AARON LEGGETT
Renaming is a loss of place names and language. The English-speaking world would first know this area as Cook’s River. It was eventually renamed Cook Inlet. In Anchorage we have a Campbell Creek – Campbell was a buddy of Vancouver’s and the former Governor of Jamaica with no connection at all to the area. Nevertheless, these names live on. The loss of indigenous place names is a first step towards the loss of language and, ultimately, a loss of control.
The commander’s decision to please Gore provides a glimpse of Cook the diplomat. The window of opportunity to head north was tiny and rimmed with ice, so to pursue a red herring was a complete waste of time. Yet Cook still did it.
Although Cook was in a tearing rush, he stuck around long enough to make quite an impression on the local Dena’ina, and to draft charts of the area so accurate that they remained in use until well into the twentieth century. Although Cook didn’t disembark there, some members of his crew did reach shore, where they engaged in trade with the local Dena’ina people.
AARON LEGGETT
At a place now called Point Possession there was a small Dena’ina settlement. Cook’s men came ashore and traded a dog they were going to take back to the ship. Dena’ina oral tradition and the journals of Cook actually line up very nicely, and this is how we know it was Cook because it was handed down in the oral tradition for almost two hundred years. This story was told about the dog that was being taken back onto the boat, but after it bit somebody one of Cook’s men shot the dog dead. This upset the Dena’ina – it was a good dog and we value dogs. There’s also a theory that Cook’s men shot the dog as an act of dominance – to show us the power of their firearms. These oral traditions and Cook’s journal accounts are important because early historians were not convinced about the ethnicity of the people Cook came in contact with in this area, but thanks to the oral tradition about the dog and its confirmation in the ship’s journals, we can prove it was our people who were here when Cook arrived.
And, of course, Cook didn’t miss the opportunity to raise a flag and claim the territory in the name of the King.
SAM NEILL
Just before leaving the inlet – and almost as an afterthought – Cook directed James King, the second lieutenant, to land and to raise the flag and take possession of this territory in the name of King George. It’s unlikely that the local Dena’ina, who watched the ceremony, understood the symbolism of what this meant.
Cook was still determined to find the North-West Passage. It’s tempting to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he had no idea what he was doing as he probed and charted the American coastline and opened the Pacific up to whoever would follow in his wake.
Whether or not Cook suspected what would happen after he left this place, he persisted.
By the time he began to tackle the Alaskan Peninsula in earnest, it was early June. Summer. Cook was racing against the clock to exploit a tiny window of opportunity before murderous conditions made the seas impassable. He knew he’d have to push his ships, his men and himself further than he’d ever had to push them before in pursuit of what could be an impossible dream.
AARON LEGGETT
You can’t help but marvel at what Cook achieved – the travel and the distances and the sheer exploration. That, to me, is rather remarkable – to travel all the way from Australia to New Zealand and Hawai‘i, then up the north-west coast into Prince William Sound, into Cook Inlet, down the Alaskan Peninsula, and all the way up to the northern part of Alaska. I mean, it is quite remarkable.
But retreat wasn’t in Cook’s vocabulary. He’d finish the task . . . or die trying.
PART SIX
SIXTEEN
CONTESTED TERRITORIES
In history we tend to celebrate those great empires . . . the Romans who conquered the world and built monuments and so on. But perhaps the greatest achievements can be found here, in these societies on the edge of the world – a place where people have lived for many thousands of years and left very little imprint on the environment. They lived harmoniously with their surroundings – they lived sustainably and they knew about subsistence.
SAM NEILL
Planet earth has no end of picturesque and delightful places. And when those places also happen to be blessed with an abundance of natural resources and a strategic – and defensible – geographic location, it’s not hard to see why humankind has been known to get quite grabby. If things were going well for the early-modern European empire builders, those regions were also easily accessed, furnished with all the things fledgling colonists required and generally pleasant to occupy once any combative indigenous people had been defeated. Throw a pleasant climate into the mix, and everything was chipper.
