The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

April, 1919 however, the part of the Inside pass- age in Alaskan waters is much better lighted than the Canadian channel, where there are few lights except the lighthouse stations. In the harbor of Ketchican there are many oil-post lanterns which re- quire attention once a day. After passing out into Clarence strait, how- ever, the vessel travels for another day among islands from whose ex- posed points “blinker” lights wink at it through the darkness of the fog or the night. At the end of the day’s journey, the ship reaches Wrangell and, leaving this interesting old town with its wealth of totem poles and other Indian -relics, it passes around the end of Mitkof island and up be- tween this island and Kopreanof, through Wrangell narrows, famed for their beauty and dangers. Icebergs Often Cause Disaster Petersburg, a flourishing fishing town, is in the northern end of the narrows, and then the ship proceeds northward into a wider channel, with the hills growing gradually higher, the channels deeper, and the menace of the pinnacle rock less frequent. This channel is called Stephens passage. Toward the northern end of it, reach- ing into the interior, is Taku inlet, and at the head of this inlet Taku glacier is constantly dropping great pieces of ice into the water. These float as far south as the southern end of Admiral island and often take a northerly course going beyond Douglas island and into Lynn canal. They are not so large as those in the northern Atlantic, but they are of sufficient size to be dangerous even to the largest ships, having been the cause of the loss of several vessels. From Taku inlet it is only a few miles to Juneau, capital of the terri- tory, then the vessel passes around the southern end of Douglas island and turns north again into Lynn canal, which resembles Greenville channel in the abruptness of its shores, except that the mountains are much higher THE MARINE REVIEW 205 and 1899. Arriving in Skagway, the gold seekers tramped over the White Horse pass. to Dawson and into the heart of the mining country, and it is by this route that the interior is reached today. Besides the importance of this channel as the main route to the interior there is also the fact that it is bordered by the most. thickly settled region of the territory, two- thirds of Alaska’s entire population being in. the southeastern division. That the government has realized the importance of this thoroughfare is UPPER ILLUSTRATION SHOWS. HOW THICKLY SCATTERED THE SMALL ISLANDS ARE IN THE WATERS ABOUT KETCHICAN—HOW THE NARROW INLETS, UPON WHICH MOST OF THE CANNERIES OF SOUTHWESTERN ALASKA ARE BUILT, WIND BACK AMONG THE HILLS MAKING NAVIGATION DIFFICULT IS SHOWN IN THE LOWER ILLUSTRATION and most of them are topped with snow and glaciers, with the bare red rock showing below them. Except for the last few miles at the northern end, however, the canal is much wider than Greenville channel. Just around Douglas island from Juneau in the center of the channel is Sentinel island, which has been the scene of more than one wreck, but on which there now stands a big lighthouse. Half way down the canal is another lighthouse on a small island called Eldred rock, which has on its record the sinking of the CraraA NEVADA in 1898, when all hands were lost and only one body ever recovered. This is one of the mysteries of the sea, for generally the loss of. life from wrecks in the Inside passage has been light. : The trip from Seattle to Skagway is 975 nautical miles, of which 510 are in Canadian waters and 465 in United States waters. About 400 miles of this journey are in Alaskan waters. Hav- ing passed over this we have traversed only a small fraction of Alaska’s 26,000 miles of shore line; but this series of narrow sea lanes is the real highway. It was along this route that the vessels plied during the great gold rush in the mad days of 1898 ° shown by the records of its surveys, for more work has been done along this route by the coast and geodetic survey than in any other similar large area in Alaska. The Canadian govern- ment has also made a more or less complete survey of its part of the route. War Brought New Business This description of the Alaska waters applies only to the main chan- nel, however, from which only passen- ger boats of the Canadian Pacific and the Grand Trunk Pacific do not deviate. All boats carrying freight call at the canneries, which are in- variably in some otherwise unfre- quented inlet. Gold mines are also scattered through the northern part of the passage, and most of the boats make these small stops. The war in- creased the number of canneries by at least 25 per cent, and the new ones were often eStablished in all kinds of out-of-the-way places: Last August, I made the trip on the Jerrerson of the Alaska Steamship Co. This boat stopped at several canneries along the route, and at the entrance to only a few of them there were sufficient signals to guide any mariner not thor- oughly familiar with the site. The mas- WO gue Meena ce abet SN. oe oe i ors 0 ica le ras rian Wy it ie SE LITE Ty ne ea REE I ee HRT ae OE EM Ra nT Be eaO RN a = pte