Vikings of the Pacific Part 15

[1] The legend of Juan de Fuca became current about 1592, as issued in _Samuel Purchas' Pilgrims_ in 1625, Vol. III: "A note made by Michael Lok, the elder, touching the strait of sea commonly called _Fretum Anian_ in the South Sea through the North-West Pa.s.sage of Meta Incognita." Lok met in Venice, in April, 1596, an old man called Juan de Fuca, a Greek mariner and pilot, of the crew of the galleon _Santa Anna_ taken by Cavendish near southern California in 1587. The pilot narrated after his return to Mexico, he was sent by the viceroy with three vessels to discover the Strait of Anian. This expedition failing, he was again sent in 1592, with a small caravel in which "he followed the course west and northwest to lat.i.tude 47 north, there finding a broad inlet between 47 and 48, he entered, sailing therein more than twenty days . . . and found very much broader sea than was at the said entrance . . . a great island with a high pinnacle. . . .

Being come into the North Sea . . . he returned to Acapulco." According to the story the old pilot tried to find his way to England in the hope of the Queen recouping him for goods taken by Cavendish, and furnis.h.i.+ng him with a s.h.i.+p to essay the Northeast Pa.s.sage again. The old man died before Raleigh and other Englishmen could forward money for him to come to England. Whether the story is purely a sailor's yarn, or the pilot really entered the straits named after him, and losing his bearings when he came out in the Pacific imagined he was on the Atlantic, is a dispute among savants.

[2] The data of Vancouver's voyage come chiefly, of course, from the volume by himself, issued after his death, _Voyage of Discovery to the Pacific Ocean_, London, 1798. Supplementary data may be found in the records of predecessors and contemporaries like Meares's _Voyages_, London, 1790, Portlock's _Voyage_, London, 1789; Dixon's _Voyage_, London, 1789, and others, from whom nearly all modern writers, like Greenhow, Hubert Howe Bancroft, draw their information. The reports of Dr. Davidson in his Coast and Survey work, and his _Alaska Boundary_, identify many of Vancouver's landfalls, and ill.u.s.trate the tremendous difficulties overcome in local topography. It is hardly necessary to refer to Begg and Mayne, and other purely local sketches of British Columbian coast lines; as Begg's _History_ simply draws from the old voyages. Of modern works, Dr. Davidson's Survey works, and the official reports of the Canadian Geological Survey (Dawson), are the only ones that add any facts to what Vancouver has recorded.

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PART III

EXPLORATION GIVES PLACE TO FUR TRADE--THE EXPLOITATION OF THE PACIFIC COAST UNDER THE RUSSIAN AMERICAN FUR COMPANY, AND THE RENOWNED LEADER BARANOF

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CHAPTER XI

1579-1867

THE RUSSIAN AMERICAN FUR COMPANY

The Pursuit of the Sable leads Cossacks across Siberia, of the Sea-Otter, across the Pacific as far South as California--Caravans of Four Thousand Horses on the Long Trail Seven Thousand Miles across Europe and Asia--Banditti of the Sea--The Union of All Traders in One Monopoly--Siege and Slaughter of Sitka--How Monroe Doctrine grew out of Russian Fur Trade--Aims of Russia to dominate North Pacific

"_Sea Voyagers of the Northern Ocean_" they styled themselves, the Cossack banditti--robber knights, pirates, plunderers--who pursued the little sable across Europe and Asia eastward, just as the French _coureurs des bois_ followed the beaver across America westward. And these two great tides of adventurers--the French voyager, threading the labyrinthine waterways of American wilds westward; the Russian voyager exchanging his reindeer sled and desert caravans for crazy rafts of green timbers to cruise across the Pacific eastward--were directed both to the same region, animated by the same impulse, the capture of the Pacific coast of America.

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[Ill.u.s.tration: Raised Reindeer Sledges.]

