Chapter IV

It was a brilliant, cloudless, tropical day at Agualta Estate, Trinidad; and the cocoa-nut palms in front of the pretty, picturesque, low-roofed bungalow were waving gracefully in the light sea-breeze that blew fresh across the open cane-pieces from the distant horizon of the broad Atlantic. Most days, indeed, except during the rainy season, were brilliant enough in all conscience at beautiful Agualta: the sun blazed all day long in a uniform hazy-white sky, not blue, to be sure, as in a northern climate, but bluish and cloudless; and the sea shone below hazy-white, in the dim background, beyond the waving palm-trees, and the broad-leaved bananas, and the long stretch of bright-green cane-pieces that sloped down in endless succession towards the beach and the breakers. Agualta House itself was perched, West India fashion, on the topmost summit of a tall and lonely rocky peak, a projecting spur or shoulder from the main mass of the Trinidad mountains. They chose the very highest and most beautiful situations they could find for their houses, those old matter-of-fact West Indian planters, not so much out of a taste for scenery—for their mental horizon was for the most part bounded by rum and sugar—but because a hilltop was coolest and breeziest, and coolness is the one great practical desideratum in a West Indian residence. Still, the houses that they built on these airy heights incidentally enjoyed the most exquisite prospects; and Agualta itself was no exception to the general rule in this matter. From the front piazza you looked down upon a green ravine, crowded with tree-ferns and other graceful tropical vegetation; on either side, rocky peaks broke the middle distance with their jagged tors and precipitous needles; while far away beyond the cane-grown plain that nestled snugly in the hollow below, the sky-line of the Atlantic bounded the view, with a dozen sun-smit rocky islets basking like great floating whales upon the gray horizon. No lovelier view in the whole of luxuriant beautiful Trinidad than that from the creeper-covered front piazza of the white bungalow of old Agualta.

Through the midst of the ravine, the little river from which the estate took its Spanish name—curiously corrupted upon negro lips into the form of Wagwater—tumbled in white sheets of dashing foam between the green foliage ‘in cataract after cataract to the sea.’ Here and there, the overarching clumps of feathery bamboo hid its course for a hundred yards or so, as seen from the piazza; but every now and again it gleamed forth, white and conspicuous once more, as it tumbled headlong down its steep course over some rocky barrier. You could trace it throughout like a long line of light among all the tangled, glossy, dark-green foliage of that wild and overgrown tropical gully.

The Honourable James Hawthorn, owner of Agualta, was sitting out in a cane armchair, under the broad shadow of the great mango-tree on the grassy terrace in front of the piazza. A venerable gray-haired, gray-bearded man, with a calm, clear-cut, resolute face, the very counterpart of his son Edward’s, only grown some thirty years older, and sterner too, and more unbending.

‘Mr Dupuy’s coming round this morning, Mary,’ Mr Hawthorn said to the placid, gentle, old lady in the companion-chair beside him. ‘He wants to look at some oxen I’m going to get rid of, and he thinks, perhaps, he’d like to buy them.’

‘Mr Dupuy!’ Mrs Hawthorn answered, with a slight shudder of displeasure as she spoke. ‘I really wish he wasn’t coming. I can’t bear that man, somehow. He always seems to me the worst embodiment of the bad old days that are dead and gone, Jamie.’

The old gentleman hummed an air to himself reflectively. ‘We mustn’t be too hard upon him, my dear,’ he said after a moment’s pause, in a tone of perfect resignation. ‘They were brought up in a terrible school, those old-time slavery Trinidad folk, and they can’t help bearing the impress of a bad system upon them to the very last moment of their existence. I think so meanly of them for their pride and intolerance, that I take care not to imitate it. You remember what Shelley says: “Let scorn be not repaid with scorn.” That’s how I always feel, Mary, towards Mr Dupuy and all his fellows.’

Mrs Hawthorn bit her lip as she answered slowly: ‘All the same, Jamie, I wish he wasn’t coming here this morning; and this the English mail-day too! We shall get our letter from Edward by-and-by, you know, dear. I hate to have these people coming breaking in upon us the very day we want to be at home by ourselves, to have a quiet hour alone with our dear boy over in England.’

