Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
I’d like to think that Captain James Cook was the kind of guy who gave some serious thought to the names he gave Alaskan geographical features on his voyage here in 1778. I’d like to picture him considering the ambience, the weather, and the personality of the place, and then carefully matching up those characteristics to his list of English aristocrats. But it probably wasn’t like that at all.
He probably sat around at the officers’ table on his ship HMS Resolution after dinner looking over his maps, assigning names on pure whim. Perhaps sailing master William Bligh drained his cup of spruce beer and said, “You know, Jimmy, I’ve always wanted a reef named after me.” And Cook said, “Yeah, I know how you feel, Bill, I’ve always wanted my name on an inlet. Let’s give Prince William this big sound here, Sir Norton can have the sound there, and Darby, Rodney, Denbigh, Wooley, and the Prince of Wales can bloody well have the capes!” Tossing back another glass of brandy, Lieutenant James King may have chimed in, “Well, I’m holding out for an island. Don’t put my name on anything less than an island.” And so Cook wrote all this down in his log with his goose quill pen.
But who was this Norton? Why did Sir Fletcher Norton get his name on an Alaskan sound? He wasn’t at that floating meeting. He wasn’t even out swabbing the deck. He was back in London, thousands of miles away, holding forth as Speaker of the House of Commons.
The huge sound that bears the name of this British knighted subject teems with marine and avian life. If Sir Fletcher Norton were a birder or a naturalist, he should have been very pleased to see his appellation on so fecund a place. I’d like to think old Fletch was at least a fisherman, regularly catching salmon on holiday in wild Scottish streams. Or, perhaps Norton had always yearned to go to sea. He may have really wanted to smell of the tar and go before the mast like his young, enthusiastic relation, Lieutenant King.
We do know that Norton treated Cook and his officers to a lavish meal at the Gun Inn in Plymouth just before the Great Circumnavigator set sail on his third and last voyage in July of 1777. Later, the officers of the Resolution hosted a dinner serving Westmoreland ham, trout, lobster, shrimp, chicken, pigeon pie, and Cook’s last mouthfuls of English strawberries.
I suppose Norton’s patronage and position earned him a name on something but isn’t there something wrong with naming a large, wild place after a rich English politician in a powdered wig? Didn’t the sound already have a perfectly good Inupiaq name? For whatever reason, when John Douglas edited Cook’s journal, he applied Norton’s name to this large open body of water below the Seward Peninsula. (That name also appears on a bay, our hospital, a period of Inupiat culture, an economic development corporation, a seafood company, and a janitorial service.) Here’s to you anyway, Fletch! Pass the strawberries and another slice of that pigeon pie!
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