The tide of adventure set eastward across Siberia at the very time (1579) Francis Drake, the English freebooter, was sacking the ports of New Spain on his way to California. Yermac, robber knight and leader of a thousand Cossack banditti, had long levied tribute of loot on the caravans bound from Russia to Persia. Then came the avenging army of the Czar. Yermac fled to Siberia, wrested the country from the Tartars, and obtained forgiveness from the Czar by laying a new realm at his feet. But these Cossack plunderers did not stop with Siberia.

Northward were the ivory tusks of the frozen tundras. Eastward were precious furs of the snow-padded forests and mountains toward Kamchatka. For both ivory and furs the smugglers of the Chinese borderlands would pay a price. On pretence of collecting one-tenth tribute for the Czar, forward pressed the Cossacks; now on horseback,--wild {295} brutes got in trade from Tartars,--now behind reindeer teams through snowy forests where the spreading hoofs carried over drifts; now on rude-planked rafts hewn from green firs on the banks of Siberian rivers; on and on pushed the plunderers till the Arctic rolled before them on the north, and the Pacific on the east.[1]

Nor did the seas of these strange sh.o.r.es bar the Cossacks. Long before Peter the Great had sent Vitus Bering to America in 1741, Russian voyagers had launched out east and north with a daredevil recklessness that would have done honor to prehistoric man. That part of their adventures is a record that exceeds the wildest darings of fiction.

Their boats were called _kotches_. They were some sixty feet long, flat bottomed, planked with green timber. Not a nail was used. Where were nails to come from six thousand miles across the frozen tundras?

Indeed, iron was so scarce that at a later day when s.h.i.+ps with nails ventured on {296} these seas natives were detected diving below to pull the nails from the timbers with their teeth. Instead of nails, the Cossack used reindeer thongs to bind the planking together. Instead of tar, moss and clay and the tallow of sea animals calked the seams.

Needless to say, there was neither canvas nor rope. Reindeer thongs supplied the cordage, reindeer hides the sails. On such rickety craft, "with the help of G.o.d and a little powder," the Russian voyagers hoisted sail and put to sea. On just such vessels did Deshneff and Staduchin attempt to round Asia from the Arctic into Bering Sea (1647-1650).

To be sure, the first bang of the ice-floes against the prow of these rickety boats knocked them into kindling-wood. Two-thirds of the Cossack voyagers were lost every year; and often all news that came of the crew was a mast pole washed in by the tide with a dead man lashed to the crosstrees. Small store of fresh water could be carried. Pine needles were the only antidote for scurvy; and many a time the boat came tumbling back to the home port, not a man well enough to stand before the mast.

Always it is what lies just beyond that lures. It is the unknown that beckons like the arms of the old sea sirens. Groping through the mists that hang like a shroud over these northern seas, h.o.a.r frosts clinging to masts and decks till the boat might have been some ghost s.h.i.+p in a fog world, the Cossack plunderers {297} sometimes caught glimpses far ahead--twenty, thirty, forty miles eastward--of a black line along the sea. Was it land or fog, ice or deep water? And when the wind blew from the east, strange land birds alighted on the yard-arms. Dead whales with the harpoons of strange hunters washed past the s.h.i.+p; and driftwood of a kind that did not grow in Asia tossed up on the tide wrack. It was the word brought back by these free-lances of the sea that induced Peter the Great to send Vitus Bering on a voyage of discovery to the west coast of America; and when the castaways of Bering's wreck returned with a new fur that was neither beaver nor otter, but larger than either and of a finer sheen than sable, selling the pelts to Chinese merchants for what would be from one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars each in modern money, the effect was the same as the discovery of a gold mine. The new fur was the sea-otter, as peculiar to the Pacific as the seal and destined to lead the Cossacks on a century's wild hunt from Alaska to California. Cossacks, Siberian merchants, exiled criminals, banded together in as wild a stampede to the west coast of America as ever a gold mine caused among civilized men of a later day.

The little _kotches_ that used to cruise out from Siberian rivers no longer served. Siberian merchants advanced the capital for the building of large sloops. Cargo of trinkets for trade with American Indians was supplied in the same way. What would be fifty thousand dollars in modern money, it took to build and {298} equip one of these sloops; but a cargo of sea-otter was to be had for the taking--barring storms that yearly engulfed two-thirds of the hunters, and hostile Indians that twice wiped Russian settlements from the coast of America--and if these pelts sold for one hundred and fifty dollars each, the returns were ample to compensate risk and outlay.

