Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  It was two A.M. as we trudged through the cold to the Elbow Room. Inside, the atmosphere seemed surprisingly calm—perhaps owing to the presence of two muscular cops who wore body armor and carried Colt revolvers, as well as pepper spray, retractable batons, and enough spare ammunition to kill everyone in Unalaska. We settled at the bar beside a broad-shouldered Aleut with a white brush cut and a windbreaker labeled “Alaska Hydraulics.” This turned out to be the Elbow Room’s owner, Larry Shaishnikoff.

  “Come to see a fight?” he asked, quickly sizing us up. “Not tonight. Not with the law in here.”

  Larry spoke with the clipped, slightly accented voice of the few other Aleuts we’d met. Sentence fragments slid out his thin mouth as if slipped through a mail slot. This seemed the Aleut way, now as in Cook’s day: nothing wasted, not even breath. “We don’t get mean fights,” he said. “Guys take it outside. They come back in, clean up, start drinking again.” Larry didn’t mind the bar’s notoriety. “Good for business,” he said.

  Larry had bought the bar for $800 in the 1960s, when crab fishermen began pouring into the town. He’d invested almost nothing in décor. “Seems to work,” he said. “No one’s here for the scenery.” Even if they were, the dim lighting, the cumulus of cigarette smoke, and the damaged condition of most patrons would prevent them from seeing much.

  Larry had a second job as a commercial fisherman. His father had been raised paddling skin kayaks and hurling spears at seals. “Dories and guns had changed all that by the time I came along,” he said. But Larry still hunted walrus and sea lion, as native Alaskans were entitled to do. Given Cook’s problems with “marine beef,” I was curious to know how Larry felt about the animals’ taste. “Cook was right—it’s delicious,” he said. “Dark and gamy, with lots of oil and fat.”

  Larry had been drinking double shots of whiskey for every one of our beers. Then he started buying us whiskeys, too. Things began to blur. I giddily bought a round for the dozen or so people seated at the bar. Then drinkers poured in from Carl’s. I weaved to the bathroom and found myself standing at the urinal beside Luther, my companion from earlier in the night. I asked him if he’d ever tasted walrus. “Yeah,” he said. “It tastes like Crisco, with mass.”

  At five A.M. the barmaid rang a bell, signaling last call. “Three for the road,” Larry said, lining up shots of Baileys Irish Cream and insisting we join him. After the first shot, he slumped forward, eyes bulging, unable to breathe. Roger hugged him around the chest and slapped his back. Larry revived, and drank another shot. “My wife’s dead, I am tired of living,” he said. Downing the last shot, he said he’d be going out in two hours for a weeklong fishing trip with his son. “He gets nervous out there,” Larry said. “It’s best if I’m with him.”

  The barmaid turned on the lights. They barely penetrated the tobacco fog. We stumbled into the Alaskan dawn, red-eyed and coughing. Roger slumped on the curb. “That was a monster piss-up, a real bender. I’m so rat-assed I’m sober.” We fumbled in our pockets and discovered that we’d spent all but a few of the $250 with which we’d begun the night. “If we’d spent that much on drink in Sydney, we’d be in the hospital by now,” Roger said, as we staggered in the direction of the hotel.

  Cook and his men spent almost a month at Unalaska, repairing and provisioning their ships. With the hard work of probing the Arctic finished for the year, Cook eased up, allowing himself and his men some much needed shore leave. Roaming the hills, Cook catalogued a vast array of berries. “One third of the people by turns had leave to go and pick them,” he wrote. Cook hoped that the fruit, coupled with the spruce beer he served his men, would combat “any seeds of the Scurvey.” He also permitted the crew to drink with the Russians and trade with natives, whom the captain judged “the most peaceable inoffensive people I ever met with.”

  In particular, Cook admired the Aleuts’ “engenuity” and “perseverance” in adapting to their hostile environment. Over knee-length skin jackets that Cook likened to a “Waggoners frock,” the Aleuts wore hooded parkas made of gut, with drawstrings around their necks and wrists. This outfit, and the well-sealed kayaks, kept Aleuts dry during long days at sea, where they proved “very expert at striking fish” from their silent, maneuverable craft. Fishermen also wore visored caps to shield their eyes from rain and glare, and decorated their hats with sea lion whiskers and ivory figurines that were believed to endow hunters with supernatural powers.

