Captain Cook’s Third Voyage, 18th Century Ideologies, and Indigenous Peoples of Alaska: John Ledyard’s Journal and the Coming of English into Alaska
SHELBY HOLMES
The history of the English language in general has been well-researched; its origins have been pinpointed, its progression and dispersion across the globe and throughout time annotated, and its current state established. Although much is known about the English language overall, especially considering that it is now spoken worldwide and dominates international communication, the history of English in the state of Alaska is an underexplored yet important piece to the overall narrative of the development of the English language. It is important to inquire into the manner in which this language was initially introduced to Alaska in order to fully comprehend its subsequent development and growth and to be able to appreciate the variety of Alaskan English that is spoken today. By analyzing the early years of its development, which began with the pioneering, travel, and trade of British explorers along the northwest coast of America in the eighteenth century, a true recognition and a more accurate understanding of this versatile tongue is able to emerge.
One of the most well-known British explorers of all time, Captain James Cook, played a central part in bringing English to Alaska, while also further developing navigational sciences of the time and achieving “an entirely new standard of professional efficiency” that had not previously been reached in the world of eighteenth century oceanic exploration (Waters 161). His third voyage, conducted between the years of 1776-1780, directed his ships as well as the intrigued imperial gaze of great European powers towards the northwest coast of America to what is now known as Alaska, and sparked a slow but growing western interest in the resources of the land. Sent by the British Board of Admiralty in search of a famed Northwest Passage between Russia and Alaska, which would provide an easier trade route from Britain to the exotic markets of the Far East, Cook’s expedition sought to examine the uncivilized world through a scientific lens of careful observation, as described by Clayton: “These voyages were not stamped by an aggressive Christian imperialism, as were the missions of Columbus and Cortes… Cook was sent on a scientific mission to put the geography of the Pacific on a cartographic footing, and was meant to observe and describe rather than exploit the peoples and resources of the South Seas” (9-10). Also, his third voyage marked the beginning of a relationship between the great land of Alaska and English-speakers. Not only did he place the measurements of its coasts on British maps for the first time, bringing awareness of the area and arousing imperial interest, but he also marked the beginning of a cultural exchange between Native Alaskans and English speakers, which set the stage for the future development of English in Alaska.
Captain Cook’s third voyage and his time spent in Alaska was recorded by Connecticut-born John Ledyard, who served as a marine aboard the ship the Resolution and in 1783 published A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, and in Quest of a North-West Passage, Between Asia and America; Performed in the Years 1776, 1777, 1778, and 1779. Although there have been many travel journals published in the latter half of the 1700s, Ledyard’s journal is significant because it provides a first-hand perspective of the events that occurred during the third voyage as well as an inside look at the interactions between Cook, his crew, and the natives that resided along the Alaskan coast during the year 1778, illustrating the first moments in history of the English language in Alaska. In the first half of the essay, examining the historical background of the journal allows insight into the imperial and scientific goals that supported the expedition and influenced the nature of the discourse between English speakers and the native Alaskans. This examination can explain how the accomplishments of Cook’s third voyage encourages further exploration of Alaska and frames future developments of English in Alaska. The second half of the essay will demonstrate linguistic inquiry regarding Ledyard’s journal and look into the encounters between English speakers and Native Alaskans represented in the text in order to realize the preexisting ideologies that shaped the language used by Ledyard to record these encounters. By dissecting the historical context of John Ledyard’s A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean and seeing how eighteenth century western ideologies of science and empire encouraged international exploration, as well as analyzing how these ideologies shaped Ledyard’s written representation of his experience in Alaska and encounters with Native Alaskans, it is possible to unveil the significance of Captain Cook’s third voyage in relation to the future establishment of English in Alaska.
