Vikings of the Pacific Part 5

With the addition of the fugitives, Korovin now had eighteen Russians.

The Indian father of the hostage, {102} Alexis, had come to demand back his son. Korovin freed the boy at once. By the end of April, the spring gales had subsided, and though half his men were prostrate with scurvy, there was nothing for Korovin to do but dare the sea. They sailed out from Oonalaska on April 26 heading back toward Oomnak, where Medvedeff had anch.o.r.ed.

In the straits between the different Aleutian Islands runs a terrific tide-rip. Crossing from Oonalaska to Oomnak, Korovin's s.h.i.+p was caught by the counter-currents and cross winds. Not more than five men were well enough to stand upon their feet. The s.h.i.+p drifted without pilot or oarsmen, and driving the full force of wind and tide foundered on the end of Oomnak Island. Ammunition, sails, and skins for fresh rowboats were all that could be saved of the wreck. One scurvy-stricken sailor was drowned trying to reach land; another died on being lifted from the stiflingly close hold to fresh air. Eight hostages sprang overboard and escaped. Of the sixteen white men and four hostages left, three were powerless from scurvy. This last blow on top of a winter's siege was too much for the Russians. Their enfeebled bodies were totally exhausted. Stretching sails round as a tent and stationing ten men at a time as sentinels, they slept the first unbroken sleep they had known in five months. The tired-out sentinels must have fallen asleep at their places; for just as day dawned came a hundred savages, stealthy and silent, seeking the s.h.i.+p that had slipped {103} out from Oonalaska. Landing without a sound, they crept up within ten yards of the tents, stabbed the sleeping sentinels to death, and let go such a whiz of arrows and lances at the tent walls, that three of the Indian hostages inside were killed and every Russian wounded.

Korovin had not even time to seize his firearms. Cutla.s.s in hand, followed by four men--all wounded and bleeding like himself--he dashed out, slashed two savages to death, and scattered the rest at the sword point. A shower of spears was the Indians' answer to this. Wounded anew, the five Russians could scarcely drag themselves back to the tent where by this time the others had seized the firearms.

All that day and night, a tempest lashed the sh.o.r.e. The stranded s.h.i.+p fell to pieces like a boat of paper; and the attacking islanders strewed the provisions to the winds with shrieks of laughter. On the 30th of April, the a.s.sailants began firing muskets, which they had captured from Korovin's ma.s.sacred hunters; but the shots fell wide of the mark. Then they brought sulphur from the volcanic caves, and set fire to the long gra.s.s on the windward side of the tents. Again, Korovin sallied out, drove them off, and extinguished the fire. May, June, and half July he lay stranded here, waiting for his men to recover, and when they recovered, setting them to build a boat of skin and driftwood.

Toward the third week of July, a skin boat twenty-four feet long was finished. In this were laid the wounded; and the well men took to the paddles. All {104} night they paddled westward and still westward, night after night, seeking the third vessel--that of Denis Medvedeff, who had come with them the year before from Bering Island. On the tenth day, Russian huts and a stone bath-house were seen on the sh.o.r.e of a broad inlet. Not a soul was stirring. As Korovin's boat approached, bits of sail, s.h.i.+ps' wreckage, and provisions were seen scattered on the sh.o.r.e. Fearing the worst, Korovin landed. Signs of a struggle were on every hand; and in the bath-house, still clothed but with thongs round their necks as if they had been strangled to death, lay twenty of Medvedeff's crew. Closer examination showed Medvedeff himself among the slain. Not a soul was left to tell the story of the ma.s.sacre, not a word ever heard about the fate of the others in the crew. Korovin's last hope was gone. There was no third s.h.i.+p to carry him home. He was in the very act of ordering his men to construct winter quarters, when Stephen Glottoff, a famous hunter on the way back from Kadiak westward, appeared marching across the sands followed by eight men. Glottoff had heard of the ma.s.sacres from natives on the north sh.o.r.e with whom he was friendly; and had sent out rescue parties to seek the survivors on the south coast of whom the Indian spies told.

The poor fugitives embraced Glottoff, and went almost mad with joy.

But like the prospector, who suffers untold hards.h.i.+ps seeking the wealth of gold, these seekers of wealth in furs could not relinquish the {105} wild freedom of the perilous life. They signed contracts to hunt with Glottoff for the year.

It is no part of this story to tell how the Cossack, Solovieff, entered on a campaign of punishment for the Aleuts when he came. Whole villages were blown up by mines of powder in birch bark. Fugitives das.h.i.+ng from the conflagration were sabred by the Russians, as many as a hundred Aleuts butchered at a time, villages of three hundred scattered to the winds, warriors bound hand and foot in line, and shot down.

