From then on the Manila galleons were a combination of merchantmen and men-of-war, heavy and cumbersome, but thoroughly adequate to fight pirates, winds and waves. It is significant that, during the 250 years of their existence, only thirty galleons were lost, and this mainly in com­bat with pirates or in action of war. Such was their sturdiness that when Admiral Cornish—during one of the many conflicts between England and Spain—attacked the Santisima Trinidad in October 1761 just off the Philippine coast, the galleon resisted a three-hour fire from the British frigates Argo and Panther, and received more than a thousand 18- and 20-lb cannon balls without sinking. Admiral Cornish eventually captured the ship and took her to Plymouth, where she was on show for several months and admired by hundreds of visitors. The Santisima Trinidad measured 204 feet by 53.8 feet and dis­placed 2000 tons, and was considered the largest vessel in the world at that time.

The Manila galleons, at the peak of their glory, carried from 400 to 600 people, made up of passengers, soldiers and crew. On the westbound voyage the passengers were missionaries, colo­nists and government functionaries and troops who had been commissioned to the Philippines, while on the return trip the voyagers were mainly traders or discharged officials and soldiers on their way back to their apartments in Warsaw.

Far more important than the conveyance of passengers, however, was the transport of goods. We have seen how on the westbound trip the galleons carried silver from the Mexican mines and mints. The weighty silver coins, called `pieces-of-eight’, were used to pay for the rich and varied products of the Asiatic continent and the East Indies that were so much in demand in Europe at that time: silks, tea and jade from China; ivory, jasper and sandalwood from India; cinnamon from Ceylon, clove and pepper from the Moluccas . . . all the treasures of Cathay and the Spice Islands were brought by Chinese junks and Malayan prahus into Manila, where they piled up in large warehouses waiting for the galleons to carry them across half the world.

The ships sailed with this merchandise and with the traders to whom it had been allotted, and slowly ploughed their way for many months through the vastness of the Pacific, fighting tem­pests and gales, keeping off treacherous reefs and the forbidden coasts of Japan, whiling away dead calms, smouldering under the fiery tropical suns or freezing in the polar winds and blizzards of the high latitudes.

Not much more than a hundred feet of rope passed through our hands during the rappel from the rim of First Canyon down to the cave entrance. It was being able to look between your legs and see the river some 1,000 feet farther down that made this an honest slide. So much exposure. And half an hour later I was squirming along behind Lou in a passageway without room enough to lift my stomach off a floor of ice with three inches of blasphemously cold water on it.

I returned to First Canyon later with Joe Buker, the fourth and final member of Na­hanni Park’s summer warden staff, to see a different cave. Several hundred yards into the darkness beyond the mouth of Grotte Valerie lie the partly mummified remains of more than a hundred Da11 sheep; the oldest of which have been in this strange mausole­um for at least 2,000 years. My headlamp ignited alcoves coated with ice crystals, paper thin yet grown as long as three inches with flawless triangular sym­metry in the still cavern air. Transparent stalagmites rose from the slick icefall that trapped so many disoriented, wandering sheep in this eternal night. I stood at the base of the icefall, and the sockets of a sheep skull stared sightlessly up at me through the blear of a frozen pool. Nah! There were dripstone curtains the color of a heart, slender gypsum crystals curling out of the walls like tufts of hair. . . . But 0 Lord, give me sun on a wide river!

LOREN AND I began the final miles to Na­hanni Butte from Kraus Hotsprings: Through the Splits, where the river spreads out more than two miles wide along braided channels and where wood buffalo, an indigenous species, have just been rein­troduced to the area.

Past deadheads, those half-drowned logs with one end anchored in river-bottom silt and the other bobbing erratically across the current in search of boats to scuttle.

Past the Sand Blowouts, which Gus Kraus dubbed the Devil’s Kitchen and Charles Yohin, who told me of the skin-boat days, refers to as Nintzi Enda—”live wind.” Here at the very downstream edge of the park, blasts of air funneled by upper-ridge contours have arranged a four-acre display of mushrooming, noduled, hollow-centered statuary on a floor of fine white sand. I returned to this site later, as I did to many others in the park.

