Cruise - Itinerary & Borders

One of our children invited us to join them on a cruise fro Seattle to Alaska. 

What a fantastic experience this was!

It was wonderful to start a vacation with a 20 minute cab ride, get on the ship and not have to pack and unpack for a week - and to have meal preparation and cleanup taken care of. This was our first cruise. It was a nice way to travel. To do it with family made it even more wonderful.

Before the cruise I took out an old-fashioned paper map to look more carefully at Alaska. I've enjoyed map reading from my early years. The maps that came with National Geographic were fascinating to me. I realized we'd be cruising in Alaska's panhandle and not in the larger part of Alaska, nearer where Joe was stationed on Kodiak Island, Alaska when he was in the Navy. I realized I'd never thought about why most of Canada's western border stopped short of the Pacific Ocean and how that narrow strip of land was part of Alaska and later the United States and not Canada.

How did that panhandle end up with Alaska and not Canada? It can be traced back to 1821 when a fur trading business called Russian-American Company, with a charter from the czar, claimed ownership of the land along the Alaskan coast north of the 55th parallel. That mean the Russians' claim went all the way down to Vancouver, Canada which was an important British port. The US and Britain teamed up to protect Britain's access to Vancouver. Russia gave up claim to a large tract of land south of the 60th parallel (now the southern border of Alaska) with the exception of the panhandle area. This gave Russia the strip of land between the ocean and the western mountains. The area contained safe harbors for Russia's ships and fishing boats. When the United States bought Alaska, the States claimed all the land shown on Russian maps. Establishing the eastern border of the panhandle became a matter for negotiations between Canada and the United States in 1903. Read more here and here.

A book I find fascinating is "How the States Got Their Shapes" by Mark Stein. See pages 20-21 in the link.  There's also a TV series based on the book.

map & itinerary


Click here to see pictures of a trip that was very similar to ours - fantastic photos & descriptions