HARRIMAN FJORD
The little-known glaciers of Prince William Sound, west of Cordova, were one of the primary enticements Hart Merriam had used to lure John Muir, who’d never visited the area on his six previous trips to Alaska. The scenery from the decks of the Elder did not disappoint; Muir declared the view toward the Chugach Mountains “one of the richest, most glorious mountain landscapes I ever beheld—peak over peak dipping deep in the sky, a thousand of them, icy and shining, rising higher, higher, beyond and yet beyond one another, burning bright in the afternoon light.” Almost no mapping work had been done here since Vancouver’s voyages, a hundred years earlier. The sheer number of glaciers, most of them anonymous, came as a pleasant surprise. Faced with one of the greatest labeling opportunities since Adam named the animals in Genesis, the boatload of academics chose to honor their favorite institutions. In a particularly fertile stretch that came to be known as College Fjord, one glacier after another was forever linked to an eastern school: Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Radcliffe, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Wellesley, Amherst.
Even along these isolated shores, the expeditioners encountered men who’d come north looking to make their fortunes. One entrepreneur had converted an entire island into a fox farm. When he noticed his animals escaping to a nearby island, he persuaded his brother to turn that one into a fox farm as well. A log cabin spotted next to a stream was home to a Norwegian prospector, who doffed his hat and bowed to the Harriman women. The copper business was treating him kindly, and he discussed his plans to visit the Paris Exposition in 1900.
The glaciers of College Fjord were calving so violently that icebergs clogged the waters. (This was, and still is, a common occurrence; the Exxon Valdez was attempting to avoid a berg discharged from Columbia Glacier when it ran aground.) The thundering avalanche struck the Elder passengers as a fusillade aimed at driving away curious trespassers. The rocks and gravel deposited by even the smaller glaciers “dwarfed anything I had yet seen,” Burroughs wrote. “They suggested the crush of mountains and the wreck of continents.” A sea of ice chunks halted the Elder’s advance twenty miles from the head of College Fjord.
The inlets of Prince William Sound reminded Burroughs of a great spider’s arms stretching out in various directions deep into the mountainous shore. Stymied in College Fjord, the Elder reversed course and steamed north toward the sound’s farthest reaches. There they encountered the massive bulk of Barry Glacier, a great white wedge stretched across the strait. Captain Doran’s U.S. Coast Survey charts confirmed that they’d reached the end of navigable waters. Harriman instructed Doran to move closer to the ice wall for a better look. A tiny slice of open water came into view at the glacier’s far left. As Captain Doran slowly inched the Elder forward, the passage opened into an entirely new fjord, previously unknown. Passengers rushed to the deck to view the gateway into a new world of ice.
Harriman biographer Maury Klein notes that for most of the railroad man’s career prior to 1899, he had been known for the prudence of his actions. Harriman’s reputation as a calculating gambler stems from the period starting just before his Alaska expedition. “He had burst from the cocoon of caution to become the most daring of butterflies, as if something had pressed upon him that great things could not be accomplished without great risks,” Klein writes. Harriman ordered Doran to enter the uncharted waters, declaring, “We shall discover a new Northwest Passage!”
Unlike his boss, Captain Doran was not undergoing a personal awakening. His job was to avoid damaging the ship or running it aground in one of the most out-of-the-way spots on Alaska’s southern coast. In Orca, Harriman had invited on board an expert on local waters, who strongly advised against going farther. He had hit many rocks in the area and, according to John Muir, frowned upon exploring “every unsounded, uncharted channel and frog marsh.” Harriman took the wheel himself, assured Captain Doran that he assumed full responsibility for any damage, and “ordered full speed ahead, rocks or no rocks.”
The jarring sound of metal on rock quickly confirmed the captain’s reservations; one of the Elder’s two propellers was lost. Harriman’s instincts were correct, though. As the ship slowly steamed through the gap, a narrow fjord twelve miles long, never before seen by white men, began to reveal itself. Along its sides, ribbons of ice ran down from steep mountains. Some were tidewater glaciers extending all the way to the water’s edge, looking like “the stretched skins of polar bears,” one expeditioner remarked. “In the solemn evening light,” wrote the poet Charles Keeler in a letter to his wife, “it was one of the grandest scenes I have ever witnessed.”
Perhaps thinking of the albatross who’d escorted them, geographer Henry Gannett was inspired to quote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner when recounting the “magnificent” mountains and glaciers that he would have the pleasure of adding to Alaska’s map:
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
By consensus, the new inlet was named Harriman Fjord, and the ice at its head Harriman Glacier. It was the most important scientific discovery of the expedition.
After Cordova, I flew home for a month to get reacquainted with my family. In early August I returned to Anchorage, which seemed an appropriate midpoint on my journey, being equidistant from my first maritime stop, Ketchikan (about 770 air miles southeast), and my last, Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutians (about 790 air miles southwest). By this time, the luxury Crystal Serenity’s sold-out burst into the silent, and ice-free, seas of the Northwest Passage was just a couple of weeks away. The ship was scheduled to make some of the same stops I was planning in the wake of the Elder, and I’d called and e-mailed a few times to see whether they’d be interested in having a reporter on board. Perhaps, I thought, some clever marketing executive would see the parallels between the historic, but comfortable, 1899 voyage of the Elder and the Crystal Serenity’s own history-making excursion, on which I assumed no one would be camping in the observation lounge. The stops on the second half of my journey—Whittier, Kodiak, Katmai National Park, Nome—were spread out along a couple thousand miles of almost roadless coast, only part of which was covered by sporadic ferry service: the three-day end-of-the-line run out to the Aleutians. The Serenity was making the same voyage, and the idea of traveling on a ship with its own casino and driving range sounded a lot more appealing than my other option: three days on the Alaska Marine Highway’s oldest ship, the fifty-year-old Tustumena, aka the “Trusty Tusty,” aka the “Rusty Tusty.”
One of the optional stops planned for the Crystal Serenity was Shishmaref, on the small barrier island of Sarichef, along the Pacific coast near Nome. Shishmaref had been in the news lately as one of several Alaskan villages that were in danger of falling into the sea due to erosion caused by climate change. Crystal Serenity passengers had been offered what sounded like a rather tone-deaf extracurricular activity, a six-hundred-dollar day trip called “Flight to Shishmaref: A Study in Global Warming.” Promotional materials promised that participants would have four hours to soak in the pathos of the situation. By unfortunate coincidence, the same day the Serenity departed, the residents of Shishmaref were voting on whether to stay and build another seawall—they had already lost two—or move the village to a new location farther inland.
The Serenity folks evidently had no interest in the pleasure of my company and set sail without me. The next day, I had coffee in Anchorage with Esau Sinnok, a Shishmaref native and sophomore at UAF, who, as news of the landmark vote spread across the country and then the globe, had become something of a spokesman for his village. (He texted a last-minute apology for pushing back the time of our meeting, but he had a good excuse—he hadn’t finished packing for the fall semester, and the BBC wanted to interview him.) The voting results were due in at any time, and Esau wasn’t sure about the outcome. “The people who want to go are the younger generation like me,” he said. “The people who want to stay are the ones who’ve been here all their lives. Most of us in Shish are family. But if we stay, we have to keep moving our houses. My grandparents have a big blue house on a cliff, where there used to be an actual beach.” He sipped his drink and checked his phone. “Shish might be underwater in two or three decades.”
Later that afternoon, Esau texted me with the referendum results. The village had voted 89 to 78 to relocate.