Part I: Historical Inquiry
Scientific Ideologies and British Exploration in the Eighteenth Century
Considered the “second great age of European exploration,” the latter half of the eighteenth century exhibited an explosion in international maritime travel by European powers, all competing for scientific discovery and commercial profit (Raj 81). British, Spanish, French, Russian, and American voyagers were all main contenders in the worldwide competition for new resources, trade routes, and undiscovered lands during this time period, especially in the Pacific. This intense western interest in the rest of the world was strongly connected to a momentous shift in scientific views and practices in European culture that began with the seventeenth century scientific revolution, which brought Newton’s discoveries as well as an obsession with empiricism influenced by the Enlightenment. This new scientific philosophy was characterized by the need for measurable facts based on actual observation and experimentation, and sought to discover the truth of the world through exploration and analysis of natural phenomena, rather than basing it off of religious or theological beliefs. One of the founders of empirical science was Francis Bacon, whose methods greatly influenced scientific practice and methodology in the eighteenth century. His Novum Organum (1662) introduced another popular ideology: utilitarianism, or the idea that scientific knowledge should be of practical use, which became the main concern of science at the time (Mackay 9). Systematic gathering of knowledge about the natural world through global exploration proved to be very useful to European nations hoping to find trade routes and precious resources across the world which would benefit economic development. This ideology permeated the nature of global exploration; scientific investigation of distant lands and utilitarian aims of commercial progress characterized many of the voyages in the latter half of the eighteenth century, which led to an intertwining of scientific and commercial intentions in the purpose of these expeditions. They often accomplished multiple goals and pursued scientific aims alongside commercial objectives: “state- sponsored circumnavigations publicly announced goals of scientific discovery (such as tracking the transit of Venus, or locating the great southern continent, or charting new coastlines) while also secretly pursuing commercial goals (such as identifying new trade goods, or locating sites for the establishment of trading posts, or competing in already established trade networks)” (Burnham 430). The usefulness of natural objects was measured during exploration of faraway lands; voyagers were instructed to not only to locate and chart any new lands or coastlines discovered but to also observe the nature of the soil and what type of vegetation it sustained (Raj 87). In the recording of plants, grains, fruits, etc., explorers noted what the area in question possessed and lacked in regards to agricultural potential, as if “anticipating trade or colonization” (Smethurst 24).
Scientific advancement during the eighteenth century also promoted industrial developments and the improvement of navigational seafaring technologies. Longer voyages across the globe required solving problems such as the determination of longitude at sea and keeping an entire crew healthy and scurvy-free. In Britain, expansion in global oceanic exploration can be attributed to the Royal Society, a main participant of empirical science that focused on developing navigational techniques and became a major sponsor of scientific survey “in close collaboration with the Admiralty” (Smethurst 22). Also, advances in navigation under the reign of George III allowed for much more extensive voyages, like Cook’s third voyage to the Pacific: “the often enormous returns of profit and knowledge from these voyages were made possible only by their lengthy duration, for it took anywhere from three to six years to travel through the Atlantic, past Cape Horn, and across and around the Pacific on voyages seeking undiscovered lands, resources, and trade goods” (Burnham 426). The ability to access the farthest corners of the world and the implication of potential profit also attracted trading companies, which very much supported these voyages and invested greatly in navigational development (Raj 83). Although these companies were primarily interested in monetary gain, accidental discoveries occurred that benefitted science and global oceanic exploration for the greater good. It is evident that political, scientific, commercial, and technological forces all had an effect on the manner and purpose of these endeavors (Raj 84).
Increased global exploration combined with the application of empirical scientific practice also led to a change in the way people viewed the natural world as well as their relationship with it. At the time it was believed that it was possible to find one single unifying general theory that explained all forces and forms of nature by achieving a clearer understanding of natural phenomena. Through methodical scientific investigation and analysis, a “final answer” would be revealed that would address all unexplained questions regarding the natural world (Smethurst 16). This desire for systematic recording and organization of facts and information about natural objects also inherently reflected the utilitarian ideals of eighteenth century scientific culture, which asserted that nature is more useful once it has been organized and better understood. An example of this attempt to instill order in nature and whose influence is still apparent in western scientific practice today is Carolus Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae. Published earlier in the eighteenth century, this work introduced Linnaean taxonomy, a hierarchical classification system which organized all biological organisms into different kingdoms, classes, and species, and was used by naturalists to categorize plants and animals that they came across during their journeys (Smethurst 21). Linnaeus’s classification system and other attempts to organize nature, such as museums, gardens, and the collection of exotic specimens from across the world, are described by Smethurst as an attempt to create “museum order.” He explains how “the study of nature led to its scientification, the production of nature as an abstract spatiality, and to the organization and institutionalization of nature-as-construct in museums and literature” (16). The envisioning of the planet through this methodical lens of classification moved the natural world into the position of a scientific subject to be analyzed by an observer from the outside. Nature was transformed into a separate realm detached from civilized life and activities and was created into an ideological construct associated with underdevelopment and primitiveness that was to be investigated, understood, and exploited, and from which Europeans were able to contrastively base their identity as a civilized, enlightened society. “As the natural world became better understood on a global scale, nature acquired symbolic weight in the politics of trade and empire, where it reinforced racial, ethnic, gender and sexual prejudices by defining what was ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, and by extension, what was ‘primitive’ or ‘civilized’”(Smethurst 3). As a result, Europeans saw themselves as no longer part of nature and instead began to see themselves as its master: “With nature no longer analogous with human affairs, an alienated humankind felt itself no longer ‘of nature’, but nature’s ‘overseer’, with all the implications of power and exploitation this implies … Meanwhile, land in its natural state became a symbol of regression in a predominantly progressive society” (Smethurst 3).