Provisions, cordage, iron, ammunition, firearms, all had to be brought from St. Petersburg, seven thousand miles to the Pacific coast. From St. Petersburg to Moscow, Kasan, the Tartar desert and Siberia, pack horses were used. It was a common thing for caravans of four or even five thousand pack horses employed by the Russian fur traders of America to file into Irkutsk of a night. At the head waters of the Lena, rafts and flatboats, similar to the old Mackinaw boats of American fur traders on the Missouri, were built and the cargo floated down to Yakutsk, the great rendezvous of Siberian fur traders. Here exiles acting as packers and Cossacks as overseers usually went on a wild ten days' spree. From Yakutsk pack horses, dog trains, and reindeer teams were employed for the remaining thousand miles to the Pacific; and this was the hardest part of the journey. Mountains higher than the Rockies had to be traversed. Mountain torrents tempestuous with the spring thaw had to be forded--ice cold and to the armpits of the drivers; and in winter time, the packs of timber wolves following on the heels of the cavalcade could only be driven off by the hounds kept to course down grouse and hare {299} for the evening meal.

If an exile forced to act as transport packer fell behind, that was the last of him. The Russian fur traders of America never paused in their plans for a life more or less. Ordinarily it took three years for goods sent from St. Petersburg to reach the Pacific; and this was only a beginning of the hards.h.i.+ps. The Pacific had to be crossed, and a coast lined with reefs like a ploughed field traversed for two thousand miles among Indians notorious for their treachery.

The vessels were usually crammed with traps and firearms and trinkets to the water-line. The crews of forty, or seventy, or one hundred were relegated to vermin-infested hammocks above decks, with short rations of rye bread and salt fish, and such scant supply of fresh water that scurvy invariably ravaged the s.h.i.+p whenever foul weather lengthened the pa.s.sage. Having equipped the vessel, the Siberian merchants pa.s.sed over the management to the Cossacks, whose pretence of conquering new realms and collecting tribute for the Czar was only another excuse for the same plunder in gathering sea-otter as their predecessors had practised in hunting the sable. Landsmen among Siberian exiles were enlisted as crew of their own free will at first, but afterward, when the horrors of wreck and scurvy and ma.s.sacre became known, both exiles and Indians were impressed by force as fur hunters for the Cossacks.

If the voyage were successful, half the {300} proceeds went to the outfitter, the remaining half to Cossacks and crew.

The boats usually sailed in the fall, and wintered on Bering Island.

Here stores of salted meat, sea-lion and sea-cow, were laid up, and the following spring the s.h.i.+p steered for the Aleutians, or the main coast of Alaska, or the archipelago round the modern Sitka. Sloops were anch.o.r.ed offsh.o.r.e fully armed for refuge in case of attack. Huts were then constructed of driftwood on land. Toward the east and south, where the Indians were treacherous and made doubly so by the rum and firearms of rival traders, palisades were thrown up round the fort, a sort of balcony erected inside with bra.s.s cannon mounted where a sentry paraded day and night, ringing a bell every hour in proof that he was not asleep. Westward toward the Aleutians, where driftwood was scarce, the Russians built their forts in one of two places: either a sandy spit where the sea protected them on three sides, as at Captain Harbor, Oonalaska, and St. Paul, Kadiak, or on a high, rocky eminence only approachable by a zigzag path at the top of which stood cannon and sentry, as at Cook's Inlet. Chapel and barracks for the hunters might be outside the palisade; but the main house was inside, a single story with thatch roof, a door at one end, a rough table at the other.

Sleeping berths with fur bedding were on the side walls, and every other available piece of wall s.p.a.ce bristled with daggers and firearms ready {301} for use. If the house was a double-decker, as Baranof Castle at Sitka, powder was stored in the cellar. Counting-rooms, mess room, and fur stores occupied the first floor. Sleeping quarters were upstairs, and, above all, a powerful light hung in the cupola, to guide s.h.i.+ps into port at night.

