Puget Sound Journalism and Local Issues : Ross Anderson : RossInk

The Duke on the Northwest: A memoir

    On a summer’s afternoon in 1972?, Pete and Sue Hanke found themselves and their guests stranded at the dock at Roche Harbor, waiting for a customs inspector to check out their 65-foot wood-hulled schooner, Alcyone. When Pete, then an Eastern Washington orchardist who cruised the Northwest during the summer, stepped ashore to inquire about their status, he encountered a tall, strapping figure with a chiseled face under a yachtsman’s cap.
   Hanke immediately recognized John Wayne, the Hollywood icon. The skippers exchanged brief pleasantries, pointed out each other’s boats in the harbor, and went about their business. Nice fella, Hanke thought. And that was that.
   Until 7 a.m. the next morning, when the Hankes and their guests were down below in the Alycone, brewing their morning coffee. A skiff pulled alongside and an oversized figure poked his head in the main hatch and bellowed in perhaps America’s most-recognized voice: “Morn-in’, Sailors. Wheeerre’s the skipper?”
    “He sat down for a cup of coffee and pretty well filled the cabin of the Alcyone,” Sue Hanke recalls.
    They chatted about boats – power versus sail, wood versus fiberglass. Wayne toured the relatively cramped quarters of their classic schooner. Later, he lured his new friends across the channel to show off his own boat – the 139-foot converted minesweeper “Wild Goose,” which had become his summer home in the Pacific Northwest. 
    So began a warm, summer friendship among the Hankes, John Wayne and the spectacular inland Northwest wonderland that for much of a decade became their common denominator.
To most of the world, the late John Wayne is the definitive Hollywood cowboy, with the deliberate, Midwestern speech, who starred in dozens of westerns and war films from the 1940s to the early 1970s.
    In the Pacific Northwest, however, Wayne’s image is a bit more salty, defined less by a Stetson and sixshooter than by his wool cap and his unmistakable boat. He’s remembered as the guy on the bridge of a big, wooden-hulled, World War II vintage minesweeper that became, beginning in the late 60s, something of a cruising fixture from Seattle to the Strait of Juan de Fuca northward to British Columbia and Alaska.
    For more than a decade, from the mid-1960s to the late ‘70s, Wayne summered in these waters. Each June, his crew would nose the Wild Goose out of the harbor at Newport Beach, turn north and spend six days climbing the uphill course to Puget Sound and Seattle, where Wayne would climb aboard. Then they would continue north the San Juans, the Gulf Islands, to Pender Harbor, Desolation Sound and Princess Louisa Inlet and beyond.

    It would be another year before the Hankes again encountered Wayne. Southbound from Canadian waters, they pulled into Friday Harbor and called their friends, novelist, mariner and pioneer aviator Ernie Gann and his wife Dodi, who lived on their San Juan Island farm.
   “Duke’s here,” Dodi Gann reported. “Come on over for dinner!”
    It was a lovely evening. Wayne was fond of Gann, “that little bookwriter” who had penned the bestseller “The High and the Mighty;” Wayne had starred in the Oscar-winning film based on the novel. He was a frequent guest at the rustic farm, where the actor and the novelist would spend hours on the porch, quietly playing chess.
    But this evening, Wayne was considerably more animated, in part due to something his old pal, Ronald Reagan had done as governor of California. To seat her many guests, Dodi Gann had contrived a makeshift leaf for her table, and it was a tad rickety. So when Wayne wanted to make a point in his cowboy manner – by pounding the table – he rattled the entire dinner and amused his friends.
    From that evening on, Wayne and the Hankes remained fast friends, corresponding and linking up each summer at Friday Harbor or various points further north.
   “Duke always looked forward to that day when we’d pull up alongside the Alycone and catch up with the Hankes,” recalls Bert Minshall, the droll Englishman who crewed aboard the Wild Goose for some 15 years and eventually became her skipper. “He valued their friendship.”
    That friendship was a large part of what kept luring Wayne back year after year. One year, when the Hankes were celebrating their wedding anniversary, Wayne showed up with a couple of bottles of champagne, and expressed disappointment that each of his three marriages was relatively short-lived.
    Those sentiments defied his Hollywood “tough guy image,” Sue Hanke says. “He was truly a sweet gentle man, and I don’t think he liked pretentious people. Our daughter, Jenny, crewed for him for a while, and he treated her like his own daughter.”
    “And he didn’t look like this,” adds Pete Hanke Jr., pointing to a canned studio photo from the family collection. “He was as bald as a billiard ball. But you only knew that if you spent time on his boat.”