When it came to encountering indigenous peoples while exploring other lands, explorers attempted to observe and classify them from a detached and analytical perspective just as any other natural object. Voyagers were instructed to note aspects such as stature, skin color, strength, agility, hair, diet, behavior, and customs (Smethurst 25). To Europeans, aboriginal people and their observed way of life resembled nothing of the western idea of civilization, and therefore they were regarded as more closely related to nature; another production of which that needed to be measured and assessed. In his classification of animals, Linnaeus had supposed the existence of different human groups and considered Europeans to be of a different species than native people and Africans (Currie 65). This new categorization of human beings seems to have a clear correlation with the emergence of more racist views towards non-Europeans. According to Douglas, the word ‘race’ had a different meaning up until the end of the eighteenth century when European explorers began coming into contact with native populations more frequently: “Race originally signified a common family or ancestry and was extended to humanity as a whole (‘the human race’). By the eighteenth century, race was synonymous with ‘tribe,’ ‘nation,’ ‘people,’ ‘variety,’ ‘kind’ or ‘species’ and was increasingly used to label extensive populations occupying broad regions of the earth” (Douglas 716). As a result, this allowed for the growth of an ideological separation between groups of people and encouraged feelings of discrimination, as well as contributed to the development of attitudes of superiority towards non-Europeans. Linnaean classification and the belief in different human species “clearly influenced the development of race theories and racism” as well as influenced the emergence of the human sciences (Currie 66; Clayton 11).
This great shift in the way Europeans viewed native people and their relationship with nature is key information for understanding the motives and beliefs that shaped the first moments of the British in the northwest coast of America. After looking at the scientific ideologies and imperial goals of European explorers and the navigational developments that made travel to the Pacific possible, a greater awareness of the overall environment of scientific practice and global exploration in the eighteenth century is made available, which is essential for fully understanding this time period which marks the initial point of the history of English in Alaska. The next section will inquire into the specific historical context that embodies this crucial point in history, including a closer look at the significance of Captain Cook, his third voyage, and John Ledyard.
John Ledyard and Captain James Cook’s Third Voyage
Out of all of the expeditions in the Pacific during the eighteenth century, Captain James Cook’s voyages are claimed to be the most memorable. Throughout his career, Captain Cook proved himself to be an exemplary captain and an essential participant in British imperial efforts and the future development of a more globalized trade market. His mapmaking accomplishments and navigational achievements, including his seafaring skills and ability to keep an entire crew healthy for an extended amount of time at sea, exalted him above other explorers of the time, as explained by Waters: “Cook had achieved a revolutionary technological breakthrough of fundamental importance to the growth of civilization - he had shown that henceforth it would be possible to send ships to the remotest parts of the world and expect them and their crews to return, sometimes years later, their mission accomplished, and the men healthy. The colonization of the empty spaces of world - New Zealand, Australia, California, British Columbia - and the extension and growth of world trade in the nineteenth century, all depended upon this" (162). He is best known for his three voyages, conducted between the years 1768-1780, intended to map all coastlines and land masses on a global scale. He filled in missing spots on the world map, ruled out the possibility of a great southern continent, and “found more unexplored lands than any other man in Western history” (Barnett 26). Cook’s efforts were shaped by imperial, geographical, and empirical concerns, which are reflected in his journals: “he industriously recorded his observations in his logs, journals and charts in a manner which made them valuable to all who might wish to use them” (Mackay 7). His popularity could be attributed not only to his accomplishments but also to his meticulously recorded works, allowing readers to learn about his extensive voyages and exploration of exotic lands years after his time.American explorer John Ledyard joined Captain Cook during his third voyage and was very much involved in enlightenment through global exploration. His interest in travel was especially influenced after taking part in Cook’s expedition, where he was exposed to various ethnic groups over great distances of land and was able to make observations on the connections he saw between geography, ethnography, and civilization. Cook’s third voyage also influenced Ledyard to embark on a journey of his own, but