Alaska (18 page)

But others in Amsterdam and London had tried to persuade him differently: 'Sire, mark our words, when you find navigators brave enough to sail from Archangels past Novaya Zemlya and on to the mouths of the Lena . . .' He had not interrupted them, for he did not care to reveal that this had already been accomplished. 'You will find that they could, if they wished, keep right on sailing from the Lena to the Kolyma and around the easternmost cape and straight down to Japan. Russia and North America are not joined. A sea intrudes between them, and although it is probably frozen most of the year, it is still a sea, and as such, it will have to be open during the summer.'

In the years since his epochal travels in Europe and his work as a shipbuilder in Holland, Peter had accumulated all the shreds of information he could glean from suppositious accounts, rumors, hard evidence and the canny speculation of geographers and philosophers, and he had in this year of 1723 concluded that there was an ocean passage open most of the year between his most eastern possessions and North America. Having accepted this as proved, he was now interested in other aspects of the problem, and to solve them he needed to know more about the Chukchis and the forbidding land they occupied.

'Tell me about your second trip, Zhdanko. The one where you met the Chukchis.'

'This time, when I reached the mouths of the Kolyma, I said to myself: ”What lies beyond?” and I sailed in good weather for many days, relying upon the skilled Siberian boatman who captained my ship, a man who seemed to have no fear. Neither of us understood the stars, so we don't know 114

how far we went, but in all that time the sun never set, so we had to be well north of the Circle, that I know.'

'And what did you find?'

'A cape, and then a sharp turn south, and when we tried to land we found those damned Chukchis.'

'And what happened?'

They turned us back, twice. Pitched battles. And if we had tried to force our way ashore, I'm sure we'd have been killed.'

'Could you talk with them?'

'No, but they were willing to trade with us, and they knew the value of what they had.'

'Did you ask them questions? I mean with signs?'

'Yes. And they told us that the sea continued south forever, but that there were islands just beyond in the mists.'

'Did you sail to those islands?'

'No,' and when the tsar's grave disappointment showed, the cossack reminded him: 'Sire, we were far from home . . . in a small boat, and we could not guess where the land lay. To tell you the truth, we were afraid.'

Tsar Peter, who realized that as emperor of a vast domain he was obligated to know what the situation was in all its parts, made no reply to this honest admission of fear and failure, but after a long swig of beer he said: 'I wonder what I might have done.'

'Who knows?' Zhdanko shrugged, and Peter was glad that he had not cried effusively: 'Oh, Sire, I'm sure you would have plowed on!' because Peter was not at all sure.

Once, in crossing from Holland to England, he had been caught in a furious Channel storm and he knew what fear could do to a man in a small boat.

But then he clapped his hands, rose, and began walking about the room. 'Listen, Zhdanko, I already know all this about Russia and North America not touching. And I want to do something about it, but in the future, not now,' and the interrogation seemed to be ending there, with the tsar going back to his unfinished palace and the cossack to his hanging, so Zhdanko, fighting for his life, boldly reached out and grabbed Peter's right sleeve, being careful not to touch his person, and said: 'In the trading, Sire, I obtained two things which might be of interest to you.'

'What?'

'Frankly, Sire, I want to trade them to you, for my freedom.'

'I came here tonight to give you your freedom. You were to leave this place and take quarters in the palace near mine.'

Zhdanko stood up, and the two big men stared at each other across the narrow space which separated them, and

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then a big smile broke across the cossack's face: 'In that case, Sire, I shall give you my secrets freely and with thanks.' And he stooped to kiss the hem of Peter's fur-lined robe.

'Where are these secret things?' Peter asked, and Zhdanko said: 'I had them spirited out of Siberia and hidden with a woman I knew in the old days.'

'Is it worth my while to go to her tonight?'

'It is,' and with this simple declaration Trofim Zhdanko left his shackles lying on the prison floor, accepted the fur cloak the tsar ordered the jailer to give him, and side by side with Peter, passed through the oak door and climbed into the waiting carriage while the four armed horsemen formed up to protect them.