    John Wayne was born Marion Michael Morrison in Iowa – about as far from
any ocean as an American can get. But he was raised in southern California. He yearned for a naval career, but failed to get the academy appointment. His acting career began in silent movies, but took off with John Ford’s “Stagecoach” in 1939, followed by a flood of war movies and westerns that soon made his one of the world’s best-known faces.
    His first forays north were to cruise with his old friend, Max Wyman, aboard the Wild Goose which Wyman had converted and renamed. In about 1962, Wayne bought the boat and hired a crew to remodel it to accommodate his 6-foot-5? frame. In the summer of 1965, the boat cruised north.
    Bert Minshall believes Wayne was never happier than when he was cruising Northwest waters. Occasionally, he hosted movie stars ranging from Bob Hope to Julie Andrews. “But I think he liked getting away from Hollywood,” Minshall recalls. “He was a true sportsman who loved to fish, and he became quite a good fisherman.”
    His sporting instincts were fired as he neared Big Bay, the fishing resort on Stuart Island, near the entrance to Desolation Sound. Over the years, Wayne developed a keen friendship with John Davies, a fishing guide who ran a rustic lodge along with his jovial wife, Kay. By the time the Wild Goose arrived, Kay Davies was waiting with a plate of freshly-baked biscuits that became the Duke’s favorites. The crew always looked forward to seeing “Ol’ Crip,” an injury-hobbled bald eagle that scavenged from its perch near the Davies’ lodge.
    Ethan Wayne, the youngest son, grew up largely on the boat, and remembers with special warmth the times at Big Bay.
    “Of course, we all loved the salmon and the orcas and the oysters. But it was the people who were always so good to us,” Ethan recalls. “Back then, the resorts were more like wilderness camps. It was so remote that my father could get clear of all the stuff down south. People recognized him, of course. But he was treated as another boater and sportsman rather than a movie star.”
    Each trip north made the Hollywood man a little more of a Northwest man. One year, the Wild Goose tied up at Friday Harbor near Alycone, and Wayne spotted Sue Hanke plodding up the dock with two big bags of laundry, headed for the town laundromat. Wayne grabbed a bag, slung it over his broad shoulder and joined the venture. So, while the tourists flocked down to the Wild Goose, hoping for a glimpse of their idol, he was strolling through their midst, disguised by the Hankes’ dirty laundry.

    More than anything, Ethan says, his father loved that boat. By today’s standards, the Wild Goose was a rather utilitarian and prosaic vessel – wood-hulled, 139 feet with a narrow military profile and a coat of Navy gray paint reflecting its wartime roots. Built in Seattle in 1942, she had been used by the Canadian Navy, then surplused and passed from one owner to the next until Wayne in the early 60s.
    The upper deck consisted of the barebones wheelhouse with its stainless helm, basic engine controls on simple pedastals, an ancient depth sounder with one big rotating eye, a military radar, Loran C and a brass compass. There were brass speaking tubes linking the bridge to the engine room, but these were eventually replaced with an electronic intercom. Other than that, the wheelhouse and engine room remained pretty much the way they’d looked during the war.
    Just aft of the bridge was the chimney stack, which became young Ethan’s favorite climbing platform. Further aft was Wayne’s stateroom, with raised roof and a big oak desk.
     The main deck consisted of a crew dining room, the galley and the main salon decorated with 60s style wet bar and couches around a wood-burning fireplace. This opened to a big aft deck enclosed in sliding glass, which usually doubled as a dining room. That deck featured a large aquarium, which rarely held any fish because the contraption leaked every time the boat rocked and rolled.
    On the lower deck were four guest staterooms, downright spartan by most standards, but nobody seemed to complain. Forward of these was the engine room, with its twin GM diesels, the originals, and the same engines used in WWII submarines. At the bow were crew quarters.
    The boat generally had a crew of six or seven – skipper, two deckhands, cook and one or two stewards and an engineer named Arnie who was reputed to be fascinated with ancient alchemy.
    Wayne loved spending time in the wheelhouse, Minshall says. “But he really didn’t know how to run the boat, so he left that to us. But he liked to run the ski boat, which had a big 125-horse motor. He must’ve put a million miles on that boat, most of it at full throttle. But he generally had trouble bringing that boat alongside the Goose.”
   Underway, the Wild Goose was slow – 11 knots cruising speed – and uncomfortable. Her narrow beam and lack of stabilizers left her susceptible to crossing seas, so she rode “like a whale in its death throes,’ Minshall says.. She had been built hastily just after Pearl Harbor, probably using green wood, which left her prone to rot and warping. Her crew learned not to shift to reverse too quickly.
    Peter Hanke, Jr., the Hankes’ son who spent a year crewing on the boat, recalls their efforts to figure out why the engines were prone to overheating. “Turns out, the boat was so limber that she would twist and turn underway, and the shaft was binding.”
    The boat, of course, was a means to an end. Wayne loved it in part because of where it took him. Minshall recalls nosing the bow of the boat to within a few feet of the bottom of 120-foot Chatterbox Falls in Princess Louisa Inlet. And he would lead guests up the trail to the top of the falls, which offered a sweeping vista of the magnificent fiord.

    Wayne died of cancer in Los Angeles in June 1979, and the Wild Goose has never returned to Northwest waters. She changed hands a couple of times in Southern California before undergoing a $2 million remodel, and now hauls boatloads of tourists around Newport Beach.
    Minshall, who is retired in Costa Mesa, near Newport Beach, wrote a book about his experiences, “On Board with the Duke,” which has become something of a collector’s item, selling for $100 and up on eBay. Now and then, he ventures down to the harbor to visit the boat he ran those many years. “They changed everything,” he grumbles. “Looks like a floating wedding cake, with seating up top for 130 people. I cringe when I see her.”
    Wayne’s heirs remain based in Southern California, where several have worked in movies. Ethan Wayne, who spent his childhood climbing around the Wild Goose, is a sometime actor who runs the family business, Wayne Enterprises. The family donated the waterfront site that became the John Wayne Marina on Sequim Bay, operated by the Port of Port Angeles. And they still own a home near the marina, and some 160 acres of prime land on Sequim Bay, which they plan to develop with 232 clustered retirement homes, 25 rental cabins, a lodge and spa. Work could begin as early as this year (2008).
    Ethan visits the home in Sequim once or twice a year. “And I suppose I inherited the boating bug,” he says. “I keep my trawler here at Newport Beach, but I look forward to cruising on a friend’s boat out of Friday Harbor each year.”