And then there was the far north Pacific – a remote and isolated corner of the globe that remains almost as difficult to get to today as it was during Cook’s era. All right, that may be a slight exaggeration. But only slight. And there’s no quibble to be had with the statement that – for visitors, at least – the region’s dauntingly inhospitable climate hasn’t mellowed with age.
SAM NEILL
Our plane to Unalaska has just arrived . . . people are getting off and, well, they look very pale and worn and shaking . . . some of them are actually kissing the ground. That’s not a good sign, is it? One of the passengers said later that in the twenty years he’s been flying to Unalaska, that was the roughest flight he’d ever had. So there’s a bit of a delay and I’m a little bit anxious about it – it’s already one of the most notorious flights in the world and we’ve had a bit of an update from a friend on the ground who tells us we have scattered snow flurries, a screaming wind out of the north, and rough seas.
In the eighteenth century, any concerns about the feasibility of establishing a presence in a place that, as far as Europeans were concerned, was designed to discourage human settlement were put to one side amidst growing interest in the region’s strategic and economic importance.
The close proximity of the two great continents of America and Asia was a major selling point for the European would-be masters of the universe. At its narrowest point, the Bering Strait is just eighty-eight kilometres wide. This geographic feature made it possible for the human migration that spread from Asia to populate the American continent. During the Pleistocene, which ended about twelve thousand years ago, expanding polar caps locked in a significant volume of water. This resulted in sea levels that were up to 110 metres lower than we’re familiar with today, a phenomenon that explains why Tasmania was once connected to mainland Australia, and how a prehistoric British adventurer could have crossed a bone-dry English Channel and stormed the beaches of Normandy without getting his or her feet even slightly wet.
In the furthest reaches of the northern Pacific Ocean, this exposed a body of land known as Beringia that once joined Asia and America. The land bridge was a steppe covering over 1.6 million square kilometres and blessed with fertile grasslands. It was here that three migrations of people crossed from Asia into America. And although Native North Americans dispute their findings, scientists believe that one of those groups had the itchiest feet of all – DNA testing has shown that all Native American and Inuit populations, including the Mowachaht people, can be traced to the same small tribe of wanderers who took the leap and crossed into a new world. They migrated along the Pacific seaboard and broke off in groups to branch inland as they continued south. Eventually, they populated the entire landmass, from Alaska in the north to the icebound southern tip of Chile.
As the polar caps began to melt, sea levels rose. Eleven thousand years ago Beringia was inundated, leaving the migrants stranded. The indigenous inhabitants of the northern reaches of the American and Asian continents, and those who occupied the islands that lie between them, lived happily and largely undisturbed for thousands of years. It was only once European powers decided there was a whole, potentially profitable, slice of the globe they had been neglecting that these remote regions saw their first s
erious incursions.
That, of course, was why Cook voyaged there. If he could find the ever-elusive prize – the North-West Passage – he could trump them all by gifting the Mother Country ready access to the lucrative commercial markets of Asia.
*
Cook was in a hurry when he made his first visit to the islands that are scattered like a string of pearls in a gentle arc that begins at the long finger extending westwards from Alaska across the northern reaches of the Pacific. Most of the Aleutian Islands are technically part of Alaska, but they stretch so far to the west that most maps of the United States don’t include them. They are sometimes lucky enough to be added in a little breakout box, just like the other remote American possession that features in the final chapter of James Cook’s story: Hawai‘i.
The Aleutian Arc, as it’s known, comprises fourteen large islands and fifty-five smaller ones that stretch 1900 kilometres across the Pacific. Because we’re talking the Pacific, with its much-celebrated Ring of Fire, the Aleutian Islands are also volcanic.
SAM NEILL
I think everybody’s got somewhere they really want to go to once in their lifetime and that place for me has always been the Aleutian Islands . . . I love volcanoes.
