Alaska (62 page)

Aleut women who had worked as servants of Russian families transferred their duties to the barracks where the soldiers were billeted, and before the week was out three cases of the ugliest kind of rape were reported. When nothing was done to discipline the men, they went outside the palisade and raped two Tlingit women, whose husbands promptly killed a soldier in retaliation, but he was not one of the rapists.

This particular case was resolved by paying the aggrieved husbands twenty-five American dollars each and sending the mother of the dead soldier a medal and the news that her son had died bravely in action against the enemy.

But now the violence extended to Russian families, who began locking and barring their doors, and two of the men complained bitterly to General Davis, but nothing happened. However, Voronov assured his wife: 'This madness will stop.'

It didn't. When a gang of drunken soldiers staggered down to a nearby village and assaulted three women, the Tlingits retaliated with a series of hammering counterblows, which General Davis interpreted as a dangerous insurrection against American rule.

Dispatching a gunboat to the offend-379

ing village, he ordered the place to be chastised; it was totally destroyed, with heavy loss of Tlingit life.

This resulted in the rupture of contact between the occupation force and the Tlingits, which meant that little fresh food made its way into the town. Tempers ran high, and one afternoon as Praskovia returned from a visit with distraught Russian neighbors she saw something which sent her screaming for her husband.

When the Voronovs and the Luzhins reached the front door of their cathedral they saw that in the sanctuary, at the iconostasis and throughout the main body of the cathedral everything breakable had been smashed, paint was smeared over the walls, and the pulpit was destroyed. The cathedral was a wreck; it would take thousands of rubles to restore it, and even at that cost the icons hallowed by time could not be replaced. When General Davis was informed of the sacrilege, he shrugged his shoulders and absolved his men of any blame: 'No doubt some angry Tlingits sneaked in when we weren't looking.'

That night those Russians with administrative or mercantile experience met at the Voronovs' to discuss what could be done to protect their rights and perhaps their lives, and the consensus was that since General Davis would not assume responsibility for his troops, the only practical thing to do was to appeal to the captain of the first foreign ship putting into Sitka, and Arkady volunteered for the assignment.

It was a French ship and the captain was a man well versed in maritime tradition.

After listening to Voronov's recitation of complaints, he fumed: 'No self-respecting general allows his troops to rape,' and he marched directly to the castle and made a formal protest. Davis was outraged at this interference, and his assistant, who took note of Voronov's name in the Frenchman's recitation, warned the Frenchman that if there was any further intervention from him, 'the cannon up here will know what to do.'

That night, perhaps by accident, perhaps by design, three soldiers went to Voronov's house while he was known to be absent at a protest meeting, and tried to rape Praskovia, who fought them off vigorously and ran from the house screaming for help. Before she could make good her escape, one of the men grabbed her, dragged her back into the house, and started stripping off her clothes.

Neighbors alerted Voronov, who came running home in time to find his wife practically naked in their bedroom, fighting and scratching and gouging at the three men, who were laughing maniacally. When they saw that three big Russians were crowding in behind the enraged husband, they 380

beat a planned retreat through a back window, smashing it and as much kitchenware as they could

The other Russians wanted to chase the soldiers, but Voronov would not allow this Instead, he gathered his wife's clothes, helped her dress, and then hurriedly packed everything that could be crammed into three bags In the dark of night he led Praskovia, the Luzhins and their children down to the shore, where he signaled the French ship, in vain Throwing off his shoes and jacket, he entered the cold water and swam out, shouting as he approached the ship 'Captain Rulon, we seek asylum1'

In the darkness the Voronovs and Luzhins fled Sitka 381

GIANTS IN CHAOS

American maladministration had a devastating effect on Sitka, for its lovely port, which had been the site of more than two hundred visits a year by ships of all nations, saw arrivals drop to nineteen stragglers with little to offer in trade and less money with which to purchase local goods.