‘Here they come, at anyrate, Mary,’ the old gentleman said, pointing with his hand down the steep ravine to where a couple of men on mountain ponies were slowly toiling up the long zigzag path that climbed the shoulder. ‘Here they come, Theodore Dupuy himself, and that young Tom Dupuy as well, behind him. There’s one comfort, at anyrate, in the position of Agualta—you can never possibly be taken by surprise; you can always see your visitors coming half an hour before they get here.—Run in, dear, and see about having enough for lunch, will you, for Tom Dupuy’s sure to stop until he’s had a glass of our old Madeira.’

‘I dislike Tom Dupuy, I think, even worse than his old uncle, Jamie,’ the bland old lady answered softly in her pleasant voice, exactly as if she was saying that she loved him dearly. ‘He’s a horrid young man, so selfish and narrow-minded; and I hope you won’t ever ask him again to come to Agualta. I can hardly even manage to be decently polite to him.’

The two strangers slowly wound their way up the interminable zigzags that led along the steep shoulders of the Agualta peak, and emerged at last from under the shadow of the green mango grove close beside the grassy terrace in front of the piazza. The elder of the two, Nora’s father, was a jovial, round-faced, close-shaven man, with a copious growth of flowing white hair, that fell in long patriarchal locks around his heavy neck and shoulders; a full-blooded, easy-going, proud face to look at, yet not without a certain touch of gentlemanly culture and old-fashioned courtesy. The younger man, Tom Dupuy, his nephew, looked exactly what he was—a born boor, awkward in gait and lubberly in feature, with a heavy hanging lower jaw, and a pair of sleepy boiled fish eyes, that stared vacantly out in sheepish wonder upon a hopelessly dull and blank creation.

Mr Hawthorn moved courteously to the gate to meet them. ‘It’s a long pull and a steep pull up the hill, Mr Dupuy,’ he said as he shook hands with him. ‘Let me take your pony round to the stables.—Here, Jo!’ to a negro boy who stood showing his white teeth beside the gateway; ‘put up Mr Dupuy’s horse, do you hear, my lad, and Mr Tom’s too, will you?—How are you, Mr Tom? So you’ve come over with your uncle as well, to see this stock I want to sell, have you?’

The elder Dupuy bowed politely as Mr Hawthorn held out his hand, and took it with something of the dignified old West Indian courtesy; he had been to school at Winchester forty years before, and the remote result of that half-forgotten old English training was still plainly visible even now in a certain outer urbanity and suavity of demeanour. But young Tom held out his hand awkwardly like a born boor, and dropped it again snappishly as soon as Mr Hawthorn had taken it, merely answering, in a slow drawling West Indian voice, partly caught from his own negro servants: ‘Yes, I’ve come over to see the stock; we want some oxen. Cane’s good this season; we shall have a capital cutting.’

‘Is the English mail in?’ Mr Hawthorn asked anxiously, as they took their seats in the piazza to rest themselves for a while after their ride, before proceeding to active business. That one solitary fortnightly channel of communication with the outer world assumes an importance in the eyes of remote colonists which can hardly even be comprehended by our bustling, stay-at-home English people.

‘It is,’ Mr Dupuy replied, taking the proffered glass of Madeira from his host as he answered. Old-fashioned wine-drinking hospitality still prevails largely in the West Indies. ‘I got my letters just as I was starting. Yours will be here before long, I don’t doubt, Mr Hawthorn. I had news, important news in my budget this morning. My daughter, sir, my daughter Nora, who has been completing her education in England, is coming out to Trinidad by the next steamer.’

‘You must be delighted at the prospect of seeing her,’ Mr Hawthorn answered with a slight sigh. ‘I only wish I were going as soon to see my dear boy Edward.’

Mr Dupuy’s lip curled faintly as he replied in a careless manner: ‘Ah, yes, to be sure. Your boy’s in England, Mr Hawthorn, isn’t he? If I recollect right, you sent him to Cambridge.—Ah, yes, I thought so, to Cambridge. A very excellent thing for you to do with him. If you take my advice, my dear sir, you’ll let him stop in the old country—a much better place for him in every way, than this island.’

‘I mean to,’ Mr Hawthorn answered in a low voice. ‘God forbid that I should ever be a party to bringing him out here to Trinidad.’

