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Transcriber's note:
Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in
curly braces, e.g. {vi} or {99}. They have been located where
page breaks occurred in the original book, in accordance with
Project Gutenberg's FAQ-V-99. For its Index, page numbers have
been placed only at the start of that section.
VIKINGS OF THE PACIFIC
The Adventures of the Explorers Who Came from the West, Eastward
Bering, the Dane; the Outlaw Hunters of Russia;
Benyowsky, the Polish Pirate; Cook and
Vancouver, the English Navigators; Gray of
Boston, the Discoverer of the
Columbia; Drake, Ledyard, and Other
Soldiers of Fortune on the
West Coast of America
by
A. C. LAUT
Author of "Pathfinders of the West," Etc.
[Frontispiece: Seal Rookery, Commander Islands.]
New York
The MacMillan Company
London: MacMillan & Co., Ltd.
1905
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1905,
by the MacMillan Company.
Set up and electrotyped. Published December, 1905.
{vii}
Foreword
At the very time the early explorers of New France were pressing from
the east, westward, a tide of adventure had set across Siberia and the
Pacific from the west, eastward. Carrier and Champlain of New France
in the east have their counterparts and contemporaries on the Pacific
coast of America in Francis Drake, the English pirate on the coast of
California, and in Staduchin and Deshneff and other Cossack plunderers
of the North Pacific, whose rickety keels first ploughed a furrow over
the trackless sea out from Asia. Marquette, Jolliet and La
Salle--backed by the prestige of the French government are not unlike
the English navigators, Cook and Vancouver, sent out by the English
Admiralty. Radisson, privateer and adventurer, might find counterpart
on the Pacific coast in either Gray, the discoverer of the Columbia, or
Ledyard, whose ill-fated, wildcat plans resulted in the Lewis and Clark
expedition. Bering was contemporaneous with La Vérendrye; and so the
comparison might be carried on between Benyowsky, the Polish pirate of
the Pacific, or the Outlaw Hunters of Russia, and the famous buccaneers
of the eastern Spanish Main. The main point is--that both tides {viii}
of adventure, from the east, westward, from the west, eastward, met,
and clashed, and finally coalesced in the great fur trade, that won the
West.
The Spaniards of the Southwest--even when they extended their
explorations into the Northwest--have not been included in this volume,
for the simple reason they would require a volume by themselves. Also,
their aims as explorers were always secondary to their aims as treasure
hunters; and their main exploits were confined to the Southwest. Other
Pacific coast explorers, like La Pérouse, are not included here because
they were not, in the truest sense, discoverers, and their exploits
really belong to the story of the fights among the different fur
companies, who came on the ground after the first adventurers.
In every case, reference has been to first sources, to the records left
by the doers of the acts themselves, or their contemporaries--some of
the data in manuscript, some in print; but it may as well be frankly
acknowledged that _all_ first sources have _not_ been exhausted. To do
so in the case of a single explorer, say either Drake or Bering--would
require a lifetime. For instance, there are in St. Petersburg some
thirty thousand folios on the Bering expedition to America. Probably
only one person--a Danish professor--has ever examined all of these;
and the results of his investigations I have consulted. Also, there
are in the State Department, Washington, some hundred old log-books of
the Russian hunters which {ix} have--as far as I know--never been
turned by a single hand, though I understand their outsides were looked
at during the fur seal controversy. The data on this era of adventure
I have chiefly obtained from the works of Russian archivists, published
in French and English. To give a list of all authorities quoted would
be impossible. On Alaska alone, the least-known section of the Pacific
coast, there is a bibliographical list of four thousand. The
better-known coast southward has equally voluminous records. Nor is
such a list necessary. Nine-tenths of it are made up of either
descriptive works or purely scientific pamphlets; and of the remaining
tenth, the contents are obtained in undiluted condition by going
directly to the first sources. A few of these first sources are
indicated in each section.
It is somewhat remarkable that Gray--as true a naval hero as ever trod
the quarter-deck, who did the same for the West as Carrier for the St.
Lawrence, and Hudson for the river named after him--is the one man of
the Pacific coast discoverers of whom there are scantiest records.
Authentic histories are still written, that cast doubt on his
achievement. Certainly a century ago Gray was lionized in Boston; but
it may be his feat was overshadowed by the world-history of the new
American republic and the Napoleonic wars at the opening of the
nineteenth century; or the world may have taken him at his own
valuation; and Gray was a hero of the non-shouting sort. The data on
{x} Gray's discovery have been obtained from the descendants of the
Boston men who outfitted him, and from his own great-grandchildren.
Though he died a poor man, the red blood of his courage and ability
seems to have come down to his descendants; for their names are among
the best known in contemporary American life. To them my thanks are
tendered. Since the contents of this volume appeared serially in
_Leslie's Monthly_, _Outing_, and _Harper's Magazine_, fresh data have
been sent to me on minor points from descendants of the explorers and
from collectors. I take this opportunity to thank these contributors.
Among many others, special thanks are due Dr. George Davidson,
President of San Francisco Geographical Society, for facts relating to
the topography of the coast, and to Dr. Leo Stejneger of the
Smithsonian, Washington, for facts gathered on the very spot where
Bering perished.
WASSAIC, New York,
July 15, 1905.
CONTENTS
PART I
DEALING WITH THE RUSSIANS ON THE PACIFIC COAST OF
AMERICA--BERING, THE DANE, THE SEA-OTTER HUNTERS,
THE OUTLAWS, AND BENYOWSKY, THE POLISH PIRATE
CHAPTER I
1700-1743
VITUS BERING, THE DANE
Peter the Great sends Bering on Two Voyages: First, to
discover whether America and Asia are united; Second, to
find what lies north of New Spain--Terrible Hardships
of Caravans crossing Siberia for Seven Thousand
Miles--Ships lost in the Mist--Bering's Crew cast away on a
Barren Isle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
CHAPTER II
1741-1743
CONTINUATION OF BERING, THE DANE
Frightful Sufferings of the Castaways on the Commander
Islands--The Vessel smashed in a Winter Gale, the Sick are
dragged for Refuge into Pits of Sand--Here, Bering
perishes, and the Crew Winter--The Consort Ship under
Chirikoff Ambushed--How the Castaways reach Home . . . . . 37
CHAPTER III
1741-1760
THE SEA-OTTER HUNTERS
How the Sea-otter Pelts brought back by Bering's Crew led
to the Exploitation of the Northwest
Coast of America--Difference of Sea-otter
from Other Fur-bearing Animals of
the West--Perils of the Hunt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
CHAPTER IV
1760-1770
THE OUTLAW HUNTERS
The American Coast becomes the Great Rendezvous for Siberian
Criminals and Political Exiles--Beyond Reach of Law,
Cossacks and Criminals perpetrate Outrages
on the Indians--The Indians' Revenge wipes
out Russian Forts in America--The Pursuit
of Four Refugee Russians from Cave to
Cave over the Sea at Night--How they escape after a
Year's Chase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
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 Bloody Melodrama enacted
at Bolcheresk--The Count and his Criminal Crew sail to
America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
PART II
AMERICAN AND ENGLISH ADVENTURERS ON THE WEST COAST
OF AMERICA--FRANCIS DRAKE IN CALIFORNIA--COOK,
FROM BRITISH COLUMBIA TO ALASKA--LEDYARD, THE
FORERUNNER OF LEWIS AND CLARK--GRAY, THE
DISCOVERER OF THE COLUMBIA--VANCOUVER, THE LAST OF
THE WEST COAST NAVIGATORS
CHAPTER VI
1562-1595
FRANCIS DRAKE IN CALIFORNIA
How the Sea Rover was attacked and ruined as a Boy on the
Spanish Main off Mexico--His Revenge in sacking
Spanish Treasure Houses and crossing Panama--The Richest
Man in England, he sails to the Forbidden Sea, scuttles all
the Spanish Ports up the West Coast of South America
and takes Possession of New Albion (California) for
England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
CHAPTER VII
1728-1779
CAPTAIN COOK IN AMERICA
The English Navigator sent Two Hundred Years later to find
the New Albion of Drake's Discoveries--He misses both
the Straits of Fuca and the Mouth of the Columbia, but
anchors at Nootka, the Rendezvous of Future
Traders--No Northeast Passage found through Alaska--The True
Cause of Cook's Murder in Hawaii told by Ledyard--Russia
becomes Jealous of his Explorations . . . . . . . . . . . 172
CHAPTER VIII
1785-1792
ROBERT GRAY, THE AMERICAN DISCOVERER OF THE COLUMBIA
Boston Merchants, inspired by Cook's Voyages, outfit Two
Vessels under Kendrick and Gray for Discovery and Trade
on the Pacific--Adventures of the First Ship to carry the
American Flag around the World--Gray attacked by
Indians at Tillamook Bay--His Discovery of the
Columbia River on the Second Voyage--Fort Defence and the
First American Ship built on the Pacific . . . . . . . . . 210
CHAPTER IX
1778-1790
JOHN LEDYARD, THE FORERUNNER OF LEWIS AND CLARK
A New England Ne'er-do-well, turned from the Door of Rich
Relatives, joins Cook's Expedition to America--Adventure
among the Russians of Oonalaska--Useless Endeavor
to interest New England Merchants in Fur Trade--A
Soldier of Fortune in Paris, he meets Jefferson and Paul
Jones and outlines Exploration of Western America--Succeeds
in crossing Siberia alone on the Way to America, but
is thwarted by Russian Fur Traders . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
CHAPTER X
1779-1794
GEORGE VANCOUVER, LAST OF PACIFIC COAST EXPLORERS
Activities of Americans, Spanish, and Russians on the West Coast
of America arouse England--Vancouver is sent out
ostensibly to settle the Quarrel between Fur Traders and
Spanish Governors at Nootka--Incidentally, he is to complete
the Exploration of America's West Coast and take Possession
for England of Unclaimed Territory--The Myth of a
Northeast Passage dispelled Forever . . . . . . . . . . . 263
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
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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
CHAPTER XII
1747-1818
BARANOF, THE LITTLE CZAR OF THE PACIFIC
Baranof lays the Foundations of Russian Empire on the Pacific
Coast of America--Shipwrecked on his Way to Alaska,
he yet holds his Men in Hand and turns the Ill-hap to
Advantage--How he bluffs the Rival Fur Companies in
Line--First Russian Ship built in America--Adventures
leading the Sea-otter Hunters--Ambushed by the Indians--The
Founding of Sitka--Baranof, cast off in his Old
Age, dies of Broken Heart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339
ILLUSTRATIONS
Seal Rookery, Commander Islands . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
Peter the Great . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Map of Course followed by Bering . . . . . . . . . . . . 20-21
The _St. Peter_ and _St. Paul_, from a rough sketch
by Bering's comrade, Steller, the scientist . . . . . . . 29
Steller's Arch on Bering Island, named after the scientist
Steller, of Bering's Expedition . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
A Glacier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Sea Cows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Seals in a Rookery on Bering Island . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Mauritius Augustus, Count Benyowsky . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Sir John Hawkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Queen Elizabeth knighting Drake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
The _Golden Hind_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Francis Drake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
The Crowning of Drake in California . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
The Silver Map of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Captain James Cook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
The Ice Islands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
The Death of Cook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Departure of the _Columbia_ and the _Lady Washington_ . . . 211
Charles Bulfinch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
Medals commemorating _Columbia_ and _Lady Washington_ Cruise 215
Building the First American Ship on the Pacific Coast . . . 223
Feather Cloak worn by a son of a Hawaiian Chief, at the
celebration in honor of Gray's return . . . . . . . . . . 226
John Derby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
Map of Gray's two voyages, resulting in the discovery
of the Columbia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
A View of the Columbia River . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
At the Mouth of the Columbia River . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
Ledyard in his Dugout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
Captain George Vancouver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
The _Columbia_ in a Squall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269
The _Discovery_ on the Rocks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
Indian Settlement at Nootka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
Reindeer Herd in Siberia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288
Raised Reindeer Sledges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294
John Jacob Astor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
Sitka from the Sea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
Alexander Baranof . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
{1}
PART I
DEALING WITH THE RUSSIANS ON THE PACIFIC
COAST OF AMERICA--BERING, THE DANE, THE
SEA-OTTER HUNTERS, THE OUTLAWS, AND
BENYOWSKY, THE POLISH PIRATE
{3}
Vikings of the Pacific
CHAPTER I
1700-1743
VITUS BERING, THE DANE
Peter the Great sends Bering on Two Voyages: First, to discover whether
America and Asia are united; Second, to find what lies north of New
Spain--Terrible Hardships of Caravans crossing Siberia for Seven
Thousand Miles--Ships lost in the Mist--Bering's Crew cast away on a
Barren Isle
We have become such slaves of shallow science in these days, such firm
believers in the fatalism which declares man the creature of
circumstance, that we have almost forgotten the supremest spectacle in
life is when man becomes the Creator of Circumstance. We forget that
man can rise to be master of his destiny, fighting, unmaking,
re-creating, not only his own environment, but the environment of
multitudinous lesser men. There is something titanic in such lives.
They are the hero myths of every nation's legends. We {4} somehow feel
that the man who flings off the handicaps of birth and station lifts
the whole human race to a higher plane and has a bit of the God in him,
though the hero may have feet of clay and body of beast. Such were the
old Vikings of the North, who spent their lives in elemental warfare,
and rode out to meet death in tempest, lashed to the spar of their
craft. And such, too, were the New World Vikings of the Pacific, who
coasted the seas of two continents in cockle-shell ships,--planks
lashed with deer thongs, calked with moss,--rapacious in their deep-sea
plunderings as beasts of prey, fearless as the very spirit of the storm
itself. The adventures of the North Pacific Vikings read more like
some old legend of the sea than sober truth; and the wild strain had
its fountain-head in the most tempestuous hero and beastlike man that
ever ascended the throne of the Russias.
[Illustration: Peter the Great.]
When Peter the Great of Russia worked as a ship's carpenter at the
docks of the East India Company in Amsterdam, the sailors' tales of
vast, undiscovered lands beyond the seas of Japan must have acted on
his imagination like a match to gunpowder.[1] Already he was dreaming
those imperial conquests which Russia still dreams: of pushing his
realm to the southernmost edge of Europe, to the easternmost verge of
Asia, to the doorway of the Arctic, to the very threshold of the {5}
Chinese capital. Already his Cossacks had scoured the two Siberias
like birds of prey, exacting tribute from the wandering tribes of
Tartary, of Kamchatka, of the Pacific, of the Siberian races in the
northeasternmost corner of Asia. And these Chukchee Indians of the
Asiatic Pacific told the Russians of a land beyond the sea, of
driftwood floating across the ocean unlike any trees growing in Asia,
of dead whales washed ashore with the harpoons of strange hunters, {6}
and--most comical of all in the light of our modern knowledge about the
Eskimo's tail-shaped fur coats--of men wrecked on the shores of Asia
who might have qualified for Darwin's missing link, inasmuch as they
wore "tails."
And now the sailors added yet more fabulous things to Peter's
knowledge. There was an unknown continent east of Asia, west of
America, called on the maps "Gamaland." [2] Now, Peter's consuming
ambition was for new worlds to conquer. What of this "Gamaland"? But,
as the world knows, Peter was called home to suppress an insurrection.
War, domestic broils, massacres that left a bloody stain on his glory,
busied his hands for the remaining years of his life; and January of
1725 found the palaces of all the Russias hushed, for the Hercules who
had scrunched all opposition like a giant lay dying, ashamed to consult
a physician, vanquished of his own vices, calling on Heaven for pity
with screams of pain that drove physicians and attendants from the room.
Perhaps remorse for those seven thousand wretches executed at one fell
swoop after the revolt; perhaps memories of those twenty kneeling
supplicants whose heads he had struck off with his own hand, drinking a
bumper of quass to each stroke; perhaps reproaches {7} of the highway
robbers whom he used to torture to slow death, two hundred at a time,
by suspending them from hooks in their sides; perhaps the first wife,
whom he repudiated, the first son whom he had done to death either by
poison or convulsions of fright, came to haunt the darkness of his
deathbed.
Catherine, the peasant girl, elevated to be empress of all the Russias,
could avail nothing. Physicians and scientists and navigators, Dane
and English and Dutch, whom he had brought to Russia from all parts of
Europe, were powerless. Vows to Heaven, in all the long hours he lay
convulsed battling with Death, were useless. The sins of a lifetime
could not be undone by the repentance of an hour. Then, as if the
dauntless Spirit of the man must rise finally triumphant over Flesh,
the dying Hercules roused himself to one last supreme effort.
Radisson, Marquette, La Salle, Vérendrye, were reaching across America
to win the undiscovered regions of the Western Sea for France. New
Spain was pushing her ships northward from Mexico; and now, the dying
Peter of Russia with his own hand wrote instructions for an expedition
to search the boundaries between Asia and America. In a word, he set
in motion that forward march of the Russians across the Orient, which
was to go on unchecked for two hundred years till arrested by the
Japanese. The Czar's instructions were always laconic. They were
written five weeks before his death. "(1) At {8} Kamchatka . . . two
boats are to be built. (2) With these you are to sail northward along
the coast. . . . (3) You are to enquire where the American coast
begins. . . . Write it down . . . obtain reliable information . . .
then, having charted the coast, return." [3]
From the time that Peter the Great began to break down the Oriental
isolation of Russia from the rest of Europe, it was his policy to draw
to St. Petersburg--the city of his own creation--leaders of thought
from every capital in Europe. And as his aim was to establish a navy,
he especially endeavored to attract foreign navigators to his kingdom.
Among these were many Norse and Danes. The acquaintance may have dated
from the apprenticeship on the docks of the East India Company; but at
any rate, among the foreign navigators was one Vitus Ivanovich Bering,
a Dane of humble origin from Horsens,[4] who had been an East India
Company sailor till he joined the Russian fleet as sub-lieutenant at
the age of twenty-two, and fought his way up in the Baltic service
through Peter's wars till in 1720 he was appointed captain of second
rank. To Vitus Bering, the Dane, Peter gave the commission for the
exploration of the waters between Asia and America. As a sailor,
Bering had, of course, been on the borders of the Pacific.[5]
{9} The scientists of every city in Europe were in a fret over the
mythical Straits of Anian, supposed to be between Asia and America, and
over the yet more mythical Gamaland, supposed to be visible on the way
to New Spain. To all this jangling of words without knowledge Peter
paid no heed. "You will go and obtain some reliable information," he
commands Bering. Neither did he pay any heed to the fact that the
ports of Kamchatka on the Pacific were six thousand miles by river and
mountain and tundra and desert through an unknown country from St.
Petersburg. It would take from three to five years to transport
material across two continents by caravan and flatboat and dog sled.
Tribute of food and fur would be required from Kurd and Tartar and wild
Siberian tribe. More than a thousand horses must be requisitioned for
the caravans; more than two thousand leathern sacks made for the flour.