Suffice it to say, scurvy slaked Solovieff's vengeance. Both Aleuts and Russians had learned the one all-important lesson--the Christian's doctrine of retribution, the scientist's law of equilibrium--that brute force met by brute force ends only in mutual destruction, in anarchy, in death. Thirty years later, Vancouver visiting the Russians could report that their influence on the Indians was of the sort that springs from deep-rooted kindness and ident.i.ty of interests. Both sides had learned there was a better way than the wolf code.[3]

[1] See c.o.xe's _Discoveries of the Russians_.

[2] Some of the old records spell the name of this wrecked Russian "Korelin," as if it were "Gorelin," the sailor, of Pushkareff's crew, who brained the Indian girl; I am unable to determine whether "Korelin"

and "Gorelin" are the same man or not. If so, then the punishment came home indeed.

[3] It would be almost impossible to quote all the authorities on this ma.s.sacre of the Russians, and every one who has written on Russian fur trade in America gives different sc.r.a.ps of the tragedy; but nearly all can be traced back to the detailed account in c.o.xe's _Discoveries of the Russians between Asia and America_, and on this I have relied, the French edition of 1781. The Census Report, Vol. VIII, 1880, by Ivan Petroff, is invaluable for topography and ethnology of this period and region. It was from Korelin, one of the four refugees, that the Russian archivists took the first account of the ma.s.sacre; and c.o.xe's narrative is based on Korelin's story, though the tradition of the ma.s.sacre has been handed down from father to child among Oonalaskans to this day, so that certain caves near Captain Harbor, and Makus.h.i.+n Volcano are still pointed out as the refuge of the four pursued Russians.

{106}

CHAPTER V

1768-1772

COUNT MAURITIUS BENYOWSKY, THE POLISH PIRATE

Siberian Exiles under Polish Soldier of Fortune plot to overthrow Garrison of Kamchatka and escape to West Coast of America as Fur Traders--A b.l.o.o.d.y Melodrama enacted at Bolcheresk--The Count and his Criminal Crew sail to America

Fur hunters, world over, live much the same life. It was the beaver led French voyageurs westward to the Rocky Mountains. It was the sea-otter brought Russian coasters cruising southward from Alaska to California; and it was the little sable set the mad pace of the Cossacks' wild rush clear across Siberia to the sh.o.r.es of the Pacific.

The tribute that the riotous Cossacks collected, whether from Siberia or America, was tribute in furs.

The farther the hunters wandered, the harder it was to obtain supplies from the cities. In each case--in New France, on the Missouri, in Siberia--this compelled resort to the same plan; a grand rallying place, a yearly rendezvous, a stamping-ground for hunters and traders.

Here merchants brought their goods; {107} hunters, their furs; light-fingered gentry, offscourings from everywhere, horses to sell, or smuggled whiskey, or plunder that had been picked up in ways untold.

The great meeting place for Russian fur traders was on a plain east of the Lena River, not far from Yakutsk, a thousand miles in a crow line from the Pacific. In the fall of 1770 there had gathered here as lawless birds of a feather as ever scoured earth for prey. Merchants from the inland cities had floated down supplies to the plain on white and black and lemon-painted river barges. Long caravans of pack horses and mules and tented wagons came rumbling dust-covered across the fields, bells ajingle, driven by Cossacks all the way from St.

Petersburg, six thousand miles. Through snow-padded forests, over wind-swept plains, across the heaving mountains of two continents, along deserts and Siberian rivers, almost a year had the caravans travelled. These, for the most part, carried s.h.i.+p supplies--cordage, tackling, iron--for vessels to be built on the Pacific to sail for America.

Then there rode in at furious pace, from the northern steppes of Siberia, the Cossack tribute collectors--four hundred of them centred here--who gathered one-tenth of the furs for the Czar, nine-tenths for themselves: drunken brawlers they were, lawless as Arabs; and the only law they knew was the law they wielded. Tartar hordes came with horses to sell, freebooters of the boundless desert, banditti in league with the Cossacks to smuggle across the {108} borders of the Chinese. And Chinese smugglers, splendid in silk attire, hobn.o.bbed with exiles, who included every cla.s.s from courtiers banished for political offences to criminals with ears cut off and faces slit open. What with drink and play and free fights--if the Czar did not hear, it was because he was far away.

On this August night half a dozen new exiles had come in with the St.

