The sum total of Vancouver's work so far had been the exploration of Puget Sound, which is to the West what the Gulf of St. Lawrence is to the East. For Puget Sound and its allied waters he had done exactly what Carrier accomplished for the Atlantic side of America. His next step was to learn if the Straits of Fuca leading northward penetrated America and came out on the Atlantic side. That is what the old Greek pilot in the service of New Spain, Juan de Fuca, had said some few years after Drake and Cavendish had been out on the coast of California.
Though Vancouver explored the Pacific coast more thoroughly than all the other navigators who had preceded him,—so thoroughly, indeed, that nothing was left to be done by the explorers who came after him, and modern surveys have been unable to improve upon his charts,—it seemed his ill-luck to miss by just a hair's breadth the prizes he coveted. He had missed the discovery of the Columbia. He was now to miss the second largest river of the Northwest, the Fraser. He had hoped to be the first to round the Straits of Fuca, disproving the assumption that they led to the Atlantic; and he came on the spot only to learn that the two English traders, Meares and Barclay, the two Americans, Kendrick and Gray, and two Spaniards, Don Galiano and Don Valdes, had already proved {273} practically that this part of the coast was a large island, and the Straits of Fuca an arm of the Pacific Ocean.
Fifty Indians, in the long dugouts, of grotesquely carved prows and gaudy paint common among Pacific tribes, escorted Vancouver's boats northward the second week in June through the labyrinthine passageways of cypress-grown islets to Burrard Inlet. To Peter Puget was assigned the work of coasting the mainland side and tracing every inlet to its head waters. Johnstone went ahead in a small boat to reconnoitre the way out of the Pacific. On both sides the shores now rose in beetling precipice and steep mountains, down which foamed cataracts setting the echo of myriad bells tinkling through the wilds. The sea was tinged with milky sediment; but fog hung thick as a blanket; and Vancouver passed on north without seeing Fraser River. A little farther on, toward the end of June, he was astonished to meet a Spanish brig and schooner exploring the straits. Don Galiano and Don Valdes told him of the Fraser, which he had missed, and how the Straits of Fuca led out to the North Pacific. They had also been off Puget Sound, but had not gone inland, and brought Vancouver word that Don Quadra, the Spanish emissary, sent to restore to England the fort from which Meares, the trader, had been ousted, had arrived at Nootka on the other side of the island, and was waiting. The explorers all proceeded up the straits together; but the little Spanish crafts were unable {274} to keep abreast of the big English vessels, so with a friendly cheer from both sides, the English went on alone.
Strange Indian villages lined the beetling heights of the straits. The houses, square built and of log slabs, row on row, like the streets of the white man, were situated high on isolated rocks, inaccessible to approach except by narrow planking forming a causeway from rock walls across the sea to the branches of a tree. In other places rope ladders formed the only path to the aerial dwellings, or the zigzag trail up the steep face of a rock down which defenders could hurl stones. Howe's Sound, Jervis Canal, Bute Inlet, were passed; {275} and in July Johnstone came back with news he had found a narrow channel out to the Pacific.
The straits narrowed to less than half a mile with such a terrific tide wash that on Sunday, July 29, the ships failed to answer to the helm and waves seventeen feet high dashed over decks. Progress was made by hauling the boats alongshore with ropes braced round trees. By the first of August a dense fog swept in from the sea. The Discovery crashed on a sunken rock, heeling over till her sails were within three inches of water. Ballast was thrown overboard, and the next tide-rush lifted her. By August 19 Vancouver had proved—if any doubt remained—that no Northeast Passage was to be found by way of the Straits of Fuca.[1] Then, veering out to sea at midnight through squalls {276} of rain, he steered to Nootka for the conference with Spain.
Vancouver came to Nootka on the 28th of August. Nootka was the grand rallying place of fur traders on the Pacific. It was a triangular sound extending into the shores of Vancouver Island. On an island at the mouth of the sound the Spaniards had built their fort. This part of the bay was known as Friendly Cove. To the north was Snug Cove, where Cook had anchored; to the south the roadstead of the fur traders. Mountains rose from the water-line; and on a terrace of hills above the Spanish fort was the native village of Maquinna, the Indian chief.
{277} Here, then, came Vancouver, met at the harbor mouth by a Spanish officer with pilot to conduct the Discovery to the Spanish fort of Nootka. The Chatham, the Daedalus, Vancouver's store ship, two or three English fur-trading ships, Spanish frigates bristling with cannon, were already at anchor; and the bright Spanish pennant, red and yellow, waved to the wind above the cannon-mounted, palisaded log fort of Nootka.