‘Oh, certainly not—certainly not. I quite agree with you. Far better for him to stop where he is, and take his chance of making a living for himself in England. Not that he can be at any loss in that matter either. You must be in a position to make him very comfortable too, Mr Hawthorn! Fine estate, Agualta, and turns out a capital brand of rum and sugar.’

‘Best vacuum-pan and centrifugal in the whole island,’ Tom Dupuy put in parenthetically. ‘Turned out four hundred and thirty-four hogsheads of sugar and three hundred and ninety puncheons of rum last season—largest yield of any estate in the Windward Islands except Mount Arlington. You don’t catch me out of it in any matter where sugar’s in question, I can tell you.’

‘But my daughter, Mr Hawthorn,’ the elder Dupuy went on, smiling, and sipping his Madeira in a leisurely fashion—‘my daughter means to come out to join me by the next steamer; and my nephew Tom and I are naturally looking forward to her approaching arrival with the greatest anxiety. A young lady in Miss Dupuy’s position, I need hardly say to you, who has been finishing her education at a good school in England, comes out to Trinidad under exceptionally favourable circumstances. She will have much here to interest her in society, and we hope she will enjoy herself and make herself happy.’

‘For my part,’ Tom Dupuy put in brusquely, ‘I don’t hold at all with this sending young women from Trinidad across the water to get educated in England—not a bit of it. What’s the good of it?—that’s what I always want to know—what’s the good of it? What do they pick up there, I should like to hear, except a lot of trumpery fal-lal, that turns their heads, and fills them brimful of all sorts of romantic topsy-turvy notions? I’ve never been to England myself, thank goodness, and what’s more, I don’t ever want to go, that’s certain. But I’ve known lots of fellows that have been, and have spent no end of a heap of money over their education too, at one place or another—I don’t even know the names of ’em—and when they’ve come back, so far as I could see, they’ve never known a bit more about rum or sugar than other fellows that had never set foot for a single minute outside the island—no, nor for that matter, not so much either. Of course, it’s all very well for a person in your son’s position, Mr Hawthorn; that’s quite another matter. He’s gone to England, and he’s going to stay there. If I were he, I should do as he does. But what on earth can be the use of sending a girl in my cousin Nora’s station in life over to England, just on purpose to set her against her own flesh and blood and her own people? Why, it really passes my comprehension.’

Mr Dupuy’s forehead puckered slightly as Tom spoke, and the corners of his mouth twitched ominously; but he answered in a tone of affected nonchalance: ‘It’s a pity, Mr Hawthorn, that my nephew Tom should take this unfavourable view of an English education, because, you see, it’s our intention, as soon as my daughter Miss Dupuy arrives from England, to arrange a marriage at a very early date between himself and his cousin Nora. Pimento Valley, as you know, is entailed in the male line to my nephew Tom; and Orange Grove is in my own disposal, to leave, of course, to my only daughter. But Mr Tom Dupuy and I both think it would be a great pity that the family estates should be divided, and should in part pass out of the family; so we’ve arranged between us that Mr Tom is to marry my daughter Nora, and that Orange Grove and Pimento Valley are to pass together to them and to their children’s children.’

‘An excellent arrangement,’ Mr Hawthorn put in, with a slight smile. ‘But suppose—just for argument’s sake—that Miss Dupuy were not to fall in with it?’

Mr Dupuy’s brow clouded over still more evidently. ‘Not to fall in with it!’ he cried excitedly, tossing off the remainder of his Madeira—‘not to fall in with it!—Why, Mr Hawthorn, what do you mean, sir? Of course, if her father bids her, she’ll fall in with it immediately. If she doesn’t—why, then, sir, I’ll just simply have to make her. She shall marry Tom Dupuy the minute I order her to. She should marry a one-eyed man with a wooden leg if her father commanded it. She shall do whatever I tell her. I’ll stand no refusing and shilly-shallying. Let me tell you, sir, if there’s a vice that I hate and detest, it’s the vice of obstinacy. But I’ll stand no obstinacy.’

‘No obstinacy in those about you,’ Mr Hawthorn put in suggestively.