Petersburg cavalcade. The prisoners were set free on parole to see the sights, while their Cossack guard went on a spree. The new-comers seemed above the common run of criminals sent to Siberia, better clothed, of the air born to command, and in possession of money. The leading spirit among them was a young Pole, twenty-eight years or thereabouts, of n.o.ble rank, Mauritius Benyowsky, very lame from a battle wound, but plainly a soldier of fortune who could trump every trick fate played him, and give as good knocks as he got. Four others were officers of the army in St. Petersburg, exiled for political reasons. Only one, Hippolite Stephanow, was a criminal in the sense of having broken law.

Hoffman, a German surgeon, welcomed them to his quarters at Yakutsk.

Where were they going?--To the Pacific?--"Ah; a long journey from St.

Petersburg; seven thousand miles!" That was where he was to go when he had finished surgical duties on the Lena. By that they knew he, too, was an exile, practising his profession on parole. He would advise {109} them--cautiously feeling his ground--to get transferred as soon as they could from the Pacific coast to the Peninsula of Kamchatka; that was safer for an exile--fewer guards, farther from the Cossacks of the mainland; in fact, nearer America, where exiles might make a fortune in the fur trade. Had they heard of schemes in the air among Russians for s.h.i.+ps to plunder furs in America "with powder and hatchets and the help of G.o.d," as the Russians say?

[Ill.u.s.tration: Mauritius Augustus, Count Benyowsky.]

Benyowsky, the Pole, jumped to the bait like a trout to the fly. If "powder and hatchets and the help of G.o.d"--_and an exile crew_--could capture wealth in the fur trade of western America, why not a break for freedom?

They didn't scruple as to means, these men. Why should they? They had been penned in festering dungeons, where the dead lay, corrupting the air till living and dead became a diseased ma.s.s. They had been knouted for differences of political opinion. They {110} had been whisked off at midnight from St. Petersburg--mile after mile, week after week, month after month, across the snows, with never a word of explanation, knowing only from the jingle of many bells that other prisoners were in the long procession. Now their hopes took fire from Hoffman's tales of Russian plans for fur trade. The path of the trackless sea seems always to lead to a boundless freedom.

In a word, before they had left Hoffman, they had bound themselves by oath to try to seize a fur-trading s.h.i.+p to escape across the Pacific.

Stephanow, the common convict, was the one danger. He might play spy and obtain freedom by betraying all. To prevent this, each man was required to sign his name to an avowal of the conspirators' aim.

Hoffman was to follow as soon as he could. Meanwhile he kept the doc.u.ments, which were written in German; and Benyowsky, the Pole, was elected chief.

The Cossack guards came sulkily back from their gambling bout. The exiles were placed in elk-team sleds, and the remaining thousand miles to the Pacific resumed. But the spree had left the soldiers with sore heads. At the first camping place they were gambling again. On the sixth day out luck turned so heavily against one soldier that he lost his entire belongings to the captain of the troops, flew in a towering rage, and called his officer some blackguard name. The officer nonchalantly took over the {111} gains, swallowed the insult, and commanded the other Cossacks to tie the fellow up and give him a hundred lashes.

For a moment consternation reigned. There are some unwritten laws even among the Cossacks. To play the equal, when there was money to win, then act the despot when offended, was not according to the laws of good fellows among Cossacks. Before the officer knew where he was, he had been seized, bundled out of the tent, stripped naked and flogged on the bare back three hundred strokes.

He was still roaring with rage and pain and fear when a coureur came thundering over the path from Yakutsk with word that Hoffman had died suddenly, leaving certain papers suspected of conspiracy, which were being forwarded for examination to the commander on the Pacific. The coureur handed the paper to the officer of the guards. Not a man of the Cossacks could read German. What the papers were the terrified exiles knew. If word of the plot reached the Pacific, they might expect knouting, perhaps mutilation, or lifelong, hopeless servitude in the chain-gangs of the mines.

One chance of frustrating detection remained--the Cossack officer looked to the exiles for protection against his men. For a week the cavalcade moved sullenly on, the soldiers jeering in open revolt at the officer, the officer in terror for his life, the exiles quaking with fear. The road led to a swift, somewhat {112} dangerous river. The Cossacks were ordered to swim the elk teams across. The officer went on the raft to guard the prisoners, on whose safe delivery his own life depended. With hoots of laughter, that could not be reported as disobedience, the Cossacks hustled the snorting elk teams against the raft. A deft hoist from the pole of some unseen diver below, and the raft load was turned helter-skelter upside down in the middle of the river, the commander going under heels up! When officer and exiles came scrambling up the bank wet as water-rats, they were welcomed with shouts by the Cossacks. Officer and prisoners lighted a fire to dry clothes. Soldiers rummaged out the brandy casks, and were presently so deep in drunken sleep not a man of the guard was on his feet.

