Captain Cook and his Expedition Artist John Webber visit Alasks and British Columbia

I got two replicas of John Webber prints.  I thought that they might maybe be actual Webber prints but it turned out that they werent.  In any case, they are nice prints.
John Webber was the expedition artist for Captain Cooks voyage of discovery in the North Pacific.  John Webber did sketches of landscapes and local people they encountered.  These sketches were later taken by engravers and turned into etchings that could be printed and brought to the attention of a wider audience.

The first print reproduction I got is called A Woman of Prince Williams Sound now called Prince William Sound without the s after William.  Probably nobody outside of Alaska can find Prince William Sound on a map but if youre curious use your google. The only reason anyone may have heard of Prince William Sound it is because the Exxon Valdez oil tanker ran aground there and spilled oil all over the bay thereby impoverishing local fisheries and ensuring decades of work for Exxon lawyers. But that was a little over two hundred years after Captain Cook visited there.  When Captain Cook visited, the primary residents of the Sound were the Chugach people.  And as you can see from the print, the people of the time adorned themselves with piercings, hair weaves and tattoos much as the people of today.

The picture above shows Prince William Sound as it looked during Cooks visit.  Toward the back is Cooks ship.  In the left foreground are Cooks people in wooden boats.  And in the foreground just to the right of center you can see a two-man kayak.  You can take my word for this or you can click on the image above to see a larger version.The kayaks paddled by the Chugach people were similar to the kayaks of the Unangan people farther to the southwest. The Russians made no distinction between the Chugach and the Unangan people and referred to all of them as Aleuts.  And they called their kayaks baidarkas.

The other print I got was of the Man of Nootka Sound. Nootka Sound is on the west coast of Vancouver Island some distance south of Prince William Sound. People there likewise adorned themselves in modern fashion but paddled wooden dugout canoes instead of kayaks.

The drawing above and the one below are the Webber originals.  These are what the engravers used to base their engravings on. 

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John Wesley Powell Descends the Colorado River

This year we visited the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, a place which gets about 4.5 million visitors a year.  Most of these visitors never descend into the canyon and until a century and a half ago, most of the canyon had never been traveled by anyone.  Indians of the area descended into the canyon and even farmed and lived there in certain areas, but they were not able to and did not travel along the bottom of the canyon for any distance.  Travel at the time was in and out of the canyon but not along the canyon. 

John Wesley Powell changed all that.  The American Civil War had just ended and Powell who had  been a Major in the Union Army organized an expedition to explore the Colorado River and its tributaries.  The US was still relatively young.  Americans were still moving west and if the movement west was going to go forward in earnest then transportation routes were needed, not only to bring people into the region but also to export resources out of the region.  Major Powell was the man to find those transportation routes.
I knew the basics of Powells story but after my own trip to the Grand Canyon, I pulled Powells report of his journey off my book shelf where it had sat unread by me for a number of decades.  It was time to upgrade my knowledge of this piece of Western history.
I have not finished Powells book so this is an incomplete report, but this being a boat related blog, I will focus on Powells means of transportation, that is, wooden row boats.

Powells boats with one or two exceptions were 20 feet long, made of wood with extra frames added for strength. The front and back ends were decked over and closed off to form water-tight compartments in which food and gear were stowed.

The journey began on a tributary of the Colorado river in territory where the canyons were not yet as imposing as farther down the river.

The expeditions first camp is shown here.  Notably absent from the picture is any kind of plastic, a substance without which modern camping and river travel would be unimaginable.

As the journey progressed, the canyons became deeper and the expedition encountered falls and rapids.  The picture above shows one of the options for dealing with rapids, that is, to run them.

Other options for dealing with rapids were lining the boats down the rapids and portaging.  In either case, the usual method was to assemble the boats on shore at the head of the rapids and secure them while scouting the rapids.  Where possible, the boats were lined, that is, led down the rapids with lines tied to both ends of the boats. 
If the rapids were too severe the boats needed to be unloaded, the gear carried to the bottom of the rapids and then the boats.  All this took time and lots of work. 

Powell and his crew explored new territory and also inadvertently invented a new sport: river running.  This sounds like not that big a deal since totally inexperienced travelers now do this trip every year albeit with experienced guides.  But what made it different for Powell and his crew was that none of them knew whether their boats would survive the rapids or what the severity of the rapids would be.  They also lacked modern gear and were cut off from civilization for most of the trip.  Conditions were sufficiently horrid to make some of the men quit.
Photos are from the National Park Service site.

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