If it had not been for
this storm, Cook would certainly have discovered that Nootka was on an
island, not the coast of the mainland; but by the time the weather
permitted an approach to land again, Friday, May 1, the ships were
abreast that cluster of islands below the snowy cone of Mt. Edgecumbe,
Sitka, where Chirikoff's Russians had first put foot on American soil.
Cook was now at the northernmost limit of Spanish voyaging.
By the 4th of May Cook had sighted and passed the Fairweather Range,
swung round westward on the old course followed by Bering, and passed
under the shadow of St. Elias towering through the clouds in a dome of
snow. On the 6th the ships were at Kyak, where Bering had anchored,
and amid myriad ducks and gulls were approaching a broad inlet
northward. Now, just as Bering had missed exploring this part of the
coast owing to fog, so Cook had failed to trace that long archipelago
of islands from Sitka Sound {190} northward; but here, where the coast
trends straight westward, was an opening that roused hopes of a
Northeast Passage. The _Resolution_ had sprung a leak; and in the
second week of May, the inlet was entered in the hope of a shelter to
repair the leak and a way northeast to the Atlantic.
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