Twenty or thirty boats must be constructed to raft down the inland
rivers. There were forests to be traversed for hundreds of miles,
where only the keenest vigilance could keep the wolf packs off the
heels of the travellers. And when the expedition should reach the
tundras of eastern Siberia, there was the double danger of the Chukchee
tribes on the north, hostile as the American Indians, and of the
Siberian exile population on the south, branded criminals, political
malcontents, banditti of {10} the wilderness, outcasts of nameless
crimes beyond the pale of law. It needed no prophet to foresee such
people would thwart, not help, the expedition. And when the shores of
Okhotsk were reached, a fort must be built to winter there. And a
vessel for inland seas must be constructed to cross to the Kamchatka
peninsula of the North Pacific. And the peninsula which sticks out
from Asia as Norway projects from Europe, must be crossed with
provisions--a distance of some two hundred miles by dog trains over
mountains higher than the American Rockies. And once on the shores of
the Pacific itself, another fort must be built on the east side of the
Kamchatka peninsula. And the two double-decker vessels must be
constructed to voyage over the sleepy swell of the North Pacific to
that mythical realm of mist like a blanket, and strange, unearthly
rumblings smoking up from the cold Arctic sea, with the red light of a
flame through the gray haze, and weird voices, as if the fog wraith
were luring seamen to destruction. These were mere details. Peter
took no heed of impossibles. Neither did Bering; for he was in the
prime of his honor, forty-four years of age. "You will go," commanded
the Czar, and Bering obeyed.
Barely had the spirit of Peter the Great passed from this life, in
1725, when Bering's forces were travelling in midwinter from St.
Petersburg to cross Siberia to the Pacific, on what is known as the
First Expedition.[6] {11} Three years it took him to go from the west
coast of Europe to the east coast of Asia, crossing from Okhotsk to
Kamchatka, whence he sailed on the 9th of July, 1728, with forty-four
men and three lieutenants for the Arctic seas.[7] This voyage is
unimportant, except as the kernel out of which grew the most famous
expedition on the Pacific coast. Martin Spanberg, another Danish
navigator, huge of frame, vehement, passionate, tyrannical out
dauntless, always followed by a giant hound ready to tear any one who
approached to pieces, and Alexei Chirikoff, an able Russian, were
seconds in command. They encountered all the difficulties to be
expected transporting ships, rigging, and provisions across two
continents. Spanberg and his men, winter-bound in East Siberia, were
reduced to eating their dog harness and shoe-straps for food before
they came to the trail of dead horses that marked Bering's path to the
sea, and guided them to the fort at Okhotsk.
Bering did exactly as Czar Peter had ordered. He built the two-deckers
at Kamchatka. Then he followed the coast northward past St. Lawrence
Island, which he named, to a point where the shore seemed to turn back
on itself northwestward at 67 degrees 18 minutes, which proved to
Bering that Asia and America were _not_ {12} united.[8] And they had
found no "Gamaland," no new world wedged in between Asia and America,
Twice they were within only forty miles of America, touching at St.
Lawrence Island, but the fog hung like a blanket over the sea as they
passed through the waters now known as Bering Straits. They saw no
continent eastward; and Bering was compelled to return with no
knowledge but that Russia did _not_ extend into America. And yet,
there were definite signs of land eastward of Kamchatka--driftwood,
seaweed, sea-birds. Before setting out for St. Petersburg in 1729, he
had again tried to sail eastward to the Gamaland of the maps, but again
foul weather had driven him back.
It was the old story of the savants and Christopher Columbus in an
earlier day. Bering's conclusions were different from the moonshine of
the schools. There was no "Gamaland" in the sea. There was in the
maps. The learned men of St. Petersburg ridiculed the Danish sailor.
The fog was supposed to have concealed "Gamaland." There was nothing
for Bering but to retire in ignominy or prove his conclusions. He had
arrived in St. Petersburg in March, 1730. He had induced the court to
undertake a second expedition by April of the same year.[9]
{13} And for this second expedition, the court, the senate the
admiralty, and the academy of sciences decided to provide with a lavish
profusion that would dazzle the world with the brilliancy of Russian
exploits. Russia was in the mood to do things. The young savants who
thronged her capital were heady with visionary theories that were to
astonish the rest of mortals. Scientists, artisans, physicians,
monks, Cossacks, historians, made up the motley roll of conflicting
influences under Bering's command; but because Bering was a Dane, this
command was not supreme. He must convene a council of the Russian
officers under him, submit all his plans to their vote, then abide by
their decision. Yet he alone must carry responsibility for blunders.
And as the days went on, details of instructions rolling out from
admiralty, senate, and academy were like an avalanche gathering impetus
to destruction from its weight. He was to establish new industries in
Siberia. He was to chart the whole Arctic coast line of Asia. He was
to Christianize the natives. He was to provide the travelling
academicians with luxurious equipment, though some of them had forty
wagon-loads of instruments and carried a peripatetic library.
Early in 1733, the Second Expedition set out from St. Petersburg in
detachments to cross Siberia. There were Vitus Bering, the commander,
Chirikoff and Spanberg, his two seconds, eight lieutenants, sixteen
mates, twelve physicians, seven priests, carpenters, {14} bakers,
Cossacks, sailors,--in all, five hundred and eighty men.[10] Now, if
it was difficult to transport a handful of attendants across Siberia
for the first simple voyage, what was it to convoy this rabble composed
of self-important scientists bent on proving impossible theories, of
underling officers each of whom considered himself a czar, of wives and
children unused to such travel, of priests whose piety took the
extraordinary form of knouting subordinates to death, of Cossacks who
drank and gambled and brawled at every stopping place till half the
lieutenants in the company had crossed swords in duels, of workmen who
looked on the venture as a mad banishment, and only watched for a
chance to desert?
Scouts went scurrying ahead with orders for the Siberian Cossacks to
prepare wintering quarters for the on-coming host, and to levy tribute
on the inhabitants for provision; but in Siberia, as the Russians say,
"_God is high in the Heaven, and the Czar is far away_;" and the
Siberian governors raised not a finger to prepare for Bering.
Spanberg left St. Petersburg in February, 1733. Bering followed in
March; and all summer the long caravans of slow-moving pack horses--as
many as four thousand in a line--wound across the desert wastes of West
Siberia.
{15} Only the academists dallied in St. Petersburg, kissing Majesty's
hand farewell, basking in the sudden sunburst of short notoriety,
driving Bering almost mad by their exorbitant demands for luxuriously
appointed barges to carry them down the Volga. Winter was passed at
Tobolsk; but May of 1734 witnessed a firing of cannon, a blaring of
trumpets, a clinking of merry glasses among merry gentlemen; for the
caravans were setting out once more to the swearing of the Cossacks,
the complaining of the scientists, the brawling of the underling
officers, the silent chagrin of the endlessly patient Bering. One can
easily believe that the God-speed from the Siberians was sincere; for
the local governors used the orders for tribute to enrich themselves;
and the country-side groaned under a heavy burden of extortion. The
second winter was passed at Yakutsk, where the ships that were to chart
the Arctic coast of Siberia were built and launched with crews of some
hundred men.
It was the end of June, 1735, before the main forces were under way
again for the Pacific. From Yakutsk to Okhotsk on the Pacific, the
course was down the Lena, up the Aldan River, up the Maya, up the
Yudoma, across the Stanovoi Mountains, down the Urak river to the sea.
A thousand Siberian exiles were compelled to convoy these boats.[11]
Not a roof had been prepared to house the forces in the mountains. Men
and horses were torn to pieces by the timber {16} wolves. Often, for
days at a time, the only rations were carcasses of dead horses, roots,
flour, and rice. Winter barracks had to be built between the rivers,
for the navigable season was short. In May the rivers broke up in
spring flood. Then, the course was against a boiling torrent. Thirty
men could not tug a boat up the Yudoma. They stood in ice-water up to
their waists lifting the barges over the turbulent places. Sores broke
out on the feet of horses and men. Three years it took to transport
all the supplies and ships' rigging from the Lena to the Pacific, with
wintering barracks constructed at each stopping place.
At Okhotsk on the Pacific, Major-General Pissarjeff was harbor master.
This old reprobate, once a favorite of Peter the Great, had been
knouted, branded and exiled for conspiracy, forbidden even to conceal
his brand; and now, he let loose all his seventy years of bitterness on
Bering. He not only had _not_ made preparation to house the explorers;
but he refused to permit them inside the stockades of the miserable
huts at Okhotsk, which he called his fort. When they built a fort of
their own outside, he set himself to tantalize the two Danes, Bering
and Spanberg, knouting their men, sending coureurs with false
accusations against Bering to St. Petersburg, actually countermanding
their orders for supplies from the Cossacks. Spanberg would have
finished the matter neatly with a sharp sword; but Bering forbore, and
Pissarjeff {17} was ultimately replaced by a better harbor master. The
men set to work cutting the timber for the ships that were to cross
from Okhotsk to the east shore of Kamchatka; for Bering's ships of the
first voyage could now be used only as packet boats.
Not till the fourth of June, 1741, had all preparations ripened for the
fulfilment of Czar Peter's dying wishes to extend his empire into
America. Two vessels, the _St. Peter_ and the _St. Paul_, rode at
anchor at Petropaulovsk in the Bay of Avacha on the east coast of
Kamchatka. On the shore was a little palisaded fort of some fifty
huts, a barrack, a chapel, a powder magazine. Early that morning,
solemn religious services had been held to invoke the blessing of
Heaven on the voyagers. Now, the chapel bell was set ringing. Monks
came singing down to the water's edge. Cannon were fired. Cheer on
cheer set the echoes rolling among the white domed mountains. There
was a rattling of anchor chains, a creaking of masts and yard-arms.
The sails fluttered out bellying full; and with a last, long shout, the
ships glided out before the wind to the lazy swell of the Pacific for
the discovery of new worlds.
And why not new worlds? That was the question the officers
accompanying Bering asked themselves as the white peaks of Kamchatka
faded on the offing. Certainly, in the history of the world, no
expedition had set out with greater prestige. Eight years had it {18}
taken to cross Siberia from St. Petersburg to the Pacific. A line of
forts across two continents had been built for winter quarters. Rivers
had been bridged; as many as forty boats knocked together in a single
year to raft down the Siberian torrents. Two hundred thousand dollars
in modern money had been spent before the Pacific was reached. In all,
nine ships had been built on the Pacific to freight supplies across
from Okhotsk to the eastern side of Kamchatka, two to carry Bering to
the new continent of "Gamaland" which the savants persisted in putting
on the maps, three to explore the region between Russia and Japan.
Now, Bering knew there was _no_ "Gamaland" except in the ignorant,
heady imaginings of the foolish geographers. So did Alexei Chirikoff,
the Russian second assistant. So did Spanberg, the Dane, third in
command, who had coasted the Pacific in charting Japan.
Roughly speaking, the expedition had gradually focussed to three
points: (1) the charting of the Arctic coast; (2) the exploration of
Japan; (3) the finding of what lay between Asia and America. Some two
hundred men, of whom a score had already perished of scurvy, had gone
down the Siberian rivers to the Arctic coast. Spanberg, the Dane, with
a hundred others, had thoroughly charted Japan, and had seen his
results vetoed by the authorities at St. Petersburg because there was
no Gamaland. Bering, himself, undertook the voyage to America. All
the month of {19} May, council after council had been held at Avacha
Bay to determine which way Bering's two ships should sail. By the vote
of this council, Bering, the commander, was compelled to abide; and the
mythical Gamaland proved his evil star.
The maps of the D'Isles, the famous geographers, contained a Gamaland;
and Louis la Croyére d'Isle, relative of the great map maker, who had
knocked about in Canada and was thought to be an authority on American
matters, was to accompany Chirikoff, Bering's first lieutenant. At the
councils, these maps were hauled out. It was a matter of family pride
with the D'Isles to find that Gamaland. Bering and Chirikoff may have
cursed all scientists, as Cook, the great navigator, cursed savants at
a later day; but they must bow to the decision of the council; and the
decision was to sail south-southeast for Gamaland. And yet, there
could have been no bitterness in Bering's feelings; for he knew that
the truth must triumph. He would be vindicated, whatever came; and the
spell of the North was upon him with its magic beckoning on--on--on to
the unknown, to the unexplored, to the undreamed. All that the
discoveries of Columbus gave to the world, Bering's voyage might give
to Russia; for he did _not_ know that the La Vérendryes of New France
had already penetrated west as far as the Rockies; and he did know that
half a continent yet lay unexplored, unclaimed, on the other side of
the Pacific.
{20}
[Illustration: Map of Course followed by Bering.]
But with boats that carried only one hundred casks of water, and
provisions for but five months, the decision to sail south-southeast
was a deplorable waste of precious time. It would lead to the Spanish
possessions, not to the unknown North. On Bering's boat, the _St.
Peter_, was a crew of seventy-seven, Lieutenant Waxel, second in
command, George William Steller, the famous scientist, Bering's friend,
on board. On the _St. Paul_, under the stanch, level-headed Russian
lieutenant, Alexei Chirikoff, were seventy-six men, with La Croyére
d'Isle as astronomer. Not the least {21} complicating feature of the
case was the personnel of the crews. For the most part, they were
branded criminals and malcontents. From the first they had regarded
the Bering expedition with horror. They had joined it under compulsion
for only six years; and the exploration was now in its eleventh year.
Spanberg, the other Dane, with his brutal tongue and constant recourse
to the knout, who had gone to St. Petersburg to report on Japan, they
cordially hated. Chirikoff, the Russian, was a universal favorite, and
Bering, the supreme commander, was loved for his {22} kindness; but
Bering's commands were subject to veto by the Russian underlings; and
the Russian underling officers kept up a constant brawl of duels and
gaming and drink. No wonder the bluff Dane sailed out from the
snow-rimmed peaks of Avacha Bay with dark forebodings. He had carried
a load of petty instructions issued by ignoramus savants for eight
years. He had borne eight years of nagging from court and senate and
academy. He had been criticised for blunders of others' making. He
had been set to accomplish a Herculean task with tied hands. He had
been threatened with fines and court martial for the delay caused by
the quarrels of his under officers to whom he was subject. He had been
deprived of salary for three years and accused of pilfering from public
funds. His wife, who had by this time returned with the wives of the
other officers to Russia, had actually been searched for hidden
booty.[12] And now, after toils and hardships untold, only five
months' provisions were left for the ships sailing from Kamchatka; and
the blockhead underlings were compelling a waste of those provisions by
sailing in the wrong direction. If the worst came, could Bering hold
his men with those tied hands of his?
The commander shrugged his shoulders and signalled Chirikoff, the
Russian, on the _St. Paul_, to lead the way. They must find out there
was no Gamaland {23} for themselves, those obstinate Russians! The
long swell of the Pacific meets them as they sheer out from the
mountain-girt harbor. A dip of the sails to the swell of the rising
wind, and the snowy heights of Avacha Bay are left on the offing. The
thunder of the surf against the rocky caves of Kamchatka coast fades
fainter. The myriad birds become fewer. Steller, the scientist, leans
over the rail to listen if the huge sperm whale, there, "hums" as it
"blows." The white rollers come from the north, rolling--rolling down
to the tropics. A gray thing hangs over the northern offing, a grayish
brown thing called "fog" of which they will know more anon. The
grayish brown thing means storm; and the "porps" tumbling, floundering,
somerseting round the ships in circles, mean storm; and Chirikoff, far
ahead there, signals back doubtfully to know if they shouldn't keep
together to avoid being lost in the gathering fog. The Dane shrugs his
shoulders and looks to the north. The grayish brown thing has
darkened, thickened, spread out impalpably, and by the third day, a
northling wind is whistling through the riggings with a rip. Sails are
furled. The white rollers roll no longer. They lash with chopped-off
tops flying backward; and the _St. Peter_ is churning about, shipping
sea after sea with the crash of thunder. That was what the fog meant;
and it is all about them, in a hurricane now, stinging cold, thick to
the touch, washing out every outline but sea--sea!
{24} Never mind! They are nine days out. It is the twelfth of June.
They are down to 46 degrees and no Gamaland! The blockheads have
stopped spreading their maps in the captain's cabin. One can see a
smile wreathing in the whiskers of the Dane. Six hundred miles south
of Kamchatka and no Gamaland! The council convenes again. It is
decided to turn about, head north, and say no more of Gamaland. But
when the fog, that has turned hurricane, lifts, the consort ship, the
_St. Paul_, is lost. Chirikoff's vessel has disappeared. Up to 49
degrees, they go; but still no Chirikoff, and no Gamaland! Then the
blunder-makers, as usual, blunder more. It is dangerous to go on
without the sister ship. The council convenes. Bering must hark back
to 46 degrees and hunt for Chirikoff. So passes the whole month of
June. Out of five months' provisions, one wasted, the odium on Bering,
the Dane.
It was noticed that after the ship turned south, the commander looked
ill and depressed. He became intolerant of opposition or approach.
Possibly to avoid irritation, he kept to his cabin; but he issued
peremptory orders for the _St. Peter_ to head back north.
In a few days, Bering was confined to bed with that overwhelming
physical depression and fear, that precede the scourge most dreaded by
seamen--scurvy. Lieutenant Waxel now took command. Waxel had all a
sailor's contempt for the bookful blockheads, who wrench fact to fit
theory; and deadly enmity arose {25} between him and Steller, the
scientist. By the middle of July, the fetid drinking water was so
reduced that the crew was put on half allowance; but on the sleepy,
fog-blanketed swell of the Pacific slipping past Bering's wearied eyes,
there were so many signs of land--birds, driftwood, seaweed--that the
commander ordered the ship hove to each night for fear of grounding.
On the thirteenth of July, the council of underlings had so far
relinquished all idea of a Gamaland, that it was decided to steer
continuously north. Sometime between the 16th and 20th, the fog lifted
like a curtain. Such a vision met the gaze of the stolid seamen as
stirred the blood of those phlegmatic Russians. It was the
consummation of all their labor, what they had toiled across Siberia to
see, what they had hoped against hope in spite of the learned jargon of
the geographers. There loomed above the far horizon of the north sea
what might have been an immense opal dome suspended in mid-heaven. One
can guess how the lookout strained keen eyes at this grand, crumpled
apex of snow jagged through the clouds like the celestial tent peak of
some giant race; how the shout of "land" went up, how officers and
underlings flocked round Bering with cries and congratulations. "We
knew it was land beyond a doubt on the sixteenth," says Steller.
"Though I have been in Kamchatka, I have never seen more lofty
mountains." The shore was broken everywhere, showing inlets and
harbors. {26} Everybody congratulated the commander, but he only
shrugged shoulders, saying: "We think we've done big things, eh? but
who knows? Nobody realizes where this is, or the distance we must sail
back. Winds may be contrary. We don't know this land; and we haven't
provisions to winter."
The truth is--the maps having failed, Bering was good enough seaman to
know these uncharted signs of a continent indicated that the _St.
Peter_ was hopelessly lost. Sixteen years of nagging care, harder to
face than a line of cannon, had sucked Bering's capacity of resistance
like a vampire. That buoyancy, which lifts man above Anxious Fright,
had been sapped. The shadowy elemental powers--physical weakness,
disease, despair--were closing round the explorer like the waves of an
eternal sea.