‘No, sir, no—not in those about me. Other people, of course, I can’t be answerable for, though I’d like to flog every obstinate fellow I come across, just to cure him of his confounded temper. O no, sir; I can’t endure obstinacy—in man or beast, I can’t endure it.’

‘So it would seem,’ Mr Hawthorn replied drily. ‘I hope sincerely, Miss Dupuy will find the choice you have made for her a suitable and satisfactory one.’

‘Suitable, sir! Why, of course it’s suitable; and as to satisfactory, well, if I say she’s got to take him, she’ll have to be satisfied with him, willy-nilly.’

‘But she won’t!’ Tom Dupuy interrupted sullenly, flicking his boot with his short riding-whip in a vicious fashion. ‘She won’t, you may take my word for it, Uncle Theodore. I can’t imagine why it is; but these young women who’ve been educated in England, they’ll never be satisfied with a planter for a husband. They think a gentleman and a son of gentlemen for fifty generations isn’t a good enough match for such fine ladies as themselves; and they go running off after some of these red-coated military fellows down in the garrison over yonder, many of whom, to my certain knowledge, Mr Hawthorn, are nothing more than the sons of tradesmen across there in England. I’ll bet you a sovereign, Uncle Theodore, that Nora’ll refuse to so much as look at the heir of Pimento Valley, the minute she sees him.’

‘But why do you think so, Mr Tom,’ their host put in, ‘before the young lady has even landed on the island?’

‘Ah, I know well enough,’ Tom Dupuy answered, with a curious leer of unintelligent cunning. ‘I know the ways and the habits of the women. They go away over there to England; they get themselves crammed with French and German, and music and drawing, and all kinds of unnecessary accomplishments. They pick up a lot of nonsensical new-fangled notions about Am I not a Man and a Brother? and all that kind of humbug. They think an awful lot of themselves because they can play and sing and gabble Italian. And they despise us West Indians, gentlemen and planters, because we can’t parley-voo all their precious foreign lingoes, and don’t know as much as they do about who composed _Yankee Doodle_. I know them—I know them; I know their ways and their manners. Culture they call it. I call it a precious lot of trumpery nonsense. Why, Mr Hawthorn, I assure you I’ve known some of these fine new-fangled English-taught young women who’d sooner talk to a coloured doctor, as black as a common nigger almost, just because he’d been educated at Oxford, or Edinburgh, or somewhere, than to me myself, the tenth Dupuy in lineal succession at Pimento Valley.’

‘Indeed,’ Mr Hawthorn answered innocently—no other alternative phrase committing him, as he thought, to so small an opinion on the merits of the question.—‘But do you know, Mr Tom, I don’t believe any person of the Dupuy blood is very likely to take up with these strange modern English heresies that so much surprise you.’

‘Quite true, sir,’ Mr Dupuy the elder answered with prompt self-satisfaction, mistaking his host’s delicate tone of covert satire for the voice of hearty concurrence and full approval. ‘You’re quite right there, Mr Hawthorn, I’m certain. No born Dupuy of Orange Grove would ever be taken in by any of that silly clap-trap humanitarian rubbish. No foolish Exeter Hall nonsense pertains to the fighting Dupuys, sir, I can assure you—root and branch, not a single ounce of it. It isn’t in them, Mr Hawthorn—it isn’t in them.’

‘So I think,’ Mr Hawthorn answered quietly. ‘I quite agree with you—it isn’t in them.’

As he spoke, a negro servant, neatly dressed in a cool white linen livery, entered the piazza with a small budget of letters on an old-fashioned Spanish silver salver. Mr Hawthorn took them up eagerly. ‘The English mail!’ he said with an apologetic look towards his two guests. ‘You’ll excuse my just glancing through them, Mr Dupuy, won’t you? I can never rest, the moment the mail’s in, until I know that my dear boy in England is still really well and happy.’

Mr Dupuy nodded assent with a condescending smile; and the master of Agualta broke open his son’s envelope with a little eager hasty flutter. He ran his eye hurriedly down the first page; and then, with a sudden cry, he laid down the letter rapidly on the table, and called out aloud: ‘Mary, Mary!’

Mrs Hawthorn came out at once from the little boudoir behind the piazza, whose cool Venetian blinds gave directly upon the part where they were sitting.

