Читать книгу The Ship, the Saint, and the Sailor - Bradley G. Stevens - Страница 10

CHAPTER 3

THE

SINKING

THE NEWS SPREAD QUICKLY IN the small village. The Kad’yak had hit a rock and foundered, and had been left adrift. The captain and crew had all returned safely. This was the greatest excitement the town had experienced in years. With little else for entertainment, news and gossip was the centerpiece of village life. Everyone wanted to know, and many wanted to see. Soon, small boats were being launched by Natives, Russians, and Creoles. They all wanted to see the Kad’yak before it sank. By evening, a small flotilla of boats had arrived on scene. Most were baidarkies (a Russian invention based on the baidarka), sealskin boats, carrying two or three persons, paddled out onto the ocean. Going out to sea in March was generally risky business for any vessel, but the weather was good, and the baidarkies were extremely seaworthy craft. Their design had evolved over centuries of use by local natives, who were quite adept at navigating them in almost any weather.

To the amazement of the small fleet, the Kad’yak had not sunk completely. It was awash up to its gunwales, with just the foc’sle and the masts sticking up above the water as it bobbed up and down in the swells like a sleeping whale. It still had enough surface area above water to catch the wind, and it was drifting along on the surface like a giant piece of flotsam. The next day, it was still afloat. Captain Arkhimandritov came out to see it himself in a small launch. By now it had drifted to the north, under command only of the mild southern breeze. He considered trying to salvage it, but it was of no use. They had no other boats that could be used to tow it. Even if they managed to tie it up to a fleet of baidarkies, they could not overcome the power of the current and wind, pushing it to the north. And if it sank suddenly, it would take them all down with it. Besides, the cargo could not be salvaged. Better then to let it just drift and see where it went. Who knew, perhaps it would wash ashore on a beach where it could be salvaged.

Many wondered why the Kad’yak hadn’t sunk yet and began to talk of miracles. Arkhimandritov knew better, of course. Though the spring equinox had arrived and winter temperatures somewhat abated, the ocean in March was at its coldest temperature of the year. Surrounded by tons of ice-cold seawater, the cargo of ice had stayed mostly frozen in the bowels of the ship. Kept afloat by its cargo of ice, well insulated in the hold, the Kad’yak had become a wooden-hulled iceberg, floating in the Gulf of Alaska. For three days it drifted as the winds held steady, first from the southwest, then the south, and finally from the southeast, driving the ship closer to shore. On the fourth day the ship finally came to rest, grounded out in the shallow waters offshore of Ostrov Elovoi, the Spruce Island. There, the cargo of ice finally melted, and the ship settled into the bottom, becoming a permanent fixture of the island.

More amazing than its four-day return to shore is the location where the Kad’yak came to rest. Selenie Bay, or Settler’s Cove, was a name in common use for just about any little cove where Russians settled. On Spruce Island alone, there were at least two, maybe three, coves with similar names. But this particular cove happened to be the place where Father Herman had lived, taught, died, and been buried. The Kad’yak had come to rest in Icon Bay, or Monk’s Lagoon, right in front of his chapel. And when it finally settled to the bottom, only the mainmast remained standing out of the water, with its topgallant spar horizontal and the main yard slightly tilted, forming the shape of the Russian Orthodox cross.

The symbolism of this was not lost on the Russians or the Natives. Was it divine providence or an accident? To top it off, Arkhimandritov’s failure to honor his promise, to make a devotion to the saint, soon became common knowledge. Whether he had told this story to one of his friends or crewmen, the holy cat was out of the bag. Among the faithful in the community, there was only one explanation for the wreckage: Arkhimandritov had failed Saint Herman, and Saint Herman had claimed his ship.

