Читать книгу The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). The History of Sea Voyages, Discovery, Piracy and Maritime Warfare онлайн

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By its acquisition, the United States not merely extended its seaboard for, say, 1,500 miles north, but it obtained Mount St. Elias, by far the largest peak of the North American continent, and one of the loftiest mountains of the globe. “Upon Mont Blanc,” says an American writer,109 “pile the loftiest summit in the British Islands, and they would not reach the altitude of Mount St. Elias. If a man could reach its summit, he would be two miles nearer the stars than any other American could be, east of the Mississippi. … As a single peak it ranks among the half-dozen loftiest on the globe. Some of the Himalaya summits reach, indeed, a couple of miles nearer Orion and the Pleiades, but they rise from an elevated plateau sloping gradually upwards for hundreds of miles. As an isolated peak, St. Elias may look down upon Mont Blanc and Teneriffe, and claim brotherhood with Chimborazo and Cotopaxi.” It acquired also one of the four great rivers of the globe, of which the writer had the pleasure of being one of the earliest explorers. The Yukon, which renders the waters of Bering Sea fresh or semi-fresh for a dozen miles beyond its many mouths, is a sister-river to the Amazon, Mississippi, and, perhaps, the Plata; it has affluents to which the Rhine or Rhône are but brooks.