The boat found itself in a wonder world, that beggared romance. The
great peak, which they named St. Elias, hung above a snowy row of
lesser ridges in a dome of alabaster. Icebergs, like floating palaces,
came washing down from the long line of precipitous shore. As they
neared anchorage at an island now known as Kyak, they could see billows
of ferns, grasses, lady's slippers, rhododendrons, bluebells,
forget-me-nots, rippling in the wind. Perhaps they saw those palisades
of ice, that stretch like a rampart northward along the main shore west
of St. Elias.
The _St. Peter_ moved slowly landward against a head wind. Khitroff
and Steller put off in the small {27} boats with fifteen men to
reconnoitre. Both found traces of inhabitants--timbered huts, fire
holes, shells, smoked fish, footprints in the grass. Steller left some
kettles, knives, glass beads, and trinkets in the huts to replace the
possessions of the natives, which the Russians took. Many years later,
another voyager met an old Indian, who told of seeing Bering's ship
anchor at Kyak Island when he was a boy; but the terrified Indians had
fled, only returning to find the presents in the huts, when the
Russians had gone.[13] Steller was as wild as a child out of school,
and accompanied by only one Cossack went bounding over the island
collecting specimens and botanizing. Khitroff, meanwhile, filled
water-casks; but on July 21, the day after the anchorage, a storm-wind
began whistling through the rigging. The rollers came washing down
from the ice wall of the coast and the far offing showed the dirty fog
that portended storm. Only half the water-casks had been filled; but
there was a brisk seaward breeze. Without warning, contrary to his
custom of consulting the other officers, Bering appeared on deck pallid
and ashen from disease, and peremptorily ordered anchors up.
In vain Steller stormed and swore, accusing the chief of pusillanimous
homesickness, "of reducing his explorations to a six hours' anchorage
on an island shore," "of coming from Asia to carry home American
water." The commander had had enough of {28} vacillation, delay,
interference. One-third of the crew was ailing. Provisions for only
three months were in the hold. The ship was off any known course more
than two thousand miles from any known port; and contrary winds might
cause delay or drive the vessel on the countless reefs that lined this
strange coast, like a ploughed field.
Dense clouds and a sleety rain settled over the sea, washing out every
outline, as the _St. Peter_ began her westward course. But what
baffled both Bering and the officers was the fact that the coast
trended, not north, but south. They were coasting that long peninsula
of Alaska that projects an arm for a thousand miles southwestward into
the Pacific.
The roar of the rollers came from the reefs. Through the blanketing
fog they could discern, on the north, island after island, ghostlike
through the mist, rocky, towering, majestic, with a thunder of surf
among the caves, a dim outline of mountains above, like Loki, Spirit of
Evil, smiling stonily at the dark forces closing round these puny men.
All along Kadiak, the roily waters told of reefs. The air was heavy
with fogs thick to the touch; and violent winds constantly threatened a
sudden shift that might drive the vessel on the rocks. At midnight on
August 1, they suddenly found themselves with only three feet of water
below the keel. Fortunately there was no wind, but the fog was like
ink. By swinging into a current, that ran a mill-race, they were
carried out to eighteen fathoms {29} of water, where they anchored till
daybreak. They called this place Foggy Island. To-day it is known as
Ukamok.
[Illustration: The _St. Peter_ and _St. Paul_, from a rough sketch by
Bering's comrade, Steller, the scientist.]
The underlings now came sharply to their senses and, at the repeatedly
convened and distracted councils between July 25 and August 10, decided
that there was only one thing to do--sail at once for the home port of
Kamchatka. The _St. Peter_ was tossing about in frightful winds among
reefs and hurricane fog like a cork. Half the crew lay ill and
helpless of scurvy, {30} and only two months' provisions remained for a
voyage of two thousand miles. The whole crew signed the resolution to
go home.
Only twenty-five casks of water remained. On August 30 the _St. Peter_
anchored off a group of thirteen bald, bare, treeless rocks. It was
thought that if some of the scurvy-stricken sailors could be carried
ashore, they might recover. One, Shumagin, died as he was lifted
ashore. This was the first death, and his name was given to the
islands. Bering himself was so ill he could not stand. Twenty
emaciated men were laid along the shore. Steller hurried off to hunt
anti-scorbutic plants, while Waxel, who had taken command, and Khitroff
ordered the water-casks filled. Unfortunately the only pool they could
find was connected with an arm of the sea. The water was brackish, and
this afterward increased disease.
A fatality seemed to hang over the wonder world where they wandered.
Voices were heard in the storm, rumblings from the sea. Fire could be
seen through the fog. Was this fire from volcanoes or Indians? And
such a tide-rip thundered along the rocks as shook the earth and set
the ship trembling. Waxel knew they must not risk delay by going to
explore, but by applying to Bering, who lay in his berth unconscious of
the dangers on this coast, Khitroff gained permission to go from the
vessel on a yawl with five sailors; but by the time he had rowed
against head winds to the scene of the fire, the Indians had {31} fled,
and such beach combers were crashing ashore, Khitroff dare not risk
going back to the ship. In vain Waxel ground his teeth with rage,
signalled, and waited. "The wind seemed to issue from a flue," says
Steller, "with such a whistling and roaring and rumbling that we
expected to lose mast and rudder, or be crushed among the breakers.
The dashings of the sea sounded like a cannon."
The fact was, Khitroff's yawl had been smashed to kindling wood against
the rocks; and the six half-drowned Russians were huddling together
waiting for help when Waxel took the other small boat and went to the
rescue. Barely had this been effected at the cost of four days' delay,
in which the ship might have made five hundred miles toward home, when
natives were seen paddling out in canoes, gesticulating for the white
men to come ashore. Waxel lowered away in the small boat with nine
armed men to pay the savages a visit. Close ashore, he beckoned the
Indians to wade out; but they signalled him in turn to land, and he
ordered three men out to moor the boat to a rock. All went well
between Russians and Indians, presents being exchanged, till a chief
screwed up his courage to paddle out to Waxel in the boat. With
characteristic hospitality, Waxel at once proffered some Russian
brandy, which, by courtesy among all Western sailors, is always known
as "chain lightning." The chief took but one gulp of the liquid fire,
when with a wild yell he spat it out, shouted that he had been
poisoned, and dashed ashore.
{32} The three Russians succeeded in gaining Waxel's boat, but the
Indians grabbed the mooring ropes and seized the Chukchee interpreter,
whom Waxel had brought from Siberia. Waxel ordered the rope cut, but
the Chukchee interpreter called out pitifully to be saved. Quick as
flash, the Russians fired two muskets in midair. At the crash that
echoed among the cliffs, the Indians fell prostrate with fear, and the
interpreter escaped; but six days had been wasted in this futile visit
to the natives.
Scarcely had they escaped this island, when such a hurricane broke over
the _St. Peter_ for seventeen days that the ship could only scud under
bare poles before a tornado wind that seemed to be driving
north-northwest. The ship was a chip in a maelstrom. There were only
fifteen casks of water fit to drink. All food was exhausted but mouldy
sea-biscuits. One sailor a day was now dying of scurvy, and those left
were so weak that they had no power to man the ship. The sailors were
so emaciated they had to be carried back and forward to the rudder, and
the underling officers were quarrelling among themselves. The crew
dared not hoist sails, because not a man of the _St. Peter_ had the
physical strength to climb and lower canvas.[14]
{33} The rain turned to sleet. The sleet froze to the rotting sails,
to the ice-logged hull, to the wan yardarms frost-white like ghosts.
At every lurch of the sea slush slithered down from the rigging on the
shivering seamen. The roar of the breakers told of a shallow sea, yet
mist veiled the sky, and they were above waters whose shallows drop to
sudden abysmal depths of three thousand fathoms. Sheets of smoking
vapor rose from the sea, sheets of flame-tinged smoke from the
crevasses of land volcanoes which the fogs hid. Out of the sea came
the hoarse, strident cry of the sea-lion, and the walrus, and the hairy
seal. It was as if the poor Russians had sailed into some under-world.
The decks were slippery as glass, the vessel shrouded in ice. Over all
settled that unspeakable dread of impending disaster, which is a
symptom of scurvy, and saps the fight that makes a man fit to survive.
Waxel, alone, held the vessel up to the wind. Where were they? Why
did this coasting along unknown northern islands not lead to Kamchatka?
The councils were no longer the orderly conferences of savants over
cut-and-dried maps. They were bedlam. Panic was in the marrow of
every man, even the passionate Steller, who thought all the while they
were on the coast of Kamchatka and made loud complaint that the
expedition had been misled by "unscrupulous leaders."
At eight o'clock on the morning of October 30 it was seen that the
ice-clogged ropes on the starboard {34} side had been snapped by the
wind like dry sticks. Offerings, vows, prayers went up from the
stricken crew. Piety became a very real thing. The men prayed aloud
and conferred on ways to win the favor of God. The colder weather
brought one relief. The fog lifted and the air was clear. The wind
veered northeast, and on November 4, to their inexpressible joy, a dim
outline sharpened to hard, clear horizon; and the gazing crew gradually
saw a high, mountainous coast become clear beyond doubt directly ahead
sixteen miles. Surely, this was Kamchatka? Surely, God had heard
their vows? The sick crawled on hands and knees above the hatchway to
see land once more, and with streaming eyes thanked Heaven for the
escape from doom. Grief became joy; gruff, happy, hilarious laughter;
for a few hidden casks of brandy were brought out to celebrate the end
of their miseries, and each man began pointing out certain headlands
that he thought he recognized. But this ecstasy was fool joy born of
desperation. As the ship rounded northeastward, a strangeness came
over the scene; a chill over the good cheer--a numbing, silent,
unspeakable dread over the crew. These turbulent waters running a
mill-race between reefs looked more like a channel between two islands
than open coast. The men could not utter a word. They hoped against
hope. They dare not voice their fears. That night, the _St. Peter_
stood off from land in case of storm. Topsails were furled, and the
wind had ripped the other {35} sails to tatters, that flared and beat
dismally all night against the cordage. One can imagine the anxiety of
that long night with the roar of the breakers echoing angrily from
shore, the whistle of the wind through the rotten rigging, the creaking
of the timbers to the crash and growl and rebound of the tide. Clear,
refulgent with sunshine like the light of creation's first day, the
sting of ozone in the air, and the freshness of a scene never before
witnessed by human eyes--dawned the morning of November 5.
The shore was of black, adamant rock rising sheer from the sea in a
rampart wall. Reefs, serried, rank on rank, like sentinels, guarded
approach to the coast in jagged masses, that would rip the bottom from
any keel like the teeth of a saw; and over these rolled the roaring
breakers with a clutch to the back-wash that bade the gazing sailors
beware. Birds, birds in myriads upon myriads, screamed and circled
over the eerie heights of the beetling cliffs. This did not look like
Kamchatka. These birds were not birds of the Asiatic home port. These
cliffs were not like the snow-rimmed mountains of Avacha Bay.
Waxel called a council.
Officers and men dragged themselves to Bering's cabin. Waxel had
already canvassed all hands to vote for a landing to winter on these
shores. This, the dying Bering opposed with all his might. "We roust
be almost home," he said. "We still have six casks of water, and the
_foremast_. Having risked so {36} much, let us risk three days more,
let us risk everything to reach Avacha Bay." Poor Bering! Had his
advice been followed, the saddest disaster of northern seas might have
been averted; for they were less than ten days' run from the home
harbor; but inspired by fool hopes born of fear, like the old marsh
lights that used to lure men to the quicksands--Waxel and Khitroff
actually persuaded themselves this _was_ Kamchatka, and when one
lieutenant, Ofzyn, who knew the north well from charting the Arctic
coast, would have spoken in favor of Bering's view, he was actually
clubbed and thrown from the cabin. The crew voted as a man to land and
winter on this coast. Little did they know that vote was their own
death warrant.
[1] See _Life of Peter the Great_, by Orlando Williams, 1859; _Peter
the Great_, by John Lothrop Motley, 1877; _History of Peter I_, by John
Mottley, 1740; _Journal of Peter the Great_, 1698; Voltaire's _Pierre
le Grand_; Ségur's _Histoire de Russie et de Pierre le Grand_.
[2] Who this man _Gama_, supposed to have seen the unknown continent of
Gamaland, was, no one knew. The Portuguese followed the myth blindly;
and the other geographers followed the Portuguese. Texeira, court
geographer in Portugal, in 1649 issued a map with a vague coast marked
at latitude 45 degrees north, with the words "Land seen by John de
Gama, Indian, going from China to New Spain."
[3] These instructions were handed to Peter's admiral--Count Apraxin.
[4] Born 1681, son of Jonas and Anna Bering, whom a petition describes,
in 1719, as "old, miserable, decrepit people, no way able to help
ourselves."
[5] He fought in Black Sea wars of 1711; and from lieutenant-captain
became captain of the second rank by 1717, when Russians, jealous of
the foreigner, blocked his promotion. He demanded promotion or
discharge, and withdrew to Finland, where the Czar's Kamchatkan
expedition called him from retirement.
[6] The expedition left St. Petersburg February 5th.
[7] The midshipman of this voyage was Peter Chaplin, whose journal was
deposited in the Naval College of the Admiralty, St. Petersburg. Berg
gives a summary of this journal. A translation by Dall is to be found
in _Appendix 19, Coast Survey, Washington, 1890_.
[8] A great dispute has waged among the finical academists, where the
Serdze Kamen of this trip really was; the Russian observations varying
greatly owing to fog and rude instruments. _Lauridsen_ quarrels with
_Müller_ on this score. _Müller_ was one of the theorists whose
wrongheadedness misled Bering.
[9] It was in 1730 that Gvozdef's report of a strange land between 65
degrees and 66 degrees became current. Whether this land was America,
Gamaland, or Asia, the savants could not know.
[10] It is from the works of _Gmelin_, _Müller_, and _Steller_,
scientists named to accompany the expedition, that the most connected
accounts are obtained. The "menagerie," some one has called this
collection of scientists.
[11] Many of the workmen died of their hardships at this stage of the
journey.
[12] Berg says Bering's two sons, Thomas and Unos, were also with him
in Siberia.
[13] _Sauer_ relates this incident.
[14] See _Müller_, p. 93, 1764 edition: "The men, notwithstanding want,
misery, sickness, were obliged to work continually in the cold and wet,
and the sickness was so dreadful that the sailors who governed the
rudder were obliged to be led to it by others, who could hardly walk.
They durst not carry much sail, because there was nobody to lower them
in case of need, and they were so thin a violent wind would have torn
them to pieces. The rain now changed to hail and snow."
{37}
CHAPTER II
1741-1743
CONTINUATION OF BERING, THE DANE
Frightful Sufferings of the Castaways on the Commander Islands--The
Vessel smashed in a Winter Gale, the Sick are dragged for Refuge into
Pits of Sand--Here, Bering perishes, and the Crew Winter--The Consort
Ship under Chirikoff Ambushed--How the Castaways reach Home
Without pilot or captain, the _St. Peter_ drifted to the swirling current
of the sea along a high, rocky, forbidding coast where beetling
precipices towered sheer two thousand feet above a white fret of reefs,
that gave the ocean the appearance of a ploughed field. The sick crawled
mutely back to their berths. Bering was past caring what came and only
semiconscious. Waxel, who had compelled the crew to vote for landing
here under the impression born of his own despair,--that this was the
coast of Avacha Bay, Kamchatka,--saw with dismay in the shores gliding
past the keel momentary proofs that he was wrong. Poor Waxel had fought
desperately against the depression that precedes scurvy; but now, with a
dumb hopelessness settling over the ship, the invisible hand of the
scourge {38} was laid on him, too. He went below decks completely
fordone.
The underling officers still upon their feet, whose false theories had
led Bering into all this disaster, were now quarrelling furiously among
themselves, blaming one another. Only Ofzyn, the lieutenant, who had
opposed the landing, and Steller, the scientist, remained on the lookout
with eyes alert for the impending destruction threatened from the white
fret of the endless reefs. Rocks rose in wild, jagged masses out of the
sea. Deep V-shaped ravines, shadowy in the rising moonlight, seemed to
recede into the rock wall of the coast, and only where a river poured out
from one of these ravines did there appear to be any gap through the long
lines of reefs where the surf boomed like thunder. The coast seemed to
trend from northwest to southeast, and might have been from thirty to
fifty miles long, with strange bizarre arches of rock overhanging endless
fields of kelp and seaweed. The land was absolutely treeless except for
willow brushwood the size of one's finger. Lichens, moss, sphagnum,
coated the rocks. Inland appeared nothing but billowing reaches of
sedges and shingle and grass.
[Illustration: Steller's Arch on Bering Island, named after the scientist
Steller, of Bering's Expedition.]
Suddenly Steller noticed that the ebb-tide was causing huge combing
rollers that might dash the ship against the rocks. Rushing below decks
he besought Bering's permission to sound and anchor. The early darkness
of those northern latitudes had been followed by moon-light bright as
day. Within a mile of the east shore, {39} Steller ordered the anchor
dropped, but by this time, the rollers were smashing over decks with a
quaking that seemed to tear the ship asunder. The sick were hurled from
their berths. Officers rushed on deck to be swept from their feet by
blasts of salt spray, and just ahead, through the moonlight, could be
seen the sharp edge of a long reef where the beach combers ran with the
tide-rip of a whirlpool. There is something inexpressibly terrifying
even from a point of safety in these beach combers, clutching their long
arms hungrily for prey. The confusion of orders and {40} counter-orders,
which no man had strength to carry out, of terrified cries and prayers
and oaths--was indescribable. The numb hopelessness was succeeded by
sheer panic terror. Ofzyn threw out a second anchor that raked bottom.
Then, another mountain roller thundering over the ship with a crash--and
the first cable snapped like a pistol shot. The ship rebounded; then
drove before the back-wash of the angry sea. With no fate possible but
the wall of rocks ahead, the terrorized crew began heaving the dead
overboard in the moonlight; but another roaring billow smashed the _St.
Peter_ squarely broadside. The second hawser ripped back with the
whistling rebound of a whip-lash, and Ofzyn was in the very act of
dropping the third and last anchor, when straight as a bullet to the
mark, as if hag-ridden by the northern demons of sailor fear, hurled the
_St. Peter_ for the reef! A third time the beach combers crashed down
like a falling mountain. When the booming sheets of blinding spray had
cleared and the panic-stricken sailors could again see, the _St. Peter_
was staggering stern foremost, shore ahead, like a drunken ship. Quick
as shot, Ofzyn and Steller between them heaved over the last anchor. The
flukes gripped--raked--then caught--and held.
The ship lay rocking inside a reef in the very centre of a sheltered cove
not six hundred yards from land. The beach comber had either swept her
through a gap in the reef, or hurled her clear above the reefs into
shelter.