One of the most active of these pyroclastic giants – the Makushin Volcano – is found on the island of Unalaska, which is today home to the largest city in the archipelago. Its population is just 4400, and amongst those residents live people descended from the adventurous souls who first crossed from Asia to America – the Unangan, often referred to by non-indigenous people as the Aleut.
Cook’s first encounter with Unalaska was fleeting. With supplies on board the two ships running low, he needed to restock before they headed further north. He approached Unalaska with a view to refreshing water, anti-scurvy greens and fish. A thick fog descended, and he heard the ominous crash of breaking waves – not a particularly reassuring sound when you’re trying to find your way to safety and can’t actually see where you’re going. But even sailing blind as he was, Cook still managed to navigate a way to safe harbour. It was only when the fog cleared that he realised how close they had come to disaster.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
We could not help being struck with horror at the sight of the dangers we had escaped, having three or four patches of rocks above water about a third of a mile from one another and the land half a mile distance on the other . . . a more providential escape from instant destruction being scarce to meet with.
Not only had Cook managed to find his way between two razor-sharp lines of rocks, he’d avoided beaching the two ships on a shoreline that was perilously close. To top it off, he’d happened upon one of the most sheltered anchorages on the island.
Canoes of Oonalashka, John Webber, c.1773–84. Cook, in his journal, wrote: ‘they paddle in most excellent time, the foremost man every 3d or 4th stroke making flourishes with his paddle’. The top canoe from Prince William Sound is broad, with a solid platform for inland waters. The bottom kayak from Unalakska is bespoke, built for survival in the more tempestuous seas of the island chain. SLNSW, SAFE / DL PXX 2, 455685
Even today, English Bay – or Samagunda – is considered one of the safest harbours in waters that are unremittingly awful.
CAPTAIN DAVE MAGONE, Marine Surveyor
There are lots of places around the island where you can hide. In English Bay, you can hide from the weather no matter which direction it’s coming from. You’ve got the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Bering Sea on the other. The tides run back and forth through that area and it can give you some really bad sea conditions. The flood tide will come this way then it will go up to nine knots as the tide turns round and comes back this way – you’ve seen a white-water rafting trip? It gets like that in here. It’s like a washing machine. But English Bay is always as smooth as a lake.
After their near miss, Cook named the island ‘Providence’, though he amended that after a brief visit by the locals, who paddled out to the ship on their kayaks and told him their home was named ‘Oonalaschka’, meaning ‘near the peninsula’.
*
Cook must have been tempted to track down the Russians he was certain were in the area. When they had been on the Alaskan coast – at a place Cook gave the rather unimaginative name, of ‘Foggy Cape’ – the two British ships had been approached by kayaks whose occupants bowed and passed over a piece of paper marked with Russian writing.
Although none of Cook’s men could read Cyrillic – they later learnt it was a receipt for taxes that Russian fur traders imposed on the locals – this was undeniable evidence of a strong Slavic presence in the area.
But now was not the time to go chasing after Russian will-o’-the-wisps. It was July already, and each day of summer that passed was another day wasted. There was a nice breeze, and the north was calling.
Besides which, in the Resolution’s Great Cabin, Russia was causing Cook a monumental headache. He had the utmost respect for fellow navigators and took their maps at face value, so when he headed north, he did so with copies of Russian charts drafted by two Germans working in the Russian Crown’s employ – Gerhard Friedrich Müller, the founder of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences, and Jacob von Staelin-Storcksburg.
Müller, who’s widely credited with being the progenitor of the science of ethnography, participated in the first expedition that Peter the Great sent to Siberia under the Danish captain, Vitus Bering – the same Bering who gave his name to the strait. So Müller’s maps carried some weight, as did those revised by Staehlin. The fundamental problem was that until late in the eighteenth century, Russian mapmakers produced what they called chertezhi – manuscript maps lacking coordinates and drafted using river systems as reference rather than the astronomical observations Cook and his peers used when drawing up a nautical chart. Distances were often expressed in the rather imprecise measurement of days of travel, and details were recorded based on second-hand accounts relayed by fur traders and other travellers.