The population of the town, once among the finest in North America, dropped from more than two thousand to less than three hundred, and with its skilled work force gone to Russia, Sitka saw its Custom House receipts decline from more than $100,000

a year in the heyday of Russian control to $21,000 under the Americans and then to a shocking $449.28.

And year by year, the leaders of the Tlingits, watching this debacle, grew bolder, moving out of the fastnesses to which they had retreated under Russian pressure, edging always closer to where the protective palisade had once stood but stood no more. Sitka was in terrible trouble.

But the lack of government had an even more destructive impact on the other parts of Alaska, as a chain of incidents will demonstrate.

WHEN THE CONSORTIUM OF LANDBOUND WEALTHY NEW Bedford owners learned that their Captain Schransky wanted to christen their new brig the Erebus, they complained that

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this name, which bespoke underworld and hell, was improper for a whaler owned by God-fearing Christians. He told them sharply: 'It could bear no name more appropriate, for it will be sailing into the white hell of the arctic ice and snow,' but when he wanted to paint the ship a solid, funereal black, they demurred: 'Our forefathers sometimes gave their lives defending New England ships against pirates, and we will not have one of our ships sailing under that fearful color.'

When Captain Emil Schransky, six feet four inches tall, with Nordic white hair and heavy beard, insisted that black was the color he wanted' If it's to be a hell ship, which it has to be to make money in these waters, let it have a proper hell color a compromise was reached: it was painted a blue so dark and snarling that from a distance it appeared black, and it was under this fearful color that the Erebus

sailed south for dreaded Cape Horn, whose passage would throw her into the broad Pacific. There she would chase the bowhead whale into the Bering Sea, with yearlong expeditions against the fur seals of the Pribilof Islands and the walrus of the Chukchi Sea. Oil taken from the whales would be delivered to Hawaii; sealskins and walrus tusks would be sold in China, and in between such commercial forays the Erebus

would prowl the Pacific, seeking any cargo of opportunity. The ominous dark ship commanded by the formidable captain with the white hair and beard never engaged in outright piracy, but Schransky would be prepared to do so should a likely opportunity safe from detection present itself.

He was forty-five years old when he assumed command of the Erebus, a huge man in every way. Born in Germany of Prussian-Russian parentage, he had been thrown out of his turbulent home at the age of eleven and had promptly shipped aboard a world-trader out of Hamburg. Educated in the cruel academy before the mast, he had been at the age of fourteen a bare-knuckle brawler, willing to take on and sometimes seeking out cabin boys four and five years older than himself. He was a gouger, a knee-er, an arm-wrencher and a terror who, after he reached his full height at twenty-two, rarely had to use his fists. He was not averse to doing so, but he was just as pleased to lean heavily upon some minor troublemaker and slowly muscle him away from the scene of trouble, saving his punishing fists for real enemies whom he felt he must destroy before they destroyed him.

Enraged, he could become a terrible foe, two hundred and forty-eight pounds of incarnate fury, all windmill arms and kicking feet and great white beard snapping in the breeze as he came roaring at whoever had in some way infuriated him. At such moments he struck for the kill, and although he had 383

not yet actually slain an American sailor with his fists, two who had shipped with him, one from Maine, one from Maryland, had never recovered from the terrible beatings he gave them. The Maine man died five months later in Lahaina; the Marylander lived along the Santiago waterfront, his brains addled and his left arm useless. Others, less severely punished, recovered, with arms slightly atwist from the breakings or teeth missing in front.

He was a massive man with massive powers and massive enthusiasms, but it was his driving compulsions that made him something more than just another German-Russian sailor with gargantuan appetites. Any ship he stepped upon as captain was his ship, and the financial owners were not welcome aboard; it would be unthinkable for any of them to accompany him on a voyage, or even part of one. He sailed to make money, and he possessed an uncanny faculty for smelling out where it was going to be found.

