With This Grand Object In View I Left San Francisco In May,
1879, On The Steamer Dakota, Without Any Definite Plan, As With The
Exception Of A Few Of The Oregon Peaks And Their Forests All The Wild
North Was New To Me.
To the mountaineer a sea voyage is a grand, inspiring, restful
change.
For forests and plains with their flowers and fruits we have
new scenery, new life of every sort; water hills and dales in eternal
visible motion for rock waves, types of permanence.
It was curious to note how suddenly the eager countenances of the
passengers were darkened as soon as the good ship passed through the
Golden Gate and began to heave on the waves of the open ocean. The
crowded deck was speedily deserted on account of seasickness. It
seemed strange that nearly every one afflicted should be more or less
ashamed.
Next morning a strong wind was blowing, and the sea was gray and
white, with long breaking waves, across which the Dakota was racing
half-buried in spray. Very few of the passengers were on deck to
enjoy the wild scenery. Every wave seemed to be making enthusiastic,
eager haste to the shore, with long, irised tresses streaming from
its tops, some of its outer fringes borne away in scud to refresh the
wind, all the rolling, pitching, flying water exulting in the beauty
of rainbow light. Gulls and albatrosses, strong, glad life in the
midst of the stormy beauty, skimmed the waves against the wind,
seemingly without effort, oftentimes flying nearly a mile without a
single wing-beat, gracefully swaying from side to side and tracing
the curves 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.
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