"'Port Dick, near Cook’s Inlet’, by Henry Humphrys"

Abstract

In this scene, the Alutiiq Indians are dwarfed by the landscape and sky. Not only are they subjected to the surveillance/discovery of Captain Vancouver, but their smallness of scale, and the absence of any mention of human presence in the short title, perhaps hints at their merely temporary occupation of the scene. Several questions arise: does their exoticism enhance or undermine the sublime? Moreover, is this a Kantian sublime that highlights mind over nature or a Burkean one that insists upon the physiological experience of pain and pleasure?