(He had once made a small fortune in sandalwood which other captains had bypassed.) And he despised all governing bodies, all restraints and rules. He kept his ships away from their home ports for four and five years because by doing so he could avoid interference from the owners, and as soon as he rounded the Horn, for he avoided the Cape of Good Hope, calling it 'the route home for milksops,' he seemed to breathe more easily, taking deep drafts of the salt air of the Pacific, which he sometimes referred to as 'the Ocean of Freedom,' for he was able to negotiate from Chile to China without surveillance from local policing agencies.

But it was when he penetrated the Aleutians and broke out into the Bering Sea that he began to operate with that abandon which characterized his captaincy. Prior to 1867, when Alaska and its surrounding seas passed into American control, he had been a scourge of the Russian masters of the Bering, for he had scorned their attempts to keep him away from the Pribilofs, where he would sweep in unexpectedly to harvest a whole shipload of forbidden sealskins. He also liked to rampage along the Siberian coast north of Petropavlovsk, trading with natives whom the Russians themselves were afraid to approach, or come storming down the western coast of Alaska in chase of bowhead whales, which he seemed able to catch when even the local Eskimos could not.

He-sometimes spent an entire year in and out of the Bering Sea, harvesting its riches and keeping them semifrozen until he decided to make port at Lahaina or Canton.

He kept honest books, and frequently sent huge amounts of money home to his New Bedford owners by way of some returning ship against which he had been competing for 384

years, and when the time came for him to head back for New England, ship captains came to him, begging him to transport their profits, for he was known to be trustworthy.

'He's his own law,' a Boston captain said with great force, remembering his own contests with Schransky, 'and he's destruction to his enemies, but there's nobody I'd trust with my cargo or my cash sooner than Captain Emil.'

The Russians before 1867 and the American authorities thereafter did not hold Schransky in this high regard; to them he was a predator, a scoffer at rules, a thief in the night, a pirate where seals were concerned, and the scourge of the Bering. He seemed ordained by some evil power to prowl the arctic, for he had a sixth sense of when he must flee these unforgiving waters before ice grabbed his vessel, immobilizing it for eight or nine months, and whereas incautious captains were sometimes trapped for the winter, he never was. No better description of him was ever given than the admiring one offered by an Eskimo at Desolation Point as he watched the Erebus

slip out of that northern anchorage just before the arrival of the ice pack: 'Cap'n Schransky, he's a polar bear in a black coat. The ice whispers to him ”I'm comin',”and out he goes.'

In this harsh world he might have been considered an ideal captain, except for three ugly flaws which estranged him from other rough-and-ready types. He was known as a niggardly captain who kept his crew on meager rations while afloat and then encouraged them to gorge themselves at their own expense when they hit some Hawaiian port. However, his sailors put up with his penury because when the time came to split profits with his crew he was generous.

His second flaw was that he was contemptuous of the great sea animals on which his prosperity depended. He hunted them callously, sometimes wounding and losing through drowning two whales or walruses for every one he hauled up to his ship. If a mate protested this arrogant waste of animal life, he growled: 'The seas are endless.

There'll never be a lack of whales or anything else,' and during the long hunting season of 1873 he put this philosophy in practice in several gruesome ways.

When the Erebus

sailed through the protective arc of the Aleutians, always a magnificent moment, it was in the Bering Sea only two days when one of the men sighted a pod of nine magnificent bowhead whales, great slow-moving creatures making their way north to the colder seas they loved. In the old days, some hundred thousand of these noble animals had threaded through the northern seas; now there were less than 385

ten thousand, and Captain Schransky's abusive manner of hunting them helped explain why.

'On the starboard beam!' he shouted to the mate at the wheel, and when the Erebus swung around to head off the whales, some of them forty feet long and weighing forty tons, the boats were launched and three teams of rowers and harpooners started in pursuit of the placid beasts, who were unaware of the dangers into which they were heading.

