From the time this coast was first visited, navigators reported the aspects which Nature assumed. But their opportunities were casual, and they necessarily confined themselves to what was most obvious. As civilization did not exist, the only vegetable products were indigenous to the soil. At the first landing, on the discovery of the coast by Behring, Steller found among the provisions in one of the Indian cabins “a sweet herb dressed for food in the same manner as in Kamtchatka.” That “sweet herb” is the first vegetable production of which we have record on this coast. At the same time, although ashore only six hours, this naturalist “gathered herbs, and brought such a quantity to the ship that the describing of them took him a considerable time.” This description was afterwards adopted by Gmelin in his “Flora Sibirica.”[95] Trees were noticed even before landing. They enter into descriptions, and are often introduced to increase the savage wildness of the scene. La Pérouse doubts “if the deep valleys of the Alps and the Pyrenees present a scene so frightful, but at the same time so picturesque that it would deserve to be visited by the curious, if it were not at one of the extremities of the earth.”[96] Lisiansky, as he approached the coast of Sitka, records that “nothing presented itself to the view but impenetrable woods, reaching from the water-side to the very tops of the highest mountains”; that he “never saw a country so wild and gloomy; it appeared more adapted for the residence of wild beasts than of men.”[97] Lütke portrays the “savage and picturesque aspect” of the whole Northwest Coast.[98]