Donning regimentals, Lieutenant Puget marched solemnly up to the fort to inform Don Juan de la Bodega y Quadra, representative of Spain, that Captain George Vancouver, representative of England, had arrived at Nootka to await the pleasure of New Spain's commander. It was New Spain's pleasure to receive England's salute; and Vancouver's guns roared out a volley of thirteen shots to the amaze of two thousand or more savages watching from the shores. Formally accompanied by his officers, Vancouver then paid his respects to New Spain. Don Quadra returned the compliment by breakfasting next morning on board the Discovery, while his frigates in turn saluted England by a volley of thirteen guns. In all this solemn parade of formality, Maquinna, lord of the wild domain, began to wonder what part he was to play, and ventured to board the Discovery, clad in a garb of nature, to join the breakfast of the leaders; when he was summarily cuffed overboard by the guard, who failed to recognize the Indian's quality. Don Quadra then gave a grand dinner to the English, to which the irate Maquinna {278} was invited. Five courses the dinner had, with royal salutes setting the echoes rolling in the hills. Seventeen guns were fired to the success of Vancouver's explorations. Toasts were drunk, foaming toasts to glory, and the navigators of the Pacific, and Maquinna, grand chief of the Nootkas, who responded by rising in his place, glass in hand, to express regret that Spain should withdraw from the North Pacific. It was then the brilliant thought flashed on Don Quadra to win the friendship of the Indians for all the white traders on the Pacific coast through a ceremonious visit by Vancouver and himself to Maquinna's home village, twenty miles up the sound.
Cutter and yawl left Friendly Cove at eight in the morning of September 4, coming to Maquinna's home village at two in the afternoon. Don Quadra supplied the dinner, served in style by his own Spanish lackeys; and the gallant Spaniard led Maquinna's only daughter to the seat at the head of the spread, where the young squaw did the honors with all the hauteur of the Indian race. Maquinna then entertained his visitors with a sham battle of painted warriors, followed by a mask dance. Not to be outdone, the whites struck up fife and drum, and gave a wild display of Spanish fandangoes and Scotch reels. In honor of the day's outing, it was decided to name the large island which Vancouver had almost circumnavigated, Quadra and Vancouver.
When Maquinna returned this visit, there were fireworks, and more toasts, and more salutes. All this {279} was very pleasant; but it was not business. Then Vancouver requested Don Quadra to ratify the international agreement between England and Spain; but there proved to be a wide difference of opinion as to what that agreement meant. Vancouver held that it entailed the surrender of Spain's sovereignty from San Francisco northward. Don Quadra maintained that it only surrendered Spanish rights north of Juan de Fuca, leaving the northwest coast free to all nations for trade. With Vancouver it was all or nothing. Don Quadra then suggested that letters be sent to Spain and England for more specific instructions. For this purpose Lieutenant Broughton was to be despatched overland across Mexico to Europe. It was at this stage that Robert Gray came down from the north on the damaged Columbia, to receive assistance from Quadra. Within three weeks Gray had sailed for Boston, Don Quadra for New Spain, and Vancouver to the south, to examine that Columbia River of Gray's before proceeding to winter on the Sandwich Islands.
The three English ships hauled out of Nootka in the middle of October, steering for that new river of Gray's, of which Vancouver had expressed such doubt. The foaming reefs of Cape Disappointment were sighted and the north entrance seen just as Gray had described it. The Chatham rode safely inside the heavy cross swell, though her small boat smashed to chips among the breakers; but on Sunday, October {280} 21, such mountainous seas were running that Vancouver dared not risk his big ship, the Discovery, across the bar. Broughton was intrusted to examine the Columbia before setting out to England for fresh orders.
The Chatham had anchored just inside Cape Disappointment on the north, then passed south to Cape Adams, using Gray's chart as guide. Seven miles up the north coast, a deep bay was named after Gray. Nine or ten Indian dugouts with one hundred and fifty warriors now escorted Broughton's rowboat upstream. The lofty peak ahead covered with snow was named Mt. Hood. For seven days Broughton followed the river till his provision ran out, and the old Indian chief with him explained by the signs of pointing in the direction of the sunrise and letting water trickle through his fingers that water-falls ahead would stop passage. Somehow, Broughton seemed to think because Gray, a private trader, had not been clad in the gold-braid regimentals of authority, his act of discovery was void; for Broughton landed, and with the old chief assisting at the ceremony by drinking healths, took possession of all the region for England, "having" as the record of the trip explains, "every reason to believe that the subjects of no other civilized nation or state had ever entered this river before; in this opinion he was confirmed by Mr. Gray's sketch, in which it does not appear that Mr. Gray either saw or was ever within five leagues of the entrance."
{281} Any comment on this proceeding is superfluous. It was evidently in the hope that the achievement of Gray—an unassuming fur trader, backed by nothing but his own dauntless courage—would be forgotten, which it certainly was for fifty years by nearly all Americans. Three days later, on November 3, Broughton was back down-stream at the Chatham, noting the deserted Indian village of Chinook as he passed to the harbor mouth. On November 6, in heavy rain, the ship stood out for sea, passing the Jenny of Bristol, imprisoned inside the cape by surf. Broughton landed to reconnoitre the passage out. The wind calmed next day, and a breach was descried through the surf. The little trading ship led the way, Broughton following, hard put to keep the Chatham headed for the sea, breakers rolling over her from stem to stern, snapping the tow-rope of the launch and washing a sailor overboard; and we cannot but have a higher respect for Gray's feat, knowing the difficulties that Broughton weathered.
