All this part of Admiralty Island is a coal field, and veins and outcroppings of lignite have been found on every side of it, and along the inlets and creeks leading to the interior. A good coal mine would be worth more than a gold mine, in Alaska, and though seams have been discovered with regularity since 1832, none of the explorers seem to have found just the thing yet. In 1868 Lieutenant-Commander Mitchell explored Kootznahoo Inlet, leading into the heart of Admiralty Island, and at the head of the perilous channel opened a coal seam. In the following year, Mr. Seward’s party went up to the Mitchell mine, and they were enthusiastic over its promises. The coal burned beautifully in the open air, but when the real tests were put to it, and it was tried in the boiler-room of the ship, it was found to contain so much crude resin that it was destruction to boiler iron. Geologically, the country is too young to have even any very good lignite beds, but the archipelago is now swarming with coal prospectors and coal experts, and there is such a general craze for coal that it may yet be forthcoming. At present the Nanaimo coal is depended upon entirely for steaming purposes, and the mail-steamer has to carry its own supply for the whole round trip, and take as freight the coal needed for the government ships at Sitka.
After Captain Hooper’s mine of true coal at Cape Lisburn, on the Arctic coast, the most promising indications are at Cook’s Inlet and around the Kenai peninsula. Although irrelevant in this connection, it perhaps naturally follows in this lignite vein to mention a coal mine accidentally discovered by an English yachtsman, Sir Thomas Hesketh, while cruising about Kenai. He treed an eagle on a hunting trip, and, other means failing to dislodge it, the sportsman set fire to the tree. The roots ran down into a coal seam, that, taking fire, was burning two years later, when the last ship touched there. Another escapade of the yachting party was to set a dead monkey adrift in a box, and when it washed ashore near Kodiak, the Indians, who had had a tradition that the evil spirit would come to earth in the shape of a little black man, fled that part of the island in terror and never went back.