    The Hankes long ago sold their Eastern Washington orchard, moved to Port Townsend and started Puget Sound Express, which runs tourist and whaling cruises, including summertime routes between Port Townsend and San Juan Island. The younger Hanke, who earned his sea legs on the Wild Goose, now runs the family charter business.
   They’ve kept a few letters, photos and mementoes of their encounters with John Wayne. But they have to rummage through cardboard boxes to find them. And it’s not their style to market their friendship to their tourist clientele..
   Because that relationship was never about celebrity. It was about people and boats in a corner of the world where celebrity and wealth are ultimately trumped by character, and where all are dwarfed by the sheer scale and magnificence of Mother Nature.

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           Gunnar Thompson navigates the globe.  On any given day, he may ride the Atlantic trade winds, thread the Straits of Magellan, or search for the fabled Northwest Passage.   He traverses oceans, calculates longitude and latitude, and plumbs the visions of the great explorers, from the ancient Chinese to Marco Polo and Francis Drake.

          And he does most of this without leaving his modest Port Townsend home.  Thompson’s vessel is an intellectual time machine, guided by ancient maps and journals.  And his mission is to sink what he considers the greatest myth in history: That Columbus discovered America.

          “I’m proving that Columbus was not the first,” he says. “Everybody beat Columbus.”

            For some 30 years, he has been obsessed with that mission.  He has written five books, all self-published, detailing what he believes to be conclusive evidence that, long before 1492, the Americas were explored repeatedly – by the ancient Chinese, Egyptians, Romans, Vikings, Irish, English, and who-knows-who-else.

          He argues, for example, that a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, sailing in the early 1400s, explored the coasts of the Americas, and he has copies of maps to prove it.  He says Marco Polo sailed into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and to the beaches of Port Townsend in the 13^th century.  He believes that Sir Francis Drake did much the same 300 years later.  And he has copies of those maps as well..

          Need some proof?  Give him a chance, and he’ll fill a room with his hand-drawn and photo-copied maps – Chinese maps that he believes depict Puget Sound and the Columbia River, Roman maps that show the Florida peninsula, signs of Asian and European art among the ancient Aztecs and Incas.

          Now he’s compiled much of what he’s learned into a 265-page, lavishly-illustrated volume called “Secret Voyages,” or “True Adventure Stories from the Forbidden Chronicles of American Discovery.”

          “This book represents the culmination of nearly 30 years of research,” he says.

          But it’s a lonesome journey. Most of the time, Thompson sails single-handed.  Established historians dismiss his theories.  Google his name, and you’ll find pages of bluster from academics who sniff and pick at his research, clearly outraged by his heresy.

          “They seem to be very angry,” Thompson says.  “They don’t like people questioning these things.  But history is too important to be left to historians.”

          Thompson is an affable 60-year-old bachelor with a mop of dark brown hair over a round Nordic face.  He lives in a small “shed” he rents from a friend in the housing cooperative just north of the golf course.

          He attributes his skeptical nature to his parents.  His father was an engineer and artist, his mother a nurse who crusaded for the polio vaccine before it was widely accepted.  “They were troublemakers who taught me the value of truth.  I struggled early at church, constantly asking: Is what I’m hearing really true?”    As a youth in suburban Chicago, the family took cross-country car trips, stopping along the way at museums and Native American sites, where Thompson developed an interest in art, history and anthropology.

          At the University of Illinois, he “figured out what was going on.”  He asked questions and learned to write “from an artistic standpoint.” He went on to graduate school in anthropology, where he became fascinated by archaeology and by striking similarities between art forms from ancient China and the Americas.

          “I was experimenting with other cultures and religions, and this didn’t go over too well.  I was kicked out.”

          In time, he grew accustomed to academics who didn’t welcome his maverick ideas. He taught anthropology, but was fired because he refused to conduct an exam that conflicted with an antiwar protest.  

          Eventually, he earned his PhD in “rehabilitation counseling,” and set out looking for a job.  He taught at five colleges, from Wisconsin to Hawaii and the University of Washington, but never earned crucial tenure.  He kept moving, always keeping one hand in ancient art and maps, until he found his way to Port Townsend, and  worked four years for Jefferson Mental Health Services.  “That was my last real job,” he says.

          Since then, he’s devoted full time to his global quest, launching a website while writing and illustrating his books on ancient explorers.

          Three years ago, Thompson finally found an intellectual ally in Gavin Menzies, a former British submariner who had written his own controversial book, called “1421,” about the pre-Columbian voyages of Zheng He.   They spent three days in a Seattle motel room, studying each other’s maps and exchanging ideas.  Menzies eventually wrote a glowing introduction to Thompson’s new book.

          Together, they’ve made a bit of impact.  They’ve given talks at the Library of Congress and at a couple of conferences.  There have been stories in “The Economist,” and on British television, focusing on a recently-discovered Chinese map which Menzies and Thompson believe proves Chinese knowledge of the Americas a century before Columbus.

          Still, a bit of publicity for the heretics only doubles the criticism. Historians argue that Thompson and Menzies essentially started with their conclusion, and search the globe for fragments of evidence to support it.  “Given only one data point, you can draw any line you want to,” one critic argues.

          Thompson is undeterred.  “I’m reminded of the bumper sticker I see around  town,”  Thompson says. “Don’t believe anything until it’s been officially denied.”

          The history establishment is hopelessly handicapped, he says, by its insistence on written documentation. Such records of ancient voyages either don’t exist, or haven’t been found, because they were systematically suppressed, censored or destroyed by ancient rulers intent on secrecy.