THE SINKING OF THE KAD’YAK was a great loss to the Russian-American Company. In a letter to the RAC offices in St. Petersburg, the manager in Sitka could hardly contain his exasperation that a captain as experienced as Arkhimandritov could run onto a rock in such a well-traveled location. Although Alaska was littered with semisubmerged rocks that were a danger to ships, so many ships had sailed in and out of Kodiak Harbor that authorities wondered if it were a new rock that had just recently appeared:

“It is strange, that the inhabitants of Kodiak until now did not notice that the water breaks above this rock, and some maps even show the channel in this very location. Maybe this rock grew just recently. Although I think that in our colonial seas there are many such new rocks. If the bigger ships sailed more often, they would show to us where the passage is clear, and where it is not; but from such discoveries let God protect me!”

The RAC had only ten ships in their fleet, and the Kad’yak was the newest and best of them all. It had been built specifically for the ice trade and was worth over eighteen thousand silver rubles. Although the cargo of ice had been insured, the ship had not. The remaining ships in the fleet were mostly converted Navy ships, many of which had seen decades of use. Despite the value of the ice trade, the RAC had fallen on hard times. After the collapse of the fur trade, Moscow was spending almost as much money to support the colony as it was getting in return. Something had to be done. Within the inner circles of Moscow there was talk about revoking the Company’s charter, its license to do business. Even worse was talk about selling the colony to the Americans. None of this reached the colony, however, and if the upper echelons of the Company knew about it, they were keeping it a secret. Recognizing this fact, a letter was sent to Arkhimandritov, chastising him for failing to salvage the ship, tow it to shore, or at least anchor it to the reef where it had grounded so that it could be salvaged later. It seems likely that the writer had not spent any time in Kodiak and had no idea what wind, seas, and storms can do to a ship grounded on a rocky reef, nor how difficult it would have been to raise or move it.

Without a ship, Captain Arkhimandritov now had little to do, but his excellent navigational skills would not go to waste. He was soon reassigned to a new duty as the cartographer of the Alaskan coast. At that time, there were no reliable charts of the area, and Arkhimandritov was a natural choice for the job. At the request of the RAC and by orders of Captain Furuhjelm, now Company manager, Arkhimandritov set out to survey the shoreline of Spruce Island and Afognak Island. On June 30, 1860, he set out in three large baidarkas with four Native paddlers and an assistant. The Aleut baidarka was traditionally a single-person craft, though they could sometimes squeeze in a small child or woman lying down in the front of the boat. Two-person kayaks were rare because they were impossible to right if turned over. To perform what we now call an “Eskimo roll” in a kayak takes coordination and practice. It is not possible to achieve that level of coordination between two people when you are upside down underwater.

Three-person baidarkies, therefore, were an invention of the Russians hunters, who sat in the middle seat, supervising two Natives who did all the paddling. Such was the way Arkhimandritov traveled around Spruce Island that summer, over a period of six weeks. During that time, he took many bearings, recorded many landmarks, and kept a detailed journal. On the third day of his journey, he entered Icon Bay. Standing on a small rocky islet, he pointed his compass toward the mast of the Kad’yak, which was still protruding above the surface of the water.

“On this bearing,” he wrote, “lies the topmast of the barque Kad’yak.”

These were the last words recorded about the ship. From there, he continued his journey and eventually gave his journal and a report to the RAC. But whatever became of his work is not known. No new map was produced, or if it were, it has become lost. His notes, however, were the property of the RAC and eventually were transferred to the United States when Alaska was sold in 1867. For over a hundred years, the Kad’yak was forgotten.

The sinking of the Kad’yak was not the end of Captain Arkhimandritov’s troubles. Only a year later, he grounded another ship while leaving the port of New Arkhangelsk. Whether he attributed either sinking to the intervention of Saint Herman is unknown, but possibly to atone for his lack of devotion, in 1869 he donated an icon of Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors, to Saint Herman’s chapel on Spruce Island. The icon was later moved to the Russian Orthodox Church in Ouzinkie, and sometime in the 1980s, it disappeared. Almost immediately following the Kad’yak shipwreck, a navigational aid was placed above the rock on which it impaled itself. This became one of the first navigational markers in Alaska, and the rock later became known as Kodiak Rock on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ship charts. Although on the surface this appears to be in reference to Kodiak Island, there are so many such rocks that one wonders why this one in particular should bear that name unless it were also a reference to the Kad’yak, which met its demise at this location.