Читать книгу Alaska's History, Revised Edition - Harry Ritter - Страница 12

St. Michael’s Cathedral and Russian-American Company buildings, Sitka, late 1800s.

RUSSIAN AMERICA: THE FORGOTTEN FRONTIER

PROMYSHLENNIKI AND THE RUSSIAN FUR TRADE

Old Russian block house at Sitka, with “Baranov’s Castle” in background which burned in 1894.

The arrival of the first Europeans in Alaska, the Russians, grew largely out of their fur trading operations in Siberia. Trappers and traders called promyshlenniki began to extend European influence east from Moscow and Kiev toward Siberia in the late 1500s. For adventurers and entrepreneurs, Central Asia and Siberia represented the Russian frontier of the day, a land of opportunity similar to the American and Canadian frontiers of the 1700s and 1800s.

Like the American mountain men and French-Canadian voyageurs, the promyshlenniki sought furs that commanded dazzling prices in Europe and, especially, China. Sometimes they trapped the fur-bearing animals themselves; in Siberia sable was the most valuable. More often, they extracted tribute in the form of furs from the Asiatic tribes they encountered—distant relatives of the Native peoples they would later find in Alaska. This system, in which hostages were taken to enforce the tribute, later became a model for Russian operations in Alaska.

Pushing ever eastward as regions were trapped out, by the 1690s the promyshlenniki reached the Kamchatka Peninsula on Siberia’s Pacific coast. The imperial Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church extended their influence along trails and waterways opened up by these pioneers, especially during the reign of Tsar Peter the Great between 1689 and 1725. The tsarist government appointed agents to collect a 10 percent tax on the furs. In strategic places it established ostrogs, or citadels—fortified trading posts, which were isolated wilderness camps. In 1726, Okhotsk, Russia’s most important Pacific port until the early 1800s, was a tiny cluster of log sheds and dwellings, a chapel, and only 10 or 11 Russian households. (Later, St. Paul Harbor on Alaska’s Kodiak Island [founded in 1792] and New Archangel—today’s Stika, founded in 1804 and center of Russia’s American operations after 1808—were established as such remote outposts.)

In January 1725, shortly before his own death, Tsar Peter commissioned a naval expedition to explore Pacific waters north and east of Kamchatka. The emperor’s motives were more scientific and political than economic. He wanted to know if Asia and North America were joined by land, to determine the extent of Spain’s control in the Pacific, and to extend Russian power into the New World. But his order would have important economic consequences—it would inaugurate the Alaskan fur trade. Alaska’s European discovery was at hand.

FIRST CONTACTS: THE VOYAGES OF BERING AND CHIRIKOV

A sea otter. Drawing by John Webber, 1778.

Two ships set sail from the Siberian coast in June 1741 on an expedition commissioned by the Russian government. At the helm of the ill-fated St. Peter was Vitus Bering, a 60-year-old Danish captain who had served the tsar’s navy since he was 23. The St. Paul’s master and Bering’s second officer was Aleksei Chirikov. Aboard the St. Peter rode the temperamental but gifted German naturalist and physician Georg Wilhelm Steller; biologists still refer to “Steller’s sea lion,” “Steller’s jay,” “Steller’s eider,” and “Steller’s sea eagle” as a consequence of his fieldwork on the journey.

Bering had sailed these waters before. In 1728 he piloted the St. Gabriel through the strait that now bears his name, concluding that Asia and America were not joined. On that voyage, however, he never saw the fog-shrouded Alaska mainland. Disappointed when his findings were not deemed conclusive by European scientists or the Russian government, Bering successfully lobbied for the chance to lead another expedition.

On this second voyage, Bering and Chirikov lost contact in foul weather, never to meet again. Each maintained an eastward course, however, and in July both ships sighted southern Alaska. On July 16, Steller led a landing party on Kayak Island at Cape Saint Elias, just east of Prince William Sound. He quickly gathered a few plants and birds before being ordered back to the ship by Bering. Chirikov had sighted the islands of Southeast Alaska a day earlier, but the two small boats he sent ashore for fresh water never returned to the mother ship. Their fate has remained a mystery.