‘Mary, Mary!’ Mr Hawthorn cried, utterly regardless of his two visitors’ presence, ‘what on earth do you think has happened? Edward’s coming out to us—coming out immediately. Oh, my poor boy, my poor boy, this is too unexpected! He’s coming out to us at once, at once, without a single moment’s warning!’

Mrs Hawthorn took up the letter and read it through hastily with a woman’s quickness; then she laid it down again, and looked blankly at her trembling husband in evident distress; but neither of them said a single word to one another.

The elder Dupuy was the first to break the ominous silence. ‘Not by the next steamer, I suppose?’ he inquired curiously.

Mr Hawthorn nodded in reply. ‘Yes, yes; by the next steamer.’

As he spoke, Tom Dupuy glanced at his uncle with a meaning glance, and then went on stolidly as ever: ‘How about these cattle, though, Mr Hawthorn?’

The old man looked back at him half angrily, half contemptuously. ‘Go and look at the cattle yourself, if you like, Mr Tom,’ he said haughtily.—‘Here, Jo, you take young Mr Dupuy round to see those Cuban bullocks in the grass-piece, will you? I shall meet your uncle at the Legislative Council on Thursday, and then, if he likes, he can talk over prices with me. I have something else to do at present beside haggling and debating over the sale of bullocks; I must go down to Port-of-Spain immediately, immediately—this very minute.—You must please excuse me, Mr Dupuy, for my business is most important.—Dick, Isaac, Thomas!—some one of you there, get Pride of Barbadoes saddled at once, very fast, will you, and bring her round here to me at the front-door the moment she’s ready.’

‘And Tom,’ the elder Dupuy whispered to his nephew confidentially, as soon as their host had gone back into the house to prepare for his journey, ‘I have business, too, in Port-of-Spain, immediately. You go and look at the bullocks if you like—that’s your department. I shall ride down the hills at once, and into town with old Hawthorn.’

Tom looked at him with a vacant stare of boorish unintelligence. ‘Why, what do you want to go running off like that for,’ he asked, open-mouthed, ‘without even waiting to see the cattle? What does it matter to you, I should like to know, whether old Hawthorn’s precious son is coming to Trinidad or not, Uncle Theodore?’

The uncle looked back at him with undisguised contempt. ‘Why, you fool, Tom,’ he answered quietly, ‘you don’t suppose I want to let Nora come out alone all the way from England to Trinidad in the very same steamer with that man Hawthorn’s son Edward? Impossible, impossible!—Here, you nigger fellow you, grinning over there like a chattering monkey, bring my mare out of the stable at once, sir, will you—do you hear me, image?—for I’m going to ride down direct to Port-of-Spain this very minute along with your master. Hurry up, there, jackanapes!’

THE LAND OF FURS.

In 1867, the United States government, for a payment to Russia of about a million and a half pounds sterling, received in exchange the strange isolated country in the far north known as Alaska, separated by one thousand miles of British colonial territory from the republican frontier. For some years there were constant conflicts with the Indians, and altogether the early history of the American occupation of Alaska is not a bright one. The San Franciscan speculators who had been attracted by hopes of gold and of untold wealth in forests and fisheries were wofully disappointed, and the majority of them gradually cleared out again.

A mere glance at the map hardly gives one an idea of the enormous superficial extent of this outlying possession of our American cousins. According to the special Report of the United States Census Commissioners—to which we are mainly indebted for the facts given in this article—the total area of Alaska is five hundred and thirty-one thousand four hundred and nine square miles, or about one-sixth of the entire area of the United States. But one hundred and twenty-five thousand two hundred and forty-five square miles are wholly within the arctic circle, an area which has rarely been traversed by the white man, and upon the coast-borders of which are a few Eskimo villages. The natives of these, it is sad to learn, are becoming rapidly deteriorated by commerce with the crews of the whalers which resort in summer to the neighbourhood, and seek only to barter what natural produce, in the shape of furs, or oil, or ivory, they can collect for the means of intoxication. The immense area of the northern division of Alaska is left to the bear, the fox, the reindeer, and other polar animals, and to somewhere about three thousand degraded Eskimos.

