Voyage of Ice and Sun

In 1778, Capt. James Cook became the first European to lay eyes on the far-flung waters of the Inside Passage. A navigator of considerable renown, he complained that the area’s myriad islands, bays and channels were generally fraught with mists and fog and vexed by powerful, unpredictable winds and currents. Capt. George Vancouver, one of Cook’s young midshipmen who subsequently became a famous explorer in his own right, followed his mentor into the same waters in 1790, dispatched by the British Admiralty to chart as much of the rocky, sparsely populated region as possible. Like Cook, Vancouver was mistrustful of the uproarious sea states and forbidding weather he encountered. He pronounced the constant rain and overcast “dreary and inhospitable.” And he often found the tidal forces he had to contend with overpowering and dangerous.

More to the point, while attempting to make his way through a confusing array of bays and channels in the midst of his surveys of the British Columbia coast in 1792, Vancouver literally lost control of his fully rigged, 337-ton sloop, HMS , for several anxious hours in waters too deep to anchor. “The night was dark