{41} For seven hours the ship had battled against tide and
counter-current. Now, at midnight, with the air clear as day, Steller
had the small boat lowered and with another--some say Waxel, others
Pleneser, the artist, or Ofzyn, of the Arctic expedition--rowed ashore to
reconnoitre. Sometime between the evening of November 5 and the morning
of November 6, their eyes met such a view as might have been witnessed by
an Alexander Selkirk, or Robinson Crusoe. The exact landing was four or
five miles north of what is now known as Cape Khitroff, below the centre
of the east coast of Bering Island.[1] Poor Waxel would have it, they
were on the coast of Kamchatka, and spoke of sending messengers for help
to Petropaulovsk on Avacha Bay; but, as they were to learn soon enough,
the nearest point in Kamchatka was one hundred miles across the sea.
Avacha Bay was two hundred miles away. And the Spanish possessions of
America, three thousand. They found the landing place literally swarming
with animal life unknown to the world before. An enormous mammal, more
than three tons in weight, with hind quarters like a whale, snout and
fore fins resembling a cow, grazed in herds on the fields of sea-kelp and
gazed languidly without fear on the newcomer--Man. This was the famous
sea-cow described by the enthusiastic Steller, but long since extinct.
Blue foxes swarmed round the very feet of the {42} men with such hungry
boldness that half a dozen could be clubbed to death before the others
scampered. Later, Steller was to see the seal rookeries, that were to
bring so much wealth to the world, the sea-lions that roared along the
rocks till the surf shook, the sea-otter whose rare pelt, more priceless
than beaver or sable, was to cause the exploration and devastation of the
northern half of the Pacific coast.
The land was as it had appeared to the ship--utterly treeless except for
trailing willows. The brooks were not yet frozen, and snow had barely
powdered the mountains; but where the coves ran in back between the
mountains from the sea were gullies or ditches of sand and sedge. When
Steller presently found a broken window casing of Kamchatka half buried
in the sand, it gave Waxel some confidence about being on the mainland of
Asia; but before Steller had finished his two days' reconnoitre, there
was no mistaking the fact--this was an island, and a barren one at the
best, without tree or shelter; and here the castaways must winter.
The only provisions now remaining to the crew were grease and mouldy
flour. Steller at once went to work. Digging pits in the narrow gullies
of sand, he covered these over with driftwood, the rotten sail-cloth,
moss, mud, and foxskins. Cracks were then chinked up with clay and more
foxskins. By the 8th of November he was ready to have the crew landed;
but the ship rolled helpless as a log to the tide, and the few well {43}
men of the staff, without distinction of officers from sailors, had to
stand waist-deep in ice-slush to steady the stretchers made of mast poles
and sail-cloth, that received the sick lowered over decks. Many of the
scurvy stricken had not been out of their berths for six weeks. The
fearful depression and weakness, that forewarn scurvy, had been followed
by the pains, the swollen limbs, the blue spots that presage death. A
spongy excrescence covered the gums. The teeth loosened. The slightest
noise was enough to throw the patient into a paroxysm of anguished
fright; and some died on the decks immediately on contact with the
cuttingly cold air. Others expired as they were lowered to the
stretchers; others, as they were laid along the strip of sandy shore,
where the bold foxes were already devouring the dead and could scarcely
be driven off by the dying. In this way perished nine of the _St.
Peter's_ crew during the week of the landing.
By November 10, all was in readiness for Bering's removal from the ship.
As the end approached, his irritability subsided to a quieted
cheerfulness; and he could be heard mumbling over thanks to God for the
great success of his early life. Wrapped in furs, fastened to a
stretcher, the Dane was lowered over the ship, carried ashore, and laid
in a sand pit. All that day it had been dull and leaden; and just as
Bering was being carried, it began to snow heavily. Steller occupied the
sand pit next to the commander; and in {44} addition to acting as cook
and physician to the entire crew, became Bering's devoted attendant.
By the 13th of November, a long sand pit had been roofed over as a sort
of hospital with rug floor; and here Steller had the stricken sailors
carried in from the shore. Poor Waxel, who had fought so bravely, was
himself carried ashore on November 21.
Daily, officers tramped inland exploring; and daily, the different
reconnoitring parties returned with word that not a trace of human
habitation, of wood, or the way to Kamchatka had been discovered.
Another island there was to the east--now known as Copper Island--and two
little islets of rock; but beyond these, nothing could be descried from
the highest mountains but sea--sea. Bering Island, itself, is some fifty
miles long by ten wide, very high at the south, very swampy at the north;
but the Commander Group is as completely cut off from both Asia and
America as if it were in another world. The climate was not intensely
cold; but it was so damp, the very clothing rotted; and the gales were so
terrific that the men could only leave the mud huts or _yurts_ by
crawling on all fours; and for the first three weeks after the landing,
blast on blast of northern hurricane swept over the islands.
The poor old ship rode her best at anchor through the violent storms; but
on November 28 she was seen to snap her cable and go staggering drunkenly
to open sea. The terror of the castaways at this spectacle {45} was
unspeakable. Their one chance of escape in spring seemed lost; but the
beach combers began rolling landward through the howling storm; and when
next the spectators looked, the _St. Peter_ was driving ashore like a
hurricane ship, and rushed full force, nine feet deep with her prow into
the sands not a pistol shot away from the crew. The next beach comber
could not budge her. Wind and tide left her high and dry, fast in the
sand.
But what had become of Chirikoff, on board the _St. Paul_, from the 20th
of June, when the vessels were separated by storm? Would it have been
any easier for Bering if he had known that the consort ship had been
zigzagging all the while less than a week's cruise from the _St. Peter_?
When the storm, which had separated the vessels, subsided, Chirikoff let
the _St. Paul_ drift in the hope that Bering might sight the missing
vessel. Then he steered southeast to latitude 48 degrees in search of
the commander; but on June 23 a council of officers decided it was a
waste of time to search longer, and ordered the vessel to be headed
northeastward. The wind was light; the water, clear; and Chirikoff knew,
from the pilot-birds following the vessel, from the water-logged trees
churning past, from the herds of seal floundering in the sea, that land
must lie in this direction. A bright lookout was kept for the first two
weeks of July. Two hundred and forty miles were traversed; and on a
calm, {46} clear night between the 13th and 15th of July, there loomed
above the horizon the dusky heights of a wooded mountainous land in
latitude 55 degrees 21 minutes. Chirikoff was in the Alexander
Archipelago. Daybreak came with the _St. Paul_ only four miles off the
conspicuous heights of Cape Addington. Chirikoff had discovered land
some thirty-six hours before Bering. The new world of mountains and
forests roused the wildest enthusiasm among the Russians. A small boat
was lowered; but it failed to find a landing. A light wind sprang up,
and the vessel stood out under shortened sails for the night. By morning
the wind had increased, and fog had blurred out all outlines of the
new-found land. Here the ocean currents ran northward; and by morning of
the 17th, when the sun pierced the washed air and the mountains began to
appear again through jagged rifts of cloud-wraith, Chirikoff found
himself at the entrance of a great bay, girt by forested mountains to the
water's edge, beneath the high cone of what is now known as Mount
Edgecumbe, {47} in Sitka Sound. Sitka Sound is an indentation about
fifteen miles from north to south, with such depths of water that there
is no anchorage except south and southwestward of Mount Edgecumbe.
Impenetrable woods lined the mountains to the very shore. Great trunks
of uprooted trees swept past the ship continually. Even as the clouds
cleared, leaving vast forests and mountain torrents and snowy peaks
visible, a hazy film of intangible gloom seemed to settle over the
shadowy harbor.[2]
[Illustration: A Glacier]
Chirikoff wished to refill his water-casks. Also, he was ambitious to do
what the scientists cursed Bering for not doing off St. Elias--explore
thoroughly the land newly found. The long-boat was lowered with Abraham
Dementieff and ten armed men. The crew was supplied with muskets, a
brass cannon, and provisions for several days. Chirikoff arranged a
simple code of signals with the men--probably a column of smoke, or
sunlight thrown back by a tin mirror--by which he could know if all went
well. Then, with a cheer, the first Russians to put foot on the soil of
America bent to the oar and paddled swiftly away from the _St. Paul_ for
the shadow of the forested mountains etched from the inland shore. The
long-boat seemed smaller as the distance from the _St. Paul_ increased.
Then men and boat disappeared behind an {48} elbow of land. A flash of
reflected light from the hidden shore; and Chirikoff knew the little band
of explorers had safely landed. The rest of the crew went to work
putting things shipshape on the _St. Paul_. The day passed with more
safety signals from the shore. The crew of the _St. Paul_ slept sound
out in mid-harbor unsuspicious of danger. Another day passed, and
another night. Not so many signals! Had the little band of Russians
gone far inland for water, and the signals been hidden by the forest
gloom? A wind was singing in the rigging--threatening a landward gale
that might carry the _St. Paul_ somewhat nearer those rocky shores than
the Russians could wish. Chirikoff sent a sailor spying from the lookout
of the highest yard-arm. No signals at all this day; nor the next day;
nor the next! The _St. Paul_ had only one other small boat. Fearing the
jolly-boat had come to grief among the rocks and counter-currents,
Chirikoff bade Sidor Savelief, the bo'swain, and six armed sailors,
including carpenters to repair damages, take the remaining boat and go to
Dementieff's rescue. The strictest orders were given that both boats
return at once. Barely had the second boat rounded the elbow of shore
where the first boat had disappeared when a great column of smoke burst
from the tree-tops of the hidden shore. To Chirikoff's amazement, the
second crew made no signal. The night passed uneasily. Sailors were on
the watch. Ship's rigging was put in shape. Dawn was witnessed {49} by
eager eyes gazing shoreward. The relief was inexpressible when two
boats--a long and a short one like those used by the two crews--were seen
rounding the elbow of land. The landward breeze was now straining the
_St. Paul's_ hawsers. Glad to put for open sea to weather the coming
gale, Chirikoff ordered all hands on deck and anchors up. The small
boats came on with a bounce over the ocean swell; but suddenly one of
Chirikoff's Russians pointed to the approaching crafts. There was a
pause in the rattle of anchor chains. There was a pause in the bouncing
of the small boats, too. They were _not_ the Russian jolly-boats. They
were canoes; and the canoes were filled with savages as dumb with
astonishment at the apparition of the _St. Paul_ as the Russians were at
the canoes. Before the Russians had come to their senses, or Chirikoff
had time to display presents to allure the savages on board as hostages,
the Indians rose in their places, uttered a war-whoop that set the rocks
echoing, and beating their paddles on the gun'els, scudded for shore.
Gradually the meaning dawned on Chirikoff. His two crews had been
destroyed. His small boats were lost. His supply of fresh water was
running low. The fire that he had observed had been a fire of orgies
over mutilated men. The _St. Paul_ was on a hostile shore with such a
gale blowing as threatened destruction on the rocks. There Was nothing
to do but scud for open sea. When the gale abated, Chirikoff returned to
Sitka and cruised {50} the shore for some sign of the sailors: but not a
trace of the lost men could be descried. By this time water was so
scarce, the men were wringing rain moisture out of the sails and
distilling sea-water. A council was called. All agreed it would be
worse than folly to risk the entire crew for the twelve men, who were
probably already dead. There was no small boat to land for more water;
and the _St. Paul_ was headed about with all speed for the northwest.[3]
Slant rain settled over the sea. The wind increased and grew more
violent. The _St. Paul_ drove ahead like a ghost form pursued through a
realm of mist. Toward the end of July, when the weather cleared,
stupendous mountains covered with snow were seen on the northwestward
horizon like walls of ice with the base awash in thundering sea.
Thousands of cataracts, clear as crystal, flashed against the mountain
sides; and in places the rock wall rose sheer two thousand feet from the
roaring tide. Inlets, gloomy with forested mountain walls where
impetuous streams laden with the milky silt of countless glaciers tore
their way through the rocks to the sea, could be seen receding inland
through the fog. Then the foul weather settled over the sea again; and
by the first {51} week of August, with baffling winds and choppy sea, the
_St. Paul_ was veering southwestward where Alaska projects a long arm
into the Pacific. Chirikoff had passed the line where forests dwarf to
willows, and willows to sedges, and sedges to endless leagues of rolling
tundras. Somewhere near Kadiak, land was again sighted. When the fog
lifted, the vapor of far volcanoes could be seen hanging lurid over the
mountain tops.
Wind was followed by dead calm, when the sails literally fell to pieces
with rain-rot in the fog; and on the evening of September 8 the becalmed
crew were suddenly aroused by the tide-rip of roaring breakers. Heaving
out all anchors at once, Chirikoff with difficulty made fast to rocky
bottom. In the morning, when the fog lifted, he found himself in the
centre of a shallow bay surrounded by the towering cliffs of what is now
known as Adakh Island. While waiting for a breeze, he saw seven canoe
loads of savages put out from shore chanting some invocation. The
Russians threw out presents, but the savages took no notice, gradually
surrounding the _St. Paul_. All this time Chirikoff had been without any
water but the stale casks brought from Kamchatka; and he now signalled
his desperate need to the Indians. They responded by bringing bladders
full of fresh water; but they refused to mount the decks. And by evening
fourteen canoe loads of the taciturn savages were circling threateningly
round the Russians. Luckily, {52} at nightfall a wind sprang up.
Chirikoff at once slipped anchor and put to sea.
By the third week of August, the rations of rye meal had been reduced to
once a day instead of twice in order to economize water. Only twelve
casks of water remained; and Chirikoff was fifteen hundred miles from
Kamchatka. Cold, hunger, thirst, then did the rest. Chirikoff himself
was stricken with scurvy by the middle of September, and one sailor died
of the scourge. From the 26th, one death a day followed in succession.
Though down, Chirikoff was not beaten. Discipline was maintained among
the hungry crew; and each day Chirikoff issued exact orders. Without any
attempt at steering, the ship drifted westward. No more land was seen by
the crew; but on the 2d of October, the weather clearing, an observation
was taken of the sun that showed them they were nearing Kamchatka. On
the 8th, land was sighted; but one man alone, the pilot, Yelagin, had
strength to stay at the helm till Avacha Bay was approached, when
distress signals were fired from the ship's cannon to bring help from
land. Poor Croyére de l'Isle, kinsman to the map makers whose mistakes
had caused disaster, sick unto death of the scurvy, had kept himself
alive with liquor and now insisted on being carried ashore. The first
breath of clear air above decks was enough. The scientist fell dead
within the home harbor. Chirikoff was landed the same day, all unaware
that at times in the mist and {53} rain he had been within from fifteen
to forty miles of poor Bering, zigzagging across the very trail of the
afflicted sister ship.
[Illustration: Sea Cows.]
By December the entire crew of Bering's castaways, prisoners on the
sea-girt islands of the North Pacific, were lodged in five underground
huts on the bank of a stream. In 1885, when these mud huts or _yurts_
were examined, they were seen to have walls of peat three feet thick. To
each man was given a pound of flour. For the rest, their food must be
what they caught or clubbed--mainly, at first, the sea-otter, whose flesh
was unpalatable to the taste and tough as leather. Later, Steller
discovered that the huge sea-cow--often thirty-five feet long--seen
pasturing on the fields of sea-kelp at low tide, afforded food of almost
the same quality as the land cow. Seaweed grew in miniature forests on
the island; and on this pastured the monster bovine of the sea--true fish
in its hind quarters but oxlike in its head and its habits--herding
together like cattle, snorting like a horse, moving the neck from side to
side as it grazed, with the hind leg a fin, the fore fin a leg, udder
between the fore legs, and in place of teeth, plates. Nine hundred or
more sea-otter--whose pelts afterward brought a fortune to the crew--were
killed for food by Steller and his companions; but two sea-cows provided
the castaways with food for six weeks. On November 22d died the old
mate, who had weathered northern seas for fifty {54} years. In all, out
of a crew of seventy-seven, there had perished by January 6, 1742, when
the last death occurred, thirty-one men.
Steller's hut was next to Bering's. From that November day when he was
carried from the ship through the snow to the sand pit, the commander
sank without rallying. Foxskins had been spread on the ground as a bed;
but the sand loosened from the sides of the pit and kept rolling down on
the dying man. Toward the last he begged Steller to let the sand rest,
as it kept in the warmth; so that he was soon covered with sand to his
waist. White billows and a gray sky followed the hurricane gale that had
hurled the ship in on the beach. All night between the evening of the
7th and the morning of the 8th of December, the moaning of the south wind
could be heard through the tattered rigging of the wrecked ship; and all
night the dying Dane was communing with his God. He was now over sixty
years of age. To a constitution already broken by the nagging cares of
eight years and by hardships indescribable, by scurvy and by exposure,
was added an acute inflammation. Bering's power of resistance was
sapped. Two hours before daybreak on December 8, 1741, the brave Dane
breathed his last. He was interred on the 9th of December between the
graves of the mate and the steward on the hillside; and the bearded
Russians came down from the new-made grave that day bowed and hopeless.
A plain Greek cross was placed above {55} his grave; and a copy of that
cross marks the same grave to-day.
The question arises--where does Bering stand among the world heroes? The
world loves success better than defeat; and spectacular success better
than duty plainly done. If success means accomplishing what one sets out
to do in spite of almost insuperable difficulties--Bering won success.
He set out to discover the northwest coast of America; and he perished
doing it. But if heroism means a something more than tangible success;
if it means that divine quality of fighting for the truth independent of
reward, whether one is to be beaten or not; if it means setting to one's
self the task of perishing for a truth, without the slightest hope of
establishing that truth--then, Bering stands very high indeed among the
world's heroes. Steller, who had cursed him for not remaining longer at
Mount St. Elias, bore the highest testimony to his integrity and worth.
It may be said that a stronger type of hero would have scrunched into
nothingness the vampire blunderers who misled the ship; but it must be
remembered that stronger types of heroes usually save their own skins and
let the underlings suffer. While Bering _might_ have averted the
disaster that attended the expedition, it must not be forgotten that when
he perished, there perished the very soul of the great enterprise, which
at once crumbled to pieces.
On a purely material plane, what did Bering accomplish?
{56} He dispelled forever the myth of the Northeast Passage if the world
would have but accepted his conclusions. The coast of Japan was charted
under his direction. The Arctic coast of Asia was charted under his
direction. A country as large as from Maine to Florida, or Baltimore to
Texas, with a river comparable only to the Mississippi, was discovered by
him. The furs of this country for a single year more than paid all that
Russia spent to discover it; all that the United States later paid to
Russia for it.
A dead whale thrown up on the shore proved a godsend to the weak and
famishing castaways. As their bodies grew stronger, the spirit of
merriment that gilds life's darkest clouds began to come back, and the
whale was jocularly known among the Russians as "our magazine of
provisions."
Then parties of hunters began going out for the sea-otter, which hid its
head during storm under the kelp of the sea fields. Steller knew the
Chinese would pay what in modern money is from one hundred to one hundred
and fifty dollars for each of these sea-otter skins; and between nine
hundred and one thousand were taken by the wrecked crew. The same skin
of prime quality sells in a London auction room to-day for one thousand
dollars. And in spring, when the sea-otter disappeared, there came
herds--herds in millions upon millions--of another visitant to the shores
of the Commander Islands--the fur seal, {57} which afforded new hunting
to the crew, and new wealth to the world.
[Illustration: Seals in a Rookery on Bering Island.]