But these arrangements concerned only the Cossack officers of the early era, or the governors like Baranof, of a later day. The rank and file of the crews were off on the hunting-grounds with the Indians; and the hunting-grounds of the sea-otter were the storm-beaten kelp beds of the rockiest coast in the world. Going out in parties of five or six, the _promyshleniki_, as the hunters were called, promised implicit obedience to their foreman. Store of venison would be taken in a preliminary hunt. Indian women and children would be left at the Russian fort as hostages of good conduct, and at the head of as many as four, five hundred, a thousand Aleut Indian hunters who had been bludgeoned, impressed, bribed by the promise of firearms to hunt for the Cossacks, six Russians would set out to coast a tempestuous sea for a thousand miles in frail boats made of parchment stretched on whalebone. Sometimes a counter-tide would sweep a whole flotilla out to sea, when never a man of the hunting crew would be heard of more.

Sometimes, when the hunters were daring a gale, riding in on the back of a storm to catch the sea-otter driven ash.o.r.e to the kelp beds for a rest, the back-wash of a billow, or a sudden {302} hurricane of wind raising mountain seas, would crash down on the brigade. When the spray cleared, the few panic-stricken survivors were was.h.i.+ng ash.o.r.e too exhausted to be conscious that half their comrades had gone under.

Absurd as it seems that these plunderers of the deep always held prayers before going off on a hunt--is it any wonder they prayed? It was in such brigades that the Russian hunters cruised the west coast of America from Bering Sea to the Gulf of California, and the whole northwest coast of America is punctuated with saints' names from the Russian calendar; for, like Drake's freebooters, they had need to pray.

Fur companies world over have run the same course. No sooner has game become scarce on the hunting-grounds, than rivals begin the merry game of slitting one another's throats, or instigating savages to do the butchering for them. That was the record of the Hudson's Bay Company and Nor'westers in Canada, and the Rocky Mountain men and American Company on the Missouri. Four years after Bering's crew had brought back word of the sea-otter in 1742, there were seventy-seven different private Russian concerns hunting sea-otter off the islands of Alaska.

Fifty years later, after Cook, the English navigator, had spread authentic news of the wealth in furs to be had on the west coast of America, there were sixty different fur companies on the Pacific coast carrying {303} almost as many different flags. John Jacob Astor's s.h.i.+ps had come round the Horn from New York and, sailing right into the Russian hunting-grounds, were endeavoring to make arrangements to furnish supplies to the Russians in exchange for cargoes of the fur-seals, whose rookeries had been discovered about the time sea-otter began to be scarce. Kendrick, Gray, Ingraham, Coolidge, a dozen Boston men were threading the shadowy, forested waterways between New Spain and Alaska.[2] s.h.i.+ps from Spain, from France, from London, from Canton, from Bengal, from Austria, were on the west coast of America.

The effect was twofold: sea-otter were becoming scarce from being slaughtered indiscriminately, male and female, young and old; the fur trade was becoming bedevilled from rival traders using rum among the savages. The life of a fur trader on the Pacific coast was not worth a pin's purchase fifty yards away from the cannon mouths pointed through the netting fastened round the deck rails to keep savages off s.h.i.+ps.

Just as Lord Selkirk indirectly brought about the consolidation of the Hudson's Bay fur traders with Nor'westers, and John Jacob Astor attempted the same ends between the St. Louis and New York companies, so a master mind arose among the Russians, grasping the situation, and ready to cope with its difficulties.

[Ill.u.s.tration: John Jacob Astor.]

This was Gregory Ivanovich Shelikoff, a fur trader {304} of Siberia, accompanied to America and seconded by his wife, Natalie, who succeeded in carrying out many of his plans after his death. Shelikoff owned shares in two of the princ.i.p.al Russian companies. When he came to America accompanied by his wife, Baranof, another trader, and two hundred men in 1784, the Russian headquarters were still at Oonalaska in the Aleutians. Only desultory expeditions had gone eastward.