          “For me, the real breakthrough came when I began to understand the importance of secrecy in early exploration,” he says.  “Why would Marco Polo lie about what he’d seen?  Because he worked for a maritime government (Venice) with a huge incentive to keep that information proprietary.”

          If journals were suppressed, maps tended to survive, passed along from one ship’s captain to the next, but always preserving the crucial information, he says.

          That’s the gist of “Secret Voyages.”  In each case, from the ancient Chinese to Francis Drake, Thompson attempts to explain why and how the details were kept secret.

          But the controversy continues, he says.  “Academic historians hate Gavin Menzies and his book,” Thompson says.  “When he spoke at the Library of Congress, they tried to prevent it.  I can’t name a single historian who accepts our evidence  – except in China.”

          Challenging historical orthodoxy isn’t easy.  Literary agents won’t look at his books.  Publishers won’t stick their necks out.

          But this is the Age of Google and Wikipedia, which provides troublemakers a chance to bypass the establishment and confront conventional wisdom without costly corporate backing.   Whether the historians like it or not, Thompson’s theories are out there, bouncing around the Internet, challenging us to rethink what we thought we knew.

          None of this pays Thompson’s rent.   His savings are almost gone, and soon he’ll be back on the streets, looking for a job to support his obsession.

          But he won’t quit.

          “I’m a reluctant detective,” he says. “I’m an artist by nature, not a historian.  But when an artist gets an inspiration, you have this need to express it.”

                  

         

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Return to the Klondike! Our Intrepid Reporter Retraces Route Carved By Restless Dreamer In 1897

Ross Anderson  Seattle Times Staff Reporter

One hundred years ago, Mont Hawthorne quit his job at a Puget Sound salmon cannery and went home to Astoria. He sat silently for a while in his favorite chair, gazing out the window at a steamship as it eased away from the docks and sailed off into the dusk. Then he announced to his aging mother: "Mama, I'm goin' Up North."

His mother was not surprised. She had been expecting this, now that the entire world knew about the steamer Portland and its "ton of gold" arriving in Seattle. That event had triggered a stampede north to the Klondike country, and Mont was bound to catch the fever.

So it was that Mont Hawthorne resumed the quest for fortune, adventure, elbow room or whatever it is that continues to lure Americans westward and, in Seattle's case, northward.

Now old Mont Hawthorne is goin' Up North again. And this time, I'm goin' with him. By the time you read this, Mont and I will be on our way to Alaska, the Yukon Territory and Dawson City, all in observance of the Klondike Gold Rush centennial.

The Klondike stampede, which began in July 1897, was perhaps the single most dramatic event in Pacific Northwest history. It made Seattle a household word around the world, luring an estimated 30,000 Klondike-bound fortune-seekers to these streets and transforming a frontier port into a booming metropolis.

For Mont, the journey is a return engagement. Like thousands of other men and women, he made the journey a century ago, hauling a ton of supplies onto a steamer and up the Inside Passage to Skagway, Alaska, over the snow-clogged Wrangell Mountains to Lake Bennett, then 500 miles down the mighty Yukon River to Dawson, the City of Gold.

And your reporter? A former editorial writer, worn-out but recovering, approaching his 50th birthday and yearning for an adventure. Like Mont a century ago, I've spent weeks collecting my gear, haunting the outfitters, trying to figure out what I need and what I don't. I have a comfortable backpack, a nylon tent that weighs 6 pounds, polypropylene fleece, freeze-dried foods and a miniature stove that weighs nothing and boils water faster than my kitchen range.

For company, I have old Mont Hawthorne in the form of a dog-eared copy of "The Trail Led North," long out of print, in which he tells the story of his Klondike adventure. OK, I'm well aware that he's been dead half a century. But Mont climbs out of those pages larger than life. So does his dog, Pedro. They will be fine company. And they don't eat much.

Why are we doing this? Good question.  First, some history:

In the early summer of 1897, the Klondike was little more than a rumor drifting south from the virtually unexplored wilderness surrounding the Yukon River. Nearly a year earlier, in August 1896, a couple of prospectors took a wrong turn in those rugged hills, some 1,500 miles from nowhere, and stumbled onto a stream. In the stream bed, they found a gold nugget, and then another. In the months to come, those few acres of wilderness were to become one of the richest gold fields in history.

Word spread up and down the river, and prospectors converged on the Klondike Country. But it took months for the news to find its way south to The Outside. Even then, the news was greeted with skepticism; most such reports turned out to be wild exaggerations, if not outright fabrications. That changed in July 1897, when two steamers from the Yukon arrived on the West Coast. On the 15th, the tiny Excelsior tied up at San Francisco with 40 prospectors carrying perhaps $750,000 worth of gold - a staggering statistic for its day. The larger Portland arrived July 17 in Seattle with even more - the storied "ton of gold."

Within hours, the stampede had begun. Thanks to telegraph lines and an extraordinary advertising campaign, Seattle soon became the gateway to the Klondike, starting point for the steamships and chief supply center for the prospectors. A motley fleet of ramshackle steamers headed north loaded with fortune-seekers. They were men and women, white folks and black folks, old-timers and towheaded schoolboys. They were Seattle Mayor W.D. Wood and former Washington Gov. John McGraw, a promising young novelist named Jack London and a mediocre poet named Robert Service. They were Swedish boatbuilders and Chinese railroad workers, Russian sailors and British nobles, a great tide of humanity all determined to reach the same God-forsaken corner of a frozen Canadian wilderness.