The terrible danger now was not from starvation, but mutiny, murder, or
massacre among the branded criminals of the discontented crew. Waxel, as
he recovered, was afraid of tempting revolt with orders, and convened the
crew by vote to determine all that should be done. Officers and
men--there was no distinction. By March of 1742 the ground had cleared
of snow. Waxel called a meeting to suggest breaking up the packet vessel
to build a smaller craft. A vote {58} was asked. The resolution was
called, written out, and signed by every survivor, but afterward, when
officers and men set themselves to the well-nigh impossible task of
untackling the ship without implements of iron, revolt appeared among the
workers. Again Waxel avoided mutiny. A meeting was called, another vote
taken, the recalcitrants shamed down. The crew lacked more than tools.
There was no ship's carpenter. Finally a Cossack, who was afterward
raised to the nobility for his work, consented to act as director of the
building, and on the 6th of May a vessel forty feet long, thirteen beam,
and six deep, was on the stocks. All June, the noise of the planking
went on till the mast raised its yard-arms, and an eight-oared
single-master, such as the old Vikings of the North Sea used, was well
under way.
The difficulties of such shipbuilding can hardly be realized. There was
no wood but the wood of the old ship, no rigging but the old hemp, no tar
but such as could be melted out of the old hemp in earth pits; and very
few axes. The upper part was calked with tallow of the sea-cow, the
under with tar from the old hull. The men also constructed a second
small boat or canoe.
On the 10th of August, with such cheers as the island never heard before
or since, the single-master was launched from the skids and named the
_St. Peter_. Cannon balls and cartridges were thrown in bottom as
ballast. Luckily, eight hundred pounds of {59} meal had been reserved
for the return voyage, and Steller had salted down steaks of whale meat
and sea-cow. On the evening of August 16, after solemn prayer and
devotions, with one last look to the lonely crosses on the hillside where
lay the dead, the castaways went on board. A sharp breeze was blowing
from the north. Hoisting sail, they glided out to sea. The old
jolly-boat bobbled behind in tow. Late at night, when the wind fell, the
eager mariners bent to the oar. By noon next day they had rounded the
southeast corner of the island. Two days afterward, rough weather set
the old jolly-boat bumping her nose so violently on the heels of the _St.
Peter_, that the cable had to be cut and the small boat set adrift. That
night the poor tallow-calked planks leaked so badly, pumps and buckets
were worked at fever heat, and all the ballast was thrown overboard.
Sometime during the 25th, there shone above the silver rim where sea and
sky met, the opal dome of far mountains, Kamchatka!
The bearded men could control themselves no longer. Shout on shout made
the welkin ring. Tears streamed down the rough, unwashed faces. The
Cossacks wept like children. Men vied with each other to seize the oars
and row like mad. The tide-rip bounding--lifting--falling--racing over
seas for the shores of Kamchatka never ran so mad and swift a course as
the crazy craft there bouncing forward over the waves. And when they saw
the home harbor {60} of Petropaulovsk, Avacha Bay, on August 27,
exultation knew no bounds. The men fired off guns, beat oars on the deck
rail, shouted--shouted--shouted till the mountains echoed and every
living soul of Avacha dashed to the waterside scarcely believing the
evidence of his eyes--that the castaways of Bering's ship had returned.
Then one may well believe that the monks set the chapel bells ringing and
the cannon roared a welcome from Avacha Bay.
Chirikoff had in May sailed in search of Bering, passing close to the
island where the castaways were prisoners of the sea, but he did not see
the Commander Islands; and all hope had been given up for any word of the
_St. Peter_. Waxel wintered that year at Avacha Bay, crossing the
mainland in the spring of 1743. In September of the same year, an
imperial decree put an end to the Northern Expedition, and Waxel set out
across Siberia to take the crew back to St. Petersburg. Poor Steller
died on the way from exposure.
So ended the greatest naval exploration known to the world. Beside it,
other expeditions to explore America pale to insignificance. La Salle
and La Vérendrye ascended the St. Lawrence, crossed inland plains, rafted
down the mighty tide of the great inland rivers; but La Salle stopped at
the mouth of the Mississippi, and La Vérendrye was checked by the barrier
of the Rockies. Lewis and Clark accomplished yet more. After ascending
the Missouri and crossing the plains, they traversed the Rockies; but
they were {61} stopped at the Pacific. When Bering had crossed the
rivers and mountains of the two continents--first Europe, then Asia--and
reached the Pacific, his expedition had _only begun_. Little remains to
Russia of what he accomplished but the group of rocky islets where he
perished. But judged by the difficulties which he overcame; by the
duties desperately impossible, done plainly and doggedly, by death heroic
in defeat--Bering's expedition to northwestern America is without a peer
in the annals of the New World discovery.[4]
[1] I adopt the views of Dr. Stejneger, of the National Museum,
Washington, on this point, as he has personally gone over every foot of
the ground.
[2] Dr. George Davidson, President of the Geographical Society of the
Pacific, has written an irrefutable pamphlet on why Kyak Island and Sitka
Sound must be accepted as the landfalls of Bering and Chirikoff.
[3] Thus the terrible Sitkan massacre of a later day was preceded by the
slaughter of the first Russians to reach America. The Russian government
of a later day originated a comical claim to more territory on the ground
that descendants of these lost Russians had formed settlements farther
down the coast, alleging in proof that subsequent explorers had found
red-headed and light-complexioned people as far south as the Chinook
tribes. To such means will statecraft stoop.
[4] Coxe's _Discoveries of the Russians between Asia and America_ (Paris,
1781) supplies local data on Siberia in the time of Bering. _Voyages
from Asia to America_, by S. Müller of the Royal Academy, St. Petersburg,
1764, is simply excellent in that part of the voyage dealing with the
wreck. _Peter Lauridsen's Vitus Bering translated from the Danish by
Olson_ covers all three aims of the expedition, Japanese and Arctic
voyages as well as American.
{62}
CHAPTER III
1741-1760
THE SEA-OTTER HUNTERS
How the Sea-otter Pelts brought back by Bering's Crew led to the
Exploitation of the Northwest Coast of America--Difference of Sea-otter
from Other Fur-bearing Animals of the West--Perils of the Hunt
When the castaway crew of Vitus Bering looked about for means to exist
on the barren islands where they were wrecked, they found the kelp beds
and seaweed fields of the North Pacific literally alive with a little
animal, which the Russians called "the sea-beaver." Sailors of
Kamchatka and eastern Siberia knew the sea-beaver well, for it had been
found on the Asiatic side of the Pacific, and its pelt was regarded as
priceless by Chinese and Tartar merchants. But where did this strange
denizen of northern waters live? Only in rare seasons did the herds
assemble on the rocky islets of Kamchatka and Japan. And when spring
came, the sea-beaver disappeared. Asia was not its home. Where did it
go?
Russian adventurers who rafted the coast of Siberia {63} in crazy
skiffs, related that the sea-beaver always disappeared northeastward,
whence the spruce driftwood and dead whales with harpoons of strange
hunters and occasionally wrecks of walrus-skin boats came washing from
an unknown land.
It was only when Bering's crew were left prisoners of the sea on an
island barren as a billiard ball that the hunger-desperate men found
the habitat of the sea-beaver to be the kelp beds of the Aleutian
Islands and northwestern America. But what use were priceless pelts
where neither money nor merchant was, and men mad with hunger were
thrown back on the primal necessities without thought of gain?
The hungry Russian sailors fell on the kelp beds, clubbing right and
left regardless of pelts. What matter if the flesh was tough as
leather and rank as musk? It filled the empty stomachs of fifty
desperate men; and the skins were used on the treeless isle as rugs, as
coats, as walls, as stuff to chink the cracks of earth pits, where the
sailors huddled like animals in underground caves with no ceiling but
the tattered sails. So passed a year--the most desolate year in the
annals of ocean voyaging, and when the castaways rafted back to Asia on
a skiff made of their wrecked ship, they were clad in the raw skins of
the sea-otter, which they had eaten. In all, nearly a thousand skins
were carried back; and for those skins, which the Russian sailors had
scarcely valued, Chinese merchants paid what in modern money would be
from {64} one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars a pelt.[1]
After that, the Russians of Siberia needed no incentive to hunt the
sea-beaver. Its habitat was known, and all the riffraff adventurers of
Siberian exile, Tartars, Kamchatkans, Russians, criminals, and officers
of royal lineage, engaged in the fur trade of western America. Danger
made no difference. All that was needed was a boat; and the boat was
usually rough-hewn out of the green timbers of Kamchatka. If iron
bolts were lacking so far from Europe as the width of two continents,
the boat builders used deer sinew, or thongs of walrus hide. Tallow
took the place of tar, deerskin the place of hemp, and courage the
place of caution. A Siberian merchant then chanced an outfit of
supplies for half what the returns might be. The commander--officer or
exile--then enlisted sailors among landsmen. Landsmen were preferable
for this kind of voyaging. Either in the sublime courage of ignorance,
or with the audacity of desperation, the poor landsmen dared dangers
which no sailors would risk on such crazy craft, two thousand miles
from a home port on an outrageous sea.
England and the United States became involved in the exploitation of
the Pacific coast in almost the same way. When Captain Cook was at
Nootka Sound thirty years after Bering's death, his crews traded {65}
trinkets over the taffrail netting for any kind of furs the natives of
the west coast chose to exchange. In the long voyaging to Arctic
waters afterward, these furs went to waste with rain-rot. More than
two-thirds were thrown or given away. The remaining third sold in
China on the home voyage of the ships for what would be more than ten
thousand dollars of modern money. News of that fact was enough.
Boston, New York, London, rubbed their eyes to possibilities of fur
trade on the Pacific coast. As the world knows, Boston's efforts
resulted in the chance discovery of the Columbia; New York's efforts,
in the foundation of the Astor fortunes. East India, France, England,
Spain, the United States, vied with each other for the prize of
America's west coast.
Just as the beaver led French voyagers westward from Quebec to the
Rocky Mountains, south to Texas, north to the Athabasca, so the hunt of
the sea-beaver led to the exploration of the North Pacific coast.
"Sea-beaver" the Russians called the owner of the rare pelt.
"Sea-otter" it was known to the English and American hunters. But it
is like neither the otter nor beaver, though its habits are akin to
both. Its nearest relative is probably the fur seal. Like the seal,
its pelt has an ebony shimmer, showing silver when blown open, soft
black tipped with white, when examined hair by hair. Six feet, the
full-grown sea-otter measures from nose to stumpy tail, with a {66}
beaver-shaped face, teeth like a cat, and short webbed feet. Some
hunters say the sea-otter is literally born on the tumbling waves--a
single pup at a time; others, that the sea-otter retire to some
solitary rocky islet to bring forth their young. Certain it is they
are rocked on the deep from their birth, "cradled" in the sea, sleeping
on their backs in the water, clasping the young in their arms like a
human being, tossing up seaweed in play by the hour like mischievous
monkeys, or crawling out on some safe, sea-girt rocklet, where they
shake the water from their fur and make their toilet, stretching and
arranging and rearranging hair like a cat. Only the fiercest gales
drive the sea-otter ashore, for it must come above water to breathe;
and it must come ashore to sleep where it _can_ breathe; for the ocean
wash in a storm would smother the sleeper. And its favorite sleeping
grounds are in the forests of kelp and seaweed, where it can bury its
head, and like the ostrich think itself hidden. A sound, a whiff--the
faintest tinge--of smoke from miles away is enough to frighten the
sleeper, who leaps up with a fierce courage unequalled in the animal
world, and makes for sea in lightning-flash bounds.
When Bering found the northwest coast of America, the sea-otter
frequented all the way from what is now California to the Commander
Islands, the last link of the chain from America to Asia. Sea-otter
were found and taken in thousands at Sitka Sound, in Yakutat Bay,
Prince William Sound, Cook's Inlet, and all {67} along the chain of
eleven hundred Aleutian Islands to the Commander Group, off Kamchatka.
Where they were found in thousands then, they are seen only in tens and
hundreds to-day. Where they are in hundreds one year, they may not
come at all the next, having been too hard hunted. This explains why
there used to be returns of five thousand in a single year at Kadiak or
Oonalaska or Cook's Inlet; and the next year, less than a hundred from
the same places. Japan long ago moved for laws to protect the
sea-otter as vigorously as the seal; but Japan was only snubbed by
England and the United States for her pains, and to-day the only
adequate protection afforded the diminishing sea-otter is in the tiny
remnant of Russia's once vast American possessions--on the Commander
Islands where by law only two hundred sea-otter may be taken a year,
and the sea-otter rookeries are more jealously guarded than diamond
mines. The decreasing hunt has brought back primitive methods.
Instead of firearms, the primitive club and net and spear are again
used, giving the sea-otter a fair chance against his antagonist--Man.
Except that the hunters are few and now dress in San Francisco clothes,
they go to the hunt in the same old way as when Baranof, head of the
Russian Fur Company, led his battalions out in companies of a thousand
and two thousand "bidarkies"--walrus-skin skiffs taut as a drumhead,
with seams tallowed and an oilskin wound round each of the manholes, so
that the boat {68} could turn a somerset in the water, or be pitched
off a rock into the surf, and come right side up without taking water,
paddler erect.
The first thing the hunter had to look to was boat and hunting gear.
Westward of Cook's Inlet and Kadiak was no timber but driftwood, and
the tide wash of wrecks; so the hunter, who set out on the trail of the
pathless sea, framed his boat on the bones of the whale. There were
two kinds of boats--the long ones, for from twelve to twenty men, the
little skiffs which Eskimos of the Atlantic call kyacks--with two or
three, seldom more, manholes. Over the whalebone frame was stretched
the wet elastic hide of walrus or sea-lion. The big boat was open on
top like a Newfoundland fisherman's dory or Frenchman's bateau, the
little boat covered over the top except for the manholes round which
were wound oilskins to keep the water out when the paddler had seated
himself inside. Then the wet skin was allowed to dry in sunshine and
wind. Hot seal oil and tallow poured over the seams and cracks, calked
the leaks. More sunshine and wind, double-bladed paddles for the
little boats, strong oars and a sail for the big ones, and the skiffs
were ready for water. Eastward of Kadiak, particularly south of Sitka,
the boats might be hollowed trees, carved wooden canoes, or
dugouts--not half so light to ride shallow, tempestuous seas as the
skin skiff of the Aleut hunter.
We supercilious civilized folk laugh at the odd dress {69} of the
savage; but it was exactly adapted to the need. The otter hunter wore
the fur in, because that was warmer; and the skin out, because cured in
oil, that was waterproof; and the chimney-pot capote, because that tied
tight enough around his neck kept the ice-water from going down his
back when the bidarka turned heels up; and the skin boots, because
they, too, were waterproof; and the sedge grass padding in place of
stockings, because it protected the feet from the jar of rocks in wild
runs through surf and kelp after the game. On land, the skin side of
the coats could be turned in and the fur out.
Oonalaska, westward of the Aleutian chain of islands and Kadiak, just
south of the great Alaskan peninsula, were the two main points whence
radiated the hunting flotillas for the sea-otter grounds. Formerly, a
single Russian schooner or packet boat would lead the way with a
procession of a thousand bidarkas. Later, schooners, thirty or forty
of them, gathered the hunters at some main fur post, stowed the light
skin kyacks in piles on the decks, and carried the Aleuts to the otter
grounds. This might be at Atka, where the finest otter hunters in the
world lived, or on the south shore of Oonalaska, or in Cook's Inlet
where the rip of the tide runs a mill-race, or just off Kadiak on the
Saanach coast, where twenty miles of beach boulders and surf waters and
little islets of sea-kelp provide ideal fields for the sea-otter. Here
the sweeping tides and {70} booming back-wash keep up such a roar of
tumbling seas, the shy, wary otter, alert as an eagle, do not easily
get scent or sound of human intruder. Surf washes out the scent of the
man track. Surf out-sounds noise of the man killer; and no fires are
lighted, be it winter or summer, unless the wind is straight from the
southward; for the sea-otter always frequent the south shores. The
only provisions on the carrying schooner are hams, rancid butter or
grease, some rye bread and flour; the only clothing, what the Aleut
hunters wear.
No sooner has the schooner sheered off the hunting-grounds, than the
Aleuts are over decks with the agility of performing monkeys, the
schooner captain wishing each good luck, the eager hunters leaping into
their bidarkas following the lead of a chief. The schooner then
returns to the home harbor, leaving the hunters on islands bare as a
planed board for two, three, four months. On the Commander Group,
otter hunters are now restricted to the use of the net alone, but
formerly the nature of the hunting was determined entirely by the
weather. If a tide ran with heavy surf and wind landward to conceal
sound and sight, the hunters lined alongshore of the kelp beds and
engaged in the hunt known as surf-shooting. Their rifles would carry a
thousand yards. Whoever saw the little round black head bob above the
surface of the water, shot, and the surf wash carried in the dead body.
If the weather was dead calm, fog or clear, bands of twenty {71} and
thirty men deployed in a circle to spear their quarry. This was the
spearing-surround. Or if such a hurricane gale was churning the sea so
that gusty spray and sleet storm washed out every outline, sweeping the
kelp beds naked one minute, inundating them with mountainous rollers
that thundered up the rocks the next, the Aleut hunters risked life,
scudded out on the back of the raging storm, now riding the rollers,
now dipping to the trough of the sea, now scooting with lightning
paddle-strokes right through the blasts of spray athwart wave wash and
trough--straight for the kelp beds or rocky boulders, where the
sea-otter must have been driven for refuge by the storm. This hunting
is the very incarnation of the storm spirit itself, for the wilder the
gale, the more sea-otter have come ashore; the less likely they will be
to see or hear or smell the hunter. Gaff or paddle in hand, the Aleut
leaps from rock to rock, or dashes among the tumbling beds of tossed
kelp. A quick blow of the bludgeon; the otter never knows how death
came. This is the club hunt. But where the shore is honeycombed with
caves and narrow inlets of kelp fields, is a safer kind of hunting.
Huge nets now made of twine, formerly of sinew, with wooden floaters
above, iron sinkers below, are spread athwart the kelp fields. The
tide sweeps in, washing the net flat. And the sea-otter swim in with
the tide. The tide sweeps out, washing the net up, but the otter are
enmeshed in a tangle that holds neck and feet. This is, perhaps, the
{72} best kind of otter hunting, for the females and young can be
thrown back in the sea.
Barely has the supply schooner dipped over the offing, when the
cockle-shell bidarkas skimming over the sea make for the shore of the
hunting-grounds. Camping is a simple matter, for no fires are to be
lighted, and the tenting place is chosen if possible on the north side
of some knoll. If it is warm weather, the Aleut will turn his skin
skiff upside down, crawl into the hole head first and sleep there. Or
he may erect the V-shaped tent such as the prairie tepee. But if it is
cold, he has a better plan yet. He will dig a hole in the ground and
cover over the top with sail-cloth. Let the wind roar above and the
ice bang the shore rocks, the Aleut swathed in furs sleeps sound close
to earth. If driftwood lines the shore, he is in luck; for he props up
the poles, covers them with furs, and has what might be mistaken for a
wigwam, except that these Indians construct their tents round-topped
and always turn the skin side of the fur out.
