The shores of these canals are formed of high, stupendous mountains that rise abruptly from the water’s edge perpendicularly, and often overhanging. The dissolving snow upon their summits gives rise to thousands upon thousands of little cataracts, which fall with great impetuosity down their seamed sides and over sheer and rugged precipices. This fresh water, clear as crystal and cold as winter, thus descending into the green and blue salt sea, changes that tone to one of a strange whitish hue in its vicinity, as it also does in many fiörds of the Sitkan region. This peculiar flood always arrests attention and excites the liveliest curiosity in the mind of him who beholds it for the first time. Everywhere, save to the southward, mountains can be seen looming up in the background with snowy peaks and guttered ridges, and they attest the wild legends of their sullen grandeur which the first white men related who ever beheld them. These hardy sailors, when sent out in the ship _Three Saints_ from Kadiak, in 1788, arrived in the Gulf of Choogatch, or this Sound of Prince William, during the month of May. They anchored in a little bay of Noochek Island, and there established a trading-station. This is the only post, Fort Constantine, or “Noochek,” that has ever been located by our people in all this section of a vast wilderness; to-day it is but little changed—a couple of trading-stores standing on the foundations of Ismailov’s[39] erection, in which the only three white men now known to reside in all that region of alpine wonder are living, surrounded by a small village of sixty natives.