Most of them never made it. If you were rich, it wasn't too rough; you could buy comfortable space on a steamer to St. Michaels, at the mouth of the Yukon, then travel by riverboat some 1,700 miles upstream to Dawson. Most, like Mont Hawthorne, were not rich. So they traveled the hard way. They collected up to a ton of supplies - clothing, tents, mining equipment, guns and ammunition, sacks of flour, sugar, beans, bacon . . . even horses, mules or dogs. They loaded their outfits onto crowded steamers or sailing ships and spent a couple of weeks beating into North Pacific storms to Skagway or other crude Alaskan ports.

Most crossed the Chilkoot or White passes in the dead of winter, enabling them to haul their gear much of the way on sleds. Temperatures dropped well-below zero and stayed there. Blizzards lasted for days. The summit of the Chilkoot was too steep for sleds, so many had to haul their outfits over one pack at a time - 20 or more trips hauling 100-pound loads up and over a rugged mountain pass. At Lake Bennett, they went to work sawing logs into planks for rudimentary boats. Mid-May, when the ice finally broke up, thousands launched their homemade boats onto the lakes and resumed the exodus - 600 miles across vast lakes, through whitewater rapids and mosquito-infested bogs. At each obstacle in the course, there were those who threw up their hands, sold their outfits and limped back home. Others persisted, endured. Hundreds died for their efforts - shipwrecked on the rocky Northwest coast, murdered for their outfits, buried in snow avalanches or frozen in their sleep, drowned in the Yukon River rapids or fallen by dysentery or other diseases in the muddy streets of Dawson.

Pierre Berton, a Canadian historian, figures 100,000 people set out for the Klondike in 1897-99. Of those, about one-third eventually reached it. Perhaps half of those actually worked in the gold fields, and a few hundred actually got rich. And most of those who found their fortunes squandered them on booze or bad investments before they made it back to civilization - if, indeed, they made it back.

Mont Hawthorne made it to Dawson, but he did not find much gold, barely enough to make his expenses.

And then he went home. What did he and thousands like him get for their efforts? Why this Herculean struggle to reach a virtually unmapped wilderness where the richest claims were staked out long before most fortune-seekers left home? What was this stampede about? That's why we're going back - me and Mont and Pedro. To see if we can figure that out.

Maybe it was simple greed, a need to get rich quick. Maybe it was desperation. Maybe it had to do with the raw beauty and challenge of Mother Nature, with that foggy notion of Frontier and The American West. Maybe it was the mystery of the unknown, an age-old love for adventure.

Whatever it was, Mont seemed to understand. It kept him moving for some 80 years - from the family farm in Pennsylvania to the plains of Nebraska. Then to the Black Hills country, on to the mines of Wyoming and across the continent to San Francisco. From there it turned him north, up the coast to Astoria and Puget Sound. And, finally, to Alaska, the Yukon and the Klondike.

It's a powerful thing, Mont says. But he can't explain it. He knows the feeling but not the words. Gotta go and see for yourself, he says. You gotta steam up the Inside Passage, where the glaciers slither down the mountains to meet the Pacific Ocean. Gotta step off the boat and resist the sinpots of Skagway, hoist a 60-pound backpack, climb Chilkoot Pass in a 40-mile-an hour gale. Gotta ride the big water through Five Finger Rapids.

You do it, says Mont. And then you'll understand why I did it.

So there you have it. Mama, we're goin' Up North.