  Aleut women, Cook wrote, were skilled “Taylors, shoe makers and boat builders,” and they wove rye grass baskets of stunning “neatness and perfection.” He also took note of the curious way Aleuts warmed themselves with a blubber-oil lamp. “Placing it between their legs and under their garment,” he wrote, they “sit over it for a few minutes.” Cook was struck as well by the way natives had integrated Western conveniences into their daily routine, including Russian cloth and brass kettles.

  But he also sensed that Russian influence wasn’t altogether benign. Many young Aleut males had been “taken, perhaps purchased, from their Parents,” and raised by the Russians. Aleuts also lacked defensive weapons—evidence, Cook suspected, of “the great subjection the Natives are under.” He’d guessed correctly; Russians had disarmed the Aleuts to guard against revolt. “They do not seem to be long lived,” Cook added of the natives. He saw “very few” that he judged above fifty years old. This was probably because old people were particularly vulnerable to Western disease and other depredations arising from Russian contact.

  Cook made note of another imported blight: Aleuts’ insatiable hunger for tobacco. Russians meted out nicotine in quantities just large enough to keep natives addicted. “There are few if any that do not both smoke and chew Tobacco,” Cook wrote of Aleuts, “a luxury that bids fair to keep them always poor.” The sex-starved English also exploited this addiction. Charles Clerke put it plainly: “The compliment usually paid for a beauty’s favours was a hand of Tobacco: for one of inferior Charms, a few leaves of this valuable Weed.”

  On Cook’s first voyage, it was Joseph Banks who had provided a running commentary on native women. On the third voyage, this role was filled by David Samwell, a young Welsh poet and surgeon’s mate who seems to have spent most of the journey admiring “fair Damsels” and “nymphs,” and calculating how to bed them. He described one such encounter in Unalaska in vivid and rather disturbing detail. Led by an Aleut guide, he and four other crewmen hiked to a settlement beside a “deep Bay” near the English camp. At first, Samwell saw no signs of habitation, except for fish hanging out to dry, which “makes [the village] appear at a distance like a Glovers’ Yard.” On closer approach, he saw semi-subterranean shelters, covered in sod, with “a hole in the top of them, which we descended down a Ladder.”

  The interior of this longhouse stank of fish, Samwell wrote. Also, “a large Bowl of stale Urine” sat near the center. The inhabitants were filthy and louse-ridden. None of this deterred the single-minded Samwell, or his companions. “Having been used to many strange Scenes since we left England, we spent no time in staring about us with vacant astonishment,” Samwell wrote, “but immediately made love to the handsomest woman in Company, who in order to make us welcome refused us no Favour she could grant tho’ her Husband or Father stood by.”

  Samwell doesn’t shed any further light on this “in Company” congress, which sounds to modern ears like a gang rape. But he later observed that Aleut women permitted the English “taking them promiscuously according to our fancies,” so long as “We had but a leaf of Tobacco.” On the Alaskan mainland, natives had a tradition of welcoming travelers with the offer of their women; it is possible that Aleuts hewed to the same custom. More likely, given their subjugation by the Russians, Aleuts reckoned it was prudent to grant Europeans whatever they requested. “We pigged very lovingly together,” Samwell wrote of a later such foray, “the Husband lying close to his Wife & her Paramour & excercising such patience as would have done Honour to a City Husband while we engrafted Antlers on
his Head.”

  Both Samwell and Cook noted that the Russians disapproved of the English behavior. They “seemed to lament our depravity in having Connection with those who they said were ‘neet Christiane,’ that is not Christians,” Samwell wrote. He appended a dirty joke. “This Circumstance may restrain these godly People from meddling with any other Fur in these regions than that of the Sea Beaver.” Russian abstinence, however, wasn’t absolute. Before long, Samwell observed that many sailors had succumbed to “that fatal Distemper,” presumably introduced by the fur traders.