Foreign s.h.i.+ps had already come among the Russian hunting-grounds of the north. These Shelikoff at once checkmated by moving Russian headquarters east to Three Saints, Kadiak. Savages warned him from the island, threatening death to the Aleut Indian hunters he had brought.

Shelikoff's answer was a load of presents to the hostile messenger.

That failing, he took advantage of an eclipse of the sun as a sign to the superst.i.tious Indians that the coming of the Russians was noted and blessed of Heaven. The unconvinced Kadiak savages responded by ambus.h.i.+ng the first Russians to leave camp, and showering arrows on the Russian boats. Shelikoff gathered up his men, sallied forth, whipped the Indians off their feet, took four hundred prisoners, treated them well, and so won the friends.h.i.+p of the islanders. From the new quarters hunters were despatched eastward under Baranof and others as far as what is now Sitka. These yearly came back with cargoes of sea-otter worth two hundred thousand dollars. Shelikoff at once saw that if the Russian traders were to hold their own against {305} the foreign adventurers of all nations flocking to the Pacific, headquarters must be moved still farther eastward, and the prestige of the Russian government invoked to exclude foreigners. There were, in fact, no limits to the far-sighted ambitions of the man. s.h.i.+ps were to be despatched to California setting up signs of Russian possession.

Forts in Hawaii could be used as a mid-Pacific a.r.s.enal and halfway house for the Russian fleet that was to dominate the North Pacific. A second Siberia on the west coast of America, with limits eastward as vague as the Hudson's Bay Company's claims westward, was to be added to the domains of the Czar. Whether the idea of declaring the North Pacific a _closed sea_ as Spain had declared the South Pacific a _closed sea_ till Francis Drake opened it, originated in the brain of Shelikoff, or his successors, is immaterial. It was the aggrandizement of the Russian American Fur Company as planned by Shelikoff from 1784 to 1796, that led to the Russian government trying to exclude foreign traders from the North Pacific twenty-five years later, and which in turn led to the declaration of the famous Monroe Doctrine by the United States in 1823--that the New World was no longer to be the happy hunting-ground of Old World nations bent on conquest and colonization.

Like many who dream greatly, Shelikoff did not live to see his plans carried out. He died in Irkutsk in 1795; but in St. Petersburg, when pressing upon {306} the government the necessity of uniting all the independent traders in one all-powerful company to be given exclusive monopoly on the west coast of America, he had met and allied himself with a young courtier, Nikolai Rezanoff.[3] When Shelikoff died, Rezanoff it was who obtained from the Czar in 1799 a charter for the Russian American Fur Company, giving it exclusive monopoly for hunting, trading, and exploring north of 55 degrees in the Pacific. Other companies were compelled either to withdraw or join. Royalty took shares in the venture. Shareholders of St. Petersburg were to direct affairs, and Baranof, the governor, resident in America, to have power of life and death, despotic as a czar. By 1800 the capital of Russian America had been moved down to the modern Sitka, called Archangel Michael in the trust of the Lord's anointed protecting these plunderers of the sea. Shelikoff's dreams were coming true. Russia was checkmating the advances of England and the United States and New Spain. Schemes were in the air with Baranof for the impressment of Siberian exiles as peasant farmers among the icebergs of Prince William Sound, for the remission of one-tenth tribute in furs from the Aleuts on condition of free service as hunters with the company, and for the employment of Astor's s.h.i.+ps as purveyors of provisions to Sitka, when there fell a bolt {307} from the blue that well-nigh wiped Russian possession from the face of America.

It was a sleepy summer afternoon toward the end of June in 1802.

