E-text prepared by Al Haines

[Frontispiece: Seal Rookery, Commander Islands.]

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.

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

ILLUSTRATIONS

{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).]

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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

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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

If a region were discovered where gold was valued less than cartloads of clay, and ropes of pearls could be obtained in barter for strings of glass beads, the modern mind would have some idea of the frenzy that prevailed in Spain after the discovery of America by Columbus. Native temples were found in Chile, in Peru, in Central America, in Mexico, where gold literally lined the walls, silver paved the floors, and handfuls of pearls were as thoughtlessly thrown in the laps of the conquerors as shells might be tossed at a modern clam-bake.

Within half a century from the time Spain first learned of America, Cortés not only penetrated Mexico, but sent his corsairs up the west coast of the {134} continent. Pizarro conquered Peru. Spanish ships plied a trade rich beyond dreams of avarice between the gold realms of Peru and the spice islands of the Philippines. The chivalry of the Spanish nobility suddenly became a chivalry of the high seas. Religious zeal burned to a flame against those gold-lined pagan temples. It was easy to believe that the transfer of wedges of pure gold from heathen hands to Spain was a veritable despoiling of the devil's treasure boxes, glorious in the sight of God. The trackless sea became the path to fortune. Balboa had deeper motives than loyalty, when, in 1513, on his march across Panama and discovery of the Pacific, he rushed mid-deep into the water, shouting out in swelling words that he took possession of earth, air, and water for Spain "for all time, past, present, or to come, without contradiction, … north and south, with all the seas from the Pole Arctic to the Pole Antarctic, … both now, and as long as the world endures, until the final day of judgment." [1]

Shorn of noise, the motive was simply to shut out the rest of the world from Spain's treasure box. The Monroe Doctrine was not yet born. The whole Pacific was to be a closed sea! To be sure, Vasco da Gama had found the way round the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean; and Magellan soon after passed through the strait of his name below South America {135} right into the Pacific Ocean; but round the world by the Indian Ocean was a far cry for tiny craft of a few hundred tons; and the Straits of Magellan were so storm-bound, it soon became a common saying that they were a closed door. Spain sent her sailors across Panama to build ships for the Pacific. The sea that bore her treasure craft—millions upon millions of pounds sterling in pure gold, silver, emeralds, pearls—was as closed to the rest of the world as if walled round with only one chain-gate; and that at Panama, where Spain kept the key.

That is, the sea was shut till Drake came coursing round the world; and his coming was so utterly impossible to the Spanish mind that half the treasure ships scuttled by the English pirate mistook him for a visiting Spaniard till the rallying cry, "God and Saint George!" wakened them from their dream.