The largest geographical division of Alaska is that which the United States officials have named the Yukon section. It is so called because it comprises the valley of the river Yukon, said to be the largest river in America, if not in the world, and which discharges into Behring’s Sea a volume of water estimated at about one-third more than that of the Mississippi. The Yukon division contains one hundred and seventy-six thousand seven hundred and fifteen square miles, and is peopled by four thousand two hundred and seventy-six Eskimos, two thousand five hundred and fifty-seven Athabaskan Indians, eighteen whites, and nineteen creoles—total, six thousand eight hundred and seventy. The occupation of the natives is entirely in hunting fur-skinned animals, which they barter with the whites for sugar, flour, tea, cloth, hardware, &c. The money value of the skins bartered is said to be about fifteen thousand pounds annually. Foxes are the chief wealth-yielders of this district, and they are found of all shades, from silver-gray and black to red and snow-white. Next to these in importance are the skins of the martens (or sables) and land-otters; and then, but in a much smaller degree, those of the black and brown bears. The moose-skins and deerskins are all retained by the natives for their own purposes, for clothing, bedding, &c.

The principal trading-post is called Saint Michael, and here are kept stocks of coal for the use of the whaling-steamers which force their way into the arctic seas every year.

The third largest geographical division is called the Kuskokvim division, from the river which intersects it. The Kuskokvim division lies to the south of the Yukon division, is bounded on the east by a range of mountains, on the west by Behring’s Sea, and it comprises the valleys of three large rivers and an intervening system of lakes. There is a trading-station called Kalmakovsky, from which are brought down from the unknown interior, by the natives, skins of beaver, marten, and fox, which all appear to be very plentiful. This trade is carried on by a race which appears to be a mixture of the Eskimos and Indians; but below Kalmakovsky, down to the sea, and along the coast, the Eskimos alone appear. These Eskimos support themselves mainly by seal and salmon fishing. The salmon are caught in traps, and are dried upon poles, which line both banks of the lower river from June to August. The estuary is very wide, and the tide rushes in with tremendous force, the rise and fall being very great, sometimes over fifty feet when the wind is from the south-west.

The houses of the natives are much the same in all the divisions of Alaska. These dwellings are thus described: ‘A circular mound of earth, grass-grown and littered with all sorts of household utensils, a small spiral coil of smoke rising from the apex, dogs crouching, children climbing up or rolling down, stray morsels of food left from one meal to the other, and a soft mixture of mud and offal surrounding it all. The entrance to this house is a low irregular square aperture, through which the inmate stoops, and passes down a foot or two through a short low passage on to the earthen floor within. The interior generally consists of an irregularly shaped square or circle, twelve or fifteen feet in diameter, receiving its only light from without, through the small smoke-opening at the apex of the roof, which rises, tent-like, from the floor. The fireplace is directly under this opening. Rude beds or couches of skin and grass mats are laid, slightly raised above the floor, upon clumsy frames made of sticks and saplings or rough-hewn planks, and sometimes on little elevations built up of peat or sod. Sometimes a small hall-way with bulging sides is erected over the entrance, where, by this expansion, room is afforded for the keeping of utensils and water-vessels and as a shelter for dogs. Immediately adjoining most of these houses will be found a small summer kitchen, a rude wooden frame, walled in and covered over with sods, with an opening at the top to give vent to the smoke. These are entirely above ground, rarely over five or six feet in diameter, and are littered with filth and offal of all kinds; serving also as a refuge for the dogs from the inclement weather. In the interior regions, where both fuel and building material are more abundant, the houses change somewhat in appearance and construction; the excavation of the coast-houses, made for the purpose of saving both, disappears, and gives way to log-structures above the ground, but still covered with sods. Living within convenient distance of timber, the people (inland) do not depend so much upon the natural warmth of mother-earth.’

All the islands in Alaskan waters are mountainous, some of the elevations rising from four thousand to eight thousand feet; but the entire division is devoid of trees. The soil is a mixture of loam, clay, and volcanic detritus; and grasses of all kinds grow in great abundance. Coal has been discovered in the island of Ounga; but this is the only mineral riches yet disclosed, although ‘prospecting’ has been carried on for years. The coal is of very poor quality. The climate of this division is more temperate than that of the other districts, and at one time it was thought that the rich grasses might allow of cattle-breeding on a considerable scale. The long winters, however, have shown this to be impracticable; and it has been found that hay, even, can be imported from San Francisco cheaper than it can be grown and cured on the spot. The only part where cattle are kept by the priests and white traders is at Oonalashka, and the fact is interesting as indicating the danger of trusting to poetic descriptions of places. Thomas Campbell, it may be remembered, speaks of ‘the pilot’ guiding his bark where

Cold on his midnight watch the breezes blow
From wastes that slumber in eternal snow;
And waft across the wave’s tumultuous roar,
The wolf’s long howl from Oonalashka’s shore.