of a different kind – in 1787, seven years after Cook’s voyage, Ledyard aimed to walk around the world – a global circumambulatory voyage (Wolff 437). He had planned to begin in Paris, travel east through Asia and Russia, over the Bering Strait of Alaska, and then across America to return to his home in Connecticut. Unfortunately, this spectacle of a journey was never completed due to Ledyard being stopped in Russia by Catherine the Great and deported back to Europe, but his goal to walk across the globe was most likely an attempt to apply his idea of “philosophic geography,” which is analyzed by Wolff in greater detail: “The term ‘philosophic geography’, apparently coined by Ledyard in his diary during his Russian misadventure, was intended to contrast with the sacred geography that oriented the globe according to Christian concerns… For an enlightened traveler like Ledyard, only secular values were relevant to his geographical sense of place, and his global map was oriented according to the rational, or ‘philosophical,’ concerns of the Enlightenment” (438). This ‘global map’ is reference to Ledyard’s scientific view that populations around the world could be defined as ‘civilized’ or ‘incivilized’ based on their geographic and ethnographic nature, which allowed him to make further assumptions on the relationships he observed between various civilized and uncivilized populations. The word “civilization” was actually another newly introduced term in the eighteenth century, gaining its modern meaning in the writings of French physiocrats in the 1750s and 1760s, and was loosely used by Ledyard in this writings to discern between European and native populations in relation to their state of technological and cultural development (Wolff 438-439). As mentioned by Wolff, this “philosophic geography” is strongly related to the overall shift in scientific ideology of the seventeenth and eighteenth century which prized theories based on empiricism and intellectual analysis rather than making deductions about the world’s populations based on religious perspectives. Ledyard set out to observe the world through a refined, cultivated mind, and attempted to apply his new philosophical knowledge to the physical world around him. This type of philosophy is apparent in the discourse of his journal, which will be discussed in the second half of the essay.
Together, John Ledyard, Captain Cook, and the rest of the crew set out on the 12th of July in 1776, in the midst of the commotion of the Revolutionary War and the conception of the United States as an independent nation, in order to explore the unknown lands and people of the Pacific (Mackay 8). The voyage consisted of two ships, the Resolution and the Discovery, and took off from Plymouth Sound in England in direction of the Cape of Good Hope. The voyage headed south around Africa, past Australia and New Zealand, through Oceania and the South Pacific, and north to the upper west coast of America, ultimately in search of the famous Northwest Passage. According to a map Cook used by Russian explorer Jacob von Stählin, Alaska was originally believed to be a great island, with a large straight between it and America where ships could sail through (Barnett 108). This obviously untrue belief about Alaska illustrates its mysteriousness to voyagers from the West; the cartographical features of Alaska and its coasts were almost completely unknown to Britain at the time of Cook’s exploration of the area.
In the year 1778, the crew spent the summer weaving through the many islands and inlets scattered along the jagged coast of Alaska, as described in Ledyard’s journal between the months of May and October. In May, the crew explored Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet; in June and July they circled around the Aleutian Islands, and in August they traversed up the western coast of Alaska and explored the area between Russia and North America, stopping at St. Lawrence Island. After travelling through the Bering Strait and far enough north, instead of finding a Northwest Passage they reached the “edge of the Arctic ice, a compact and frozen wall stretching east and west as far as the eye could reach” and were forced to return to Hawaii in November for the winter (Waters 163).
Even though they did not achieve what they had originally set out to and were unable to find a practical route between America and Russia, Cook, Ledyard, and the rest of the crew had accomplished much more than they were aware of in regards to the cartography and exploration of Alaska, and had for the first time produced a reasonably accurate map of Alaska’s coasts (Cook Inlet Historical Society 116). Before Cook, exploration in Alaska by any European state was not notable other than Russian interest in the area earlier in the 1700s. His third voyage also made discovery of the profitability of otter pelts that could be sold for a high price in China, which led to multiple private expeditions by European and American voyagers to the northwest coast in pursuit of quick riches. Now that English speakers were aware of this new part of the world, it made way for a future of further exploration, trade, and contact between the indigenous people of Alaska and western travelers.
