336 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1960 



bergs suitable for replenishing the mariners' iceboxes. Lituya's 

 inner end is crossed like a T, with Lituya Glacier emptying into Gil- 

 bert Inlet on the north, and Crillon Inlet and Glacier at the opposite 

 end of the T. The corners where the inlets meet the bay are guarded 

 by two mountains like gateposts, and the opposite shore on the east is 

 a wall rising steeply toward the main mass of the big range. This nat- 

 ural amphitheater, in which the normally still waters are walled about 

 by liigh green- forested slopes and the towering faces of the glaciers, 

 is a secluded place of cathedral-like solemnity and grandeur. 



Lituya may seem like a miracle of nature, but men have learned 

 that it has a harsh and cruel aspect. For one thing, it is plagued 

 by a narrow and difficult entrance, nearly closed by the spit known 

 as La Chaussee because it looked to the Frenclimen so like a causeway 

 or dike. The two small vessels of La Perouse, on first approaching, 

 found themselves sucked into a veritable sluiceway where the tide 

 flooded past sunken rocks through an 80-yard passage. After they 

 whirled, completely out of control, into the calm v.ater of the bay 

 and came to rest he wrote in his journal, "In my 30 years of naviga- 

 tion I never saw two ships so near destruction." Later mariners have 

 learned of the dangers lurking in these powerful currents, often made 

 worse by the breaking of storm waves and terrifying tide rips, so 

 they try to make the passage during the brief periods of slack water 

 between the ebb and flow of the tide. 



La Perouse, it turned out, was not to escape disaster after all. 

 While awaiting good weather he sent out small boats to survey the 

 bay, 3 of them being seized in the ebb current and swept out the 

 entrance through high combers, where 2 were swamped with the loss 

 of 21 of his men. On his chart there was shown a low, rounded 

 island near the middle of the bay, where he erected a monument to 

 tlie memory of the lost sailors. The island has long borne the name 

 Cenotaph. Subsequent liistory records a long tale of ship losses 

 and drownings in Lituya's difficult entrance, of which La Perouse's 

 was but the first. 



The chart also showed two Indian villages on the south shore of the 

 bay, of which no trace exists today. It is not even known when they 

 were destroyed, but it probably occurred during a great wave in 1853 

 or 1851 — there is an old tale relating how several sea-otter hunters 

 survived the disappearance of their villages about tliat time by being 

 at sea in their canoes. This, then, is the other of two evil aspects 

 of Lituya — the lurking menace of unpredictable waves that wipe 

 villages off the earth, that pick up anchored boats and throw them 

 over La Chaussee Spit, that sweep mountainsides clean of their 

 forests. 



There must have been many great waves in the unrecorded history 

 of Lituya, One of them, in 1936, we know well from eyewitness 



