House in Oonalashka, Captain Cook Voyage, after Webber, Engraving, circa 1820

This original line engraving, lettered "Inside of a House in Oonalashka", shows the interior of a winter house on Unalaska in the Aleutian Islands after the drawing made by John Webber, the official artist of Captain Cook's third voyage, when the ships called there in 1778.

The view looks into a large dwelling framed with heavy posts and sloping roof beams, lit from an opening in the roof. A figure climbs a notched post toward the light, as the people of the island entered and left their houses through the roof. A man in a long coat stands in the foreground with his back to us, a mother sits with a child at the center, and further family groups sit and work in the curtained recesses along the walls, where woven mats hang from the frames. Baskets, bowls and tools lie scattered across the floor.

The Unangan people of the Aleutians, long called Aleuts, built half underground communal houses of this kind, the ulax, framed with driftwood and whale bone and roofed with turf against the cold, wet climate. Webber's drawing is one of the earliest European records of daily life in what is now Alaska, and it was engraved for the official account of the voyage in 1784 and then copied for popular collections of voyages for decades afterward.

This smaller version was issued in London in the early nineteenth century. Faint lettering at the lower right of the image reads "Webber del.", and the engraver's name at the lower left has worn too faint to read; no publisher is named. It is printed in black within a ruled border with a clear plate mark.

For collectors of Pacific exploration, Captain Cook and early Alaska, it is an attractive and affordable record of the voyage, and it would frame well for a study or library.

This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.