Part II: Linguistic Inquiry
Shaping Ideologies of Ledyard’s A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean
As a travel narrative from the eighteenth century, John Ledyard’s A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean was part of a very popular and important literary genre that made it possible for the public to be informed about fantastic discoveries and successes in global exploration. Travel literature was expected to provide readers with information about important events and scientific data, as well as entertain them with stories of discovery and exotic, faraway lands, which is described by Currie as a “generic blending of factual information and literary art” (25). It is important to remember that travel narratives from this time were not produced as purely objective, scientific documents of recorded observation, but were also shaped by other factors. In fact, the written representations of experiences abroad and encounters with foreign people were molded by the perspectives of the author as well as the emotions the observer was feeling at the time of the encounter: “such representations were also products of travelers’ personal experience of actual encounters with indigenous people and the confusion, stress and exaggerated emotions such meetings entailed” (Douglas 715). It is also important to remember how travelers’ cultural preconceptions of foreign lands and people influenced the production of travel writing, including the scientific and imperial ideologies that shaped explorers’ perceptions of native people, and the nature of their experiences abroad. These ways of thinking about the natural world very much influenced the way explorers recorded and described these experiences abroad in their writing. Travel journals are a “narrative produced by a culture rather than an individual,” and if rhetorically analyzed can reveal evidence of previously held attitudes towards nature and ideologies that influenced the behaviors of travelers as well as the way they represented their experiences in writing (Currie 7).In Ledyard’s A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, the empirical and utilitarian scientific ideologies that were prevalent during eighteenth century exploration have a clear impact on the manner in which Ledyard represents exploration along the coast as well as the Alaska native people. Throughout his descriptions of Alaska, roughly pages 78 to 101 in his journal, Ledyard extensively surveys the environment, noting geographical and navigational details and weather conditions. Ledyard is not often very thorough when describing encounters with Alaska natives, but he manages to note general aspects about their appearances – “They were tall, well made, wild fierce looking people, in skin-canoes” – their possessions – “We found them possessed of a few knives and copper trinkets” – and other features like similarities between different tribes and evidence of European presence (Ledyard 80, 85). His curiosity of what the native Alaskans possessed as practical resources and their level of contact with other civilized European alludes to his interest in trade, illustrating the commercial considerations that shaped his observations.
Viewing the native Alaskans through an empirical scientific lens also put Ledyard in a heightened position of enlightened scientific dominance, and rather than investigating the natives as a developed society with their own traditions and ways of life equal to his own, he portrays them as more of “static objects of a dominant imperial gaze” (Douglas 714). In his writing, they are often treated more as scientific subjects or specimens with the implication of underdevelopment or savagery: “They hallooed to us, making signs that they wanted to trade… this they complied with, shouting, shaking their spears and using a variety of noises and gesticulations that we knew nothing of until they came within hail of the ships… boats were sent to try if they could not by some friendly means persuade the savages to the ships” (Ledyard 79). Trade was often the main theme of communication between indigenous people and European explorers and allowed the crew to collect supplies as well as bring natives within close enough range to be observed (Clayton 12).
Douglas notes the lack of “ethnographic sensibility” that characterizes representations of natives in this type of travel writing: “From an indigenous perspective, such works typically lack ethnographic sensibility and positions ‘natives’ as exotic backdrop to a Eurocentric, often hagiographic agenda which renders indigenous people irrelevant or peripheral” (714). This lack of sensibility is evident throughout the interactions in Ledyard’s journal, and he often uses his own English and westernized ways of life as comparison for the unfamiliar language and practices of the native Alaskans. Ledyard refers to their language as “guttural” and harsh to the ears, noting that “the guttural is the universal and radical pronunciation of all the aboriginal languages on this continent” (97-98). He also makes a chart comparing the numbers of one native Alaskan language to English: one “tantuck,” two “auluck,” three “konnoqueet,” etc (97). David Samwell, who was also present on Cook’s third voyage as a surgeon of the Royal Navy, writes a similar description of the Alaska natives in his own journal, describing the phonetics of their language and the sounds “ch” being guttural, the sound g pronounced as the “hard sound as in good”, and commenting that “many of their words not to be pronounced by Europeans” (1103). This type of disinterested disgust in the language of the native Alaskans – this idea that the language was too “ugly” to even be spoken by Europeans – truly represents the superiority that Ledyard and other English-speaking explorers felt and demonstrates their belief that their language was somehow better and more developed than the language of the indigenous people.
