Passage to Juneau
Subtitle: a sea and its meanings
By: Jonathan Raban
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 1999
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 435
ISBN-13: 9780679442622
Subjects: Art; Description and travel; Indians of North America; Travel; History; Romanticism; Folklore
Description: The Inside Passage from Puget Sound to Alaska is winding, turbulent, and deep--an ancient, thousand-mile-long sea route, rich in dangerous whirlpools, eddies, rips, and races. Here flourished the canoe culture of the Northwest Indians, with their fantastic painted masks and complex iconography and their stories of malign submarine gods and monsters. The unhappy British ship Discovery, captained by George Vancouver, came through these open reaches and narrow chasms in 1792. The early explorers were quickly followed by fur traders, settlers, missionaries, anthropologists, fishermen, and tourists, each with their own designs on this intricate and haunted sea.