  In a rare digression from sex, Samwell also made passing mention that one of the Discovery’s anchors had been damaged. Cook put his armorers to work forging the iron into small tools to trade on the ships’ return to the tropics, where Cook planned to wait out the winter. In particular, Polynesians valued iron adzes modeled on their own, called to’i; for these, they would trade many hogs. “Nothing,” Samwell fatefully observed, “went so well as these Tois.”

  On the afternoon following our all-night drinking bout, I left Roger asleep, slugged down a quart of coffee, and attempted a restorative walk through the wind-blown rain. I made it one block before seeking refuge inside a building marked “Museum of the Aleutians.” This proved a sobering stop. The small, excellent museum traced Aleut culture from its beginnings in a migration from Siberia some ten thousand years ago, to its near extinction in the past two and a half centuries. Studying the exhibits, I was struck, like Cook, by the stunning “engenuity” and “perseverance” of the Aleuts in surviving one of the harshest environments on earth. Lacking trees, metal, and land animals apart from small hares and fox, Aleuts exploited every available resource to its ultimate extent. A single sea lion, for instance, yielded food, blubber oil, bone tools, fishhooks (from the teeth), and fish lines (from the sinews); the flippers became boot soles, and the intestines and esophageal membrane were woven into waterproof parkas or used to make skylights for subterranean houses. Even the troughs of urine in Aleut homes, which had so disgusted Samwell, served a purpose: softening animal skins and making dyes.

  Yet Aleuts, who had endured for millennia in these harsh surroundings, barely survived one generation of Western contact. The Russian fur traders who arrived in the last half of the eighteenth century numbered only a few hundred. Yet during that time, the Aleut population of about fifteen thousand fell by more than 90 percent. Russians killed roughly five thousand Aleuts outright. They also dispersed the population, carrying off young males to hunt furs in the uninhabited Pribilof Islands, or as far south as Russian trading posts in California. Epidemics and famine took an even greater toll, caused in part by Russian hunting of sea lions. Food had always been scarce in the Aleutians, particularly in late winter as stores ran out: the native word for “March” translated as “When They Gnaw Straps.”

  The Aleutian Islands became American territory following William Seward’s famous purchase of Alaska in 1867, and for seventy-five years the remote Aleuts survived in a state of benign neglect. Then came World War II, when the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor and seized several islands farther out along the Aleutian chain, the first occupation of American soil by a foreign army since the War of 1812. The inhabitants of the occupied islands were taken to camps in Japan, where only twenty-five survived. The United States evacuated the rest of the Aleuts, ostensibly for their own protection, interning them at wretched camps in southeastern Alaska, where many of them also died. Because of wartime censorship, the Aleuts’ plight remained unknown to the American public. Not until 1988 did the U.S. government formally apologize to the Aleuts and pay compensation of $12,000 to each of the camps’ few hundred survivors.

  I found the museum’s director, Rick Knecht, in a back office, studying drawings of Steller’s sea cow, an extinct species named for a naturalist who had traveled with Vitus Bering. Rick, a veteran archaeologist, looked as though he’d just come in from the field—or, rather, the tundra. He wore a lumberjack shirt, fleece vest, heavy boots, and tan pants made of double-layered canvas. Deep-set gray eyes and a bushy, graying beard lent his handsome face a biblical cast, appropriate to his period of study. Rick had recently excavated a site dating back nine thousand years, believed to be the oldest coastal settlement in America, predating even the civilizations of the Tigris and Euphrates.

  Given this, I doubted he’d have much time for Cook, who had visited only a nanosecond ago in archaeological terms. But as Rick took a phone call, I noticed a sketch by one of Cook’s artists hanging behind his desk, as well as a Union Jack set against a white field—a royal ensign of the sort Cook displayed on his ships. Volumes on Cook’s voyages filled his bookshelf. When I asked Rick about this, he seemed a bit embarrassed.

  “Cook’s just a personal interest,” he said, “something I do for fun.” He pointed at a pile of research papers he’d published, with titles such as “Trace Metals in Ancient Hair from the Karluk Archaeological Site.” Rick smiled. “Cook’s about seven thousand years outside my principal area of expertise.”

  “So why are you interested in him?”