Benyowsky waited till the commander, too, slept. Then the Pole limped, careful as a cat over cut gla.s.s, to the coat drying before the fire, drew out the packet of doc.u.ments, and found what the exiles had feared--Hoffman's papers in German, with orders to the commander on the Pacific to keep the conspirators fettered till instructions came the next year from St. Petersburg.

The prisoners realized that all must be risked in one desperate cast of the dice. "I and time against all men," says the proverb. No fresh caravan would be likely to come till spring. Meanwhile they must play against time. Burning the packet to ashes, they replaced it with a forged order instructing the commander on the Pacific to treat the exiles with all {113} freedom and liberality, and to forward them by the first boat outward bound for Kamchatka.

The governor at Okhotsk did precisely as the packet instructed. He allowed them out on parole. He supplied them with clothing and money.

He forwarded them to Kamchatka on the first boat outward bound, the _St. Peter and Paul_, with forty-three of a crew and ten cannon, which had just come back from punis.h.i.+ng American Indians for ma.s.sacring the Russians.

A year less two days from the night they had been whisked out of St.

Petersburg, the exiles reached their destination--the little log fort or _ostrog_ of Bolcheresk, about twenty miles up from the sea on the inner side of Kamchatka, one hundred and fifty miles overland from the Pacific. The rowboat conducting the exiles up-stream met rafts of workmen gliding down the current. Rafts and rowboat paused within call. The raftsmen wanted news from Europe. Benyowsky answered that exiles had no news. "Who are you?" an officer demanded bluntly.

Always and unconsciously playing the hero part of melodrama, Benyowsky replied--"Once a soldier and a general, now a slave." Shouts of laughter broke from the raftsmen. The enraged Pole was for leaping overboard and thras.h.i.+ng them to a man for their mockery; but they called out, "no offence had been meant": they, too, were exiles; their laughter was welcome; they had suffered enough in Kamchatka to know that when men must laugh or weep, better, much better, laugh! Even as they {114} laughed came the tears. With a rear sweep, the rafts headed about and escorted the newcomers to the fortress, where they were locked for the night. After all, a welcome to exile was a sardonic sort of mirth.

Kamchatka occupies very much the same position on the Pacific as Italy to the Mediterranean, or Norway to the North Sea. Its people were nomads, wild as American Indians, but Russia had established garrisons of Cossacks--collectors of tribute in furs--all over the peninsula, of whom four hundred were usually moving from place to place, three hundred stationed at Bolcheresk, the seat of government, on the inner coast of the peninsula.

The capital itself was a curious conglomeration of log huts stuck away at the back of beyond, with all the gold lace and court satins and regimental formalities of St. Petersburg in miniature. On one side of a deep ravine, was the fort or _ostrog_--a palisaded courtyard of some two or three hundred houses, joined together like the face of a street, with a.s.sembly rooms, living apartments, and mess rooms on one side of a pa.s.sageway, kitchens, servants' quarters, and barracks for the Cossacks on the other side of the aisle. Two or three streets of these double-rowed houses made up the fort. Few of the houses contained more than three rooms, but the rooms were large as halls, one hundred by eighty feet, some of them, with whip-sawed floors, clay-c.h.i.n.ked log walls, parchment {115} windows, and furniture hewed out of the green fir trees of the mountains. But the luxurious living made up for the bareness of furnis.h.i.+ngs. s.h.i.+ning samovars sung in every room. Rugs of priceless fur concealed the rough flooring. Chinese silks, j.a.panese damasks,--Oriental tapestries smuggled in by the fur traders,--covered the walls; and richest of silk attired the Russian officers and their ladies, compelled to beguile time here, where the only break in monotony was the arrival of fresh s.h.i.+ps from America, or exiles from St. Petersburg, or gambling or drinking or dancing or feasting the long winter nights through, with, perhaps, a duel in the morning to settle midnight debts. Just across a deep ravine from the fort was another kind of settlement--ten or a dozen _yurts_, thatch-roofed, circular houses half underground like cellars, grouped about a square hall or barracks in the centre. In this village dwelt the exiles, earning their living by hunting or acting as servants for the officers of the Cossacks.

Here, then, came Benyowsky and his companions, well received because of forged letters sent on, but with no time to lose; for the first spring packet overland might reveal their conspiracy. The raftsmen, who had welcomed them, now turned hosts and housed the newcomers. The Pole was a.s.signed to an educated Russian, who had been eight years in exile.

"How can you stand it? Do you fear death too much to dare one blow for liberty?" Benyowsky asked the other, as they sat over their tea that first night.