, fog, fog everywhere, rising and descending with the force of wind-currents that bear it-now veiling, now revealing the startling and impressive beauties of this vast sea-girt chain of the Aleutian archipelago. These majestic blue swells of the great Pacific join with those cold green waves of that lesser, shallower ocean of the North in holding with firm embrace the most impres- sive range of fire-eaten mountains known to the geographer. This cordon of smoking, grumbling, quaking hills and peaks, when once surveyed, leaves an enduring image, grand and superb, on the retina of that eye which has been so fortunate as to behold it.
As the little schooner bears up to the westward for our port of Oonalashka, after we have well passed the Straits of Oonimak, we sail into the shorter, choppy waters of Bering Sea-into its charac- teristic light gray-green hue of soundings. The precipitous walls of Akoon Island, rising like so much Titanic sandstone masonry everywhere abruptly from the surf, carry a broad green plateau, that rolls and extends high above the surrounding tide-level. Here, under their lee, on the north shore, we encounter one of those large schools of humpback whales * which are so common and so frequently met with in the Aleutian straits and passages. These animals rise and sink alongside of the vessel, in utter disre- gard of its presence; and even volleys and bullets of our breech- loading rifles rapidly fired into their broad, glistening, gray-black
* Megaptera versabilis.
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backs and sides do not seem to arouse or alarm them in the least. Down they lazily go, to soon rise again with a sonorous whistle as they " blow." A cloud of whale-birds hover over and settle on the watery area occupied by the feeding whales, ever and anon rising, to alight again as the cetacean fleet leaves its feathered convoy tossing behind on the wavelets of the sea.
Our skipper, who has been a whaler in his youth, tells us, with a quaint air of contempt for what we so much admire, that these fish-like monsters are of no consequence in the eyes of a wise whal- ing captain, for though they are large enough, it is true, yet they are the wrong breed of whales-they are lean, fighting humpbacks, which, if struck with a harpoon, will run like an express engine for fifty miles or more, carrying a boat and crew of our species, either down in its rapid rush, or else diving in the shoals, over which it feeds, it rolls the death-dealing iron out or breaks it off on the bottom.
A stiff head-wind causes the course of the vessel to frequently lie close in to the shore where the massive bluffs of Akoon and Akootan rise in grim defiance, and from the shelves and interstices of which flocks of sea-parrots and little auks fly out in circling flights of curiosity and inspection around the schooner. As we watch the lazy motions of the whales, we recall the fact that on the summits of these bluffs and headlands now before us, the natives of Oonimak, as well as those to the country born, were in the habit of standing through long vigils of daily and nightly watch, as they went whale-fishing long ago after their own primitive fashion.
Nothing fit to eat is, or was, so highly prized by the Aleutes or Kaniags, as the blubber and gristle of a whale. To secure this luxury these savages were in the habit of subjecting themselves to infinite hardship and repeated bitter disappointment. The chase of the "ahgashitnak"* and the little "aklioaks"t was the impor- tant business of their lives in times of peace. The native hunter used, as his sole weapon of destruction, a spear-handle of wood about six feet in length ; to the head of this he lashed a neatly- polished socket of walrus ivory, in which he inserted a tip of ser- rated slate that resembled a gigantic arrow-point, twelve or fourteen inches long and four or five broad at the barbs, and upon the point of which he carved his own mark.
* Yearling whale.
+ Calf whales.
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In the months of June and July the whales begin to make their first inshore visits to the Aleutian bays, where they follow up schools of herring and shoals of Amphipoda, or sea-fleas, upon which they love to feed. These bays of Akootan and Akoon were and are always resorted to more freely by those cetaceans than are any others in Alaska, and here the hunt is continued as late as August. When a calm, clear day occurs the natives ascend the bluffs and locate a school of whales ; then the best men launch their skin-canoes, or bidarkas, and start for the fields. "Two-holed " bidarkas only are used. The hunter himself sits forward with nothing but his whale-spear in his grasp; his companion, in the after hatch, swiftly urges the light boat over the water in obedi- ence to his order. Carefully looking the whales over, the hunter finally recognizes that yearling, or the calf, which he wishes to strike ; for it is not his desire to attack an old bull or angry cow- whale. He calculates to a nice range where the " akhoak " will rise again from its last point of disappearance, and directs the course of the bidarka accordingly. If he is fortunate he will be within ten or twenty feet of the rising calf or yearling, and as it rounds its glistening back slowly and lazily out from its cover of the wavelets the Aleut throws his spear with all his physical power, so as to bury the head of it just under the stubby dorsal fin of that marine monster ; the wooden shaft is at once detached, but the contortions of the stricken whale only assist to drive and urge the barbed slate- point deeper and deeper into its vitals. Meanwhile the canoe is paddled away as alertly as possible, before the plunging flukes of the tortured animal can destroy it or drown its human occupants.
