RIM OF RED WATER, by TIM JONES

In Kodiak and several other settlements along the coast of Alaska, people wear t-shirts which quip, "This may not be the end of the earth, but you can see it from here."

Twenty-one years after Columbus made his famous landing, when the Spanish explorer Balboa hiked across the Isthmus of Panama and had his first view of the ocean he called "pacific," he might not have used that term if he could have seen to the north toward that edge of the Earth in the waters where the weather begins, the Gulf of Alaska, the Bering and Chukchi Seas and the Sea of Japan. The violence of the storms generated in those waters would have brought to mind anything but “pacific." The most recent United States Coast Pilot for the area describes it this way: "The weather of the Aleutians is characterized by persistently overcast skies, strong winds and violent storms. It is often variable and quite local. Clear weather is seldom encountered over a large area. About 30 to 75 inches of precipitation occurs on 200 to more than 300 days. Example: at Adak there is an average of 335 days with measurable precipitation.... The poorest visibilities in the Alaska area occur along the Aleutians.”

And, if the waters generated the violent weather of the North Pacific, the lands that bordered them proved no less volatile. Formed by plates moving out from the center of the ocean and then colliding with the North American continent, sliding along it, subducting under it, and giving rise to the volcanoes that come with subduction, the land rose to steep mountains from the very shorelines, and erupted and separated into archipelagos and island chains. Through the middle of this maelstrom of nature's violence, the chain of volcanic islands that would come to be called the Aleutians rose from the subduction and vulcanism of the Aleutian Trench to stand in defiance of the storms, and formed the crown of the Pacific Rim. Because of their history of volcanoes they also became part of what is called the Ring of Fire.

In forming their barrier between the Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea, the Aleutian Islands created a geological phenomenon that provided well for those animals and men who inhabited this land at the end of the earth. Strong currents developing as far south as where Balboa stood flowed to the north and west unobstructed through the Pacific until they met the land mass of Alaska and the Aleutians. In the islands, as those currents slid along the continental shelf, they created what are called upwellings, some of them constant or inertial, others wind driven and variable as to location. These upwellings caused a vertical mixing of the ocean's waters, and in the process, drew rich nutrients from deep water into the sunlit shallows around the islands.

At Samalga Pass, which separates Umnak Island from the Islands of the Four Mountains, modern scientists have found one of the highest nutrient concentrations in the world. The Samalga Pass upwelling is inertial and constant, while others along the islands vary with the wind and changing currents. These upwellings and the food sources they draw from the bottom provide a rich environment for a wide variety of life forms, from the smallest of microscopic fauna to the great whales.

It was into these rich waters one land mammal reversing the popular evolution theory slowly evolved into a creature of the sea. At some time in prehistory, Enhydra lutris, the largest of the weasel family, changed its habits of life on land and hunting at sea and one day remained in the ocean, developing, as it grew, webbed hind feet and a broadened flatter tail for propulsion, and retractable front claws for opening the mollusks that provided their main food source.

Last in a line of mammals entering the sea, they did not develop the underlying layers of blubber that keep most marine mammals insulated against constant immersion in cold waters. Where other marine mammals developed that blubber and lost most of their hair in the process, the sea otter instead grew thick luxuriant fur that gave them comfort and almost led to their extinction.

Men eventually joined the other predators in those sustaining waters around the Aleutian Islands. Though the lands and waters of the north defied the myth of European discovery for more than 200 years after Balboa first saw the Pacific, the islands had been populated for thousands of years before. If they needed discovering, the people living there didn't know it. They had done their exploring and discovering long before Balboa, and they had done it out of necessity as the land they had formerly occupied on the south shore of the Bering Land Bridge gradually disappeared under waters rising with the melting of the great glaciers of North America and gave way to the Bering Strait. As far as they knew, the land was already discovered.

Along with other inhabitants of the land bridge they had ventured eastward toward the North American continent where the peoples of the bridge separated into distinct groups. Inupiaq remained in the North and Yup'ik in western Alaska, while Indians moved farther east into the interior and then south deeper into the continent. The first islanders, sharing a common heritage with Inupiaq, descended from a population dating back as far as 10,000 years before Christ. They moved south along the coast of Alaska and then west again along the Alaska Peninsula toward the Aleutian Islands, where they established themselves as early as 4,000 years ago.

What those early discoverers found was a chain of more than 100 windswept treeless islands stretching 900 miles out into the ocean, and as time passed they ventured westward, eventually occupying all of the major island groups.

Sites in the Fox Islands, those closest to the mainland, show evidence of occupation almost 3,000 years before Christ. Examination of several living sites along the Aleutians shows those early discoverers moved from east to west rather than coming across the ocean directly from Siberia. Evidence of populations in the western Aleutians is more recent, 1,000 years BC in the Andreanof Islands and 600 BC in the Near Islands, so named because they were the closest to Russia at the Kamchatka Peninsula.