As a matter of fact, the country here is neither ‘wastes,’ nor does it ‘slumber in eternal snow.’ The summer is warm; the vegetation, as we have said, is rich; and it may be doubted if the ‘wolf’s long howl’ has ever been heard by the oldest inhabitant. At anyrate, we can find no mention of wolves there now, although foxes are abundant enough. The Aleutian islands are well peopled; and the people are semi-civilised, the Russians having had relations with them and settlements and missions among them for more than a century. There are now schools at which both English and Russian are taught, and ‘stores’ at which the natives can provide themselves with the clothing of civilisation. The Aleutian ladies, indeed, whose lords have grown rich with their seal-fishing, can even sport silks on great occasions, and at all times display a fondness for ribbons and ‘trade’ jewellery. Only the exceptionally rich, however, can afford bonnets or hats; and the Russian-peasant fashion of tying a handkerchief over the head is the prevailing one. The men are especially fond of the broad-crowned, red-banded caps of the Russian uniforms, which were the first examples of civilised clothing ever seen on their shores. While the men devote themselves to the fishing, the women make mats, baskets, cigar-cases, and other articles of grass-cloth; and they turn out some very delicate and beautiful work. The waters are rich in fish of all kinds; but the most important industry is the seal-fishing that is now conducted under leases from the United States government, which retains the monopoly.

The south coast of the eastern half of the Alaska peninsula, with the adjacent islands and a portion of the mainland, forms another geographical division called the Kadiak section. It comprises altogether some seventy thousand eight hundred and eighty-four square miles, and has a population of four thousand three hundred and fifty-two, of which thirty-four are whites, and nine hundred and seventeen creoles. This district is mountainous, well watered, abounds in fur-clad animals, and the men, when not hunters, are fishers. Several settlements and missions were founded by the Russians in various parts of this district; and at one time there was even a ship-building establishment in Resurrection Bay. The forests are dense, and some of the timber is of immense size, especially the spruce.

A narrow strip of coast running from Mount St Elias to the boundary-line of British Columbia, forms the last or south-eastern division of Alaska. It covers twenty-eight thousand nine hundred and eighty square miles, and it forms a wedge of some five hundred miles in length between Canada and the western sea. In character, this section of Alaska differs from all the rest, and is essentially similar to that of the British possessions. It is mountainous and densely wooded; the forests come quite down to the sea-line, and are very valuable; the coast is indented by countless bays and fiords, and is sheltered the greater portion of its length by a chain of islands, forming the Alexander Archipelago. The spruce and the yellow cedar are the most valuable of the forest-trees, and the timber of these is annually exported in considerable quantity. Coal exists on several of the islands, and at some places on the mainland, but has not been worked yet to any great extent. Both copper and gold are known to exist, and have been and are to some extent being mined. Other minerals are supposed to exist, and the Americans expect that this division of Alaska will in time become a great mining field. Already the mining industry has thrown the fur-trade into the second place, and yet the yield of fox, marten, otter, bear, and beaver skins is annually very considerable. The hunting is carried on by the natives, who are of the Thlinket Indian race; the rest of the population of seven thousand seven hundred and forty-eight being made up of two hundred and ninety-three whites and two hundred and thirty creoles. Salmon, halibut, and herring fishing are carried on along the coast; and there are two or three salting and canning establishments. There are also factories for the production of oil from the herring, the dog-fish, and the shark; and on the islands there is some seal-fishing.

The climate of this division is not very cold, the average mean temperature being forty-three degrees twenty-eight minutes; but the rainfall is heavy, ranging from eighty to one hundred inches per annum. The principal settlement of this district is Sitka. Here are the headquarters of the United States naval station for Alaska, and here also resides the collector of customs, who is the civil representative of the government of Washington in the territory. In the time of the Russians, there were several schools and churches at Sitka, but now there is only one church, and the teaching is left practically to the missionaries of the Presbyterian and Roman Catholic bodies.

