USA > Alaska > Our Arctic province, Alaska and the Seal islands > Part 45
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To the northwest of Cape Thompson the coast runs out abruptly as a low spit, projected into the Arctic Ocean for a distance of twenty miles. This is Port Hope. The beach everywhere is prin- cipally formed of dark basaltic gravel. To the north of a considerable stream not far from this point, and on a low and diluvial shore, is a large hamlet of Innuits, who have covered the turfy thatches on their winter houses with heavy blocks of angular clink-stones picked up from the sea-beach. The whole surface of the interior country here is raised several hundred feet above tide-level, and is diversi- fied with saddle-backed hills of gray and bronzed tints, separated by wide valleys in which a rich green summer verdancy is character- istic. Here and there conical eminences and perpendicular shelv- ing cliffs arise from a general evenness of the whole landscape. These cliffs seem to be composed of limestones, while their acclivi- ties are of slate and shale.
As we near Cape Lisburne a jutting range of bluffs, stratified in bands of grayish-brown and black, receive the full wash of the sea, and are called Cape Dyer ; but Cape Lisburne is the striking land- mark, and a most important one for the navigator to recognize. It is composed of two remarkable promontories : the southwestern one rises abruptly from the surf, is covered with loose gray stones, divested of the smallest traces of vegetation. The northeastern one rises gradually, and, although but thinly clad with verdure, it forms
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a pleasing and marked contrast with the gray head of the other. The first is elevated from the sea in distinct strata, with a south- western dip, and consists of layers of impure chert in its central and most prominent projections, and of a soft, friable slate and shale in its worn and more retiring sides. The front of the second is rugged and shelving, with very indistinct bandings ; it is partly covered with tundra vegetable-growths, and with fallen masses of gray flint. Both points to this double-headed cape of Lisburne are easily acces- sible ; they are about one thousand feet in height from the shore of the ocean, and both stretch their ridges away inland far to the southeast.
The highly elevated country here ceases at once to the northeast of Cape Lisburne, where the entire coast-line, away on and off to Icy Cape, and beyond again, forms a deep and extensive bay skirted by a dark, low beach. A gravel-flat fronts this again, filled with shallow estuaries and lagoons. The land of the interior rises from that beach in a series of low, earthy cliffs and in gradual acclivities.
The coal-veins, which Beechey visited in 1826, are about fifty miles to the eastward of Lisburne, embedded in a ridge some three hundred feet high where it juts into the ocean. This point is known as Cape Beaufort. A narrow vein of pure carboniferous coal is exposed there, about a quarter of a mile from the beach. "It was slaty, but burned with a bright, clear flame and rapid consump- tion." Again, at a point about midway between Beaufort and Lis- burne, directly at the surf-margin, the officers of the United States Revenue Marine cutter Corwin mined a few tons of this same coal in 1880-81. But no harbor for a coaling ship is near by ; the steady north and westerly winds of summer, which blow right on shore almost all of that short time in which a vessel can navigate the Arctic, make it very doubtful whether these remote mines of Alaskan " black diamonds " will ever be of real economic value.
That sand- and shingle-spit ahead of us, which the whalers have named Icy Cape with perfect fitness, is in itself almost invisible, since it is a mere continuation of the outer rim to a remarkable lagoon which borders this coast from Cape Beaufort to Wainright Inlet, over one hundred miles in length, and varying in width from five to ten miles, with an average depth of two fathoms. It is spanned by occasional sand-bars, some of them entirely dry, so that it is not navigable except for those small boats and oomiaks of the natives, who haul these craft across as they journey, thus safe
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and snug, up and down a desolate coast. This lagoon of the Arc- tic Ocean has several openings to the sea itself. Small schoon- ers can run in and escape from ice-pack "jams," if they draw less than eight or ten feet of water. The coast-line of the mainland at Icy Cape is a series of low mud-cliffs, varying from ten to fifty feet in height above a shingly beach, which is everywhere composed of fine, minutely comminuted, pebbly bases of granite, of chert, of sienite, and of indurated clay, the last being a predominant form.