The hunters of the Erebus

had two enormous advantages. The long harpoons they used had in their sharply pointed heads toggles which fitted snugly against the shaft as the harpoon stabbed into the flank of the whale, then sprang open to form a T inside the whale's body so long and strong that the whale could never dislodge it; and to the other end of the harpoon were fastened big inflated seal bladders which prevented the stricken whale from either diving or swimming rapidly ahead. Once a whale had four or five Erebus

harpoons in it, with trailing bladders, it was doomed.

But if it managed to swim too far from the ship, Captain Schransky let it go; he did not pursue endlessly: 'It's gone! Get that next one!' So in this attack on the nine whales of the pod, his men killed three, but only one of them was captured for its oil and baleen; the other two wandered off to perish at a distance. However, that one proved a bonanza, for it rendered many casks of oil and, even better, immensely long strips of baleen, the bonelike substance that enabled the whale to filter out the plankton from the huge amounts of seawater it passed through its gaping mouth.

'Get all the baleen!' Schransky shouted as his men worked the whale, for he knew that in the fashion shops of Paris and London this whalebone, as it was called, was essential. He could afford to let the two stricken whales escape, for this one catch would bring him more than seven thousand dollars.

His hunting of the walrus was equally brutal: three huge beasts shot with rifles, only two and sometimes one retrieved for their ivory. But it was his treatment of the fur-bearing seal that was most ruthless. Evading American patrols with the same clever tricks that had fooled the Russians, he slipped into the Pribilof Islands, that remarkable pair to which most of the world's seals came to have their young.

Watching for an opportunity, he landed swiftly on Saint Paul, the northernmost island, where his men armed with clubs rampaged among the defenseless seals, beating them over the head and crushing their skulls. It was not difficult work, because perhaps six hundred thousand seals clustered on this island, a slightly lesser number on southerly Saint George, so

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the killing could continue as long as the men's arms could wield their bloodied clubs.

In the time of the Russians, when perhaps two million seals had come to the Pribilofs, they appreciated the fact that they had an almost inexhaustible treasury here and policed the harvest so that the immense herd was sure to be replenished, but when avaricious men like Schransky were not restrained, the seals on the Pribilofs were threatened with extinction.

However, the real slaughter, the one that all the maritime nations of the world opposed and strove to abolish, was pelagic sealing, the kind that Schransky particularly enjoyed and from which he profited enormously. Pelagic hunting, derived from the Greek word

pelagos meaning sea, as in archipelago, consisted of chasing down the seals, most of them gravid females, when they were in the open sea totally defenseless, slaughtering them with ease, and ripping from their wombs the partly formed young whose skins had a special appeal in China. It was an operation that sickened many sailors forced to engage in it, but it was remunerative, and if a captain had no conscience and a ship fast enough to elude Russian or British or American patrol boats, a tidy sum could be made from pelagic campaigns.

Captain Schransky was known as 'the King of the Pelagic Sealers,' and this year he was determined to sail into Canton with his holds full of choice pelts, so he kept two lookouts forward to spot, if possible, the areas in which the oncoming seals might show, and when one of the men shouted *Seals, five on the port bow!' he sped the

Erebus

toward that spot, and when the boats were launched, the men rowed in among the defenseless seals and started stabbing and beating them to death. Since seals could not stay submerged indefinitely, and since a boat with four strong rowers could overtake them when they had to surface for air, the slaughter was concentrated and endless.

Especially vulnerable were the pregnant females; their mortality was above ninety percent in any area that the boats reached, and in time the Bering Sea was reddened with their blood. But again, a shocking eighty percent of all seals killed were not retrieved; they sank fruitlessly to the bottom of the sea as the Erebus

signaled for its boats to return so that it could proceed on its way to China and the riches that awaited it there.

Captain Schransky's third flaw was the most serious, for its evil consequences would survive long after he departed these waters. Abstemious himself and allowing no drunkenness aboard his ship, he early discovered the enormous profits that could be made by filling his hold in New Bedford with 387