Meanwhile Vancouver on the Discovery had coasted on down from the mouth of the Columbia to Drake's Bay, just outside the Golden Gate of San Francisco, where the bold English pirate had anchored in 1579. By nightfall of November 14 he was inside the spacious harbor of San Francisco. Two men on horseback rode out from the Spanish settlement, a mile back from the water front, firing muskets as a salute to Vancouver. The next morning, a Spanish friar and {282} ensign came aboard the Discovery for breakfast, pointing out to Vancouver the best anchorage for both wood and water. While the sailors went shooting quail on the hills, or amused themselves watching the Indians floating over the harbor on rafts made of dry rushes and grass, the good Spanish padre conducted Vancouver ashore to the presidio, or house of the commandant, back from the landing on a little knoll surrounded by hills. The fort was a square area of adobe walls fourteen feet high and five deep, the outer beams filled in between with a plaster of solid mortar, houses and walls whitewashed from lime made of sea-shells. A small brass cannon gathered rust above one dilapidated carriage, and another old gun was mounted by being lashed to a rotten log. A single gate led into the fort, which was inhabited by the commandant, the guard of thirty-five soldiers, and their families. The windows of the houses were very small and without glass, the commandant's house being a rude structure thirty by fourteen feet, whitewashed inside and out, the floor sand and rushes, the furnishings of the roughest handicraft. The mission proper was three miles from the fort, with a guard of five soldiers and a corporal. Such was the beginning of the largest city on the Pacific coast to-day.
Broughton was now sent overland to England for instructions about the transfer of Nootka. Puget became commander of the Chatham. The store ship Daedalus was sent to the South Seas, and touching only {283} at Monterey, Vancouver sailed to winter in the Sandwich Islands. Here two duties awaited the explorer, which he carried out in a way that left a streak both of glory and of shame across his escutcheon. The Sandwich Islands had become the halfway house of the Pacific for the fur traders. How fur traders—riff-raff adventurers from earth's ends beyond the reach of law—may have acted among these simple people may be guessed from the conduct of Cook's crews; and Cook was a strict disciplinarian. Those who sow to the wind, need not be surprised if they reap the whirlwind. White men, welcomed by these Indians as gods, repaid the native hospitality by impressing natives as crews to a northern climate where the transition from semitropics meant almost certain death. For a fur trader to slip into Hawaii, entice women aboard, then scud off to America where the victims might rot unburied for all the traders cared—was considered a joke. How the joke caused Captain Cook's death the world knows; and the joke was becoming a little frequent, a little bold, a little too grim for the white traders' sense of security. The Sandwich Islanders had actually formed the plot of capturing every vessel that came into their harbors and holding the crews for extortionate ransom. How many white men were victims of this plot—to die by the assassin's knife or waiting for the ransom that never came—is not a part of this record. It was becoming a common thing to find white men living in a state of quasi-slavery among the {284} islanders, each white held as hostage for the security of the others not escaping. Within three years three ships had been attacked, one Spanish, one American, one English—the store ship Daedalus on the way out to Nootka with supplies for Vancouver. Two officers, Hergest and Gooch of the Daedalus, had been seized, stripped naked, forced at the point of spears up a hill to the native village, and cut to pieces. Vancouver determined to put a stop to such attacks. Arriving at the islands, he trained his cannon ashore, demanded that the murderers of the Daedalus's officers be surrendered, tried the culprits with all the solemnity and speed of English court-martial, sentenced them to death, had them tied up to the mast poles and executed. That is the blot against Vancouver; for the islanders had put up a trick. The real murderers had been leading chiefs. Not wishing to surrender these, the islanders had given Vancouver poor slaves quite guiltless of the crime.
In contrast to this wrong-headed demonstration of justice was Vancouver's other act. At Nootka he had found among the traders two young Hawaiian girls not more than fifteen and nineteen years of age, whom some blackguard trader had forcibly carried off. The most of great voyagers would not have soiled their gloves interfering with such a case. Cook had winked at such crimes. Drake, two hundred years before, had laughed. The Russians outdid either Drake or Cook. They dumped the victims overboard where the {285} sea told no tales. Vancouver might have been strict enough disciplinarian to execute the wrong men by way of a lesson; but he was consistent in his strictness. Round these two friendless savages he wrapped all the chivalry and the might of the English flag. He received them on board the Discovery, treated them as he might have treated his own sisters, prevented the possibility of insult from the common sailors by having them at his own table on the ship, taught them the customs of Europeans toward women and the reasons for those customs, so that the young girls presently had the respect and friendship of every sailor on board the Discovery. In New Spain he had obtained clothing and delicacies for them that white women have; and in the Sandwich Islands took precautions against their death at the hands of Hawaiians for having been on the ship with strange men, by securing from the Sandwich Island chief the promise of his protection for them and the gifts of a home inside the royal enclosure.