Their diets short on vitamin C, many of Bering’s crew became ill with scurvy—the captain included. Weak and exhausted by years of labor struggling with the imperial bureaucracy, Bering was anxious to get back to Kamchatka before the cold weather began. Instead of wintering in Alaska, as Steller advised, the explorer sailed for home. In heavy seas the St. Peter ran aground on a rocky island off the Siberian coast, since known as Bering Island. Twenty of the stranded sailors died of scurvy, including Bering, on December 8, 1741. Those remaining survived with Steller’s medical care and eventually built a 40-foot boat from the wreck of the St. Peter. They finally reached Kamchatka in the spring. Chirikov had already made a safe return in the previous October.

Bering’s voyage not only laid the basis for Russian claims to Alaska but also opened the fur trade. His crews brought back many pelts, among them 800 sea otter skins, more prized even than sable on Chinese markets because of their plush density. The fur-trading promyshlenniki immediately began to outfit trips to the Aleutians, and the fur rush was on. By the late 1700s—the era of Catherine the Great—the Russian fur trade became the richest fur enterprise in the world; a single sea otter skin might equal three times a man’s yearly income and profits were dazzling—100 percent on the average.

As for the otters, eventually they were hunted to near extinction—by the 1820s sea otters were scarce even as far south as Oregon and California. Harder hit was the “Steller’s sea cow,” which became extinct by 1768 because the fur traders had hunted them for food. Our only full description of the large, manatee-like beast is Steller’s.

IN THE RUSSIANS’ WAKE: BRITISH AND FRENCH EXPLORERS

The death of 21 French sailors in rip tides, Lituya Bay, 1786.

For decades following Bering’s 1741–42 expedition, Russia enjoyed uncontested control of Alaskan seas, and the lucrative fur trade remained a closely guarded secret. By the 1770s, however, the explorers of other nations began to penetrate the North Pacific. Spain was the first power to encounter Russia in the New World. But ultimately, Russia’s greatest challenge came from Britain and the new American republic.

In the late 1770s, British Captain James Cook sailed north under orders to find an ice-free passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Along the way he produced the first reliable charts of the Northwest Coast. (Cook’s best cartographer was the young William Bligh, later of Mutiny on the Bounty notoriety.)

In May 1778, Cook reached the bay since known as Cook Inlet, site of modern Anchorage, noting the region’s promise for the fur trade but doubting its value for Britain without discovery of a northern channel.

Searching for just such a passage, he sailed through the Bering Strait, but was stopped by ice in the Chukchi Sea. Turning southward, he charted the Aleutian Islands for two months. He then sailed for Hawaii where he was killed by Polynesian Natives.

Cook’s crew returned to Alaska in another futile search for the passage, and as they sailed for England via the China Sea made an astounding discovery. In Canton, they found that sea otter furs fetched astronomical prices. A ship’s officer wrote the “rage with which our seamen were possessed to return to Cook’s River (Cook Inlet) and buy another cargo of skins at one time was not far short of mutiny.”

The word was out; others soon followed. In a measure of sea otter skins’ value, New England trader Robert Gray sold his sloop Adventure to the Spanish Captain Bodega y Quadra for 75 prime skins. But the most famous of those sailing in Cook’s wake was George Vancouver, a veteran of Cook’s last voyage.

In a four-year expedition between 1791 and 1795, Vancouver charted the Inside Passage, and became the first European to sight from Cook Inlet “distant stupendous mountains covered with snow”—now known as Mount Foraker and nearby Denali, the continent’s highest peak.

By 1805, at least 200 European scientific and commercial voyages had been made up the Northwest Coast by the Russians, British, Americans, Spanish, and French. Most tragic of the early expeditions was that of Jean François Galaup de la Pérouse, master of the French vessel Boussole, which visited Lituya Bay near Yakutat in July 1786. In a humbling display of nature’s power, two of the ship’s small boats attempting to chart the bay’s mouth were caught in violent rip tides, killing all 21 crewmen. Later on the ill-starred voyage, the expedition’s second-in-command and nine others were killed by Natives in Samoa. Their troubles did not end there. La Pérouse, along with the Boussole and his remaining crew, disappeared in a 1788 typhoon in the southwest Pacific.

MALASPINA AND THE SPANISH INCURSIONS

“Return of the Stolen Trousers.” Drawing by José Cardero, 1791–92.