From this point clear around to the boundary of our Alaskan Arctic coast at Point Demarcation that country presents the same appearance which we note here. It is low and slightly rolling, and falls in small cliffs of mud or sandstone at the sea-shore. During
Innuit Whaling-camp at Icy Cape.
the midsummer season it wears a hue of gray and brown, with lit- tle patches of bright green where the snow has melted early in sunny, sheltered spots. The lines of many streams, as they course in carrying off melting snows, are plainly marked over a dreary tundra by the dark fringes of dwarfed willows, birches, and alders which only grow upon their banks.
All along this cheerless northern sea-shore are small and widely scattered settlements of our Innuits, who burrow in their turfy un- derground winter huts, and who tent outside in summer-time upon these shingly gravels and clink-stones of the Arctic coast. They then live upon the walrus and kill an occasional calf-whale. For the better apprehension of these animals they erect lookouts on the beach by setting up drift-wood scaffolds, and climbing as lookouts
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to an elevated platform thus made. In the winter, when the weather permits, they net a ringed seal (Phoca fœtida) under the ice, make short inland trips, where they camp for weeks at a time in rude snow-houses, hunting reindeer, which are shy though abundant, and they trap a few wolves and foxes. Every July and August they expect the visit of a few whaling-vessels at least, and they are seldom disappointed, for such craft are compelled by ice-floes to hug this shore very closely, in order to get as far to the eastward as the whales are found ; sometimes, in spite of all the wariness and skill of our own hardy whalemen, great floe-booms, of icy make, suddenly shut down on that land so quickly from the north as to catch and crush the staunchest ships like egg-shells under foot. Then, indeed, is the sadness and the distress of the white men sharply contrasted with that great joy and happy anticipation of an Innuit who feasts his eyes and gloats in fancy over the abandoned vessels as they lie riven by ice upon those shallow strands of Icy Cape or Point Barrow.
It is more than sixty years now since Captain Beechey * camped upon and located Point Barrow, our extreme limit of northern landed possession, and in that time few changes, other than depop- ulation of the natives, have taken place on this coast. That same village of Noowuk, which he graphically described, still stands there on the tip of a low gravel-spit which extends out from the mainland twelve miles into the chill flood of an Arctic Ocean. All the land at its extremity not inundated by the sea in storms is now, as it was then, occupied by the winter houses of the natives. Blooming here in the short summer of July, on those desolate moors adjacent to Point Barrow, is the same dandelion and buttercup which filled the Englishman then, as it does us now, with thoughts of meadows at home, and some bright little poppies still nod their yellow heads again to us, as they did to him, on this low north end of Alaska. A tiny golden butterfly flits from flower to flower, and as they fade, it, too, disappears over frost-bitten swales.
Big ice-fields seldom ever fail to threaten the coast here, even
* Captain F. W. Beechey H. M. S. Blossom, voyage 1825-28, inclusive. The seasons of 1826 and 1827 were passed in these waters. Murdoch, who passed the winters of 1881-83, inclusive, here, has given an interesting résumé of the natural history, etc., of the spot. Beechey's account of the people and country are confirmed by him.
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when they relax their grasp in July. In a few short weeks, how- ever, they return to stay for the rest of the year and best part of the next. Such brief intervals for navigation in the Arctic Ocean during every July and August are those which lure whaling-ships, and the dark lanes of open water in white ice-floes are the last refuge of many hard-hunted whales, unless they dive, and rise to breathe again in that conjectured clear yet frigid flood of a polar sea, far away under the north star.
There is nothing more to see, or noteworthy to learn, at or be- yond Point Barrow, even were you to live and drag out a wretched year's existence in looking for it, so you gladden the heart of your skipper and his hardy crew by telling them to shape a course home-
The Ringed Seal (Phoca fœtida). [The common Hair-Seal of the Arctic Ocean.]
ward. Back through the Straits of Bering, wrapped in a chill thick fog, the little schooner heels, with a singing northwester on her quarter that holds her canvas just as taut as if made of tough wood. She fairly scrapes by the Diomedes-the walls of Noorna- book loom up high in a cold, gray fog-light, as though its bold, gray cliffs were right over her spars-but the crew know at the time that they are more than two miles away from that surf which noisily thunders on the dark rocks of these islets. That same chill wind, and gloomy fog-surrounding, follows them into Bering Sea --- not a glimpse of all the land and mountain, which they so plainly dis- cerned going up, have they caught going down.