As soon as the whale is thus wounded it makes for the open sea, where "it goes to sleep " for three days, as the natives believe ; then death intervenes, and the gases of decomposition cause its carcass to float, and, if the waves and currents are favorable, it will be so drifted as to lodge on a beach at some locality not so very remote from the place where it was struck by the hunter. The business of watching for these expected carcasses then became the great object of everyone's life in that hunters' village ; dusky sentinels and pickets were ranged over long intervals of coast-line, stationed on the brows of the most prominent headlands, where they commanded an extensive range of watery vision. But the caprices of wind and tides are such in these highways and byways of the Aleutian Islands, that on an average not more than one whale
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ALEUTES WHALING Natives of Akoon and Akootan killing Humpback Whales
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in twenty, struck in this manner by native hunters, was ever secured ; nevertheless, that one alone (when cast ashore) amply repaid the labor and the exposure incurred chiefly by watching day after day, in storm and fog, from the bluffs of Akoon and Akootan. The lucky hunter who successfully claimed, by his spear-head mark, the credit of slaying such a stranded calf or yearling, was then an object of the highest respect among his fellow-men, and it was remembered well of him even long after death .* Also, the greatest expression of respect for the size and ability of a native village and its people was the statement that it was so populous as to be able to eat all the meat and blubber of a large whale's carcass in a single day !
As we "put about " under the frowning walls at Cape North, of Akootan, our captain says that the next tack will carry us into Oonalashka Harbor. Meanwhile, as we stand out into the waters of Bering Sea, we have a superb vista of the rugged, seared, and smoking summit of Akootan itself, which rears its hot head high above the rough, rocky island that bears its name. The beaches are few and far between, and there is but little land upon this island to invite a pedestrian, since masses of dark basalt, vesicular and olivine, are scattered in wild profusion everywhere. Over the northeast side steamy clouds arise from the path of a hot spring, which gushes out of the mountain, so hot that meat and fish are cooked in its scalding flood by the natives. On the very crest, as it were, of this whale-backed volcano, are two small, deep lakes that once were the vent-holes of subterranean fires. In olden times seven settlements, with a population of more than six hundred Aleutes, lived on the coast of this island, which, with Akoon, was then the whale-hunter's paradise. To-day we find it utterly deso- late, inhabited by a poverty-stricken hamlet of sixty-five natives, who are located on the southwest shore. The able-bodied men of
* Then it was the custom to cut up the dead body of a celebrated native whale-hunter into small pieces, each of which was kept by the survivors to rub over their spear-heads, being carefully dried and preserved for that pur- pose. Again, in ancient times, the pursuit of the whale was the prelude to many secret and superstitions observances by the hunters. These primitive whalers preserved the bodies of distinguished hunters in caves, and before going out on a whale-chase would carry those remains into the water of streams so as to drink of that which flowed over them. The tainted draught conveyed the spirit and luck of the departed !
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this place spend the greater part of their time, however, far away from home on the sea-otter grounds of Saanak, being carried, like their brethren of Akoon and Avatanak, to and from that spot by a trader's vessel.
Closely joined to them is the village of Akoon, in which fifty-five or sixty of their countrymen live on the northiwest shore, who hunt and deport themselves as do those of Akootan. The Akoonites, however, enjoy the satisfaction of being nearer than their neighbors to that small, rugged islet of Oogamak, which stands in the path, as it were, of the great Pass of Oonimak ; here on the low rocks a comparatively large number of sea-lions repair, and the little hair- seal also. For some reason or other, more of these last-named seals are found here than elsewhere in the entire large extent of this gigantic island chain. Akoon used to boast of many mighty whalers among its prehistoric population of five or six hundred natives, who, in fading away, have left the ruins only of eight settlements to attest their previous proud existence.
While we have noticed the poverty of the Akootans, yet, as we contemplate the wretched little village on Avatanak, close by and facing the straits, we must call this the most abject human settle- ment, perhaps, that we shall or can find throughout the archipelago -only nineteen souls living here in the most abandoned squalor and apathy, principally upon the sea-castings of the beach and mussels. Yet this island in olden days was the happy home for a busy little fishing community which then had three settlements on the banks of a beautiful stream that empties its clear waters into the sea on its north side. The most revolting chapter in all the long story of Russian outrage and oppression of Aleutian natives is devoted to a recital of the savage brutality of Solovaiyah and Notoorbin, who lived here during the winter of 1763.
Steam-vessels usually make the jagged headlands and peaks of Tigalda Island as their first land-fall en route from San Francisco to Oonalashka and Bering Sea. They then shape their course into Akootan Straits very easily and safely. The currents and winds, which always cause a variation of the ship's course, never carry the vessel much to the right of Tigalda, or to the left of Avatanak, so that an experienced Alaskan mariner has but little difficulty-even though dense fog prevails, which only gives him fitful gleams of the rude landscape-in recognizing some one of the characteristic peaks or bluffs of these Krenitzin islands; then, with a known
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point of departure, he can literally feel his way into Oonalashka Harbor. He almost always has to do so, for seldom indeed does he enjoy as fair a sweep of these coasts of Avatanak and Tigalda as that viewed by the author, who scanned this rocky group in a calm, clear September afternoon of 1876.