The luster of Spain’s American empire—created in the age of Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro—had tarnished considerably by the time the Russians landed in Alaska in 1741. Still, Spain’s proud tradition compelled her to contest all rival claims to America’s Pacific shore. From her naval base at San Blas in Baja California, Spain sent 13 voyages northward between 1774 and 1793 under such commanders as Bodega y Quadra, Arteaga, Martínez, Lopez de Haro, and Malaspina.

Some expeditions pushed as far as Prince William Sound and the Aleutians. Spanish charts of Alaska’s waters and fjords were often more thorough and precise than those produced by Russian or British cartographers. This helps explain why so many Spanish place names stuck: present-day Ketchikan, for instance, is located on Revillagigedo Island, named for a viceroy of New Spain, and the site of modern Valdez (today pronounced val-DEEZ by Alaskans) was christened Puerto de Valdés by Captain Salvador Fidalgo in 1790.

Though Spain never controlled Alaskan soil, Russian-Spanish tensions had far-reaching consequences for the North Pacific region. Partly out of fear of Russian expansion southward, the Spanish moved into what was known as Upper California, where they founded missions and presidios in San Diego (1769), Monterey (1770), and San Francisco (1776).

Among the most notable Spanish incursions was the expedition of Captain Alejandro Malaspina, which sailed from Cádiz, Spain, in July 1789. Malaspina’s ships, the Descubierta (Discovery) and Atrevida (Daring) were lavishly outfitted, and the Spanish crown hoped the expedition’s scientific achievements would exceed those of the great British navigator, Captain James Cook. After two years mapping the shores of South America and Mexico, Malaspina received orders to head for Alaska to search for the fabled Northwest Passage, believed to link the Pacific and Atlantic oceans at the top of the globe. The mission led him to Yakutat Bay in June 1791. “Great was the joy of the commander and all the officers,” wrote Tomás de Suria, the ship’s artist, “because they believed… that this might be the much-desired and sought-for strait.” Two weeks of exploration, however, produced only disappointment. Malaspina named the inlet Bahia de Desengaño (“Disenchantment Bay”) when he discovered that it ended abruptly at the face of a great glacier.

Though he had failed in his major purpose, Malaspina remained in the area for over a month, charting the coasts and collecting scientific information. The immense Malaspina Glacier, Alaska’s largest, is named in his honor. His stay at Yakutat also produced some wonderful drawings by de Suria and two other ship’s artists, José Cardero and Felipe Bauzá. At one point a sailor’s trousers were stolen by Tlingit residents, but a levelheaded chief prevented the affair from escalating by returning the pants, an incident captured in a drawing by Cardero.

In a melancholy postscript, upon his return to Europe in 1794 Malaspina became entangled in intrigues at the Spanish court, was imprisoned for eight years, then banished from the country. The journals of the man sent to outdo Cook lay forgotten in the archives until resentments faded, and they were finally published in 1885.

LORD OF ALASKA: ALEXANDER BARANOV

Alexander Baranov

Alexander Andreyevich Baranov was a “doer,” just the sort of man demanded by the unforgiving conditions of the Great Land.

Hired in 1790 to manage Russian America’s dominant fur trading company owned by Grigori Shelikov, the 43-year-old Baranov seemed an unlikely choice. His own Siberian fur business had recently failed. But his charisma, aggressiveness, and tough—sometimes brutal—political skills proved indispensable to the survival and expansion of Russia’s American empire. Within seven years he eliminated all competitors and secured the Alaska coast—from the Aleutian Islands to Yakutat—for Shelikov’s firm; renamed the Russian-American Company (RAC), Tsar Paul I granted it an Alaskan trade monopoly in 1799.

Learning to handle an Aleut baidarka and navigate a seagoing sloop, he established a citadel at remote Sitka Bay in 1799 and, in 1804, reestablished the post following its destruction by Tlingit warriors.

From his own small kremlin, Sitka’s Castle Hill, Baranov ruled like a now severe, now enlightened despot with a practical knack for making the colony prosper. He encouraged marriage between European men and Native women. His own Native wife, Anna, bore him a son and daughter. The settlement’s need for clerks and artisans led him to provide basic schooling for creole (Russian-Native) children and, in gifted cases, technical training in Siberia. One colony youngster later became a brigadier general in the Russian army.