What trifles often determine our success or failure in life ! Had it not been for a sudden sunburst from the gloom of a leaden fog
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which shrouded all about it in its misty darkness, and thus lighted up a lofty russet head of the East Cape of St. Lawrence Island, a little vessel bearing the author would have been piled up and thrown into foaming breakers which beat upon a low, rocky reef that reaches out from its feet. This gleam of light reflected from that headland warned a startled man on the lookout just in time to have her wheel put hard up, and thus luff our light trim craft in season to shave safely by.
St. Lawrence is the largest island in Bering Sea. It is directly south of Bering Straits, one hundred and eighty miles distant from the Diomedes ; it is eighty to eighty-five miles in length, with an average width of fifteen or twenty. The sea has built onto it quite extensively, in very much the same manner as it has filled out and extended the coast of St. Paul, of the Pribylov group. At Kagallegak, on the east shore, the island is made up of coarse feld- spathic, red granitic flats and hills, with extensive lagoons and lakelets. The skeleton of this island seems to have been originally one of low hills and ranges of granite, with volcanic outbursts every- where manifested at their summits, especially on the north shore. Between them stretch long, low plains, or gently rolling uplands, and perfectly smooth reaches of sand and gravelly beaches that border the sea everywhere not so marked by bluffs.
At Kagallegak your eye sweeps over extensive level plains to the northward, upon which a green-stalked and white-plumed tundra grass (Eriophorum) principally grows everywhere on the wet and boggy surface, while, on those sand-beach margins, the "wild wheat" (Elymus) springs up most abundantly, short and stunted, however. These extended low areas of moorland so peculiar to this island are made up of fine granitic drift and clays, lined at their sea-bor- ders with a low, broad sand-belt. The hills and hill ranges of St. Lawrence are rich in color, with dark blue-black patches inter- spersed which indicate a location of trap-protrusions. No shrub- bery whatever grows upon these wind-swept tundra and hills save dwarfed and creeping willows ; yet, a series of characteristic rock- lichens color such bare summits in their bright relief which we have just noted. The rocks themselves are reddish, coarse-grained, shining granites, with abundant trap-protrusions, that weather out and fall down upon the flanks of the peaks and ridges in dusky patches and streaks, so as to contrast, from a slight distance, very sharply with the main ground of pinkish rock, which is moss- and
VILLAGE AND ISLET OF POONOOK Mahlemoot Winter Houses on the Poonook Islets, 6 miles East of St. Lawrence
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lichen-grown, and colored here and there with areas of that pecu- liar and characteristic greenish-russet tinge of sphagnous origin. This dark marking of those trap-dikes appears like the presence of low-growing shrubbery from the vessel, as an observer sails by. Snow and ice lie all the year around in small bodies within the gullies and on the hill-sides.
The lower plains have a richer, warmer, yellowish-green tone than that cold tint of the uplands, while the sand of the sea-shore is a bright light-brown. Small streams flow down from these hills, and twist and turn sluggishly through the tundra as they lead to lakes or empty directly into the sea-a few parr, or young salmon, being the only fish in them that can be found ; most of the fresh- water lakes and lagoons are, however, fairly stocked with familiar- looking mullets (Catastomus), but nothing else.
The entire expanse of these lowlands of St. Lawrence are pre- cisely like all of those vast reaches of Alaskan tundra-they are great saturated, earthy sponges, filled and overrunning with wa- ter in midsummer-the chief and happiest vegetation upon them being that same beautiful tufted or plumed grass which we no- ticed at Michaelovsky, since the white and silken tassels of its feathery inflorescence never fail to charm even tired and travel- worn eyes. This grass, in conjunction with several rank-growing mosses, the trailing runners of the crowberry-vines, and little patches of the humble arctic raspberry (Rubus chamæemorus) make up that conventional tundra color of russet-green (flecked with grayish-blue spots on the slopes of stern northern exposures) which mark these great marshy traets of Alaska, and under which eter- nal frost is found, even in midsummer, a foot or two only from their surfaces. Small white shells of a land-mollusk (succinea) are scattered thiekly over these moorlands.
On the flats of the east shore of St. Lawrence a great abundance of drift-wood was piled in much confusion. Here the natives had a wood-cutting camp, hewing and carving ; its chips were scattered all along the beach-levels for miles. There are places, here, where the ice in some unusual seasons has carried large logs and pieces of drift-wood far back, full half a mile from the sea, and a vigorous growth of tundra vegetation now flourishes in between ; and there they lie to-day deeply embedded in the swale, settling down in de- cay-that slow, hungering eremacausis of the Aretic.