Cook had sailed into the great unknown with these charts, assuming they weren’t leading him up the proverbial garden path. That was a mistake – it has been suggested that Staehlin’s map, in particular, may have been deliberately crafted to be misleading to the English, Spanish and French ambassadors in St Petersburg. Whatever the reason for their errors, the charts compounded Cook’s difficulties in this already daunting region. As he followed the Alaskan Peninsula south, the Russian charts showed him heading north. Staehlin’s map plonked an island – Alaschka – in the middle of Bering Strait.
Confused by errors in the maps, by August 1778 Cook was on the edge of the Arctic Circle but found himself blown off course to the Asian continent without really knowing where he was. For a man who prided himself on keeping track of such things, it was infuriating – a sentiment captured unambiguously in his journal entries.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
A map that the most illiterate of illiterate seafaring men would have been ashamed to put his name to.
*
When the Resolution and the Discovery arrived in Siberia, it was 10 August – St Lawrence’s feast day, according to the Church of England’s calendar – so Cook named the bay in Chukotka ‘St Lawrence Bay’. The settlement on the same site is today called ‘Lavrentiya’. According to Staehlin’s fantastical map, they were on the island of Alaschka. But as Cook observed a group of people on shore heading away from the coast, he had other ideas about their location.
Approaching shore with three boats manned by well-armed marines, Cook – as always – led from the front. Forty or so locals approached with arrows drawn and spears brandished. In his journal, Cook described the men as quite different from the people he had encountered in North America, both in terms of their physique and their attire. Impressed by the intricate ornamentation of their weapons and the practicality of their clothes, houses and canoes, he concluded that the people who fiercely opposed his landing were the same people described by Vitus Bering in 1728 �
�� the Tchutschians. This told Cook that he and his men were not, as indicated by Staehlin’s map, on an island, but were actually in Asia.
The Chukchi – as they’re now known – are of Mongolian descent. But it’s also recently been discovered that they carry the same DNA as the first wave of people that populated the continent on the opposite side of the Pacific. This shows there were Eskimo-Aleut speakers who travelled back to Asia after the initial migration – not an easy journey by any measure, and proving beyond doubt the Chukchi maritime credentials.
SAM NEILL
For millennia, like the Polynesians, the Chukchi had been master mariners. They traded all around the Bering Sea and went to places like Nome – they’d travel over the ice in the winter, and in summer by boat.
The Chukchi reputation as mariners par excellence had made an impression in the court of Tsar Peter the Great. Rumours of the great land they had visited across the strait played a part in convincing the Tsar to sponsor an expedition to North America. But on Vitus Bering’s second expedition from Kamchatka, the navigator met his end after his ship was wrecked on Bering Island in the Aleutian archipelago. Survivors from his crew salvaged timber from the ruined vessel and cobbled together a ship that carried them to safety. The pelts they brought with them back to Russia were of such high quality, they inspired a rush eastward – it was the first wave of Alaska’s ‘soft gold’ rush. The Russian traders who subsequently set up shop in the Aleutian Islands would make quite the impression later in Cook’s Arctic adventure.
The Chukchi people Cook encountered in St Lawrence Bay were less than enthusiastic about Slavic incursions into their territory, and that had an adverse effect upon his reception – it’s thought that the aggressive response to the British ships was largely thanks to a case of mistaken identity. The Russians had acquired most of their knowledge of the region at the easternmost extreme of their empire from attempts to subjugate or avoid the Chukchi, who classified the Russians as their traditional enemies. Being master mariners, the Chukchi understood that there would be no Russian maritime exploration or expansion if they did not have seagoing vessels, and so the indigenous people embarked upon a concerted – and very successful – campaign to destroy any Russian ships that appeared off the coast. This made it impossible for Russian expeditions to winter in the relatively hospitable surrounds of Lavrentiya and restricted their navigational season. So when the Chukchi saw Cook and his men, it seems they assumed they were more Russians. Cook, with his customary apparent fearlessness, persisted.
The Pacific Page 27