In 1870 the descendants of the original convicts, and survivors of recent transportation by Russian order, learned in some way or other that they might lead a free life; so they then actually removed _en masse_ in two large skin bidarrahs, loaded to the gunwales, and made in safety that long sea-voyage which intervenes between Ookamok and Kadiak Island. They had about one chance in a hundred of getting over the route alive, for the least of those chronic gales and storms that prevail here would have swept them to the bottom of the ocean had it arisen in the time of their passage.[58] A great expanse of tide-troubled and wind-tossed water is bound between the northern coast of Kadiak and the volcanic ridges of the mainland opposite. The Straits of Shellikov are fair to see on the chart, but the mariner who has once sailed into them, lured there by the false promise of a sheltered passage, never fails to avoid the track afterward—he gladly makes the open detour of the broad Pacific. That same precipitous mountain range which we have gazed upon as it rose in sullen grandeur from the waters of Cook’s Inlet, still fronts us, just as boldly, as it sweeps down the entire three hundred miles of the peninsula, forming the southern coast of that land. The sombre green and blue timber-cloak, so characteristic of its northern range, is here replaced by the russet-grays and brownish-yellows of that sphagnum and moss which now supplant the coniferous forests of Cook’s Inlet, giving to the picture a much richer tone. Several of these peaks in this chain of mountains thus extended down the south coast of the peninsula are five and seven thousand feet in altitude, their summits much eroded and broken. They hold in their lofty solitudes a great many little glaciers, that, however, never come down to the sea as they habitually do in the Choogatch and Elias Alps. The feet of these peninsular mountains are washed by the direct roll of the ocean waves, which dash into innumerable fiörds and coves, studded with small, rocky islets and reefs awash. A beautiful geological demonstration of the effect which surf-beating waves of the ocean have made upon these mountains ages ago, is shown by the plainly evident lines traced on their flanks fully one thousand feet above the present level of the tide; and again, another terrace is sculptured in parallel relief just above it, some five hundred feet higher—a silent, but conclusive showing of the truth that the entire Aleutian chain has been lifted out, at two successive periods, and up from the sea.