For provisions, he has brought very little from the ship. He will
depend on the winds driving in a dead whale, or on the fish of the
shore, or on the eggs of the sea-birds that nest on these rocks
millions upon millions--such myriads of birds they seem to crowd each
other for foot room, and the noise of their wings is like a great
wind.[2] The Aleut himself is what any race of men {73} would become
in generations of such a life. His skin is more like bronze than
leather. His chest is like a bellows, but his legs are ill developed
from the cramped posture of knees in the manhole. Indeed, more than
knees go under the manhole. When pressed for room, the Aleut has been
known to crawl head foremost, body whole, right under the manhole and
lie there prone between the feet of the paddlers with nothing between
him and the abysmal depths of a hissing sea but the parchment keel of
the bidarka, thin as paper.
How do these thin skin boats escape wreckage on a sea where tide-rip
washes over the reefs all summer and ice hummocks sweep out from the
shore in winter tempest? To begin with, the frost that creates the ice
clears the air of fog, and the steel-shod pole either sheers the
bidarka off from the ice, or the ice off from the bidarka. Then, when
the fog lies knife-thick over the dangerous rocks in summer time, there
is a certain signal to these deep-sea plunderers. The huge Pacific
walrus--the largest species of walrus in the world--lie in herds of
hundreds on these danger rocks, and the walrus snorts through the gray
mist like a continual fog-horn. No better danger signal exists among
the rocks of the North Pacific than this same snorting walrus, who for
all his noise and size is a floundering coward. The great danger to
the nutshell skin's is from becoming ice-logged when the sleet storms
fall and freeze; and for the rest, the sea makes small matter of a
hunter more or less.
{74} No landsman's still-hunt affords the thrilling excitement of the
otter hunter's spearing-surrounds. Fifteen or twenty-five little skin
skiffs, with two or three men in each, paddle out under a chief elected
by common consent. Whether fog or clear, the spearing is done only in
calm weather. The long line of bidarkas circles silently over the
silver sea. Not a word is spoken, not a paddle blade allowed to click
against the bone gun'els of the skiff. Double-bladed paddles are
frequently used, so shift of paddle is made from side to side of the
canoe without a change of hands. The skin shallops take to the water
as noiselessly as the glide of a duck. Yonder, where the boulders lie
mile on mile awash in the surf, kelp rafts--forests of seaweed--lift
and fall with the rhythmical wash of the tide. Hither the otter
hunters steer, silent as shadows. The circle widens, deploys, forms a
cordon round the outermost rim of the kelp fields. Suddenly a black
object is seen floating on the surface of the waters--a sea-otter
asleep. Quick as flash, the steersman lifts his paddle. Not a word is
spoken, but so keen is the hearing of the sleeping otter, the drip of
the lifted paddle has not splashed into the sea before the otter has
awakened, looked and dived like lightning to the bottom of the sea
before one of the Aleut hunters can hurl his spear. Silently, not a
whisper, the steersman signals again. The hunters deploy in a circle
half a mile broad round the place where the sea-otter disappeared; for
they know that in fifteen or twenty {75} minutes the animal must come
up for breath, and it cannot run farther than half a mile under sea
before it reappears.
Suddenly somebody sees a round black-red head poke above water, perhaps
close to the line of watchers. With a wild shout, the nearest bidarkas
dart forward. Whether the spear-throw has hit or missed, the shout has
done enough. The terrified otter dives before it has breath. Over the
second diving spot a hunter is stationed, and the circle narrows, for
the otter must come up quicker this time. It must have breath. Again
and again, the little round head peeps up. Again the shout greets it.
Again the lightning dive. Sometimes only a bubble gurgling to the top
of the water guides the watchers. Presently the body is so full of
gases from suppressed breathing, it can no longer sink, and a quick
spear-throw secures the quarry. One animal against, perhaps, sixty
men. Is the quest fair? Yonder thunders the surf below beetling
precipices. Then the tide wash comes in with a rip like a whirlpool,
or the ebb sets the beach combers rolling--lashing billows of tumbling
waters that crash together and set the sheets of blinding spray
shattering. Or the fog comes down over a choppy sea with a whizzing
wind that sets the whitecaps flying backward like a horse's mane. The
chase may have led farther and farther from land. As long as the
little black head comes up, as long as the gurgling bubble tells of a
struggling breather below, the hunters follow, be it {76} near or far,
till, at the end of two or three hours, the exhausted sea-otter is
taken. Perhaps forty men have risked their lives for a single pelt for
which the trader cannot pay more than forty dollars; for he must have
his profit, and the skin must be dressed, and the middlemen must have
their profit; so that if it sells even for eleven hundred dollars in
London--though the average is nearer one hundred and fifty dollars--the
Aleut is lucky to receive forty or fifty dollars. Day after day, three
months at a time, warm or cold, not daring to light fires on the
island, the Aleut hunters go out to the spearing-surround, till the
schooner returns for them from the main post; and whether the hunt is
harder on man or beast may be judged from the fact that where the
hunting battalions used to rally out in companies of thousands, they
to-day go forth only in twenties and forties. True, the sea-otter has
decreased and is almost extinct in places; but then, where game laws
protect it, as in the Commander Islands, it is on the increase, and as
for the Aleut hunters--their thousands lie in the bottom of the sea;
and of the thousands who rallied forth long ago, often only a few
hundred returned.
But while the spearing-surround was chiefly followed in battalions
under the direction of a trading company, the clubbing was done by the
individuals--the dauntless hunters, who scudded out in twos and threes
in the wake of the blast, lost themselves in the shattering sheets of
spray, with the wind screaming mad riot in their ears {77} and the
roily rollers running a mill-race against tide and wind. How did they
steer their cockle-shell skiffs--these Vikings of the North Pacific; or
did they steer at all, or only fly before the gale on the wings of the
mad north winds? Who can tell? The feet of man leave earth sometimes
when the spirit rides out reckless of land or sea, or heaven or hell,
and these plunderers of the deep took no reckoning of life or death
when they rode out on the gale, where the beach combers shattered up
the rocks, and the creatures of the sea came huddling landward to take
refuge among the kelp rafts.
Tossing the skin skiffs high and dry on some rock, with perhaps the
weight of a boulder to keep them from blowing away, the hunters rushed
off to the surf wash armed only with a stout stick.
The otters must be approached away from the wind, and the noise of the
surf will deaden the hunter's approach; so beating their way against
hurricane gales--winds that throw them from their feet at
times--scrambling over rocks slippery as glass with ice, running out on
long reefs where the crash of spray confuses earth and air, wading
waist-deep in ice slush, the hunters dash out for the kelp beds and
rocks where the otter are asleep. Clubbing sounds brutal, but this
kind of hunting is, perhaps, the most merciful of all--to the animal,
not the man. The otter is asleep. The gale conceals the approaching
danger. One blow of the gaff, and the otter never awakes. In this way
have three hunters killed as many as a hundred otter {78} in two hours;
and in this way have the thousands of Aleutian otter hunters, who used
to throng the inlets of the northern islands, perished and dwindled to
a population of poverty stricken, scattered men.
What were the rewards for all this risk of life? A glance at the
records of the old fur companies tells why the Russian and American and
English traders preferred sea-otter to the gold mines of the Spaniards
in Mexico. Less than ten years after Cook's crew had sold their
sea-otter for ten thousand dollars, the East India Company sold six
hundred sea-otter for from sixty to one hundred dollars each. Two
years later, Portlock and Dixon sold their cargo for fifty-five
thousand dollars; and when it is remembered that two hundred
sea-otter--twelve thousand dollars' worth at the lowest average--were
sometimes got from the Nootka tribes for a few dollars' worth of old
chisel iron--the profit can be estimated.
In 1785 five thousand sea-otter were sold in China for one hundred and
sixty thousand dollars. A capital of fifty thousand usually yielded
three hundred thousand dollars; that is--if the ships escaped the
dangers of hostile Indians and treacherous seas. What the Russians
made from sea-otter will probably never be known; for so many different
companies were engaged in the trade; and a hundred years ago, as many
as fifteen thousand Indian hunters went out for the Russians yearly.
One ship, the year after Bering's wreck, {79} is known to have made
half a million dollars from its cargo. By definite figures--not
including returns not tabulated in the fur companies--two hundred
thousand sea-otter were taken for the Russians in half a century. Just
before the United States took over Alaska, Russia was content with four
hundred sea-otter a year; but by 1875 the Americans were getting three
thousand a year. Those gathered at Kadiak have totalled as many as six
thousand in a year during the heyday of the hunt, at Oonalaska three
thousand, on the Prybilofs now noted for their seal, five thousand. In
1785 Cook's Inlet yielded three thousand; in 1812, only one hundred.
Yakutat gave two thousand in 1794, only three hundred, six years later.
Fifteen thousand were gathered at Sitka in 1804, only one hundred and
fifty thirty years later. Of course the Russians obtained such results
only by a system of musket, bludgeon, and outrage, that are repellent
to the modern mind. Women were seized as hostages for a big hunt.
Women were even murdered as a punishment for small returns. Men were
sacrificed like dogs by the "promyshleniki"--riffraff blackguard
Russian hunters from the Siberian exile population; but this is a story
of outrageous wrong followed by its own terrible and unshunnable
Nemesis which shall be told by itself.
[1] The price of the sea-otter varied, falling in seasons when the
market was glutted to $40 a pelt, selling as high, in cases of rare
beauty, as $1000 a pelt.
[2] See John Burroughs's account of birds observed during the Harriman
Expedition. Elliott and Stejenger have remarked on the same phenomenon.
{80}
CHAPTER IV
1760-1770
THE OUTLAW HUNTERS
The American Coast becomes the Great Rendezvous for Siberian Criminals
and Political Exiles--Beyond Reach of Law, Cossacks and Criminals
perpetrate Outrages on the Indians--The Indians' Revenge wipes out
Russian Forts in America--The Pursuit of Four Refugee Russians from
Cave to Cave over the Sea at Night--How they escape after a Year's Chase
"_God was high in the Heavens, and the Czar was far away_," as the
Russians say, and the Siberian exiles--coureurs of the sea--who flocked
to the west coast of America to hunt the sea-otter after Bering's
discoveries in 1741 took small thought and recked no consequences of
God or the Czar.
They timbered their crazy craft from green wood in Kamchatka, or on the
Okhotsk Sea, or among the forests of Siberian rivers. They lashed the
rude planks together, hoisted a sail of deer hide above a deck of,
perhaps, sixty feet, and steering by instinct across seas as chartless
as the forests where French coureurs ran, struck out from Asia for
America with wilder {81} dreams of plunder than ever Spanish galleon or
English freebooter hoped coasting the high seas.
The crews were criminals with the brands of their crimes worn
uncovered, banded together by some Siberian merchant who had provided
goods for trade, and set adrift under charge of half a dozen Cossacks
supposed to keep order and collect tribute of one-tenth as homage from
American Indians for the Czar. English buccaneers didn't scruple as to
blood when they sacked Spanish cities for Spanish gold. These Russian
outlaws scrupled less, when their only hope of bettering a desperate
exile was the booty of precious furs plundered, or bludgeoned, or
exacted as tribute from the Indians of Northwest America. The plunder,
when successful, or trade, if the crazy planks did not go to pieces
above some of the reefs that cut up the North Pacific, was halved
between outfitter and crew. If the cargo amounted to half a million
dollars in modern money--as one of Drusenin's first trips did--then a
quarter of a million was a tidy sum to be divided among a crew of, say,
thirty or forty. Often as not, the long-planked single-master fell to
pieces in a gale, when the Russians went to the bottom of the sea, or
stranded among the Aleutian Islands westward of Alaska, when the
castaways took up comfortable quarters among the Indians, who knew no
other code of existence than the _rights of the strong_; and the
Russians with their firearms seemed strong, indeed, to the Aleuts. As
long as the newcomer demanded only furs, {82} on his own terms of
trade--the Indians acquiesced. Their one hope was to become strong as
the Russians by getting iron in "toes"--bands two inches thick, two
feet long. It was that ideal state, which finical philosophers
describe as the "survival of the fit," and it worked well till the
other party to the arrangement resolved he would play the same game and
become fit, too, when there resulted a cataclysm of bloodshed. The
Indians bowed the neck submissively before oppression. Abuse, cruelty,
outrage, accumulated on the heads of the poor Aleuts. They had reached
the fine point where it is better for the weak to die trying to
overthrow strength, than to live under the iron heel of brute
oppression.
The immediate cause of revolt is a type of all that preceded it.[1]
Running out for a thousand miles from the coast of Alaska is the long
chain of Aleutian Islands linking across the Pacific toward Asia.
Oonalaska, the most important and middle of these, is as far from
Oregon as Oregon is from New York. Near Oonalaska were the finest
sea-otter fields in the world; and the Aleutians numbered twenty
thousand hunters--men, women, children--born to the light skin boat as
plainsmen were born to the saddle. On Oonalaska and its next-door
neighbor westward were at least ten thousand of these Indian otter
hunters, when Russia first sent her ships to America. Bassof came
soonest after Bering's discovery; and he carried back {83} on each of
three trips to the Commander Islands a cargo of furs worth from
seventy-five thousand to one hundred thousand dollars in modern money.
The effect on the Siberian mind was the same as a gold find. All the
riffraff adventurers of Siberia swarmed to the west coast of America.
We have only the Russian version of the story--not the Indians'--and
may infer that we have the side most favorable to Russia. When booty
of half a million was to be had for the taking, what Siberian exiles
would permit an Indian village to stand between them and wealth? At
first only children were seized as hostages of good conduct on the part
of the Indians while the white hunters coasted the islands. Then
daughters and wives were lured and held on the ships, only to be
returned when the husbands and fathers came back with a big hunt for
the white masters. Then the men were shot down; safer dead, thought
the Russians; no fear of ambush or surprise; and the women were held as
slaves to be knouted and done to death at their masters' pleasure.
In 1745--four years after Russia's discovery of western America--a
whole village in Attoo was destroyed so that the Russians could seize
the women and children fleeing for hiding to the hills. The next year
Russians were caught putting poison in the food of another village: the
men ate first among the Indians. The women would be left as slaves to
the Russians; and these same Russians carried a pagan boy home to {84}
be baptized in the Christian faith; for the little convert could come
back to the Aleutian Islands as interpreter. It was as thorough a
scheme of subjugation as the wolf code of existence could have entailed.
The culmination came with the crew of Betshevin, a Siberian merchant,
in 1760. There were forty Russians, including Cossacks, and twenty
other Asiatic hunters and sailors. Four of the merchant's agents went
along to enforce honest returns. Sergeant Pushkareff of the Cossacks
was there to collect tribute from Russia's Indian subjects on the west
coast of America. The ship was evidently better than the general run,
with ample room in the hold for cargo, and wide deck room where the
crew slept in hammocks without cover--usually a gruff, bearded, ragged,
vermin-infested horde. The vessel touched at Oomnak, after having met
a sister ship, perhaps with an increase of aggressiveness toward the
natives owing to the presence of these other Russians under Alixei
Drusenin; and passed on eastward to the next otter resort, Oonalaska
Island.
Oonalaska is like a human hand spread out, with the fingers northeast,
the arm end down seventy miles long toward Oomnak Island. The entire
broken coast probably reaches a circuit of over two hundred miles.
Down the centre and out each spur are high volcanic mountains, two of
them smoking volcanoes, all pitted with caves and hot springs whose
course can be traced in winter by the runnels of steam {85} down the
mountain side. On the south side, reefs line all approach. North,
east, and west are countless abrupt inlets opening directly into the
heart of the mountains down whose black cliffs shatter plumes of spray
and cataract. Not a tree grows on the island. From base to summit the
hills are a velvet sward, willow shrubs the size of one's finger, grass
waist high, and such a wealth of flowers--poppy fields, anemones,
snowdrops, rhododendrons--that one might be in a southern climate
instead of close proximity to frozen zones. Fogs wreathe the island
three-quarters of the time; and though snow lies five feet deep in
winter, and such blizzards riot in from the north as would tear trees
up by the roots, and drive all human beings to their underground
dwellings, it is never cold, never below zero, and the harbors are
always open. Whaling, fishing, fur hunting--those were the occupations
of the islanders then, as now.
Here, then, came Pushkareff in 1762 after two years' cruising about the
Aleutian Islands. The natives are friendly, thinking to obtain iron,
and knives, and firearms like the other islanders who have traded with
the Russians. Children are given as hostages of good conduct for the
Oonalaskan men, who lead the Russians off to the hunt, coasting from
point to point. Pushkareff, the Cossack, himself goes off with twenty
men to explore; but somehow things go wrong at the native villages on
this trip. The hostages find they are not guests, but slaves. Anyway,
Betshevin's {86} agent is set upon and murdered. Two more Russians are
speared to death under Pushkareff's eyes, two wounded, and the Cossack
himself, with his fourteen men, forced to beat a hasty retreat back to
ships and huts on the coast. Here, strange enough, things have gone
wrong, too! More women and children objecting to their masters'
pleasure--slavery, the knout, the branding iron, death by starvation
and abuse. Two Russians have been slain bathing in the hot springs
near Makushin Volcano, four murdered at the huts, four wounded; and the
barrack is burned to the ground. Promptly the Cossack wreaks vengeance
by slaughtering seven of the hostages on the spot; but he deems it wise
to take refuge on his ship, weigh anchor and slip out to sea carrying
with him by way of a lesson to the natives, two interpreters, three
boys, and twenty-five women, two of whom die of cruelty before the ship
is well out of Oonalaskan waters.
He may have intended dropping the captives at some near island on his
way westward; for only blind rage could have rendered him so
indifferent to their fate as to carry such a cargo of human beings back
to the home harbor of Kamchatka. Meanwhile a hurricane caught
Pushkareff's ship, chopping the wave tops off and driving her ahead
under bare poles. When the gale abated, the ship was off Kamchatka's
shore and the Cossack in a quandary about entering the home port with
proofs of his cruelty in the cowering group of Indian women huddled
above the deck. {87} On pretence of gathering berries, six sailors
were landed with fourteen women. Two watched their chance and dashed
for liberty in the hills. On the way back to the ship, one woman was
brained to death by a sailor, Gorelin; seeing which, the others on
board the jolly-boat took advantage of the confusion, sprang overboard,
and suicided. But there were still a dozen hostages on the ship.
These might relate the crime of their companions' murder. It was an
old trick out of an ugly predicament--destroy the victim in order to
dodge retribution, or torture it so it would destroy itself. Fourteen
had been tortured into suicide. The rest Pushkareff seized, bound, and
threw into the sea.
To be sure, on official investigation, Betshevin, the Siberian
merchant, was subjected to penal tortures for this crime on his ship;
and an imperial decree put an end to free trade among the fur hunters
to America. Henceforth a government permit must be obtained; but that
did not undo the wrong to the Aleutian Islanders. Primal instincts,
unhampered by law, have a swift, sure, short-cut to justice; to the
fine equipoise between weak and strong. It was two years before
punishment was meted out by the Russian government for this crime.