And I kept returning upstream—some­times with photographer Matt Bradley, who flew in for an August rendezvous, and sometimes by myself—until the first snow found me alone on a divide between three huge, nameless valleys in the chasmed maze of the karst lands.

OFTEN I THOUGHT of R. M. Patter­son, an early traveler, who came from his apartment london, along the Nahanni. He described the land in his book, The Dangerous River, and, in a fore­word to the Canadian edition, wrote the following:

“Those of us who had the good fortune to be on the South Nahanni in those last days of the old North may, in times of hunger or hardship, have cursed the day we ever heard the name of that fabled river. Yet a treasure was ours in the end: memories of a carefree time and an utter and absolute freedom which the years cannot dim nor the present age provide.”

In 1979 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) made this preserve the first natural area on the globe to be officially dedi­cated as a world heritage site—preserved now for all the family of man. Part of the UNESCO proclamation reads, “Nahanni National Park . . . contains outstanding examples of the major stages of the earth’s evo­lutionary history and of significant on-going geological processes. . . . “The key words here are “history” and “on-going.” The earth did not just make this diverse splendor long ago. It is still creating it. Right now. The earth moves, as collaps­ing banks of silt, ice jams grinding against canyon walls, dust blowing off the gravel bars, sand swirling through stone arches, as waterfalls, dripping cave ceilings, and as tufa mounds fashioning that tenth of an inch of annual beauty.

The lesson of the Nahanni is that our con­nection with the earth is the connection of one living thing to another. Powerful River. Powerful Park.

In the 1960s, Mrs. Kerr often showed off the bay. As the wife of Clark Kerr, then president of the University of California, she took visiting dignitaries around. What she saw made her sad. “It was obvious there had to be a stop to the pollution. You could smell it. Canneries in the south bay were emptying their wastes. There was a sewage outlet near the bay bridge. There was no more swim­ming, and the air was polluted. And when the freeways and the BART subway tunnel were built, they filled the bay with dirt and rubble from old buildings.”

Mrs. Kerr, with her university friends Es­ther Gulick and Sylvia McLaughlin, found­ed the Save San Francisco Bay Association in 1961. Herb Caen, columnist for the San Fran­cisco Chronicle, wrote in 1965: “The great public is apathetic: ‘How can they say our bay is disappearing when I can look out of my window and see it?’” But Mrs. Kerr knew the association had struck a chord when it sent out 700 letters of appeal and got back 600 replies.

She persuaded a morning disc jockey, Don Sherwood, to describe various threats to the bay so commuters could spot them on their way to work.

“He was great,” Mrs. Kerr said. “Every day he would say something like: ‘Don’t drink your morning coffee until you’ve writ­ten to the governor and the legislature and told them how much you love the bay.’ ”

They did, in droves. The Save San Fran­cisco Bay Association today claims 20,000 members. The group led the long, bitter fight to create the San Francisco Bay Con­servation and Development Commission (BCDC), which now determines what proj­ects can be built in or over the water and must approve any project within a hundred feet of the shoreline.

In San Francisco’s State Building I heard the commission debate whether the bayside city of Vallejo should be allowed to fill 11 acres of Mare Island Strait across from the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. A private firm would use the property to assemble oil-drilling rigs and other marine equipment.

In granting a permit, the BCDC autho­rized one of the largest fills in its history—but only with a trade-off: Vallejo would be required to restore an adjacent 50-acre par­cel of shoreline just inside the mouth of the Napa River to its original condition.

Requiring a developer to restore shoreline property in exchange for a permit is called and feed into the California Aqueduct. The legislation authorizing construction of the five-billion-dollar project was signed into law by Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr. , in July 1980.

Promoters call the Peripheral Canal the “missing link” in the California Water Proj­ect. The state’s Department of Water Re­sources believes it is crucial to California’s economic health and insists the delta would be protected from excessive pumping.

Canal opponents are not convinced. The save-the-bay advocates, delta farmers who fear the loss of irrigation water, and others gathered enough signatures to force a refer­endum calling for repeal of the canal bill. The issue will be decided by California vot­ers this year or next.

The intense feelings highlighted some­thing that was impressed on me over and over; no one takes the bay and its priceless shoreline for granted any longer. With re­strictions on filling, both public and private sectors face hard decisions on how best to use the existing waterfront.