The Innuits, living here as they do, some three or four hundred
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in number, are great walrus-hunters. They enjoy a location that enables them to secure these animals at all seasons of a year. In win- ter the sea-horse floats on big ice-fields ; but during summer-time the " aibwook " hauls up to sun and rest his heavy body in and on the inviting peace of those beaches of St. Lawrence. A famous spot for this landing of the walrus is on the rocky and pebbly shores of Poonook (three small rocky islets), just five miles east of the sum- mer tents of Kagallegak. These tiny, detached fragments of St. Lawrence stand in the full sweep of those air- and water-currents which keep broad ice-floes in constant motion, and thus bring walrus-herds into range of Mahlemoöt hunters, who have a winter village dug deep into sandy flats of "Poonookah."
Naturally enough we regard the walrus with more than passing interest, for it plays so large and so vital a part in sustaining the life of human beings who reside in these arctic and subarctic regions of Alaska. Perhaps the only place in all this extended The Walrus-hunter. [A St. Lawrence Mahlemoöt-in winter parka with the hood removed. August 16, 1874.] area in which these clumsy brutes are found, where the creature itself can be closely observed and studied, is that unique islet, six miles east of St. Paul (Pribylov group) and about four hundred miles south of St. Lawrence.
Here the morse rests upon some rocky, surf-washed tables char- acteristic of this place without being disturbed ; hence the locality afforded me a particularly pleasant and advantageous opportunity of minutely observing these animals. My observations, perhaps, would not have passed over a few moments of general notice, had I found a picture presented by them such as I had drawn in my mind from previous descriptions ; the contrary, however, stamping itself so suddenly and decidedly upon my eye, set me to work with
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pen and brush in noting and portraying such extraordinary brutes, as they lay grunting and bellowing, unconscious of my presence, and not ten feet away from the ledge upon which I sat .*
Sitting as I did to the leeward of them, with a strong wind blow- ing in at the time from seaward, which, ever and anon, fairly covered many of them with foaming surf-spray, therefore they took no notice of me during the three or more hours of my study. I was first aston- ished at observing the raw, naked appearance of the hide : it was a skin covered with multitudes of pustular-looking warts and large boils or pimples, without hair or fur, save scattered and almost invisi- ble hairs ; it was wrinkled in deep, flabby seam-folds, and marked by dark-red venous lines, which showed out in strong contrast through the thicker and thinner yellowish-brown cuticle, that in turn seemed to be scaling off in places as if with leprosy ; indeed, a fair expres- sion of this walrus-hide complexion if I may use the term, can be understood by the inspection of those human countenances in the streets and on the highways of our cities which are designated as the faces of " bloats." The forms of Rosmarus struck my eye at first in a most unpleasant manner, and the longer I looked at them the more heightened was my disgust ; for they resembled distorted, mortified, shapeless masses of flesh ; those clusters of big, swollen, watery pimples, which were of a yellow, parboiled flesh-color, and
* These favored basaltic tables are also commented upon in similar connec- tion by an old writer in 1775, Shuldham, who calls them " echouries ;" he is describing the Atlantic walrus as it appears at the Magdalen Islands: "The echouries are formed principally by nature, being a gradual slope of soft rock, with which the Magdalen Islands abound, about eighty to one hundred yards wide at the water-side, and spreading so as to contain, near the summit, a very considerable number." The tables at Walrus Island and those at Southwest Point are very much less in area than those described by Shuldham, and are a small series of low, saw-tooth jetties of the harder basalt, washed in relief, from a tufa matrix ; there is no room to the landward of them for many wal- ruses to lie upon. The Odobanus does not like to haul up on loose or shingly shores, because it has the greatest difficulty in getting a solid hold for its fore flippers with which to pry up and move ahead its huge, clumsy body. When it hauls on a sand beach, it never attempts to crawl out to the dry region back of the surf, but lies just awash, at high water. In this fashion they used to rest all along the sand-reaches of St. Paul prior to the Russian advent in 1786-87 ; and when Shuldham was inditing his letters on the habits of Rosmarus, Odo- bænus was then lying out in full force and great physical peace on the Priby- lov Islands.