What did the Aleut Indian care for the law's slow jargon? His only law
was self-preservation. His furs had been plundered from him; his
hunting-fields overrun by brigands from he knew not where; his home
outraged; his warriors poisoned, bludgeoned, done to death; his women
and children {88} kidnapped to lifelong slavery; the very basic, brute
instincts of his nature tantalized, baited, tortured to dare!
It was from January to September of 1762, that Pushkareff had run his
mad course of outrage on Oonalaska Island. It was in September of the
same year, that four other Russian ships, all unconscious of the
reception Pushkareff's evil doings had prepared for them, left
Kamchatka for the Aleutian Islands. Each of the ships was under a
commander who had been to the islands before and dealt fairly by the
Indians.
Betshevin's ship with Pushkareff, the Cossack, reached Kamchatka
September 25. On the 6th there had come to winter at the harbor a ship
under the same Alexei Drusenin, who had met Pushkareff the year before
on the way to Oonalaska. Drusenin was outward bound and must have
heard the tales told of Pushkareff's crew; but the latter had brought
back in all nearly two thousand otter,--half sent by Drusenin, half
brought by himself,--and Oonalaska became the lodestar of the otter
hunters. The spring of '63 found Drusenin coasting the Aleutians.
Sure enough, others had heard news of the great find of the new
hunting-grounds. Three other Russian vessels were on the grounds
before him, Glottoff and Medvedeff at Oomnak, Korovin halfway up
Oonalaska. No time for Drusenin to lose! A spy sent out came back
with the report that every part of Oomnak and {89} Oonalaska was being
thoroughly hunted except the extreme northeast, where the mountain
spurs of Oonalaska stretch out in the sea like a hand. Up to the
northeast end, then, where the tide-rip thunders up the rock wall like
an inverted cataract, posts Drusenin where he anchors his ship in
Captain Harbor, and has winter quarters built before snow-fall of '63.
An odd thing was--the Indian chiefs became so very friendly they
voluntarily brought hostages of good conduct to Drusenin. Surely
Drusenin was in luck! The best otter-hunting grounds in the world! A
harbor as smooth as glass, mountain-girt, sheltered as a hole in a
wall, right in the centre of the hunting-grounds, yet shut off from the
rioting north winds that shook the rickety vessels to pieces! And best
of all, along the sandy shore between the ship and the mountains that
receded inland tier on tier into the clouds--the dome-roofed,
underground dwellings of two or three thousand native hunters ready to
risk the surf of the otter hunt at Drusenin's beck! Just to make sure
of safety after Pushkareff's losses of ten men on this island, Drusenin
exchanges a letter or two with the commanders of those other three
Russian vessels. Then he laid his plans for the winter's hunt. But so
did the Aleut Indians; and their plans were for a man-hunt of every
Russian within the limits of Oonalaska.
A curious story is told of how the Aleuts arranged to have the uprising
simultaneous and certain. A bunch of sticks was carried to the chief
of every tribe. {90} These were burned one a day, like the skin wick
in the seal oil of the Aleut's stone lamp. When the last stick had
burned, the Aleuts were to rise.
Now, the northeast coast was like the fingers of a hand. Drusenin had
anchored between two mountain spurs like fingers. Eastward, across the
next mountain spur was another village--Kalekhta, of some forty houses;
eastward of Kalekhta, again, ten miles across, another village of
seventy families on the island of Inalook. Drusenin decided to divide
his crew into three hunting parties: one of nine men to guard the ship
and trade with the main village of Captain Harbor; a second of eleven,
to cross to the native huts at Kalekhta; a third of eleven, to cross
the hills, and paddle out to the little island of Inalook. To the
island ten miles off shore, Drusenin went himself, with Korelin, a
wrecked Russian whom he had picked up on the voyage. On the way they
must have passed all three mountains, that guard the harbor of
Oonalaska, the waterfalls that pour over the cliffs near Kalekhta, and
the little village itself where eleven men remained to build huts for
the winter. From the village to the easternmost point was over quaking
moss ankle-deep, or through long, rank grass, waist-high and
water-rotted with sea-fog. Here they launched their boat of sea-lion
skin on a bone frame, and pulled across a bay of ten miles to the
farthermost hunting-grounds. Again, the natives overwhelm Drusenin
with kindness. The Russian keeps his sentinels as {91} vigilant as
ever pacing before the doors of the hut; but he goes unguarded and
unharmed among the native dwellings. Perhaps, poor Drusenin was not
above swaggering a little, belted in the gay uniform Russian officers
loved to wear, to the confounding of the poor Aleut who looked on the
pistols in belt, the cutlass dangling at heel, the bright shoulder
straps and colored cuffs, as insignia of a power almighty. Anyway,
after Drusenin had sent five hunters out in the fields to lay
fox-traps, early in the morning of December 4, he set out with a couple
of Cossack friends to visit a native house. Korelin, the rescued
castaway, and two other men kept guard at the huts.[2]
At that time, and until very recently, the Aleuts' winter dwelling was
a domed, thatched roof over a cellar excavation three or four feet
deep, circular and big enough to lodge a dozen families. The entrance
to this was a low-roofed, hall-like annex, dark as night, leading with
a sudden pitch downward into the main circle. Now, whether the Aleut
had counted burning fagots, or kept tally some other way, the count was
up. Barely had Drusenin stepped into the dark of the inner circle,
when a blow clubbed down on his skull that felled him to earth. The
Cossack, coming second, had stumbled over the prostrate body before
either had any suspicion of danger; and in a {92} second, both were cut
to pieces by knives traded to the Indians the day before for otter
skins.
Shevyrin, the third man, happened to be carrying an axe. One against a
score, he yet kept his face to the enemy, beat a retreat backward
striking right and left with the axe, then turned and fled for very
life, with a shower of arrows and lances falling about him, that
drenched him in his own blood. Already a crash of muskets told of
battle at the huts. More dead than alive, the pursued Russian turned
but to strike his assailants back. Then, he was at the huts almost
stumbling over the man who had probably been doing sentinel duty but
was now under the spears of the crowd--when the hut door opened; and
Korelin, the Russian, dashed out flourishing a yard-long bear knife
under protection of the other guard's musket fire from the window,
slashed to death two of the nearest Indians, cut a swath that sent the
others scattering, seized the two wounded men, dragged them inside the
hut, and slammed the door to the enraged yells of the baffled warriors.
Some one has said that Oonalaska and Oomnak are the smelting furnaces
of America. Certainly, the volcanic caves supplied sulphur that the
natives knew how to use as match lighters. The savages were without
firearms, but might have burned out the Russians had it not been for
the constant fusillade of musketry from door and roof and parchment
windows of the hut. Two of the Russians were wounded and weak {93}
from loss of blood. The other two never remitted their guard day or
night for four days, neither sleeping nor eating, till the wounded
pair, having recovered somewhat, seized pistols and cutlasses, waited
till a quelling of the musketry tempted the Indians near, then sallied
out with a flare of their pistols, that dropped three Aleuts on the
spot, wounded others, and drove the rest to a distance. But in the
sortie, there had been flaunted in their very faces, the coats and caps
and daggers of the five hunters Drusenin had sent fox trapping.
Plainly, the fox hunters had been massacred. The four men were alone
surrounded by hundreds of hostiles, ten miles from the shores of
Oonalaska, twenty from the other hunting detachments and the ship. But
water was becoming a desperate need. To stay cooped up in the hut was
to be forced into surrender. Their only chance was to risk all by a
dash from the island. Dark was gathering. Through the shadowy dusk
watched the Aleuts; but the pointed muskets of the two wounded men kept
hostiles beyond distance of spear-tossing, while the other two Russians
destroyed what they could not carry away, hauled down their skin boat
to the water loaded with provisions, ammunition, and firearms, then
under guard of levelled pistols, pulled off in the darkness across the
sea, heaving and thundering to the night tide.
But the sea was the lesser danger. Once away from the enemy, the four
fugitives pulled for dear life {94} across the tumbling waves--ten
miles the way they went, one account says--to the main shore of
Oonalaska. It was pitch dark. When they reached the shore, they could
neither hear nor see a sign of life; but the moss trail through the
snows had probably become well beaten to the ship by this time--four
months from Drusenin's landing--or else the fugitives found their way
by a kind of desperation; for before daybreak they had run within
shouting distance of the second detachment of hunters stationed at
Kalekhta. Not a sound! Not a light! Perhaps they had missed their
way! Perhaps the Indians on the main island are still friendly!
Shevyrin or Korelin utters a shout, followed by the signal of a musket
shot for that second party of hunters to come out and help. Scarcely
had the crash died over the snows, when out of the dark leaped a
hundred lances, a hundred faces, a hundred shrieking, bloodthirsty
savages. Now they realize the mistake of having landed, of having
abandoned the skin boat back on the beach there! But no time to
retrace steps! Only a wild dash through the dark, catching by each
other to keep together, up to a high precipitous rock they know is
somewhere here, with the sea behind, sheer drop on each side, and but
one narrow approach! Here they make their stand, muskets and sword in
hand, beating the assailants back, wherever a stealthy form comes
climbing up the rock to hurl spear or lance! Presently, a
well-directed fusillade drives the savages off! While night still hid
{95} them, the four fugitives scrambled down the side of the rock
farthest from the savages, and ran for the roadstead where the ship had
anchored.
As dawn comes up over the harbor something catches the attention of the
runners. It is the main hatch, the planking, the mast poles of the
ship, drawn up and scattered on the beach. Drusenin's ship has been
destroyed. The crew is massacred; they, alone, have escaped; and the
nearest help is one of those three other Russian ships anchored
somewhere seventy miles west. Without waiting to look more, the three
men ran for the mountains of the interior, found hiding in one of the
deep-grassed ravines, scooped out a hole in the sand, covered this with
a sail white as snow, and crawled under in hiding for the day.
The next night they came down to the shore, in the hope, perhaps, of
finding refugees like themselves. They discovered only the mangled
bodies of their comrades, literally hacked to pieces. A saint's image
and a book of prayers lay along the sand. Scattered everywhere were
flour sacks, provisions, ships' planking. These they carried back as
well as they could three miles in the mountains. A pretty legend is
told of a native hunter following their tracks to this retreat, and not
only refusing to betray them but secretly carrying provisions; and some
such explanation is needed to know how the four men lived hidden in the
mountains from December 9 to February 2, 1764.
If they had known where those other Russian ships {96} were anchored,
they might have struck across country to them, or followed the coast by
night; but rival hunters did not tell each other where they anchored,
and tracks across country could have been followed. The trackless sea
was safer.
There is another story of how the men hid in mountain caves all those
weeks, kept alive by the warmth of hot springs, feeding on clams and
shell-fish gathered at night. This, too, may be true; for the
mountains inland of Oonalaska Harbor are honeycombed with caves, and
there are well-known hot springs.
By February they had succeeded in making a skin skiff of the leather
sacks. They launched this on the harbor and, stealing away unseen,
rounded the northwest coast of Oonalaska's hand projecting into the
sea, travelling at night southwestward, seeking the ships of Korovin,
or Medvedeff, or Glottoff. Now the majority of voyagers don't care to
coast this part of Oonalaska at night during the winter in a safe ship;
and these men had nothing between them and the abyss of the sea but the
thickness of a leather sack badly oiled to keep out water. Their one
hope was--a trader's vessel.
All night, for a week, they coasted within the shadow of the shore
rocks, hiding by day, passing three Indian villages undiscovered.
Distance gave them courage. They now paddled by day, and just as they
rounded Makushin Volcano, lying like a great white corpse five thousand
feet above Bering Sea, they came on five {97} Indians, who at once
landed and running alongshore gave the alarm. The refugees for the
second time sought safety on a rock; but the rising tide drove them
off. Seizing the light boat, they ran for shelter in a famous cave of
the volcanic mountain. Here, for five weeks, they resisted constant
siege, not a Russian of the four daring to appear within twenty yards
of the cave entrance before a shower of arrows fell inside. Their only
food now was the shell-fish gathered at night; their only water, snow
scooped from gutters of the cave. Each night one watched by turn while
the others slept; and each night one must make a dash to gather the
shell-fish. Five weeks at last tired the Indians' vigilance out. One
dark night the Russians succeeded in launching out undetected. That
day they hid, but daybreak of the next long pull showed them a ship in
the folds of the mountain coast--Korovin's vessel. They reached the
ship on the 30th of March. Poor Shevyrin soon after died from his
wounds in the underground hut, but Korovin's troubles had only begun.
Ivan Korovin's vessel had sailed out of Avacha Bay, Kamchatka, just two
weeks before Pushkareff's crew of criminals came home. It had become
customary for the hunting vessels to sail to the Commander
Islands--Bering and Copper--nearest Kamchatka, and winter there, laying
up a store of sea-cow meat, the huge bovine of the sea, which was soon
to be exterminated by the hunters. Here Korovin met Denis Medvedeff's
{98} crew, also securing a year's supply of meat for the hunt of the
sea-otter. The two leaders must have had some inkling of trouble
ahead, for Medvedeff gave Korovin ten more sailors, and the two signed
a written contract to help each other in time of need.
In spring (1763) both sailed for the best sea-otter fields then
known--Oonalaska and Oomnak, Korovin with thirty-seven men, Medvedeff,
forty-nine. In order not to interfere with each other's hunt,
Medvedeff stopped at Oomnak, Korovin went on to Oonalaska. Anchoring
sixty yards from shore, not very far from the volcano caves, where
Drusenin's four fugitives were to fight for their lives the following
spring, Korovin landed with fourteen men to reconnoitre. Deserted
houses he saw, but never a living soul. Going back to the ship for
more men, he set out again and went inland five miles where he found a
village of three hundred souls. Three chiefs welcomed him, showed
receipts for tribute of furs given by the Cossack collector of a
previous ship, and gave over three boys as hostages of good
conduct--one, called Alexis, the son of a chief. Meanwhile, letters
were exchanged with Medvedeff down a hundred miles at Oomnak. All was
well. The time had not come. It was only September--about the same
time that Drusenin up north was sending out his hunters in three
detachments.
Korovin was so thoroughly satisfied all was safe, that he landed his
entire cargo and crew, and while the carpenters were building wintering
huts out of {99} driftwood, set out himself, with two skin boats, to
coast northeast. For four days he followed the very shore that the
four escaping men were to cruise in an opposite direction. About forty
miles from the anchorage he met Drusenin himself, leading twenty-five
Russian hunters out from Captain Harbor. Surely, if ever hunters were
safe, Korovin's were, with Medvedeff's forty-nine men southwest a
hundred miles, and Drusenin's thirty sailors forty miles northeast.
Korovin decided to hunt midway between Drusenin's crew and Medvedeff's.
It is likely that the letters exchanged among the different commanders
from September to December were arranging that Drusenin should keep to
the east of Oonalaska, Korovin to the west of the island, while
Medvedeff hunted exclusively on the other island--Oomnak.
By December Korovin had scattered twenty-three hunters southwest,
keeping a guard of only sixteen for the huts and boat. Among the
sixteen was little Alexis, the hostage Indian boy. The warning of
danger was from the mother of the little Aleut, who reported that sixty
hostiles were advancing on the ship under pretence of trading
sea-otter. Between the barracks and the sea front flowed a stream.
Here the Cossack guard took their stand, armed head to foot, permitting
only ten Indians at a time to enter the huts for trade. The Aleuts
exchanged their sea-otter for what iron they could get, and departed
without any sign. Korovin had almost concluded it was a false {100}
alarm, when three Indian servants of Drusenin's ship came dashing
breathless across country with news that the ship and all the Russians
on the east end of Oonalaska had been destroyed.
Including the three newcomers, Korovin had only nineteen men; and his
hostages numbered almost as strong. The panic-stricken sailors were
for burning huts and ship, and escaping overland to the twenty-three
hunters somewhere southwest.
It was the 10th of December--the very night when Drusenin's fugitives
had taken to hiding in the north mountains. While Korovin was still
debating what to do, an alarm came from beneath the keel of the ship.
In the darkness, the sea was suddenly alive with hundreds of skin
skiffs each carrying from eight to twenty Indian warriors. One can
well believe that lanterns swinging from bow and stern, and lights
behind the talc windows of the huts, were put suddenly out to avoid
giving targets for the hurricane of lances and darts and javelins that
came hurtling through the air. Two Russians fell dead, reducing
Korovin's defence to fourteen; but a quick swing of musketry exacted
five Indian lives for the two dead whites. At the end of four days,
the Russians were completely exhausted. The besiegers withdrew to a
cave on the mountain side, perhaps to tempt Korovin on land.
Quick as thought, Korovin buried his iron deep under the barracks, set
fire to the huts, and concentrated all his forces on the vessel, where
he wisely carried the {101} hostages with him and sheered fifty yards
farther off shore. Had the riot of winter winds not been driving
mountain billows along the outer coast, he might have put to sea; but
he had no proof the twenty-three men gone inland hunting to the south
might not be yet alive, and a winter gale would have dashed his ship to
kindling wood outside the sheltered harbor.
Food was short, water was short, and the ship over-crowded with
hostages. To make matters worse, scurvy broke out among the crew; and
the hostiles renewed the attack, surrounding the Russian ship in forty
canoes with ten to twenty warriors in each. An ocean vessel of the
time, or even a pirate ship, could have scattered the assailants in a
few minutes; but the Russian hunting vessels were long, low,
flat-bottomed, rickety-planked craft, of perhaps sixty feet in length,
with no living accommodation below decks, and very poor hammock space
above. Hostages and scurvy-stricken Russians were packed in the hold
with the meat stores and furs like dying rats in a garbage barrel. It
was as much as a Russian's life was worth, to show his head above the
hatchway; and the siege lasted from the middle of December to the 30th
of March, when Drusenin's four refugees, led by Korelin, made a final
dash from Makushin Volcano, and gained Korovin's ship.
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 anchored.
In the straits between the different Aleutian Islands runs a terrific
tide-rip. Crossing from Oonalaska to Oomnak, Korovin's ship was caught
by the counter-currents and cross winds. Not more than five men were
well enough to stand upon their feet. The ship 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 ship
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. Cutlass 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 shore. The stranded ship
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 assailants began firing muskets, which they had
captured from Korovin's massacred hunters; but the shots fell wide of
the mark. Then they brought sulphur from the volcanic caves, and set
fire to the long grass 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 shore
of a broad inlet. Not a soul was stirring. As Korovin's boat
approached, bits of sail, ships' wreckage, and provisions were seen
scattered on the shore. 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
massacre, not a word ever heard about the fate of the others in the
crew. Korovin's last hope was gone. There was no third ship 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 massacres from natives on the
north shore 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 hardships 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
dashing 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 identity of interests. Both sides had
learned there was a better way than the wolf code.[3]
[1] See Coxe'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
massacre of the Russians, and every one who has written on Russian fur
trade in America gives different scraps of the tragedy; but nearly all
can be traced back to the detailed account in Coxe'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 massacre; and Coxe's
narrative is based on Korelin's story, though the tradition of the
massacre has been handed down from father to child among Oonalaskans to
this day, so that certain caves near Captain Harbor, and Makushin
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 Bloody 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 shores 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 ship 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, hobnobbed with exiles, who
included every class 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 noble 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 ships to plunder furs in America "with powder and hatchets
and the help of God," as the Russians say?
