IN THE NORTHERN PACIFIC
Climate change may be a touchy subject in Alaska, but anthropologists generally agree that a drastic shift in temperatures facilitated the populating of North America. During the Late Wisconsin glacial period, beginning roughly twenty-five thousand years ago, so much water was captured in ice sheets that sea levels fell to more than three hundred feet lower than they are today. (Florida was twice its current width; the Aleutian Islands were a scimitar-shaped peninsula.) What is now the seafloor between Siberia and Alaska was exposed as a thousand-mile-wide strip of land known as the Bering Land Bridge. There is much debate over exactly how the first immigrants arrived in the Americas—it’s possible that they crossed from Siberia on foot or hugged the coast in boats—but Alaska was likely humanity’s primary point of entry to the Americas.
The first place in the New World to be settled was the last to be located by Europeans during the Age of Exploration. Following Columbus’s first transatlantic crossing, in 1492, the Spanish had claimed much of the Americas within thirty years. The Portuguese completed the first circumnavigation of the globe in 1522. Yet more than two hundred years would pass before the first known white men landed in Alaska.
Shortly before his death in 1725, Russian emperor Peter the Great sponsored an expedition that he hoped might answer one of the great remaining questions of world geography: Was Asia connected to North America? Siberian natives had shared stories of a “great land” to the east. Peter selected Vitus Bering, a Dane serving as an officer in the Russian navy, to lead an expedition to find out whether these tales were true, and if so to search for any evidence of European settlements that would preclude a Russian land claim. Bering’s first major excursion, in 1728, demonstrated that Asia was separated from other landmasses by the strait that now bears his name, but failed to find any significant new territory. It was 1741 before his second expedition departed from Siberia. Bering helmed one of two ships, and the other sailed under the command of Aleksei Chirikov, an officer from the 1728 voyage. After much fruitless nautical meandering, the ships became separated in a storm on June 20. Bering sailed into the Gulf of Alaska, and on July 16 one of his crew spotted the snowy eighteen-thousand-foot peak of Mount St. Elias. Around the same time, Chirikov sent eleven sailors ashore south of Glacier Bay in a longboat. His men were never seen again. A second party of four was dispatched and also vanished. Chirikov, having lost a sizable portion of his crew, sailed toward home.
Bering, meanwhile, landed briefly on Kayak Island, where the expedition’s naturalist, Georg Wilhelm Steller, recorded a single jay that resembled one he had seen in a book about the Carolinas—evidence that they had indeed found the Americas. On the attempted return home, with winter coming on, Bering’s ship ran aground. The captain was one of nineteen who died before the spring thaw, of scurvy. Forty-six survivors sailed back to Kamchatka the following summer in a boat built from the wreckage of their ship. With them they carried a cargo of exquisite furs. “The immediate result,” wrote William Dall in an essay adapted from a history lecture he’d delivered to his Elder shipmates, was “to stimulate every inhabitant of the region who could leave Kamchatka to push out and secure riches.”
Among the skins with which the crew of the second expedition returned were sea otters, whose luxurious warmth made them extremely valuable. Russian trappers quickly began to make their way east along the Aleutian Islands, exhausting the population of sea mammals at each stop. Their treatment of the native population, the Aleuts, was savage. Men were enslaved as hunters. Women were raped. Children were taken hostage, their ransoms often paid in furs. Diseases against which the Alaskans had no immunity were introduced, with devastating results. The Aleut population fell by more than 80 percent in three decades.
Whispers of Russian discoveries in Alaska filtered back to Western Europe through the court at St. Petersburg. The Spanish, who rather ambitiously had claimed all lands touching the Pacific Ocean, had concentrated their colonial activities in South and Central America. Sensing a new threat, they founded missions at sites further up the coast, including San Diego and San Francisco.
Great Britain was the other major European power on the North American continent, and it had staked a competing claim to most of the Pacific coast from Mexico to Alaska. Spain had the advantage of settlements. Britain possessed the world’s finest navy and one of history’s greatest sea captains, James Cook. During two round-the-world voyages, Cook had mapped the South Seas, including the previously unknown lands of Australia and New Zealand. On July 2, 1776, the same day delegates to the Second Continental Congress voted in Philadelphia to declare independence from Great Britain, Cook set sail from Plymouth, England, on his third great voyage.
Cook’s primary mission was to find the Northwest Passage, a hypothetical water route around the North American landmass that would vastly shorten sea voyages from Europe to the Orient. (Prior to the opening of the Panama Canal, Asia-bound ships could sail only via Cape Horn, or eastward around the Cape of Good Hope.) With two vessels, the Discovery and the Resolution, Cook sailed east via Tahiti, encountering in his path the previously unknown Hawaiian Islands. He and his crew mapped the Pacific Northwest Coast from just north of Washington State to the Bering Sea, bringing into focus for the first time the actual geographic outline of Alaska. Cook would never hear the acclaim for his discoveries, however—he was killed in a skirmish with Native Hawaiians in 1779.
An officer on Cook’s voyages, George Vancouver, expanded on his mentor’s cartography with a series of journeys along the Alaskan coast from 1792 to 1794. Vancouver had been instructed to determine once and for all whether a Northwest Passage led from the far North Pacific to Hudson Bay. On July 12, 1794, while probing the inlets of the Alexander Archipelago, a group of Vancouver’s men in longboats, led by Lieutenant Joseph Whidbey, encountered the mouth of Glacier Bay. They were unable to enter, however, because their path was blocked by what Vancouver later described as “compact and solid mountains of ice, rising perpendicularly from the water’s edge.”
Vancouver was a fussy, unpleasant man in a silly wig but also an extraordinarily precise mapmaker. The charts assembled by his crew are works of art, and more resemble Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts than the rudimentary atlases of Russian America that came before. So fine was their work that, eighty-five years later, when John Muir began his explorations in Alaska, it had not been improved upon. Vancouver’s surveys were no longer entirely accurate, however. For by the time Muir arrived, the mountains of ice seemed to have vanished.