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principally located over the shoulders and around the necks, pain- fully suggested unwholesomeness.
On examining the herd individually, and looking upon perhaps one hundred and fifty specimens directly beneath and within the sweep of my observation, I noticed that there were no females among them ; they were all males, and some of the younger ones had considerable hair, or enough of that close, short, brown coat to give a hirsute tone to their bodies-hence I believe that it was only the old, wholly matured males which offered to my eyes such bare and loathsome nakedness.
I noticed, as they swam around, and before they landed, that they were clumsy in the water, not being able to swim at all like
Entrance Tunnel .
Interior
Meat Cache
Section showing Construction of Mahlemoot Winter Houses at Poonook.
the Phocidce and the Otariide ; yet their progress in the sea was wonderfully alert when brought into comparison with that terres- trial action of theirs ; the immense bulk and weight of this walrus, contrasted with the size and strength of its limbs, renders it sim- ply impotent when hauled out of the water on those low, rocky beaches or shelves upon which it rests. Like the seals, however, it swims entirely under water when travelling, but it does not rise, in my opinion, so frequently to take breath ; when it does, it blows or snorts not unlike a whale. Often have I heard this puffing snort of those animals (since the date of these observations on Walrus Islet), when standing on the bluffs near the village of St. Paul and looking seaward ; on one cool, quiet morning in May I followed with my eye and ear a herd of walrus, tracing its progress some distance off and up along the east coast of the island by those tiny
EnTIEM you re're
AN OLD WALRUS, OR "MORSE "
A Life Study, made by the Author, of an aged Male on Walrus Islet. July 5, 1872
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jets of moisture or vapor from its confined breath which the ani- mals blew off as they rose to respire.
Mariners, while coasting in the Arctic, have often been put on timely footing by a walrus fog-horn snorting and blowing as the ship dangerously sails silently through dense fog toward land or ice-floes, upon which those animals may be resting ; indeed, these uncouth monitors to this indistinct danger rise and bob under and around a vessel like so many gnomes or demons of fairy romance, and sailors may well be pardoned for much of that strange yarning which they have given to the reading world respecting the sea- horse during the last three centuries.
When a walrus-herd comes ashore, after short preliminary sur- veys of the intended spot of landing, an old veteran usually takes the lead of a band which is so disposed.
Finally the first one makes a landing, and no sooner gets com- posed upon the rocks for sleep than a second one comes along, prodding and poking with its blunted tusks, demanding room also, thus causing the first to change its position to another location still farther off and up from the water, a few feet beyond ; then the sec- ond is in turn treated in the same way by a third, and so on until hundreds will be slowly packed together on the shore as thickly as they can lie-never far back from the surf, however-pillowing their heads upon the bodies of one another : and, they do not act at all quarrelsome toward each other. Occasionally, in their lazy, phlegmatic adjusting and crowding, the posteriors of some old bull will be lifted up, and remain clevated in the air, while the passive owner continues to sleep, with its head, perhaps, beneath the pudgy form of its neighbor.
These pinnipeds are, perhaps, of all animals, the most difficult subjects that an artist can find to reproduce from life. There are no angles or elbows to seize hold of. The lines of body and limbs are all rounded, free and flowing ; yet, the very fleshiest examples never have that bloated, wind-distended look which most of the published figures give them. One must first become familiarized with the restless, varying attitudes of these creatures by extended personal contact and observation ere he can satisfy himself with the result of his drawings, no matter how expert he may be in rapid and artistic delineation. Life studies by artists of the young of the At- lantic walrus have been made in several instances ; but of the mature animal, until my drawing, there was nothing extant of that character.
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As the walrus came ashore they made no use of their tusks in as- sistance ; but such effort was all done by their fore flippers and the " boosting " of exceptionally heavy surf which rolled in at wide inter- vals, and for which marine assistance the walrus themselves seemed to patiently wait. When moving on land they do not seem to have any real power in the hinder limbs. These are usually pulled and twitched up behind, or feebly flattened ont at right angles to its body. Terrestrial progression is slowly and tediously made by a dragging succession of short steps forward on the forefeet ; but if an alarm is given, it is astonishing to note the contrast which they present in their method of getting back to sea : they fairly roll and hustle themselves over and into the waves within an exceedingly short lapse of time.
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