They left the river docks, where Zhdanko could see the gaunt timbers of many ships under construction, but before reaching the area leading to the rude palace they veered inland away from the river, and in the two-o'clock darkness searched for a mean alley, where they stopped at a hovel protected by a door without hinges. The drowsy occupant, when finally wakened, informed Zhdanko: 'She left here last year.

You'll find her three alleys down, house with a green door.'

There they learned that the woman Maria still protected the valuable package the prisoner Zhdanko had sent her from Yakutsk. She showed neither surprise nor pleasure in seeing her friend Trofim again, and for the very good reason that when she saw the soldiers she supposed that this very tall man with Zhdanko was an official of some kind who was going to arrest the cossack for having stolen whatever was in the package.

'Here,' she muttered, shoving a greasy bundle into Peter's hands. Then, to Zhdanko, she said: 'I'm sorry, Trofim. I hope they don't hang you.'

Eagerly the tsar ripped open the package, to find that it contained two pelts, each about five feet long, of the softest, finest, strongest fur he had ever seen. It was a dark brown that scintillated in the weak light and much longer in each hair than the furs with which he was familiar, though dealers brought him only the best.

It had come from the treasured sea otter inhabiting the icy waters east of the Chukchi lands, and these two pelts were the first of their kind to reach the western world.

In his first moments of examining these remarkable furs, Peter appreciated their worth, and he could visualize, even then, the immense importance they would enjoy in the capitals of Europe if they could be supplied in assured quantities.

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'These are excellent,' Peter said. 'Tell this woman who I am and give her rubles for having saved them for me.'

The captain of the guard told Maria as he handed her the coins: 'This is your tsar.

He thanks you,' and she fell to her knees and kissed his boot.

Her gesture did not close this unusual night, for while she was still genuflecting, Peter shouted to one of his guards: 'Fetch it,' and before the man returned, the tsar had forced a startled Zhdanko onto the hut's only chair. When the guard produced a long, dull and murderous-looking razor, Peter cried: 'No man, not even you, Zhdanko, stays in my palace with a beard,' and with considerable force he proceeded to hack off the cossack's beard, taking with it a substantial helping of skin.

Troflm could not protest, for as a citizen he knew that the law forbade him to wear a beard, and as a cossack he must not flinch when the unsharpened razor pulled hair out by the roots or cut into his face. Stolidly he sat there until the barbering was completed, then he rose, wiped the blood from his newly revealed face, and said: 'Sire, keep hold of the empire. You'll never make a barber,' and Peter tossed the razor to a guard, who allowed it to fall to the floor lest it cut him. Placing an arm about his astonished cossack, the tsar led him to their carriage.

PETER THE GREAT WAS IN NO DEGREE DIVERTED FROM his main interest in far eastern Siberia by the fact that a new and wonderful kind of fur appeared to be available there.

Of course, he had his tailor, a Frenchman named DesArbes, adapt the furs to three of his ceremonial robes, but then forgot about them, for his perpetual concern was with the actuality of Russia where it was and how it related to its neighbors and in safeguarding it for the future. And now, when occasional rushes of blood to the head warned him that even he with all his strength was mortal, he began to focus on three or four major projects which had to be given direction or consolidation.

Russia still had no reliable seaport, and certainly no warm-water one. Relations with all-powerful Turkey were not good. The internal government of Russia was sometimes a disaster, especially in those districts far from St. Petersburg where a letter of instruction might take eight months for delivery and two years for a response to reach the capital if the recipient was desultory in conforming and replying. The road system was deplorable in all parts save a fairly reliable route between the two major cities, and

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in the far east, nobody in power ever seemed to know what was going on.