April of 1793 saw Vancouver back again on the west coast of America. In results this year's exploring was largely negative; but the object of Vancouver's life was a negative one—to prove there was no passage between Pacific and Atlantic. He had missed the Columbia the previous year by standing off the coast north of Mendocino. So this year, he again plied up the same shore to Nootka. No fresh instructions had {286} come from England or Spain to Nootka; and Vancouver took up the trail of the sea where he had stopped the year before, carrying forward survey of island and mainland from Vancouver Island northward to the modern Sitka or Norfolk Sound. Gray, the American, had been attacked by Indians here the year before; and Vancouver did not escape the hostility of these notoriously treacherous tribes. Up Behm Canal the ships were visited by warriors wearing death-masks, who refused everything in exchange for their sea-otter except firearms. The canal here narrowed to a dark canyon overhung by beetling cliffs. Four large war canoes manned by several hundred savages daubed with war paint succeeded in surrounding the small launch, and while half the warriors held the boat to prevent it escaping, the rest had rifled it of everything they could take, from belaying-pins and sail rope to firearms, before Vancouver lost patience and gave orders to fire. At the shot the Indians were over decks and into the sea like water-rats, while forces ambushed on land began rolling rocks and stones down the precipices. One gains some idea of Vancouver's thoroughness by his work up Portland Canal, which was to become famous a hundred years later as the scene of boundary disputes. Here, so determined was he to prove none of the passages led to the Atlantic that his small boat actually cruised seven hundred miles without going more than sixty miles from ocean front. By October of 1793 Vancouver had demolished the myth of {287} a possible passage between New Spain and Russian America; for he had examined every inlet from San Francisco to what is now Sitka. While the results were negative to himself, far different were they to Russia. It was Vancouver's voyage northward that stirred the Russians up to move southward. In a word, if Vancouver had not gone up as far as Norfolk Sound or Sitka, the Russian fur traders would have drowsed on with Kadiak as headquarters, and Canada to-day might have included the entire gold-fields of Alaska.
Again Vancouver wintered in the Sandwich Islands. In the year 1794 he changed the direction of his exploring. Instead of beginning at New Spain and working north, he began at Russian America and worked south. Kadiak and Cook's Inlet were regarded as the eastern bounds of Russian settlement at this time, though the hunting brigades of the Russians scoured far and wide; so Vancouver began his survey eastward at Cook's Inlet. Terrific floods of ice banged the ships' bows as they plied up Cook's Inlet; and the pistol-shot reports of the vast icebergs breaking from the walls of the solid glacier coast forewarned danger; but Vancouver was not to be deterred. Again the dogged ill-luck of always coming in second for the prize he coveted marked each stage of his trip. Russian forts were seen on Cook's Inlet, Russian settlements on Prince William Sound, Russian flotillas of nine hundred {288} Aleutian hunters steering by instinct like the gulls spreading over the sea as far east as Bering Bay, or where the coast of Alaska dips southward. Everywhere he heard the language of Russia, everywhere saw that Russia regarded his explorations with jealousy as intrusion; everywhere observed that Russian and savage had come to an understanding and now lived as friends, if not brothers. Twice Baranof, the little Czar of the North, sent word for Vancouver to await a conference; but Vancouver was not keen to meet the little Russian potentate. One row at a time was enough; and the quarrel with Spain was still unsettled. The waters of to-day plied by the craft of gold seekers, Bering Bay, Lynn Canal, named after his birthplace, were now so thoroughly surveyed by Vancouver that his charts may still be used.
Only once did the maze of waterways seem to promise a northeast passage. It was up Lynn Canal, where so many gold seekers have rushed to have their hopes dashed, like Vancouver. Two officers had gone up the channel in a small boat to see if any opening led to the Atlantic. Boisterous weather and tremendous tide had lashed the sea to foam. The long daylight was so delusive that the men did not realize it was nearly midnight. At ten o'clock they had rowed ashore, to rest from their fight with wave and wind, when armed Indians suddenly rushed down to the water's edge in battle array, spears couched. The exhausted rowers bent to the oars all night. At one place in their {289} retreat to open sea, the fog lifted to reveal the passage between precipices only a few feet wide with warriors' canoes on every side. A crash of musketry drove the assailants off. Two or three men kept guard with pointed muskets, while the oarsmen pulled through a rolling cross swell back to the protection of the big ships outside.