The total population of the whole of the enormous country called Alaska is computed at only 33,426, and of this number, only four hundred and thirty are whites; creoles number 1756; Eskimos, 17,617; Aleuts, 2145; Athabaskans, 3927; Thlinkets, 6763; and Hydas, 788. Of the habits, customs, and beliefs of these curious peoples, we may tell something on another occasion.

To sum up, it may be said that the acquisition of Alaska by the Americans has been a good deal of a disappointment to them. They thought it would be an excellent district for extensive settlement for agricultural purposes, and the country, as we have seen, is quite unsuited almost everywhere for such purposes. Then they had glowing dreams of rich mineral deposits; but although gold and silver and coal have been found, and are being partially worked, the mining industry is a secondary feature in Alaskan wealth. The extent of the forests, however, has been found greater than was expected. On this point, the United States Commissioner thus enlarges: ‘The timber of Alaska ... clothes the steep hills and mountain sides, and chokes up the valleys of the Alexander Archipelago and the contiguous mainland: it stretches, less dense, but still abundant, along the inhospitable reach of territory which extends from the head of Cross Sound to the Kenai peninsula, where, reaching down to the westward and south-westward as far as the eastern half of Kadiak Island, and thence across Shelikhof Strait, it is found on the mainland and on the peninsula bordering on the same latitude; but it is confined to the interior opposite Kadiak, not coming down to the coast as far eastward as Cape Douglas. From the interior of the peninsula, the timber-line over the whole of the great area of Alaska will be found to follow the coast-line at varying distances of from one hundred to one hundred and fifty miles from the seaboard, until the section of Alaska north of the Yukon mouth is reached, where a portion of the coast of Norton Sound is directly bordered by timber as far north as Cape Denbigh. From this point to the eastward and north-eastward, a line may be drawn just above the Yukon and its immediate tributaries as the northern limits of timber to any considerable extent. There are a number of small watercourses rising here, that find their way into the Arctic, bordered by hills and lowland ridges, on which some wind-stunted timber is found, even to the shores of the Arctic Sea.

But although the tree-clothed area is thus enormous, the market value of the timber is not so great as one might imagine. The most valuable is the yellow cedar; but this is not nearly so abundant as the spruce or fir, and even that is not of the very best quality.

More important than the timber is the produce of the waters, for it is said that in the seas which wash the shores of Alaska there are no fewer than seventy-five species of food-fishes. Many of these, however, are only considered as suitable for bait wherewith to catch the richer kinds. The chief of these is the cod, which abounds off the whole of the southern coasts, and the catching and curing of which promises to become an important industry. The quality is said to be quite equal to the cod of the North Atlantic. We have already spoken of the salmon, the herring, and halibut, all of which swarm in the waters in shoals of countless myriads; and there are also many valuable white-fishes, which at present are caught for native consumption only. Fish, indeed, is the chief diet in Alaska, and the consumption is enormous.

But the real wealth at present of Alaska rests in the abundance of its fur-skinned animals. It was for the fur-trade that the Russians occupied the country after it had been discovered by Behring, and it was mainly for the fur-trade that the Americans acquired it from Russia. The extent of the trade has proved greater even than was expected at the time of the transfer. The shipments of sea-otter and fur-seal skins alone have more than doubled since 1867, and now average annually about three hundred thousand pounds in value. Of land-furs, as they are called, the list is a long one, and in the order of wideness of distribution may be thus given: land-otter, beaver, brown bear, black bear, red fox, silver fox, blue and white fox, mink, marten, polar bear, lynx, and musk-rat. Rabbits, marmots, and wolverines are also common, but the skins are retained by the natives. The annual value of the furs, sea and land, now obtained from Alaska is estimated to average about half a million sterling, and there is no sign of decrease in the yield. On the contrary, the competition of the traders for skins has stimulated the natives to greater industry in hunting; while the prices now paid to the hunters are from four to ten times more than were current during the Russian rule.

A GOLDEN ARGOSY.

_A NOVELETTE._