[Illustration: 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 God"--_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 mass. 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 ship 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
documents, 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 glass, to the coat drying before the fire,
drew out the packet of documents, 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 punishing American Indians for massacring 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 thrashing 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 assembly rooms, living apartments, and mess rooms on one side of a
passageway, 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-chinked 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 furnishings. Shining samovars sung in every room. Rugs of
priceless fur concealed the rough flooring. Chinese silks, Japanese
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 ships 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
assigned 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.
{116} But a spy might ask the same question. The Russian evaded
answer, and a few hours later showed the Pole books of travel, among
which were maps of the Philippines, where twenty or thirty exiles might
go _if they had a leader_.
Leader? Benyowsky leaped to his feet with hands on pistol and cutlass
with which he had been armed that morning when Governor Nilow liberated
them to hunt on parole. Leader? Were they men? Was this settlement,
too, ready to rise if they had a leader?
No time to lose! Within a month, cautious as a man living over a
volcano, the Polish nobleman had enlisted twenty recruits from the
exile settlement, bound to secrecy by oath, and a score more from a
crew of sailor exiles back from America, mutinous over brutal treatment
by their captain. In addition to secrecy, each conspirator bound
himself to implicit and instant obedience to Benyowsky, their chief,
and to slay each with his own hand any member of the band found guilty
of betrayal. But what gave the Pole his greatest power was his
relation to the governor. The coming of the young nobleman had caused
a flutter in the social life of the dull little fort. He had been
appointed secretary to Governor Nilow, and tutor to his children. The
governor's lady was the widow of a Swedish exile; and it took the Pole
but a few interviews to discover that wife and family favored the
exiles rather than their Russian lord. In fact, the good woman
suggested to the Pole that he {117} should prevent her sixteen-year-old
daughter becoming wife to a Cossack by marrying her himself.
The Pole's first move was to ask the governor's permission to establish
a colony of exile farmers in the south of the peninsula. The request
was granted. This created a good excuse for the gathering of the
provisions that would be needed for the voyage on the Pacific; but when
the exiles further requested a fur-trading vessel to transport the
provisions to the new colony, their design was balked by the
unsuspecting governor granting them half a hundred row boats, too frail
to go a mile from the coast. There seemed no other course but to seize
a vessel by force and escape, but Benyowsky again played for time. The
governor's daughter discovered his plot through her servant planning to
follow one of the exiles to sea; but instead of betraying him to her
Russian father, she promised to send him red clippings of thread as
danger signals if the governor or his chancellor got wind of the
treason.
Their one aim was to get away from Asia before fresh orders could come
overland from Yakutsk. Ice still blocked the harbor in April, but the
_St. Peter and Paul_, the armed vessel that had brought the exiles
across the sea from the mainland, lay in port and was already enlisting
a crew for the summer voyage to America. The Pole sent twelve of his
men to enlist among the crew, and nightly store provisions in the hold.
The rest of the band were set to manufacturing cartridges, and buying
or borrowing all the firearms {118} they could obtain on the pretence
of hunting. Word was secretly carried from man to man that, when a
light was hoisted on the end of a flagstaff above the Benyowsky hut,
all were to rally for the settlement across the ravine from the fort.
The crisis came before the harbor had opened. Benyowsky was on a sled
journey inland with the governor, when an exile came to him by night
with word that one of the conspirators had lost his nerve and
determined to save his own neck by confessing all to the governor.
The traitor was even now hard on the trail to overtake the governor.
Without a moment's wavering, Benyowsky sent the messenger with a flask
of poisoned brandy back to meet the man.
The Pole had scarcely returned to his hut in the exile village, when
the governor's daughter came to him in tears. Ismyloff, a young
Russian trader, who had all winter tried to join the conspirators as a
spy, had been on the trail when the traitor was poisoned and was even
now closeted with Governor Nilow.
It was the night of April 23. No sooner had the daughter gone than the
light was run up on the flagstaff, the bridge across the ravine broken
down, arms dragged from hiding in the cellars, windows and doors
barricaded, sentinels placed in hiding along the ditch between village
and fort. For a whole day, no word came. Governor and chancellor were
still busy examining witnesses. In the morning came a maid {119} from
the governor's daughter with a red thread of warning, and none too
soon, for at ten o'clock, a Cossack sergeant brought a polite
invitation from the governor for the pleasure of M. Benyowsky's company
at breakfast.
M. Benyowsky returns polite regrets that he is slightly indisposed, but
hopes to give himself the pleasure later.
The sergeant winked his eyes and opined it was wiser to go by fair
means than to be dragged by main force.
The Pole advised the sergeant to make his will before repeating that
threat.
Noon saw two Cossacks and an officer thundering at the Pole's door.
The door opened wide. In marched the soldiers, armed to the teeth; but
before their clicking heels had ceased to mark time, the door was shut
again. Benyowsky had whistled. A dozen exiles rose out of the floor.
Cossacks and captors rolled in a heap. The soldiers were bound head to
feet, and bundled into the cellar. Meanwhile the sentinels hidden in
the ravine had captured Ismyloff, the nephew of the chancellor, and two
other Russians, who were added to the captives in the cellar; and the
governor changed his tactics. A letter was received from the
governor's daughter pleading with her lover to come and be reconciled
with her father, who had now no prejudice against the exiles; but in
the letter were two or three tiny red threads such as might have {120}
been pulled out of a dress sleeve. The letter had been written under
force.
Benyowsky's answer was to marshal his fifty-seven men in three
divisions round the village; one round the house, the largest hidden in
the dark on the fort side of the ravine, a decoy group stationed in the
ditch to draw an attack.
By midnight, the sentinels sent word that the main guard of Cossacks
had reached the ravine. The decoy had made a feint of resistance. The
Cossacks sent back to the fort for reinforcements. The Pole waited
only till nearly all the Cossacks were on the ditch bank, then
instructing the little band of decoys to keep up a sham fight, poured
his main forces through the dark, across the plain at a run, for the
fort. Palisades were scaled, gates broken down, guards stabbed where
they stood! Benyowsky's men had the fort and the gates barricaded
again before the governor could collect his senses. As Benyowsky
entered the main rooms, the enraged commander seized a pistol, which
missed fire, and sprang at the Pole's throat, roaring out he would see
the exiles dead before he would surrender. The Pole, being lame, had
swayed back under the onslaught, when the circular slash of a cutlass
in the hand of an exile officer severed the governor's head from his
body.
Twenty-eight Cossacks were put to the sword inside the fort; but the
exiles were not yet out of their troubles. Though they had seized the
armed vessel at once and {121} transferred to the hold the entire loot
of the fort,--furs, silks, supplies, gold,--it would be two weeks
before the ice would leave the port. Meanwhile the two hundred
defeated Cossacks had retreated to a hill, and sent coureurs scurrying
for help to the other forts of Kamchatka. Within two weeks seven
hundred Cossacks would be on the hills; and the exiles, whose supplies
were on board the vessel, would be cut off in the fort and starved into
surrender.
No time to waste, Benyowsky! Not a woman or child was harmed, but
every family in the fort was quickly rounded up in the chapel. Round
this, outside, were piled chairs, furniture, pitch, tar, powder,
whale-oil. Promptly at nine in the morning, three women and twelve
young girls--wives and daughters of the Cossack officers--were
despatched to the Cossack besiegers on the hill with word that unless
the Cossacks surrendered their arms to the exiles and sent down fifty
soldiers as hostages of safety for the exiles till the ship could
sail--precisely at ten o'clock the church would be set on fire.
The women were seen to ascend the hill. No signal came from the
Cossacks. At a quarter past nine Benyowsky kindled fires at each of
the four angles of the church. As the flames began to mount a forest
of handkerchiefs and white sheets waved above the hill, and a host of
men came spurring to the fort with all the Cossacks' arms and fifty-two
hostages.
{122} The exiles now togged themselves out in all the gay regimentals
of the Russian officers. Salutes of triumph were fired from the
cannon. A _Te Deum_ was sung. Feast and mad wassail filled both day
and night till the harbor cleared. Even the Cossacks caught the madcap
spirit of the escapade, and helped to load ammunition on the _St. Peter
and Paul_. Nor were old wrongs forgiven. Ismyloff was bundled on the
vessel in irons. The chancellor's secretary was seized and compelled
to act as cook. Men, who had played the spy and tyrant, now felt the
merciless knout. Witnesses, who had tried to pry into the exiles'
plot, were hanged at the yard-arm. Nine women, relatives of exiles,
who had been compelled to become the wives of Cossacks, now threw off
the yoke of slavery, donned the costly Chinese silks, and joined the
pirates. Among these was the governor's daughter, who was to have
married a Cossack.
On May 11, 1771, the Polish flag was run up on the _St. Peter and
Paul_. The fort fired a God-speed--a heartily sincere one, no
doubt--of twenty-one guns. Again the _Te Deum_ was chanted; again, the
oath of obedience taken by kissing Benyowsky's sword; and at five
o'clock in the evening the ship dropped down the river for the sea,
with ninety-six exiles on board, of whom nine were women; one, an
archdeacon; half a dozen, officers of the imperial army; one, a
gentleman in waiting to the Empress; at least a dozen, convicts of the
blackest dye.
{123} The rest of Benyowsky's adventures read more like a page from
some pirate romance than sober record of events on the west coast of
America. Barely had the vessel rounded the southern cape of the
peninsula into the Pacific, when Ismyloff, the young Russian trader,
who had been carried on board in irons, rallied round Benyowsky such a
clamor of mutineers, duels were fought on the quarter-deck, the
malcontents clapped in handcuffs again, and the ringleaders tied to the
masts, where knouting enough was laid on to make them sue for peace.
The middle of May saw the vessel anchoring on the west coast of Bering
Island, where a sharp lookout was kept for Russian fur traders, and
armed men must go ashore to reconnoitre before Benyowsky dared venture
from the ship. The Pole's position was chancy enough to satisfy even
his melodramatic soul. Apart from four or five Swedes, the entire crew
of ninety-six was Russian. Benyowsky was for sailing south at once to
take up quarters on some South Sea island, or to claim the protection
of some European power. The Russian exiles, of whom half were
criminals, were for coasting the Pacific on pirate venture, and
compelled the Pole to steer his vessel for the fur hunters' islands of
Alaska.
The men sent to reconnoitre Bering Island came back with word that
while they were gathering driftwood on the south shore, they had heard
shots and met five Russians belonging to a Saxon exile, who had {124}
turned fur hunter, deposed the master of his ships, gathered one
hundred exiles around him, and become a trader on his own account. The
Saxon requested an interview with Benyowsky. What was the Pole to do?
Was this a decoy to test his strength? Was the Saxon planning to
scuttle the Pole's vessel, too? Benyowsky's answer was that he would
be pleased to meet his Saxon comrade in arms on the south shore, each
side to approach with four men only, laying down arms instantly on
sight of each other. The two exile pirates met. Each side laid down
arms as agreed. Ochotyn, the Saxon, was a man of thirty-six years, who
had come an exile on fur trading vessels, gathered a crew of one
hundred and thirty-four around him, and, like the Pole, become a
pirate. His plan in meeting Benyowsky was to propose vengeance on
Russia: let the two ships unite, go back to Siberia, and sack the
Russian ports on the Pacific. But the Pole had had enough of Russia.
He contented himself with presenting his brother pirate with one
hundred pounds of ammunition; and the two exiles sat round a campfire
of driftwood far into the night, spinning yarns of blasted hopes back
in Europe, and desperate venture here on the Pacific. The Saxon's
headquarters were on Kadiak, where he had formed alliance with the
Indians. Hither he advised the Pole to sail for a cargo of furs.
Ismyloff, the mutineer, was marooned on Bering Island. Ice-drift had
seemed to bar the way {125} northward through Bering Straits. June saw
Benyowsky far eastward at Kadiak on the south shore of Alaska,
gathering in a cargo of furs; and from the sea-otter fields of Kadiak
and Oonalaska, Benyowsky sailed southwest, past the smoking volcanoes
of the Aleutians, vaguely heading for some of those South Sea islands
of which he used to read in the exile village of Kamchatka.
Not a man of the crew knew as much about navigation as a schoolboy.
They had no idea where they were going, or where the ship was. As day
after day slipped past with no sight but the heaving sea, the Russian
landsmen became restive. Provisions had dwindled to one fish a day;
and scarcely a pint of water for each man was left in the hold. In
flying from Siberian exile, were they courting a worse fate?
Stephanow, the criminal convict, who had crossed Siberia with the Pole,
dashed on deck demanding a better allowance of water as the ship
entered warmer and warmer zones. The next thing the Pole knew,
Stephanow had burst open the barrel hoops of the water kegs to quench
his thirst. By the time the guard had gone down the main hatch to
intercept him, Stephanow and a band of Russian mutineers had trundled
the brandy casks to the deck and were in a wild debauch. The main
hatch was clapped down, leaving the mutineers in possession of the
deck, till all fell in drunken torpor, when Benyowsky rushed his
soldiers up the fore scuttle, snapped handcuffs on {126} the rebels,
and tied them to the masts. In the midst of this disorder, such a
hurricane broke over the ocean that the tossing yard-arms alternately
touched water.
To be sure, Benyowsky had escaped exile; but his ship was a hornets'
nest. After the storm all hands were busy sewing new sails. The old
sails were distributed as trousers for the ragamuffin crew. For ten
days no food was tasted but soup made from sea-otter skins. Then birds
were seen, and seaweed drifted past the vessel; and a wild hope mounted
every heart of reaching some part of Japan.
On sunset of July 15, the Pole's watch-dog was noticed standing at the
bow, sniffing and barking. Two or three of the ship's hands dashed up
to the masthead, vowing they would not come down till they saw land.
Suddenly the lookout shouted, Land! The exiles forgot their woes.
Even the mutineers tied to the masts cheered. Darker and darker grew
the cloud on the horizon. By daybreak the cloud had resolved itself to
a shore before the eager eyes of the watching crew. The ship had
scarcely anchored before every man was overboard in a wild rush for the
fresh water to be found on land. Tents were pitched on the island; and
the wanderers of the sea rested.
It is no part of this narrative to tell of Benyowsky's adventures on
Luzon of the Philippines, or the Ladrones,--whichever it was,--how he
scuttled {127} Japanese sampans of gold and pearls, fought a campaign
in Formosa, and wound up at Macao, China, where all the rich cargo of
sea-otter brought from America was found to be water rotted; and
Stephanow, the criminal convict, left the Pole destitute by stealing
and selling all the Japanese loot.
This part of the story does not concern America; and the Pole's whole
life has been told by Jokai, the Hungarian novelist, and Kotzebue, the
Russian dramatist.
Benyowsky got passage to Europe from China on one of the East India
Company ships, whose captain was uneasy enough at having so many
pirates on board. In France he obtained an appointment to look after
French forts in Madagascar; but this was too tame an undertaking for
the adventure-loving Pole. He threw up his appointment, returned to
Europe, interested English merchants in a new venture, sailed to
Baltimore in the _Robert Anne_ of twenty cannon and four hundred and
fifty tons, interested merchants there in his schemes, and departed
from Baltimore October 25, 1784, to conquer Madagascar and set up an
independent commercial government. Here he was slain by the French
troops on the 23d of May, 1786--to the ruin of those Baltimore and
London merchants who had advanced him capital. His own account of his
adventures is full of gross exaggerations; but even the Russians were
so impressed with the prowess of his valor that a few years later, when
Cook sailed to Alaska, Ismyloff could not be brought to mention his
name; {128} and when the English ships went on to Kamchatka, they found
the inhabitants hidden in the cellars, for fear the Polish pirate had
returned. But like many heroes of misfortune, Benyowsky could not
stand success. It turned his head. He entered Macao with the airs of
an emperor, that at once discredited him with the solid people. If he
had returned to the west coast of America, as a fur trader, he might
have wrested more honors from Russia; but his scheme to capture an
island of which he was to be king, ended in ruin for himself and his
friends.[1]
[1] It may as well be acknowledged that Mauritius Augustus, Count
Benyowsky (pronounced by himself Be-nyov-sky), is a liar without a peer
among the adventurers of early American history. If it were not that
his life was known to the famous men of his time, his entire memoirs
from 1741 to 1771 might be rejected as fiction of the yellow order; but
the comical thing is, the mendacious fellow cut a tremendous swath in
his day. The garrisons of Kamchatka trembled at his name twenty-five
years after his escapades. Ismyloff, who became a famous trader in the
Russian Fur Company, could not be induced to open his mouth about the
Pole to Cook, and actually made use of the universal fear of Benyowsky
among Russians, to keep Cook from learning Russian fur trade secrets,
when the Englishman went to Kamchatka, by representing that Cook was a
pirate, too. The _Gentleman's Magazine_ for June, 1772, contained a
letter from Canton, dated November 19, 1771, giving a full account of
the pirate's arrival there with his mutineers and women refugees. The
Bishop Le Bon of Macao writes, September 24, 1771: "Out of his
equipage, there remain no more than eight men in health. All the rest
are confined to their beds. For two months they suffered hunger and
thirst." Captain King of Cook's staff writes of Kamchatka: "We were
informed that an exiled Polish officer named Beniowski had seized upon
a galliott, lying at the entrance of the harbor, and had forced on
board a number of Russian sailors, sufficient to navigate her; that he
had put on shore a part of the crew . . . among the rest, Ismyloff."
In Paris he met and interested Benjamin Franklin. Hyacinth de
Magellan, a descendant of the great discoverer, advanced Benyowsky
money for the Madagascar filibustering expedition. So did certain
merchants of Baltimore in 1785. On leaving England, Benyowsky gave his
memoirs to Magellan, who passed their editing over to William Nicholson
of the Royal Society, by {129} whom they were given to the world in
1790. German, French, and Russian translations followed. This called
forth Russia's account of the matter, written by Ivan Ryumin, edited by
Berg, St. Petersburg, 1822. These accounts, with the facts as cited
from contemporaries, enable one to check the preposterous exaggerations
of the Pole. Of late years, between drama and novels, quite a
Benyowsky literature has sprung up about this Cagliostro of the sea.
His record in the continental armies preceding his exile would fill a
book by itself; and throughout all, Benyowsky appears in the same
light, an unscrupulous braggart lying gloriously, but withal as
courageous as he was mendacious.
[Transcriber's note: the "e" and "o" in the above "Be-nyov-sky" are
actually e-macron (Unicode U+0113) and o-macron (Unicode U+014D).]
{131}
PART II
AMERICAN AND ENGLISH ADVENTURERS ON THE WEST COAST
OF AMERICA--FRANCIS DRAKE IN CALIFORNIA--COOK, FROM
BRITISH COLUMBIA TO ALASKA--LEDYARD, THE FORERUNNER
OF LEWIS AND CLARK--GRAY, THE DISCOVERER OF THE
COLUMBIA--VANCOUVER, THE LAST OF THE WEST COAST NAVIGATORS
{133}