So, important though furs were, and much of Russia's wealth came from the brave men who trapped in the Siberian wilderness, the providential discovery that the waters off the Chukchi lands would provide a fur as resplendent as that of the sea otter was no cause for immediate action. Peter the Great had learned, more from his experiences in Europe than from what he saw in Russia, that in the far east his nation faced two potential dangers: China and whatever European nation ultimately controlled the west coast of North America. He already knew that Spain, through her ancillary agent Mexico, had a strong foothold on the part of America facing the Pacific Ocean and that her power extended unchallenged all the way down to Cape Horn. By his constant study of maps then available, and they were becoming more complete each year, Peter saw that if Spain attempted to project her power northward, as she probably would, she must ultimately come into conflict with Russian interests. He was therefore much concerned about Spanish behavior.

But with that intuition which so often assists great men, especially those responsible for the governance of homelands, he anticipated that other nations more powerful today than Spain might also extend their power to the Pacific coast of North America, and he saw that if either France or England, each with a foothold on the Atlantic, were to do so, he might one day be faced with pressure from such a country applying it in Europe on his western borders and in America on his eastern.

Peter loved ships, had sailed in them and believed that had his life developed differently, he might have made a fine sea captain. As a consequence, he was fascinated by the capacity of ships to move freely over the waters of the world. He was close to completing his grand design of making Russia a sea power in Europe, and his empire had derived so much advantage from this new posture that he was considering building a fleet in Siberia if conditions warranted. But first he had to know what those conditions were.

Accordingly, he spent much time planning a vast enterprise which would place a Russian ship of stout construction in the seas off Siberia with a commission to explore the area, not for any specific item of information but for the kind of general knowledge on which the leader of an empire could rely when making prudent decisions. Concerning the vital question of whether his Siberia touched North America, his mind was made up: it did not. But he did have considerable mercantile interests in the area. He already conducted prof—

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itable trade with China overland, but he wanted to know whether he could do better by sea. And he was most eager to trade with Japan on any terms, for the few goods which reached Europe from that mysterious land were of such high quality that they excited him as they did others. Above all, he wanted to know what Spain, England and France were doing in this important ocean and be able to estimate what they were capable of doing. Eighty years later the American president Thomas Jefferson, a man much like Peter, would want to know the same things about his newly acquired western possessions along the Pacific.

When his ideas were in a yeasty froth with no firm structure often the precedent to man's most constructive thinking he sent for this cossack he had come to trust, this rough, unlettered man who seemed to know more about Siberia than most of the more learned officials he had sent there to govern, and after preliminary sparring to satisfy himself as to Zhdanko's energy and continued interest, he reached a favorable conclusion: ”Trofim, you're twenty-two, great age to be. A man's approaching his apex then. By God, I wish I were twenty-two again.' Motioning Zhdanko to join him on a bench, he continued: 'I have in mind to send you back to Yakutsk. Beyond, maybe.

Perhaps all the way to Kamchatka.'

'Place me under a better governor this time, Sire.'

'You'd not be under a governor.'

'Sire, what could I do on my own? I can't read or write.'

'You'd not be on your own.'

The cossack rose, walked about, and said: 'I don't understand,' and Peter said: 'You'd be on a ship. Under the command of the best sailor we could find.' Before Trofim could show his astonishment, Peter became all excitement, waving his hands about and talking louder each minute: 'You'd go to Tobolsk and pick up some carpenters, to Yeniseysk and get some men knowledgeable about tar, then on to Yakutsk, where you already know everyone and can advise what men to take to Okhotsk, where you will build your ship. A big one. I'll give you the plans.'

'Sire!' Zhdanko interrupted. 'I cannot read.'

'You shall learn, starting this day, and as you learn you will tell no one why you are learning.' Now Peter rose and stalked about the room with his arm linked in Trofim's.

'I want you to take a job at the docks. Where we're building ships . . .'

'I don't know much about timber.'

'You're not expected to bother about timber. You're to listen, to judge, to compare, to serve as my eyes and ears.'

'For what?'

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'To advise me as to who the best man is down there. Who really knows ships. Who can handle men. Above all, Zhdanko, who is as brave as you proved to be.'