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   In the spring of 1792, Captain George Vancouver and some 145 sea-weary crew members in two ships sailed around Cape Flattery and into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, searching for the “expansive Mediterranean ocean” rumored to exist in this largely uncharted corner of the Pacific.
   As they entered Puget Sound and surveyed the landscape, the stern and often crotchety Englishman sang its praises. “The surface of the sea was perfectly smooth,” he wrote in his journal. :”And the country before us exhibited everything that bounteous nature could be expected to draw into one point of view.”
   There was little time for poetry, however. Over the next six weeks, Vancouver and company sailed and rowed through much of this int4ricate inland sea, meticulously charting its length and breadth and depth, assigning names to its islands, channels and bays, and ultimately compiling the first map of Puget Sound. It was a remarkable achievement. Published in 1799, Vancouver’s charts of the Northwest coast quickly circulated throughout Europe, luring more sthips to this newly discovered land.
   Two centuries later, Puget Sound is home to 4 million people in a dozen cities from Bellingham to Olympia and Bremerton. Its waters are spanned by bridges, cables and super ferries.. Yet the map Vancouver started inking remains very much a work in progress. Much of the thousand miles of shoreline he sketched from his vessel, Discovery, has been reshaped or obliterated by everything from timbered bulkheads to world-class seaports. And only recently have scientists devised ways to peer beneath the surface, adding a third, all-important dimension to this map.
    Earlier this month, the University of Washington research ship Thompson set out on much the same voyage – from Admiralty Inlet, down Hood Canal and back out into the southern fjords, then north into the San Juans. For five days, some 20 oceanographers and students worked around the clock, probing the sound, carefully drawing water samples from its depths and rushing them into the on-board laboratory.
    It was, said oceanographer Mark Warner, the first time in 40 years that scientists have attempted a comprehensive assessment of Puget Sound in a single voyage. Their objective: To gather data on currents, water quality, temperatures and productivity at some 30 specific stations – data demanded by a powerful new UW computer program called the Puget Sound Regional Synthesis Model, or PRISM.
   UW researcher Jeff Richey, who heads the PRISM project, and his colleagues are today’s Vancouver’s, pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge and compiling it into a dynamic, “virtual Puget Sound” available to researchers, teachers, planners and policy-makers.
   The oceanographers are not the only ones retracing Vancouver’s 200-year-old course. Today, The Seattle Times begins its own exploration of Puget Sound. We are a crew of two or three – this reporter and UW historian of science Keith Benson, joined from time to time by photographer Tom Reese – aboard Benson’s 32-foot sailboat, “Velella.”
   Over the month to come, we will retrace the voyage of the Discovery, and of the Thompson. Our mission is to re-explore a place that is both familiar and foreign. What Vancouver saw freshly, we will see through the eyes of scientists gradually learning some of Puget Sound’s secrets. Unlike our predecessor, we will not have to wait seven years to share our findings. With a laptop computer linked to a cellular phone, we will be able to bring readers with us, reporting what we learn as we learn it.
   First, a few basics: Puget Sound is an inland sea or estuary, of about 2,000 square miles, containing about 1 trillion cubic meters of water, give or take a few billion. It is an extremely complex body of water, due to factors such as its extreme depth (an average of 600 feet), its intricate shoreline, its fierce tides and currents, and its maze of fjord-like channels. It is both one ecosystem and a collection of ecosystems that may or may not be linked. The water itself is complicates – layers of salt water imported from the North Pacific and huge volumes of fresh water delivered by rivers such as the Nisqually, Skagit and Dosewallips.
    For these and other reasons, Puget Sound is also one of the world’s most productive inland seas. Its cloudy waters are an indication not of sickness, but of dense concentrations of marine life ranging from microscopic plants to orca whales.
    Yet, the Sound is also a troubled sea. Once-healthy populations of salmon, herring, rockfish and other species have dwindled. Something out there is not working right. Fifteen years ago, the region launched a concerted effort to preserve Puget Sound. Billions of dollars have been spent building sewage-treatment plants and addressing polluted bays. New laws have made it more difficult to build on the waterfront. Commercial and sports fishing have been cut back dramatically.
   There has been some payoff. Earlier this year, the state Puget Sound Water Quality Action Team reported that water quality has improved in most places. Previously closed shellfish beds have been reopened. But nobody believes the sound is fixed. The federal government recently warned that it intends to formally list Puget Sound Chinook salmon runs as endangered, potentially invoking restrictions on cities, businesses and homeowners from the shores of the Sound to the crest of the Cascades.
    And most people seem amazingly willing to swallow their medicine. Surveyed last month by pollster Stuart Elway, 74 percent of Puget Sound voters contacted said they were aware of the salmon problem. Four out of five agreed that salmon are an indicator of environmental health and that government should do what is necessary to save them – whatever ithe costs.
   So what now? Polls suggest that people blame some combination of pollution, sprawl, over-fishing, poor management, logging, dams, agriculture and El Nino. The rogue’s gallery of culprits may suggest confusion, but it also reflects reality. If science can provide any answers, we certainly are in the right place. Puget Sound is home to thousands of marine biologists and oceanographers working for dozens of institutions. Yet most scientists are deeply reluctant to assign blame or to prescribe solutions for the state of our waters. There are too many uncertainties. For all our efforts to understand, the sound remains an enormous black box. On one hand, its waters are transparent; yet they are also dark, apaque and seemingly impenetrable. Ten feet beneath the surface, light begins to dim; at 100 feet, it is virtually gone.
   Still, confronted by declining salmon runs, taxpayers long for simple diagnoses and simple solutions. Ban gill nets. Shoot sea lions. Tear down dams. End logging. Trouble is, instant analysis doesn’t work out there. The one thing we know about marine biology is that it is profoundly different from the biology in our back yard. Take reproduction: Most fish produce thousands, even millions of eggs and larvae during their lives. Those offspring are immediately left to fend for themselves, drifting in a fluid environment where most are eaten by larger fish – possibly Mom or Dad. Nature’s strategy is a massive smorgasbord that allows only one in a thousand to reach maturity and perpetuate the lineage.
   Scientists believe that a minute change in the environment – water temperature, currents or an upwelling of microscopic plankton thousands of miles away – can profoundly affect which creatures survive and which don’t Unraveling that web is a daunting challenge. Consider, for example, the perspectives of just two of the oceanographers who worked aboard the Thompson this month. Jan Newton, who works for the state Department of Ecology, studies diatoms –microscopic, single-celled plants that drift beneath the surface of the sea. To her, water samples crqwn from the depths of the Sound are pure gold, a micro-world that supports all other life in the sea. The rate at which diatoms provides critical clues to the health of the sound, she says.
   UW oceanographer Mitsuhiro Kawase sees the same ecosystem very differently. His view is global. As a computer modeler at Princeton, he studied oceans for 15 years without ever going to sea. At the UW, his focus has narrowed to Puget Sound as a marine system composed of tides and currents, deep water and shallow water, layers of salt water and fresh, seasonal fluctuations and more. Kawase studies the sound as displayed on a computer monitor. The same spaceshiplike gadget that collects Jan Newton’s water samples carries an array of instruments that measure water temperature, salinity and oxygen content at different depths and transmit that data directly into the computer.
   “The data provides an opportunity to test the model,” he says. “So far, it has done a pretty god job of predictions circulation, layering fresh water and salt water. But it is not perfect. We haven’t been able to factor for wind.” He steps across the room and calls up PRISM, clicking his mouse to take a simulated flight over a simulated sea, clicking again for an animated display of undulating arrows that show tide cycles in Admiralty Inlet or Tacoma Narrows. “It’s working pretty well so far,” he says. “Our main limitation is memory.”
   To most Sound dwellers, Puget Sound conjures up images of leaping salmon and killer whales. But these are only the marquee players in a vast cast that also includes untold trillions of microscopic plankton, millions of herring and unknown numbers of 10-foot, bottom-dwelling sharks we rarely, if ever, see. As the Elway poll shows, the collective will already exists to preserve our regional sea. But effective strategies must be based on the best science, the broadest data available. We need wisdom, but first we need more memory.
   This is our modest mission – to add a little more data to the collective memory. Before leaving the dock in Seattle, we equipped the good ship Velella with an odd cargo -- journals from Vancouver’s voyage, cardboard boxes jammed with inter view3 notes and biological studies of Puget Sound We have a laptop computer linked via cellphone to The Times newsroom. We have lightweight kayaks on deck, a hand-held GPS device and, for diving, a drysuit, mask and snorkel.
     Over the next few weeks, we will sail to Discovery Bay, where Vancouver began his exploration, then down the Kitsap Peninsula and to the soughern inlets, back north along the urbanized shores of Taoma and Seattle and finally into the San Juans. Along the way we will visit with scientists and others who endeavor to peer beneath the surface. We will visit the notorious toxic hot spots and a couple of environmental success stories, and try to explore some puzzling questions: What in the world are diatoms and why should we care? Why are salmon and other fin fish declining while oysters and crab and other shellfish seem to be doing very well, thank you? Why are harbor seal populations growing while their food supply dwindles? Are expensive sewage-treatment plants worth the expense?
    We have an itinerary, but no agenda. We sail with no intention of making rand discoveries or scientific breakthroughs. We have no interest in pointing fingers, nor in preaching ecological virtue. Instead our job is to take a fresh look at this grand inland sea through the eyes of both Vancouver, who explored these waters when they were supposedly undisturbed, and through the eyes of today’s scientists, Vancouver’s intellectual descendants, who are still trying to finish his map.

