THE ALPINE ZONE OF MOUNT ST. ELIAS. 79 



with snowy peaks and guttered ridges, and they attest the wild 

 legends of their sullen grandeur which the first white men related 

 who ever beheld them. These hardy sailors, when sent out in 

 the ship Three Saints from Kadiak, in 1788, arrived in the Gulf of 

 Choogatch, or this Sound of Prince William, during the month of 

 May. They anchored in a little bay of Noochek Island, and there 

 established a trading-station. This is the only post, Fort Constan- 

 tine, or "Noochek," that has ever been located by our people in all 

 this section of a vast wilderness ; to-day it is but little changed a 

 couple of trading-stores standing on the foundations of Ismailov's * 

 erection, in which the only three white men now known to reside 

 in all that region of alpine wonder are living, surrounded by a 

 small village of sixty natives. 



The large size of those spruce-trees on the southern slopes of 

 Kenai Peninsula, Montague, and Noochek Islands of Prince Will- 

 iam's Sound, so impressed the Kussians that they established a 

 shipyard at Kesurrection Bay as early as 1794 ; by the close of that 

 year they actually built and launched a double-decker, 73 feet long 

 by 23 feet beam, of 180 tons burden the first three-masted, full- 

 rigged ship ever constructed on the west coast of the North Ameri- 

 can continent ; she was named the Phoenix, and as she slid from her 

 ways into the unruffled waters of this far-away place the exultation 

 and delighted plaudits f of her builders echoed in strange discord 

 with the wild surrounding. Baranov had no paint or even tar, so that 

 this pioneer ship was covered with a coat of spruce-gum, ochre, 

 and whale-oil. A few small vessels only were built after this, inas- 

 much as the company found it much more economical to purchase in 

 European yards the sailing-craft and steamers which it was obliged 

 to employ : but, to-day the traces of the Eussian ship-carpenter's 



* Ivan Ismailov and Gayorgi Bochorov ; they went in the dual capacity of 

 explorers and traders, lured into the undertaking by rumors which had pre- 

 vailed at Kadiak respecting great numbers of sea-otters in this bay. 



f Had these enthusiastic builders then been able to have foreseen the 

 tragedy which this vessel precipitated, five years later, they would have scarcely 

 thus expressed themselves, but rather have stood in silence, with bowed heads, 

 as the work of their hands swept into the flood that embraced her. In 1799 

 she sailed from the Okotsk, bound for Sitka, with the newly-ordained Bishop 

 Joasaph and twenty priests and deacons of the Greek Church; she was never 

 seen or heard of afterward, nor was anything seen or heard of her passengers 

 and crew she took them with her to the bottom of the sea. 