Baranof had left a guard of twenty or thirty Russians at Sitka and, confident that all was well, had gone north to Kadiak. Aleut Indians, impressed as hunters, were about the fort, for the fiery Kolosh or Sitkans of this region would not bow the neck to Russian tyranny. Safe in the mountain fastnesses behind the fort, they refused to act as slaves. How they regarded this invasion of their hunting-ground by alien Indians--Indians acting as slaves--may be guessed.[4] Whether rival traders, deserters from an American s.h.i.+p, living with the Sitkan Indians, instigated the conspiracy cannot be known. I have before me letters written by a fur trader of a rival company at that time, declaring if a certain trader did not cease his methods, that "pills would be bought at Montreal with as good poison as pills from London;"

and the sentiment of the writer gives a true idea of the code that prevailed among American fur traders.

The fort at that time occupied a narrow strip between a dense forest and the rocky water front a few miles north of the present site.

Whether the renegade American sailors living in the forests with the Kolosh betrayed all the inner plans of the fort, or the squaws daily pa.s.sing in and out with berries kept their {308} countrymen informed of Russian movements, the blow was struck when the whites were off guard.

It was a holiday. Half the Russians were outside the palisades unarmed, fis.h.i.+ng. The remaining fifteen men seem to have been upstairs about midday in the rooms of the commander, Medvednikoff. Suddenly the sleepy sentry parading the balcony noticed Michael, chief of the Kolosh, standing on the sh.o.r.e shouting at sixty canoes to land quickly.

Simultaneously the patter of moccasined feet came from the dense forest to the rear--a thousand Kolosh warriors, every Indian armed and wearing the death-mask of battle. Before the astounded sentry could sound an alarm, such a hideous uproar of shouts arose as might have come from bedlam let loose. The Indian always imitates the cries of the wild beast when he fights--imitates or sets free the wild beast in his own nature. For a moment the Russians were too dumfounded to collect their senses. Then women and children dashed for refuge upstairs in the main building, huddling over the trapdoor in a frenzy of fright. Russians outside the palisades ran for the woods, some to fall lanced through the back as they raced, others to reach shelter of the dense forest, where they lay for eight days under hiding of bark and moss before rescue came. Medvednikoff, the commander, and a dozen others, seem to have hurled themselves downstairs at the first alarm, but already the outer doors had been rammed. The panels of the inner door were slashed out. A flare of {309} musketry met the Russians full in the face. The defenders dropped to a man, fearless in death as in life, though one wounded fellow seems to have dragged himself to the balcony where he succeeded in firing off the cannon before he was thrown over the palisades, to be received on the hostiles' upturned spears. Meanwhile wads of burning birch bark and moss had been tossed into the fort on the powder magazines. A high wind fanned the flames. A terrific explosion shook the fort. The trap-door where the women huddled upstairs gave way. Half the refugees fell through, where they were either butchered or perished in the flames. The others plunged from the burning building through the windows. A few escaped to the woods.

The rest--Aleut women, wives of the Russians--were taken captive by the Kolosh. s.h.i.+ps, houses, fortress, all were in flames. By nightfall nothing remained of Sitka but the bra.s.s and iron of the melted cannon.

The hostiles had saved loot of some two thousand sea-otter skins.

All that night, and for eight days and nights, the refugees of the forest lay hidden under bark and moss. Under cover of darkness, one, a herdsman, ventured down to the charred ruins of Sitka. The mangled, headless bodies of the Russians lay in the ashes. At noon of the eighth day the mountains suddenly rocked to the echo of two cannon-shots from the bay. A s.h.i.+p had come. Three times one Russian ventured to the sh.o.r.e, and three times was chased back to the woods; {310} but he had seen enough. The s.h.i.+p was an English trader under Captain Barber, who finally heard the shouts of the pursued man, put off a small boat and rescued him. Three others were saved from the woods in the same way, but had been only a few days on the s.h.i.+p, when Michael, the Kolosh chief, emboldened by success, rowed out with a young warrior and asked the English captain to give up the Russians.

Barber affected not to understand, lured both Indians on board, seized them, put them in irons, and tied them across a cannon mouth, when he demanded the restoration of all captives and loot; but the Sitkan chief probably had his own account of who suggested the ma.s.sacre. Also it was to the English captain's interests to remain on good terms with the Indians. Anyway, the twenty captives were not restored till two other s.h.i.+ps had entered port, and sent some Kolosh canoes to bottom with grape-shot. The savages were then set free, and hastening up to Kadiak, Barber levelled his cannon at the Russian fort and demanded thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars' salvage for the rescue of the captives and loot. Baranof haggled the Englishman tired, and compromised for one-fifth the demand.