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     The world keeps passing this place by, riding the daily ebbs and floods, bound for somewhere else.  In the spring of 1792, Capt. George Vancouver stopped for just a couple of hours. He and a handpicked crew had packed a week's worth of supplies, left their ships anchored in Discovery Bay and set out in a boat no bigger than ours, determined to explore the foggy "inlet" that turned out to be Puget Sound. At Point Wilson, the northeast tip of Port Townsend, they beached the boat and stepped ashore, waiting for the "heavy vapour" to lift.
   "The shores here are sandy and pebbly," wrote Archibald Menzies, the Scottish botanist who traveled with Vancouver. "The point we came to was low and flat with some marshy ground behind it, and a pond of water surrounded with willows and tall bulrushes. Behind this a green bank stretched to the southward a little distance from the shore, which was marked with the beaten paths of deer and other animals. I ascended this bank and strolled over an extensive lawn, where solitude, rich pasture and rural prospects prevailed."
   Judging from their journals, the visitors were taken not just by the natural beauty of Puget Sound, but by its potential for exploitation. Menzies remarked on a land "where the plough might enter at once without the least obstruction and where the soil . . . appeared capable of yielding in this temperate climate luxuriant crops of European grains or of rearing herds of cattle . . ."
    Meanwhile, the crew set a small seine net, trying to catch some fish, but "without the least success." So they got back into their boat and rowed on south into the sound.
    Two centuries later, this windblown peninsula, with its green lawns and evergreens atop weathered bluffs, closely resembles what Menzies described. We stand on the same pebbly beach, gazing across Admiralty Inlet, Puget Sound's grand entryway, watching the world go by. Inbound is the Princess Marguerite with its load of tourists, and an ominous Trident submarine; outbound is a trio of purse seiners steaming toward the Alaska salmon grounds, and a massive grain freighter - all setting course to or from the Puget Sound seaports that Port Townsend once aspired to be but never became.
    But people here don't seem to care about this. They may raise a few cows, but Port Townsend's passion is the sea. Scores of businesses build or repair fishing boats, kayaks, traditional wood-hulled boats, sails or a thousand other things that link a terrestrial species to the inland sea that virtually surrounds them. At low tide on a Sunday afternoon, there must be 20 kids scattered across the tideflats, peering into pools and shouting for mom to come look. Others walk their dogs, sail along the waterfront or sit in folding chairs next to motor homes, drinking in the seascape.
    Down at the boat harbor, we berth the Velella near the Brendan D. II, the weathered, 48-foot vessel from which Jim Norris conducts his ongoing investigation of Puget Sound. "I wish I could tell you what's going on out there," he says wistfully, nodding toward the broad, shallow bay that is Port Townsend's front yard. "We know more than we did 10 years ago, but that's not saying much."
   Norris is not your usual scientist. He launched his career 25 years ago on the deck of a gill-net boat, chasing the elusive salmon. Ten years later, he returned to the University of Washington and fished his way to a Ph.D. in marine biology. Since then, he has refitted his boat to serve double duty as a floating platform to study Puget Sound's fisheries as well as to harvest them. Working with middle-school students and volunteers at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center, Norris helps the state monitor water quality, eelgrass growth, weather and wildlife in Port Townsend's bay. Last week, he conducted his annual "trawl survey," dragging a small trawlnet through the bay, one section at a time, then carefully documenting what it brought to the surface.
   After nearly a decade of surveys, "there doesn't seem to be any consistent pattern," he says. "Some species show a downward trend, but others are going up." He runs his finger down a computer printout listing yearly counts of Pacific tomcod, snake prickleback, walleye pollock, Pacific herring, sculpin and many more.
   Last month, he says, some Oregon biologists came to Port Townsend looking for signs of pollock, a cod-like fish whose numbers appear to have dwindled in Northwest waters. They found fewer than 50 - not good. Last week, trawling in the same bay, Norris caught 150 pollock - the second highest recorded by his surveys. The same nets brought up more young cod than all previous years combined, he says.
   "As a fisherman, nothing surprises me," he says. "We'll have great luck at a certain place year after year, so you go back the next year expecting it to happen again. And you come up empty."
Norris wonders if he isn't seeing evidence of what is called the decadal oscillation, an emerging theory that fish populations vary dramatically in long-term cycles that may be linked to ocean temperatures. A growing number of adherents believe that, for some 20 years, Mother Nature has favored fish in Alaskan waters over the Pacific Northwest, and that the oscillation, if it exists, is beginning to oscillate back in favor of Puget Sound.
   So goes the theory. Alas, the same scientists warn that the most predictable law of the sea is its unpredictability, the cycles and variables they still don't understand. Like the ocean at large, Puget Sound is simply not the homogenous monoculture many people think it is, Norris says. Its habitat and wildlife vary dramatically from year to year, place to place.
   Even Port Townsend's bay, only about five miles long, appears to be comprised of two ecosystems, he says. The northeast half is dominated by rock sole, Pacific sand dab, spotted rockfish; the southwest by pricklebacks, tomcod and herring. The apparent boundary is a riptide that runs north to south from the marina to Indian Island. East of that rip, Norris says, water temperatures drop by two degrees, a significant difference in the marine environment. Why the difference? Probably because the water in the southwest is relatively stable, while the northeast is in constant turmoil, agitated by the powerful currents of Admiralty Inlet.
   Sorting out Puget Sound's complex ecosystem will take many years, Norris says. Scientists need long-term data in order to recognize and begin to study its biological cycles. "We need a 100-year database," he says. "And in this bay, we only have 10 years."
   But if it is daunting, it need not be costly. Norris and the local marine-science center operate on a shoestring budget, using mostly volunteer assistants. Water-quality data is gathered by eighth-grade students from local schools. Norris' crew last week was comprised of schoolteachers taking a summer course. Still more volunteers conducted wildlife tours along the seashore.
   Port Townsend is not the only place where citizens have become invested in the health of Puget Sound. Communities from Skagit County to Hood Canal and South Puget Sound have demonstrated that there is a payoff in making marine science accessible to nonscientists.
   "You don't need a Ph.D. to read the meters, only to interpret them," he says. "I believe we're producing research-quality data at a fraction of the normal cost."
    Encouraged by those words of encouragement, we cast off our lines and point our sloop southward toward the foggy vapours of Puget Sound.