On August 19, as the ships drove south to Norfolk or Sitka Sound, the men suddenly recognized headlands where they had cruised the summer before. For a second they scarcely realized. Then they knew that their explorations from Alaska southward had come to the meeting place of their voyage from New Spain northward. Just a little more than fifty years from Bering's discoveries, the exploration of the northwest coast of America had been completed. Some one emitted an incoherent shout that the work was finished! The cheer was caught up by every man on board. Some one else recalled that it had been April when they set out on the fool-quest of the Northeast Passage; and a true April's fool the quest had proved! Then flags were run up; the wine casks brought out, the marines drawn up in line, and three such volleys of joy fired as those sailors alone could feel. For four years they had followed the foolish quest of the learned world's error. That night Vancouver gave a gala dinner to his crews. They deserved it. Their four years' cruise marked the close of the most heroic epoch on the Pacific coast. Vancouver had accomplished his life-work—there {290} was no northeast passage through the west coast of America.[2]
[1] The legend of Juan de Fuca became current about 1592, as issued in Samuel Purchas' Pilgrims in 1625, Vol. III: "A note made by Michael Lok, the elder, touching the strait of sea commonly called Fretum Anian in the South Sea through the North-West Passage of Meta Incognita." Lok met in Venice, in April, 1596, an old man called Juan de Fuca, a Greek mariner and pilot, of the crew of the galleon Santa Anna taken by Cavendish near southern California in 1587. The pilot narrated after his return to Mexico, he was sent by the viceroy with three vessels to discover the Strait of Anian. This expedition failing, he was again sent in 1592, with a small caravel in which "he followed the course west and northwest to latitude 47 north, there finding a broad inlet between 47 and 48, he entered, sailing therein more than twenty days … and found very much broader sea than was at the said entrance … a great island with a high pinnacle.… Being come into the North Sea … he returned to Acapulco." According to the story the old pilot tried to find his way to England in the hope of the Queen recouping him for goods taken by Cavendish, and furnishing him with a ship to essay the Northeast Passage again. The old man died before Raleigh and other Englishmen could forward money for him to come to England. Whether the story is purely a sailor's yarn, or the pilot really entered the straits named after him, and losing his bearings when he came out in the Pacific imagined he was on the Atlantic, is a dispute among savants.
[2] The data of Vancouver's voyage come chiefly, of course, from the volume by himself, issued after his death, Voyage of Discovery to the Pacific Ocean, London, 1798. Supplementary data may be found in the records of predecessors and contemporaries like Meares's Voyages, London, 1790, Portlock's Voyage, London, 1789; Dixon's Voyage, London, 1789, and others, from whom nearly all modern writers, like Greenhow, Hubert Howe Bancroft, draw their information. The reports of Dr. Davidson in his Coast and Survey work, and his Alaska Boundary, identify many of Vancouver's landfalls, and illustrate the tremendous difficulties overcome in local topography. It is hardly necessary to refer to Begg and Mayne, and other purely local sketches of British Columbian coast lines; as Begg's History simply draws from the old voyages. Of modern works, Dr. Davidson's Survey works, and the official reports of the Canadian Geological Survey (Dawson), are the only ones that add any facts to what Vancouver has recorded.
EXPLORATION GIVES PLACE TO FUR TRADE—THE EXPLOITATION OF THE PACIFIC COAST UNDER THE RUSSIAN AMERICAN FUR COMPANY, AND THE RENOWNED LEADER BARANOF
The Pursuit of the Sable leads Cossacks across Siberia, of the Sea-Otter, across the Pacific as far South as California—Caravans of Four Thousand Horses on the Long Trail Seven Thousand Miles across Europe and Asia—Banditti of the Sea—The Union of All Traders in One Monopoly—Siege and Slaughter of Sitka—How Monroe Doctrine grew out of Russian Fur Trade—Aims of Russia to dominate North Pacific
"Sea Voyagers of the Northern Ocean" they styled themselves, the Cossack banditti—robber knights, pirates, plunderers—who pursued the little sable across Europe and Asia eastward, just as the French coureurs des bois followed the beaver across America westward. And these two great tides of adventurers—the French voyager, threading the labyrinthine waterways of American wilds westward; the Russian voyager exchanging his reindeer sled and desert caravans for crazy rafts of green timbers to cruise across the Pacific eastward—were directed both to the same region, animated by the same impulse, the capture of the Pacific coast of America.
