To many, Alaska means a crude land of gold and
snow, whose history began with the reckless days of
the Klondyke rush in 1897. But long before the gold
strike there was a more glamorous time when the
Thlingets were a mighty nation of warriors who thought
nothing of travelling a thousand miles of open ocean in
their painted, high-prowed canoes, and Russia’s fear-
less courcurs of the sea were bargaining with them for
land to build up an empire for Muscovy.
Those are the wild and colourful days that tinge all
my thoughts of the North. And if my presentation of
Alaska’s history is touched a bit with Celtic mysticism
and romance, it is because my schoolroom was the
after-deck of a schooner, the teacher my Irish father
sitting on the water-cask spinning yarns and pointing
out the places of their happening as we sailed along.
Because of Dad and his vision we never sailed alone.
He had a way of looking back through the centuries to
other lands and other ways, and summoning for our
company all the shadowy adventurers who have played
a part in the discovery and exploration of Alaska.
And because of him, they still rise for me out of the
mists that blue the seas of Asia—Deshneff, the Cossack
robber-knight ; Benyowsky, the Polish pirate ; Chiri-
kov, the Russian; Vitus Bering, the Dane. They
still come swaggering along the decks of ships as
strange as the chartless seas they sailed — galiots, half-
deckers, eight-oared single-masters, galleons, sloops,
and ketches, and nameless flat-bottomed craft fashioned
of planks, caulked with moss and spruce-pitch, and
bound with thongs of walrus hide. And back of them
all, so faint as to be but a wraith of tradition, glimmer
the bamboo sails of sampans, whose shipwrecked,
slant-eyed crews mingled their seed with that of the
Eskimos along these alien shores.
To plunder furs in America with powder and shot
and the help of God ‘ so came the first Russians.
There followed the gold-hunting Spaniards, thc land-
hungry English, the exploring Frenchmen, the com-
mercial Yankees all venturing into the dangerous
waters of this unmapped land in search of their hearts’
desires. Fish and furs and gold, land and freedom
and adventure — these were the lures of Alaska that
drew, and that are still drawing the gipsy-hearted to
follow in the wake of those first Russian ships.
As for myself, after three years spent in the States, I
was coming home hungry for the romance of my
father’s old sea trails that stretch from Dixon’s En-
trance to the Alaska Peninsula flinging its chain of
islands across the green of Bering Sea. I was cominc
back to loiter again along the Coast of Ten Thousar
Isles, stopping where my fancy dictated to recapt
the glamour of my country for those who might
to read about an Alaskan’s Alaska.