Travels in Alaska | Page 3

of the briny water hills
with the finest precision, now and then just grazing the highest.
And yonder, glistening amid the irised spray, is still more striking
revelation of warm life in the so-called howling waste,--a half-dozen
whales, their broad backs like glaciated bosses of granite heaving aloft
in near view, spouting lustily, drawing a long breath, and plunging
down home in colossal health and comfort. A merry school of
porpoises, a square mile of them, suddenly appear, tossing themselves
into the air in abounding strength and hilarity, adding foam to the
waves and making all the wilderness wilder. One cannot but feel
sympathy with and be proud of these brave neighbors, fellow citizens
in the commonwealth of the world, making a living like the rest of us.
Our good ship also seemed like a thing of life, its great iron heart
beating on through calm and storm, a truly noble spectacle. But think of
the hearts of these whales, beating warm against the sea, day and night,
through dark and light, on and on for centuries; how the red blood must
rush and gurgle in and out, bucketfuls, barrelfuls at a beat!
The cloud colors of one of the four sunsets enjoyed on the voyage were
remarkably pure and rich in tone. There was a well-defined range of
cumuli a few degrees above the horizon, and a massive, dark-gray
rain-cloud above it, from which depended long, bent fringes
overlapping the lower cumuli and partially veiling them; and from time
to time sunbeams poured through narrow openings and painted the
exposed bosses and fringes in ripe yellow tones, which, with the
reflections on the water, made magnificent pictures. The scenery of the
ocean, however sublime in vast expanse, seems far less beautiful to us
dry-shod animals than that of the land seen only in comparatively small
patches; but when we contemplate the whole globe as one great
dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through
space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole

universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.
The California coast-hills and cliffs look bare and uninviting as seen
from the ship, the magnificent forests keeping well back out of sight
beyond the reach of the sea winds; those of Oregon and Washington are
in some places clad with conifers nearly down to the shore; even the
little detached islets, so marked a feature to the northward, are mostly
tree-crowned. Up through the Straits of Juan de Fuca the forests,
sheltered from the ocean gales and favored with abundant rains,
flourish in marvelous luxuriance on the glacier-sculptured mountains of
the Olympic Range.
We arrived in Esquimault Harbor, three miles from Victoria, on the
evening of the fourth day, and drove to the town through a magnificent
forest of Douglas spruce,--with an undergrowth in open spots of oak,
madrone, hazel, dogwood, alder, spiraea, willow, and wild rose,--and
around many an upswelling moutonne rock, freshly glaciated and
furred with yellow mosses and lichens.
Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, was in 1879 a small
old-fashioned English town on the south end of Vancouver Island. It
was said to contain about six thousand inhabitants. The government
buildings and some of the business blocks were noticeable, but the
attention of the traveler was more worthily attracted to the neat cottage
homes found here, embowered in the freshest and floweriest climbing
roses and honeysuckles conceivable. Californians may well be proud of
their home roses loading sunny verandas, climbing to the tops of the
roofs and falling over the gables in white and red cascades. But here,
with so much bland fog and dew and gentle laving rain, a still finer
development of some of the commonest garden plants is reached.
English honeysuckle seems to have found here a most congenial home.
Still more beautiful were the wild roses, blooming in wonderful
luxuriance along the woodland paths, with corollas two and three
inches wide. This rose and three species of spiraea fairly filled the air
with fragrance after showers; and how brightly then did the red
dogwood berries shine amid the green leaves beneath trees two hundred
and fifty feet high.

Strange to say, all of this exuberant forest and flower vegetation was
growing upon fresh moraine material scarcely at all moved or in any
way modified by post-glacial agents. In the town gardens and orchards,
peaches and apples fell upon glacier-polished rocks, and the streets
were graded in moraine gravel; and I observed scratched and grooved
rock bosses as unweathered and telling as those of the High Sierra of
California eight thousand feet or more above sea-level. The Victoria
Harbor is plainly glacial in origin, eroded from the solid; and the rock
islets that rise here and there in it are unchanged to any appreciable
extent by