The Spirit of Alaska [antikvár]

Back at the turn of the century, when most Americans would no sooner have planned a vacation in Alaska than contemplate a holiday in Siberia, an explorer predicted, quite accurately, that the day was not too far off when Alaska would be near the top of everyone's list of must-see places. But he added a warning: "If you are young, wait," he said. "It is not well to dull one's capacity for enjoyment by seeing the finest first."But if he thought Alaska was too good to waste on the young, the message was lost on future Alaskans. The population today is among the youngest of the fifty states and most of them first arrived, if not as visitors, as workers or military personnel, with every intention of going home again before deciding that any other home would be dull by comparison. It's entirely appropriate. Alaska itself is one of the youngest places on earth. Its oldest rocks are about five-hundred million years old, compared to some five-billion years in other parts of the world, but many are relatively brand-new, having been spewed up in this century by forty-seven active volcanoes, or lifted to the surface by earthquakes and moved around by five-thousand glaciers whose work is still in progress.Although the ancestors of America's Indians crossed a land bridge from Asia into Alaska more than fifteen thousand years ago, Alaska is quite young in terms of modern civilization, too. Nearly three million people were living in thirteen English colonies on the eastern edge of the continent before the first Europeans reached its northwestern corner.The stories of the adventures of Christopher Columbus and others who explored the other side of North America are tame compared to the tale of the first voyages to Alaska. Seventeen years passed from the time that Tsar Peter the Great of Russia ordered the exploration, before word reached St. Petersburg that the mission was accomplished, and by then both the Tsar and Vitus Bering, the Danish mariner in charge of the expedition, were dead. Bering was not like the average explorer, but was an officer in the Russian Navy following orders he must have thought were bizarre. The assignment was to drag the materials to outfit and supply an ocean-going ship across six-thousand miles of Siberian wilderness, where there were no roads, no bridges and no relief from the world's most formidable climate. It took them two and a half years to make the trip, to build a ship and sail a few miles to St. Lawrence Island, at which point they turned back. They were at sea less than two months, and although they had proved that North America and Asia were separated by water, they never made it to Alaska. Even without a train of supplies, it took Bering another year and a half to march back to St. Petersburg, and when he got there he was treated as a failure.But in spite of it, he was put in charge of an even more ambitious undertaking: to explore all of Siberia and then to sail down to Japan, and finally to map the west coast of North America from Mexico to whatever might happen to be at the northern end. He decided to start at the top, but eight years passed before the expedition set sail in the direction of America, with Bering in command of the square-rigger Saint Peter, followed by a smaller vessel, Saint Paul, commanded by Aleksei Chirikov. The ships were separated in the fog, and it was Chirikov's that sighted land first. He sent a longboat ashore but, even though the weather was fair, it disappeared. A few days later Chirikov sent another small boat to investigate and it, too, mysteriously vanished, leaving the Saint Paul without any way to land to collect any information about the place they had discovered. Bering himself, meanwhile, also spotted Alaska's St. Elias mountains and, considering his assignment fulfilled, he headed in the general