Baranov was equally pragmatic in dealing with foreign intruders. Lacking military support to exclude British and American vessels from Alaskan waters, he made a virtue of necessity by cultivating cordial relations with foreign captains. Boston traders—notably the enterprising Irishman Joseph O’Cain—supplied Baranov’s outpost with food and sold company furs in southern China, where Russians were forbidden to trade.

Baranov’s lavish, alcoholic receptions for foreigners became legend. “They all drink an astonishing quantity, Baranov not excepted,” reported American captain John Ebbets. “It is no small tax on the health of a person trying to do business with him.” His reputation as host spread to Hawaii and even New England, where Washington Irving described him as a “rough, rugged, hard-drinking old Russian; somewhat of a soldier, somewhat of a trader, above all a boon companion.”

Yet Baranov had a darker side. He had a stormy relationship with the Russian Church, which criticized his sometimes-abusive treatment of Natives and RAC workers. Arthritis became an excuse for heavy private drinking, and the bleak isolation of Alaska’s winters drove him to fits of depression. The worst came in 1809, after nine disgruntled colonists who considered him a tyrant plotted to murder him and his family. The plot was foiled, but Baranov sent his family to Kodiak, submitted his resignation, and passed the winter in an alcoholic stupor. After two intended replacements died en route to Alaska, however, Baranov declared that God had ordained that he continue as governor.

Reinvigorated, he directed the company to its most profitable years to date in 1813 and 1814. When he finally retired at age 71, Russian influence in the North Pacific stretched from Siberia to an RAC farming station at Fort Ross in northern California. Yet his last few years as company director were not happy. Revenues were uneven, there were rumors of his physical and mental decline, and he was accused (falsely) of profiting at RAC expense. Neither Baranov—nor his successors—solved the problem of properly supplying Russia’s remote colony with food. In 1818 he was replaced as chief manager by the naval officer Leontii Hagemeister.

The “Lord of Alaska,” the man who more than any other helped Russia tap the New World’s riches, died of fever aboard the ship Kutuzov on April 12, 1819, en route to St. Petersburg, off the coast of Java.

APOSTLE OF ALASKA: FATHER IVAN VENIAMINOV

St. Michael’s Cathedral, Sitka. LaRoche photo, late 1800s.

Near the Sitka waterfront stand two wooden structures that powerfully recall Alaska’s Russian heritage: the Russian Bishop’s House, completed in 1842, and the onion-domed St. Michael’s Cathedral, first dedicated in 1848. Both are products of a man whose work as a religious leader, craftsman, and scholar has been as enduring as the buildings themselves: Father Ivan Veniaminov.

Veniaminov was born in Siberia in 1797, the son of a church caretaker. Young Ivan attended the Russian Orthodox seminary in Irkutsk, where he was not only the outstanding scholar of his class but displayed a restless interest in mechanical crafts. From a local artisan he learned the art of clock making. (Later, as Bishop of Alaska, he built the belfry clock of St. Michael’s.) In 1821 the young priest was ordained and, three years later, he traveled with his wife, son, and elderly mother as a missionary to the east Aleutian Island of Unalaska.

Tall and athletic, Veniaminov had the practical genius of a Benjamin Franklin. He immediately established a sympathetic rapport with his Native parishioners. Using his craftsman’s skills, the artisan priest set to work on his own house, furniture, and a church. In the process he taught woodworking, blacksmithing, and brickmaking to Native apprentices. An amateur scientist, he compiled observations on local plant and animal life, the weather, and tides.

Unlike some later American missionaries who tried to suppress Native dialects and customs, Veniaminov respected local traditions—at least when they did not directly contradict Orthodox teachings—and taught that Natives must receive Christian doctrine in their own tongue. A gifted linguist, Father Veniaminov preached in Aleut, prepared (with the help of Aleut headman Ivan Pan’kov) an Aleut dictionary, grammar, and primer, and laid the foundations of literacy among the Aleut people.

In 1834 he moved to Sitka, where he did similar work among the Tlingit people, winning their trust by inoculating them against a smallpox epidemic in 1836. Among his greatest achievements was his Notes on the Islands of Unalaska District, a treasure of information on the early Aleut and Tlingit cultures. A tireless traveler, in 1838 he journeyed to California’s Fort Ross and San Francisco Bay to inspect Church affairs and Catholic missions.