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    "The region . . . seemed nearly destitute of human beings. . . . The brute creation also had deserted the shores. The tracks of deer were no longer to be seen, nor was there an aquatic bird in the whole extent of the canal. Animated nature seemed nearly exhausted, and her awful silence was only now and then interrupted by the croaking of a raven or the scream of an eagle. Even these solitary sounds were so seldom heard that the rustling of the breeze . . . gave rise to ridiculous suspicions in our seamen of hearing rattlesnakes and other hideous monsters. . . ." Capt. George Vancouver, 1792 

     In the evening shadow of a forested ridge, we steer the sloop Velella into a bay near the Hood Canal floating bridge and drop our anchor, which instantly disappears into a green, unenticing soup. We can hear the rumble and groan of the nearby highway and the shouts of a group of teenagers at a rowdy beach party, complete with firecrackers. It will not be a quiet evening on Hood Canal.
   Safely anchored, I settle back with a glass of wine while Keith Benson, skipper and science consultant, talks about the disappearing anchor. Even a century ago, he says, scientists understood that water quality and water clarity are linked. To measure clarity, then and now, they lower a white disk about a size of a long-play phonograph record into the water and note the depth at which it becomes invisible. That link between clarity and quality is complicated, however, Benson warns.

    With this in mind I revisit my trusty copy of George Vancouver's journal. In the first week of May 1792, Vancouver and a small company rowed their launch south into Hood Canal, stopping when the tide turned against them, then resuming exploration. It was to be his first experience with the Northwest's glacial fjords, some of which lead somewhere, most of which don't.  In his journal, he noted the change in landscape - steep, forested walls plunging into the bottomless channel - and the eerie silence of the place.
   The whistle of the wind in the trees frightened the crew, he wrote, conjuring fears of "rattlesnakes" and "hideous monsters." In an odd and accidental way, the superstitious sailors were right. For, unknown to the captain and company, they were floating above a veritable explosion of life forms completely foreign to them, and to most of us today.
    Puget Sound's springtime boom begins with untold trillions of microscopic plants and animals collectively called plankton, the primordial soup that is the basis for all life in the oceans. The explosion begins innocently enough with diatoms - microscopic, single-celled plants shaped like aspirin tablets, but so tiny that a million would fit inside a single pill. During the winter, they drift in a state similar to hibernation, deep in the sea.
    In April or May increased sunlight and warmer water trigger photosynthesis and the silent explosion begins. Fed by nutrients from decaying plants and animals, the diatoms begin to reproduce. Each divides into two identical offspring, which promptly divide again. If this binary fission occurs daily, which is not uncommon, it will take only a month for one diatom to become one billion. Scienti