These descriptions of the Alaska Natives in Ledyard’s journal recursively helped to feed the existing idea that native people needed to be freed from the terrors of barbarism and that western, civilized ways of living were intrinsically ideal. Clayton further elaborates on the subject, explaining that through trade practices with natives “European goods could be used to illustrate European Civilization to the peoples of the Pacific: that they would have an irresistible desire for European goods and through them would discover the superiority of European ways. European civilization was to be bestowed rather than forced on Native peoples” (13). Europeans were so dedicated to this idea of superiority that they believed by simply presenting indigenous people with aspects of westernized culture that they would automatically advance towards this way of life. Although these were common beliefs during the eighteenth century, they were unfounded, finding their basis only as ideologically-constructed misconceptions, deeply ingrained in European culture and identity and closely connected to the belief systems of imperialism and the Enlightenment.
During exploration of the coast of Alaska, Ledyard was intrigued by the various tribes he encountered, and he would often make anthropological observations based on the similarities he saw between different indigenous groups. After ten days of travel along the Alaskan coast, the ships enter Prince William Sound, and Ledyard makes note of the people he saw there: “The inhabitants seem to be a distinct tribe from those at George’s-Sound (Nootka Sound), and bear a very striking resemblance if not an exact one to the Esquimaux. Their skin-canoes, their double bladed paddles, their dress and other appearances of less note are the same as on the coast of Labrador and in Hudson’s-Bay” (80). A few weeks later they enter Cook Inlet and Turnagain Arm; Ledyard also examines the people there and makes an observation: “The inhabitants are the same as those we left in Sandwich-Sound (Prince William Sound). We called them the New-Esqimaux” (81).
Coming across multiple tribes of native people during his travels in the northeast Pacific allowed Ledyard to deeply reflect and develop his ideas of ‘philosophic geography.’ By observing the similarities and differences between neighboring Alaskan tribes, he was able to make generalizations and speculate origins and relationships between tribes, which is also evident in his realization of the resemblance between a native Alaskan tribe and indigenous people of Russia: “They were every way like those we had seen since we left George’s-Sound (Nootka Sound), except in the dress of their hair, which was exactly like the Mahometan Tartars” (the word Tartars was used to describe the native Russians) (Ledyard 85). Ledyard actually speculated a possible connection between native Alaskans and native Russians; Wolff notes that Ledyard perceived an “aboriginal transpacific correspondence between the Tartars of Siberia and the Indians of America (the ‘American Tartars’),” and by comparing these two populations Ledyard hypothesized the existence of “specific geographical domains” in both Asia and America that are interrelated with the ideas of “civilization and incivilization” (439-440). By analyzing his descriptions of the native Alaskans as they develop throughout the voyage, it is possible to see the experimental process of Ledyard applying his ideas to his anthropological observations and arrive at a conclusion; he sees the appearance of the inhabitants of Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet as strikingly similar to the “esquimaux,” or Eskimos, he had seen at Nootka Sound and therefore labels them as the “New-Esquimaux,” or the new Eskimos, illustrating his knowledge of the relationships between populations and their geographical location.