The tide of adventure set eastward across Siberia at the very time (1579) Francis Drake, the English freebooter, was sacking the ports of New Spain on his way to California. Yermac, robber knight and leader of a thousand Cossack banditti, had long levied tribute of loot on the caravans bound from Russia to Persia. Then came the avenging army of the Czar. Yermac fled to Siberia, wrested the country from the Tartars, and obtained forgiveness from the Czar by laying a new realm at his feet. But these Cossack plunderers did not stop with Siberia. Northward were the ivory tusks of the frozen tundras. Eastward were precious furs of the snow-padded forests and mountains toward Kamchatka. For both ivory and furs the smugglers of the Chinese borderlands would pay a price. On pretence of collecting one-tenth tribute for the Czar, forward pressed the Cossacks; now on horseback,—wild {295} brutes got in trade from Tartars,—now behind reindeer teams through snowy forests where the spreading hoofs carried over drifts; now on rude-planked rafts hewn from green firs on the banks of Siberian rivers; on and on pushed the plunderers till the Arctic rolled before them on the north, and the Pacific on the east.[1] Nor did the seas of these strange shores bar the Cossacks. Long before Peter the Great had sent Vitus Bering to America in 1741, Russian voyagers had launched out east and north with a daredevil recklessness that would have done honor to prehistoric man. That part of their adventures is a record that exceeds the wildest darings of fiction. Their boats were called kotches. They were some sixty feet long, flat bottomed, planked with green timber. Not a nail was used. Where were nails to come from six thousand miles across the frozen tundras? Indeed, iron was so scarce that at a later day when ships with nails ventured on {296} these seas natives were detected diving below to pull the nails from the timbers with their teeth. Instead of nails, the Cossack used reindeer thongs to bind the planking together. Instead of tar, moss and clay and the tallow of sea animals calked the seams. Needless to say, there was neither canvas nor rope. Reindeer thongs supplied the cordage, reindeer hides the sails. On such rickety craft, "with the help of God and a little powder," the Russian voyagers hoisted sail and put to sea. On just such vessels did Deshneff and Staduchin attempt to round Asia from the Arctic into Bering Sea (1647-1650).
To be sure, the first bang of the ice-floes against the prow of these rickety boats knocked them into kindling-wood. Two-thirds of the Cossack voyagers were lost every year; and often all news that came of the crew was a mast pole washed in by the tide with a dead man lashed to the crosstrees. Small store of fresh water could be carried. Pine needles were the only antidote for scurvy; and many a time the boat came tumbling back to the home port, not a man well enough to stand before the mast.
Always it is what lies just beyond that lures. It is the unknown that beckons like the arms of the old sea sirens. Groping through the mists that hang like a shroud over these northern seas, hoar frosts clinging to masts and decks till the boat might have been some ghost ship in a fog world, the Cossack plunderers {297} sometimes caught glimpses far ahead—twenty, thirty, forty miles eastward—of a black line along the sea. Was it land or fog, ice or deep water? And when the wind blew from the east, strange land birds alighted on the yard-arms. Dead whales with the harpoons of strange hunters washed past the ship; and driftwood of a kind that did not grow in Asia tossed up on the tide wrack. It was the word brought back by these free-lances of the sea that induced Peter the Great to send Vitus Bering on a voyage of discovery to the west coast of America; and when the castaways of Bering's wreck returned with a new fur that was neither beaver nor otter, but larger than either and of a finer sheen than sable, selling the pelts to Chinese merchants for what would be from one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars each in modern money, the effect was the same as the discovery of a gold mine. The new fur was the sea-otter, as peculiar to the Pacific as the seal and destined to lead the Cossacks on a century's wild hunt from Alaska to California. Cossacks, Siberian merchants, exiled criminals, banded together in as wild a stampede to the west coast of America as ever a gold mine caused among civilized men of a later day.
The little kotches that used to cruise out from Siberian rivers no longer served. Siberian merchants advanced the capital for the building of large sloops. Cargo of trinkets for trade with American Indians was supplied in the same way. What would be fifty thousand dollars in modern money, it took to build and {298} equip one of these sloops; but a cargo of sea-otter was to be had for the taking—barring storms that yearly engulfed two-thirds of the hunters, and hostile Indians that twice wiped Russian settlements from the coast of America—and if these pelts sold for one hundred and fifty dollars each, the returns were ample to compensate risk and outlay. Provisions, cordage, iron, ammunition, firearms, all had to be brought from St. Petersburg, seven thousand miles to the Pacific coast. From St. Petersburg to Moscow, Kasan, the Tartar desert and Siberia, pack horses were used. It was a common thing for caravans of four or even five thousand pack horses employed by the Russian fur traders of America to file into Irkutsk of a night. At the head waters of the Lena, rafts and flatboats, similar to the old Mackinaw boats of American fur traders on the Missouri, were built and the cargo floated down to Yakutsk, the great rendezvous of Siberian fur traders. Here exiles acting as packers and Cossacks as overseers usually went on a wild ten days' spree. From Yakutsk pack horses, dog trains, and reindeer teams were employed for the remaining thousand miles to the Pacific; and this was the hardest part of the journey. Mountains higher than the Rockies had to be traversed. Mountain torrents tempestuous with the spring thaw had to be forded—ice cold and to the armpits of the drivers; and in winter time, the packs of timber wolves following on the heels of the cavalcade could only be driven off by the hounds kept to course down grouse and hare {299} for the evening meal. If an exile forced to act as transport packer fell behind, that was the last of him. The Russian fur traders of America never paused in their plans for a life more or less. Ordinarily it took three years for goods sent from St. Petersburg to reach the Pacific; and this was only a beginning of the hardships. The Pacific had to be crossed, and a coast lined with reefs like a ploughed field traversed for two thousand miles among Indians notorious for their treachery.