  Rick glanced out his window at fog and rain and distant, snowcapped peaks. “This place is pretty extreme,” he said, with considerable understatement. The previous winter, 189 inches of snow had fallen on Dutch Harbor. For much of the year, the sky was dark for all but a few hours, and the weather was too cold and windy for people to step outside. “By the end of winter,” he quipped, “you pass people on the street with half-moon dents on their foreheads from leaning on shotgun barrels.” Yet Rick, a Michigan native who had excavated his way ever farther from civilization during several decades as an archaeologist, felt most at home poking around the globe’s fringes. He wondered sometimes whether Cook was the same.

  “Cook keeps seeing the edge and can’t resist leaping off it. Neither can I.” He laughed. “So we end up in godforsaken places like this. Leaper colonies.”

  He shuffled papers and resumed his curatorial mien. “Of course, Cook’s voyages are also an invaluable resource,” he said, leading me to the museum’s latest acquisition: a sketch by the Resolution’s artist, John Webber, titled “Woman of Oonalashka.” The drawing showed a pretty, round-faced young woman with cheek tattoos, a dangling nose ring, and a Mona Lisa smile. For Rick, the sketch offered a trove of detail about traditional clothing, hairstyle, and native adornment, including the bone labrets that Aleuts wore. (A labret is an ornament worn in a slit between the lower lip and the chin.) Webber’s portraits of Aleuts offered the only visual evidence of what islanders looked like at the time of Western contact.

  Webber had also drawn the subterranean settlement where David Samwell enjoyed the “favours” of an Aleut woman. Rick had used these sketches, and Cook’s charts, to locate the remains of the village, as well as the nearby inlet, now known as English Bay, where the crewmen had set up camp during their stay on the island. The sites lay at the unoccupied eastern edge of Unalaska, reachable only by a strenuous day’s hike, or by a long boat ride through the Bering Sea. “Some day I’d like to do a proper archaeological survey,” Rick said. “It’d be cool to find a button with an anchor on it and be able to say, ‘Cook was right here. He walked on this ground.’”

  We talked about Cook for a while longer, and by the time we’d finished, Rick was on the phone, lining up a fishing boat to take us to English Bay later in the week.

  Back at the hotel, I prodded Roger awake. “Found a Cookaholic,” I said triumphantly.

  “You woke me up to tell me that? Town’s full of pisspots, not counting me.”

  “Cook-aholic,” I repeated. “An archaeologist. He’s taking us on a boat to see where Cook landed.”

  “Did he talk about halibut?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Pollock?”

  “No. Just Steller’s sea cows.”

  “Do we have to eat one?”

  “They’re extinct.”

  “Thank God for that.” Roger sat up, holding his head. “A boat ride would be nice. Fres
h air, howling wind, mountainous seas. It’ll clean me right out.”

  We spent the two days before our trip exploring the environs of the town. Unalaska had only thirty-eight miles of road, much of it unpaved and bordered by the fantastic detritus of the fishing industry: sprawling salvage yards, five-story-high piles of crab pots, mountains of cable, nets, hawsers, floats. The landscape also bore scars from the Second World War: ruined bunkers, zigzag trench lines, rotted wooden barracks. At a school playground, children frolicked in a concrete pill-box. Cabanas and Quonset huts thrown up during the war had become permanent dwellings; even an old latrine block had been renovated and occupied. In the midst of this jerry-built, war-warped landscape rose brilliant public edifices, including a new school, gym, library, and city hall. Halibut and pollock might make for boring bar talk, but the tax that Unalaska levied on fishing boats had brought tens of millions of dollars pouring into local coffers.

  We wandered down to the waterfront, a thin strand of dirty sand with a sweeping view of the majestic, and still unspoiled, mountains surrounding the harbor. Salmon jumped from the water and bald eagles swooped all around us. The birds’ heavily feathered legs made them appear trousered, their sharp beaks and eyes as proud and piercing as those pictured on the dollar bill. For one of the few moments since our arrival in the Aleutians, I felt the wild, whalish grandeur that loomed just beyond every speck of humanity.

  Feeling as expansive as the landscape, I went over to chat with an old Aleut fisherman who stood by the water’s edge. I smiled and asked, “What are you casting for?”

  “Fish.”

  “How do you cook it?”

  “Don’t. I dry it.”