Interestingly, Ledyard is partly correct in his observation of the Alaska Native’s similarity to the Eskimos, as pointed out by Anchorage historian and attorney James K. Barnett: “He was half right. The inhabitants of Prince William Sound were related to Eskimos, but they had arrived in migrations that took centuries and certainly not by navigating a great-unfound waterway” (Barnett 97). James Barnett, whose insight and research on Alaskan history was substantial to this investigation, is the author of Captain Cook in Alaska and the North Pacific (2008) in which he focuses specifically on Captain Cook’s third voyage and his time spent in Alaska. In his book, Barnett is actually able to identify the tribes present during Cook’s third voyage:
There are four major Alaska Native cultures: the Tlingit and Haida on the southeast coast, the circumpolar Eskimo (Inuit and Yupik), the interior and coastal Athabascan Indians, and the Aleut. In the course of his voyage in Alaska that summer, Cook came into contact with all but those from the southeast coast and frequently did not distinguish the differences. Modern scholars believe the people Cook observed in Prince William Sound were Pacific Eskimo, from the coastal branch of the Alutiiq nation, also known as the Pacific Yupik or Sugpiaq. The Alutiiq, a southern, coastal branch of the Alaskan Yupik, ranged from Prince William Sound to the Kenai Peninsula, the Alaska Peninsula, and Kodiak Island. (101)
Barnett also notes that “while Cook and Ledyard correctly attributed traits of the Inuit Eskimo to the Alutiiq residents of Prince William Sound, they were incorrect in thinking the people of Cook Inlet were Eskimos as well. They were, however, Dena’ina Athabascans, related to the Athabascans who occupied Interior Alaska and Canada” (120). It is fascinating that Barnett was able to correctly identify the true Alaska native populations in the area in relation to Cook’s third voyage and demonstrate how Cook and Ledyard were heading in the right direction when making their suppositions of the native Alaskan tribes in the area.
Conclusion
John Ledyard’s A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific is incredibly significant to the history of English in Alaska because it gives such a detailed account of Captain James Cook’s third voyage and the crew’s time spent exploring the coasts of Alaska. It tells the story of a significant moment in history that was the “first sustained period in which Europeans came in contact with the Indians of the Pacific Northwest” and the “first record of western culture coming to the people of the Northwest coast” (Barnett 60). Thanks to Captain Cook and the success and popularity of his travel journals, news of the discovery of the great land of Alaska and its valuable otter furs made its way back to the United States and Britain and influenced future voyages to the area, setting in motion the chain of events that led to the permanent establishment of English in Alaska. Also, thanks to John Ledyard’s presence on the voyage and the journal he produced in result, readers today are able to experience a first-hand account of this critical point in history that took place two and a half centuries ago.Evidence from these initial moments in the history of English in Alaska that is still able to be witnessed today was the scientific practice of naming islands, straits, and inlets by Captain Cook during the voyage. Many places retained their original names, including Turnagain Arm (originally named “Turnagain River”) and Montague Island. Some places were renamed after the voyage; Sandwich Sound was changed to Prince William Sound by the Admiralty after the king’s third son (Barnett 259). Some places were even named after the great voyager himself, like Cook Inlet. These places in Alaska bear these English names all thanks to British exploration of the area in the 1770s in search of a Northwest Passage.
The names Cook gave to places often reflected the momentum and sentiment of the voyage and would “allude to his journey itself”; for example, the naming of Turnagain Arm reflected the frustration Cook felt having to sail in and out of it, because for him it felt like a waste of time (Clayton 42). Since Alaska was believed to be an island, a supposed body of water existed between it and America. When the crew sailed into Cook Inlet, they believed that they were actually in the mouth of a “great river,” hoping it would take them all the way to the Arctic and prove success of their goal of finding the Northwest Passage. Unfortunately for them, that did not happen, which might have been why Cook did not bother to name the inlet; he was more upset about wasted time that could have been spent looking for the passage. Cook spent eleven days exploring the area just to find out that he was unable to reach the Arctic. Barnett points out how residents of Anchorage might not be too pleased with this news: “Local residents take pride in knowing that Cook was among the first Europeans to visit the region, now with the largest population of all the places he visited that summer, but few are aware that Cook despised the place... Ironically, the British Admiralty later named it after the Captain” (124).
John Ledyard’s A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific truly embodies a critical point in the history of the English language in Alaska. It illustrates the first time English speakers have stepped foot into Alaska and is evidence of how the commercial and scientific goals of Britain during the eighteenth century affected the nature of the interactions between the crew on Captain Cook’s third voyage and the indigenous people of Alaska. Ledyard’s journal also illustrates how European attitudes towards nature influenced the representation of Alaska Natives in travel writing, causing them to be presented as uncivilized savages or reduced to scientific subjects under the study of imperial powers rather than intelligent people with their own developed societies. By analyzing Ledyard’s journal and the historical contexts that surround it, as well as the linguistic representation of contact between Cook’s crew and the natives of Alaska, a better understanding emerges of how early contact between English speakers and Native Alaskans during initial British exploration of the Alaskan coast in the late eighteenth century led to the future colonization and establishment of English in Alaska.
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