The vessels were usually crammed with traps and firearms and trinkets to the water-line. The crews of forty, or seventy, or one hundred were relegated to vermin-infested hammocks above decks, with short rations of rye bread and salt fish, and such scant supply of fresh water that scurvy invariably ravaged the ship whenever foul weather lengthened the passage. Having equipped the vessel, the Siberian merchants passed over the management to the Cossacks, whose pretence of conquering new realms and collecting tribute for the Czar was only another excuse for the same plunder in gathering sea-otter as their predecessors had practised in hunting the sable. Landsmen among Siberian exiles were enlisted as crew of their own free will at first, but afterward, when the horrors of wreck and scurvy and massacre became known, both exiles and Indians were impressed by force as fur hunters for the Cossacks. If the voyage were successful, half the {300} proceeds went to the outfitter, the remaining half to Cossacks and crew.
The boats usually sailed in the fall, and wintered on Bering Island. Here stores of salted meat, sea-lion and sea-cow, were laid up, and the following spring the ship steered for the Aleutians, or the main coast of Alaska, or the archipelago round the modern Sitka. Sloops were anchored offshore fully armed for refuge in case of attack. Huts were then constructed of driftwood on land. Toward the east and south, where the Indians were treacherous and made doubly so by the rum and firearms of rival traders, palisades were thrown up round the fort, a sort of balcony erected inside with brass cannon mounted where a sentry paraded day and night, ringing a bell every hour in proof that he was not asleep. Westward toward the Aleutians, where driftwood was scarce, the Russians built their forts in one of two places: either a sandy spit where the sea protected them on three sides, as at Captain Harbor, Oonalaska, and St. Paul, Kadiak, or on a high, rocky eminence only approachable by a zigzag path at the top of which stood cannon and sentry, as at Cook's Inlet. Chapel and barracks for the hunters might be outside the palisade; but the main house was inside, a single story with thatch roof, a door at one end, a rough table at the other. Sleeping berths with fur bedding were on the side walls, and every other available piece of wall space bristled with daggers and firearms ready {301} for use. If the house was a double-decker, as Baranof Castle at Sitka, powder was stored in the cellar. Counting-rooms, mess room, and fur stores occupied the first floor. Sleeping quarters were upstairs, and, above all, a powerful light hung in the cupola, to guide ships into port at night.
But these arrangements concerned only the Cossack officers of the early era, or the governors like Baranof, of a later day. The rank and file of the crews were off on the hunting-grounds with the Indians; and the hunting-grounds of the sea-otter were the storm-beaten kelp beds of the rockiest coast in the world. Going out in parties of five or six, the promyshleniki, as the hunters were called, promised implicit obedience to their foreman. Store of venison would be taken in a preliminary hunt. Indian women and children would be left at the Russian fort as hostages of good conduct, and at the head of as many as four, five hundred, a thousand Aleut Indian hunters who had been bludgeoned, impressed, bribed by the promise of firearms to hunt for the Cossacks, six Russians would set out to coast a tempestuous sea for a thousand miles in frail boats made of parchment stretched on whalebone. Sometimes a counter-tide would sweep a whole flotilla out to sea, when never a man of the hunting crew would be heard of more. Sometimes, when the hunters were daring a gale, riding in on the back of a storm to catch the sea-otter driven ashore to the kelp beds for a rest, the back-wash of a billow, or a sudden {302} hurricane of wind raising mountain seas, would crash down on the brigade. When the spray cleared, the few panic-stricken survivors were washing ashore too exhausted to be conscious that half their comrades had gone under. Absurd as it seems that these plunderers of the deep always held prayers before going off on a hunt—is it any wonder they prayed? It was in such brigades that the Russian hunters cruised the west coast of America from Bering Sea to the Gulf of California, and the whole northwest coast of America is punctuated with saints' names from the Russian calendar; for, like Drake's freebooters, they had need to pray.
