Pacific is a succession of bays, rivers, sounds, inlets, and islands, forming a chain of abrupt, rugged, irregular coast of more than seventeen thousand miles in extent along the waters of the Pacific, following all the principal inlets and island lines until it reaches Behring strait. Chief among the islands are Prince of Wales, New Archangel, Sitka, and Kodiak, all east of the peninsula of Alaska, and the extensive groups of islands known as the Aleutian islands, extending through thirty degrees of longitude, and reaching almost across the Pacific ocean toward Copper and Behring islands on the Asiatic coast off the shore of Kamschatka. This vast chain of islands, more than a hundred in number, form a half-circle to the north, leaving between it and Behring strait, Bristol bay, and Behring sea, into which empties the Great Yukon, one of the mightiest rivers on the American continent, carrying in its course deposits which form at its mouth the greatest moorland in America, and gradually decreasing the depth of water in Behring sea. In the semicircle formed to the north by this chain of islands, and twelve degrees off the mouth of Bristol bay in Behring sea, are the islands of St. George and St. Paul, so famous for their valuable fur-seals. This terra incognita of the Northwest is yet totally unexplored; and although its coast line on the Pacific has been long the active field of the Russian American Fur Company, and the whaling fleets of the United States, and more recently of the American fur-seal hunters and fishermen of the Pacific coast, but little has been seen of the vast interior region of this country, embracing an area of more than five hundred thousand square miles. |