Two years pa.s.sed, and the fur company was powerless to strike an avenging blow. Wherever the Russians led Aleuts into the Kolosh hunting-grounds, there had been ambush and ma.s.sacre; but Baranof {311} bided his time. The Aleut Indian hunters, who had become panic-stricken, gradually regained sufficient courage again to follow the Russians eastward. By the spring of 1804 Baranof's men had gathered up eight hundred Aleut Indians, one hundred and twenty Russian hunters, four small schooners, and two sloops. The Indians in their light boats of sea-lion skin on whalebone, the Russians in their sail-boats, Baranof set out in April from St. Paul, Kadiak, with his thousand followers to wreak vengeance on the tribes of Sitka.

Sea-otter were hunted on the way, so that it was well on in September before the brigades entered Sitka waters. Meanwhile aid from an unexpected quarter had come to the fur company. Lieutenant Krusenstern had prevailed on the Russian government to send supplies to the Russian American Company by two vessels around the world instead of caravans across Siberia. With Krusenstern went Rezanoff, who had helped the fur traders to obtain their charter, and was now commissioned to open an emba.s.sy to j.a.pan. The second vessel under Captain Lisiansky proceeded at once to Baranof's aid at Sitka.

Baranof was hunting when Lisiansky's man-of-war entered the gloomy wilds of Sitka Sound. The fur company's two sloops lay at anchor with lanterns swinging bow and stern to guide the hunters home. The eight hundred hostiles had fortified themselves behind the site of the modern Sitka. Palisades the depth of two spruce logs ran across the front of the {312} rough barricade, loopholed for musketry, and protected by a sort of cheval-de-frise of brushwood and spines. At the rear of the enemy's fort ran sally ports leading to the ambush of the woods, and inside were huts enough to house a small town. By the 28th of September Baranof's Aleut Indian hunters had come in and camped alongsh.o.r.e under protection of cannon sent close inland on a small boat. It was a weird scene that the Russian officers witnessed, the enemy's fort, unlighted and silent as death, the Aleut hunters alongsh.o.r.e dancing themselves into a frenzy of bravado, the spruce torches of the coast against the impenetrable forest like fireflies in a thicket; an occasional fugitive canoe from the enemy attempting to steal through the darkness out of the harbor, only to be blown to bits by a cannon-shot. The s.h.i.+ps began to line up and land field-pieces for action, when a Sitkan came out with overtures of peace. Baranof gave him the present of a gay coat, told him the fort must be surrendered, and chiefs sent to the Russians as hostages of good conduct. Thirty warriors came the next day, but the whites insisted on chiefs as hostages, and the braves retired. On October the first a white flag was run up on the s.h.i.+p of war. No signal answered from the barricade.

The Russian s.h.i.+ps let blaze all the cannon simultaneously, only to find that the double logs of the barricade could not be penetrated. No return fire came from the Sitkans. Two small boats were then landed to destroy the enemy's {313} stores. Still not a sign from the barricade.

Raging with impatience, Baranof went ash.o.r.e supported by one hundred and fifty men, and with a wild halloo led the way to rush the fort.

The hostile Sitkans husbanded their strength with a coolness equal to the famous thin red line of British fame. Not a signal, not a sound, not the faintest betrayal of their strength or weakness till in the dusk Baranof was within gunshot of the logs, when his men were met with a solid wall of fire. The Aleuts stopped, turned, stampeded. Out sallied the Sitkans pursuing Russians and Aleuts to the water's edge, where the body of one dead Russian was brandished on spear ends. In the sortie fourteen of the Russian forces were killed, twenty-six wounded, among whom was Baranof, shot through the shoulder. The guns of the war s.h.i.+p were all that saved the retreat from a panic.