Fur companies world over have run the same course. No sooner has game become scarce on the hunting-grounds, than rivals begin the merry game of slitting one another's throats, or instigating savages to do the butchering for them. That was the record of the Hudson's Bay Company and Nor'westers in Canada, and the Rocky Mountain men and American Company on the Missouri. Four years after Bering's crew had brought back word of the sea-otter in 1742, there were seventy-seven different private Russian concerns hunting sea-otter off the islands of Alaska. Fifty years later, after Cook, the English navigator, had spread authentic news of the wealth in furs to be had on the west coast of America, there were sixty different fur companies on the Pacific coast carrying {303} almost as many different flags. John Jacob Astor's ships had come round the Horn from New York and, sailing right into the Russian hunting-grounds, were endeavoring to make arrangements to furnish supplies to the Russians in exchange for cargoes of the fur-seals, whose rookeries had been discovered about the time sea-otter began to be scarce. Kendrick, Gray, Ingraham, Coolidge, a dozen Boston men were threading the shadowy, forested waterways between New Spain and Alaska.[2] Ships from Spain, from France, from London, from Canton, from Bengal, from Austria, were on the west coast of America. The effect was twofold: sea-otter were becoming scarce from being slaughtered indiscriminately, male and female, young and old; the fur trade was becoming bedevilled from rival traders using rum among the savages. The life of a fur trader on the Pacific coast was not worth a pin's purchase fifty yards away from the cannon mouths pointed through the netting fastened round the deck rails to keep savages off ships. Just as Lord Selkirk indirectly brought about the consolidation of the Hudson's Bay fur traders with Nor'westers, and John Jacob Astor attempted the same ends between the St. Louis and New York companies, so a master mind arose among the Russians, grasping the situation, and ready to cope with its difficulties.
This was Gregory Ivanovich Shelikoff, a fur trader {304} of Siberia, accompanied to America and seconded by his wife, Natalie, who succeeded in carrying out many of his plans after his death. Shelikoff owned shares in two of the principal Russian companies. When he came to America accompanied by his wife, Baranof, another trader, and two hundred men in 1784, the Russian headquarters were still at Oonalaska in the Aleutians. Only desultory expeditions had gone eastward. Foreign ships had already come among the Russian hunting-grounds of the north. These Shelikoff at once checkmated by moving Russian headquarters east to Three Saints, Kadiak. Savages warned him from the island, threatening death to the Aleut Indian hunters he had brought. Shelikoff's answer was a load of presents to the hostile messenger. That failing, he took advantage of an eclipse of the sun as a sign to the superstitious Indians that the coming of the Russians was noted and blessed of Heaven. The unconvinced Kadiak savages responded by ambushing the first Russians to leave camp, and showering arrows on the Russian boats. Shelikoff gathered up his men, sallied forth, whipped the Indians off their feet, took four hundred prisoners, treated them well, and so won the friendship of the islanders. From the new quarters hunters were despatched eastward under Baranof and others as far as what is now Sitka. These yearly came back with cargoes of sea-otter worth two hundred thousand dollars. Shelikoff at once saw that if the Russian traders were to hold their own against {305} the foreign adventurers of all nations flocking to the Pacific, headquarters must be moved still farther eastward, and the prestige of the Russian government invoked to exclude foreigners. There were, in fact, no limits to the far-sighted ambitions of the man. Ships were to be despatched to California setting up signs of Russian possession. Forts in Hawaii could be used as a mid-Pacific arsenal and halfway house for the Russian fleet that was to dominate the North Pacific. A second Siberia on the west coast of America, with limits eastward as vague as the Hudson's Bay Company's claims westward, was to be added to the domains of the Czar. Whether the idea of declaring the North Pacific a closed sea as Spain had declared the South Pacific a closed sea till Francis Drake opened it, originated in the brain of Shelikoff, or his successors, is immaterial. It was the aggrandizement of the Russian American Fur Company as planned by Shelikoff from 1784 to 1796, that led to the Russian government trying to exclude foreign traders from the North Pacific twenty-five years later, and which in turn led to the declaration of the famous Monroe Doctrine by the United States in 1823—that the New World was no longer to be the happy hunting-ground of Old World nations bent on conquest and colonization.
Like many who dream greatly, Shelikoff did not live to see his plans carried out. He died in Irkutsk in 1795; but in St. Petersburg, when pressing upon {306} the government the necessity of uniting all the independent traders in one all-powerful company to be given exclusive monopoly on the west coast of America, he had met and allied himself with a young courtier, Nikolai Rezanoff.[3] When Shelikoff died, Rezanoff it was who obtained from the Czar in 1799 a charter for the Russian American Fur Company, giving it exclusive monopoly for hunting, trading, and exploring north of 55 degrees in the Pacific. Other companies were compelled either to withdraw or join. Royalty took shares in the venture. Shareholders of St. Petersburg were to direct affairs, and Baranof, the governor, resident in America, to have power of life and death, despotic as a czar. By 1800 the capital of Russian America had been moved down to the modern Sitka, called Archangel Michael in the trust of the Lord's anointed protecting these plunderers of the sea. Shelikoff's dreams were coming true. Russia was checkmating the advances of England and the United States and New Spain. Schemes were in the air with Baranof for the impressment of Siberian exiles as peasant farmers among the icebergs of Prince William Sound, for the remission of one-tenth tribute in furs from the Aleuts on condition of free service as hunters with the company, and for the employment of Astor's ships as purveyors of provisions to Sitka, when there fell a bolt {307} from the blue that well-nigh wiped Russian possession from the face of America.