In the Aleutians, though these first people found one of the worst climates on earth, they also found the same richness in the sea that had sustained the otters and other ocean creatures long before they arrived. And so it was to the sea they turned for their sustenance. The land provided little for these early settlers; grasses, birds and eggs, some small animals, but in the sea supported by the upwelling systems, a myriad of food sources awaited the savvy hunter. In directing their efforts toward the sea, the Unanguan peoples of the Aleutians gained an immense knowledge of the critters who inhabited it. Because of this knowledge and the more constant source of food the ocean provided, the people seldom had to endure the cycles of feast and famine that plagued so many aboriginal groups. They studied the animals in their environment, testing, experimenting, using those that fit their purposes and ignoring those that didn't. One of those hunted infrequently was the sea otter that preyed in the same waters.

Probably more than 200,000 otters populated the shallow waters around the Aleutian Islands prior to Russian contact, largely unmolested by the hunters from land. They were hunted, but not often, because their meat and skins had limited use. Principally the fur was used for women's clothing, as trim or sometimes in full coats. The skin and fur were not particularly to the liking of the men, who needed lightweight waterproof clothing. The otter fur proved too heavy, too warm, for men working. The meat of the otter was all but inedible. One Native who tried it said it tasted like mud. Only in the Rat Islands, the second most westerly group, were otters used for food and all evidence shows that stopped shortly after the Russians began hunting there.

Nevertheless, otters were held in high esteem by the Unanguans. At least in pre-contact times they considered the otter an honored animal, and believed it had human origins. In the mythology of the people, the otters were transformed humans who were most vain in the preference for fine dress and adornments, particularly those worn by women. Many artworks recovered in the Aleutians depict otters dressed in some sort of ceremonial garb. That otter fur was used mostly in women's dress may have complemented the legend. Men preparing to hunt would observe several precautions to win the favor of the human presence in the otter. They wore their own personal finery in keeping with the otter's preferences, and even added articles of their wives’ clothing because of this particular partiality of the sea otter.

In many ways the Unanguan culture advanced beyond their hunter-gatherer way of life. Because of the plenty around them, they had time to examine more carefully their surroundings and the otter became one object of that study. Perhaps their belief in the human origins of otters came from their recognition that of all the animals around them, the otter was closest to man in physical structure. Unlike seals and sea lions and whales, the otter had legs and paws rather than flippers. It had ears and fur rather than blubber. The people became knowledgeable about anatomy to the point of performing autopsies on people in order to learn how they had died. As the animal most closely resembling humans, the sea otter actually became the object of comparative anatomy. They dissected otters and compared what they saw with what they'd seen looking inside the human body. From their autopsies and from the dissecting of sea otters, the original people knew the basic functions of the organs of the body, the skeletal and musculature systems.

But for a food source the hunters moved in other directions. Sea lions, seals and at times whales were much more to their liking and just as plentiful. They fished for salmon when they ran in the streams at spawning time and for halibut in the deeper waters. They hunted birds on land and took the eggs. And they scoured the intertidal zones for crustaceans and mollusks.

And the sea sustained the people very well. The average longevity of an Aleut was about the same as a resident of the American colonies could expect in the 1770s. The bounty of the sea and the knowledge of the people led to this longevity, which was uncommon in Native societies. For instance, the Unanguans understood some complicated medical practices which helped slow the rate of infant mortality. Older people, too, benefited from the environment. In other societies when people reached their elder years they often became a burden on the group. But in the Aleutians, though a man might no longer be able to hunt the open ocean, he could still fish in protected bays, and help with the salmon catch; in short, an older man or woman could be a productive member of the society. and sustain life to some extent.

The Unanguans and the sea otters prospered in their intimidating environment and for many years after Balboa's first view of their ocean, defied the myth of European discovery. While the seafaring nations of the world explored ever farther from their homelands, they concentrated in the warmer latitudes, seeking the riches of temperate climates, and those like the Aleuts, living on the perimeters, remained insulated from intrusion by the very climate that at times could make their lives so miserable.

But those early explorers and later the merchants, ever restless, ever reaching out, were relentless in their searches for new lands and new riches, and as exploration spread it reached closer to the Aleutian Islands. Many of the early explorations, though not actually touching the islands, had a bearing on their future. And the sea otters became the valued objects that drew the first Europeans to Aleutian and subsequently Alaskan shores. ~•~

From "Rim of Red Water" by Tim Jones. Tim Jones is the author of several books on Alaskan subjects and maintains a blog athttp://alaskaatitude.blogspot.com.