To-day, Tigalda is an utterly abandoned island, given over during the summer to the undisturbed possession of foxes and those flocks of "tundra " geese which settle on the uplands to breed and preen in safety. When moulting here, they have the shelter of several lakes, upon which they swim in mocking security, even if crafty, lurking Reynard attempts to capture them. Near the largest lake on this island a settlement once throve. The inhab- itants had control of a mine of red and golden-yellow chalk, which formed the base of a pigment highly prized by all Aleutes, far and near, for painting their ancient grass, and wooden hats, and other work of the same materials. On the north side of this island is a singular cluster of needle rocks which rise, as twenty-eight points, abruptly from the sea. On them, in positive security, the big burgomaster gull breeds, and the eagle-like pinions of this bird bear thousands of heavy bodies in stately flight over and around these nesting-places. The shrill, hawk-like screams of those " chikies " can be heard far out at sea, over the noise of the surf.
Oogalgan rock, which stands up boldly, and defies that fury of an ocean in the mouth of Oonalga Straits, is another striking head- land which the mariner should be well acquainted with, for in times of arrival, when fog prevails, it is often the first land-fall made after leaving California or Oregon, when bound in for Oona- lashka. It is a bleak, tempest-swept islet, presenting to the Paci- fic a black, reddish front of abrupt precipitous cliffs, without a sign of vegetation in the crevices ; but, from the inside passages of Akootan and Oonalga, it exhibits two or three saddle-backed slopes covered with green mosses and lichens. Flocks of those comical shovel-billed sea-parrots breed upon it, and skurry in their rapid, noiseless manner all around.
At last our little schooner " comes about," to make that "reach " which is to take us into the peace and quiet of a beautiful harbor, and, with every sail drawing hard, she fills away, and we glide swiftly ahead. That richly banded waterfall bluff on our right, and the striking outline of Kahlechta Point, over the " Bishop " rock under it, on our left, are eagerly scanned as we dash through the
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heavy roll of Akootan Straits and its violent tide-rips, the surf break- ing on the " Bishop " and the point beyond it most grandly. A short hour, and the rough water is passed. We have entered Captain's Harbor, and are " fanning " along over a glassy surface up to our anchorage off from, but close by, the village of Oonalashka .*
What San Francisco is to California, so is Oonalashka to all Alaska west of Kadiak. It is the point of all arrivals and all de- partures for and from this vast area. It is most fitly chosen, and beautifully located. From earliest time, an Aleutian legend never failed in its rendition to the dusky people then living in their yourts and kazarmies to vividly impress upon the native mind a full sense of those pleasures of life and hope at Illoolook ; not, how- ever, as expressed so sadly by our own bard, whose inimitable poem declares that the wolf howled long and dismally from this lovely shore of Illoolook.
Cold on his midnight watch the breezes blow From wastes that slumber in eternal snow, And waft across the wave's tumultuous roar The wolf's long houl from Ounalaska's shore.
If Campbell had only substituted "Akoon " for " Oonalashka" in this much-admired verse descriptive of savage desolation, he would not have marred a famous passage by the slightest error- but, at Oonalashka, never, never was a wolf ever known to be. In 1830, however, two of these animals got over from Oonimak as far west as Akoon-on drifting ice-floes, most likely. They were speed- ily noticed by the natives, who killed them at once, so Veniaminov says, for they were cordially hated by the Aleutes, since these beasts " kill foxes and spoil the traps."
The panorama of land and water here in summer is an exceed- ingly attractive one-in its effect fully as charming as is the lovely spread of Sitka Sound ; but its character is widely opposed. If we chance to view Oonalashka in clear sunshine during a day in the summer months, we will recall this picture to our mind's eye often with positive pleasure. Here, strung along for half a mile just back of a curved and pebbly beach, is an irregular row of frame, single-story cottages, a large Greek church, and a fine parsonage,
" The natives always called this settlement "Illoolook," or "curved beach."
Elliott
ILLOOLOOK, OR OONALASHKA View of the Village looking West from the Cemetery
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three or four big wooden warehouses with a wharf running well into the harbor, two or more trading-stores, one of them quite im- posing in its size, and fifty or sixty barraboras-these constitute the abiding-places of the four hundred residents of Illoolook. They are placed upon a narrow spit of alluvium that divides the sea from the waters of a small creek which runs just back of the village right under these hills that abruptly rise there, to rise again, farther inland, to higher peaks in turn. A rich, dark, vivid green covers and clothes the mountain slopes, the valleys, and the hills, even to the loftiest summits, where only a light patch of glistening snow is now and then seen relieved thereon by the grayish-brown rocky shingle. These hills and mountains, rising on every hand above us from the land-locked shores of Captain's Harbor, bear no tim- ber whatsoever, but the mantle of circumpolar sphagnum, inter- spersed with grasses and a large flora, makes ample amends for that deficiency and hide their nakedness completely-in their narrow defiles and over the bottom-land patches grass grows with tropi- cal luxuriance, waist-high, with small clumps of stunted willow- bushes clinging to the banks of little water-courses and rivu- lets. This is the only growing timber found anywhere on the Aleutian chain. It never becomes stouter than the thickness of a man's wrist, and the tallest bushes in scattered thickets are never over six or seven feet high, rapidly dwindling in growth as they as- cend the hillsides.
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