Alaska (66 page)

Later, an able, quiet-spoken Commander Beardslee reached Sitka in the Jamestown, whose afterdeck became the capital of Alaska, with Beardslee issuing orders regarding things about which he knew little. Fortunately, he had the advice of Lawyer Caldwell, and many of the good rules the latter had sought were promulgated by Beardslee, who installed Caldwell as a kind of judge in an informal court.

It was not a good system of government and both men knew it, but it was the only one available, so for two years 404

these well-intentioned men more or less ran Alaska, but neither believed such a system could prevail. 'It's a disgrace,' Beardslee growled one day when something had gone wrong, and Judge Caldwell agreed. But they did not take themselves too seriously, because at this time Sitka contained only one hundred and sixty whites and Creoles, plus about a hundred Indians, and all of Alaska had only thirty-three thousand people, counting everybody.

THE IMPLACABLE COURSE OF HISTORY AND THE NATURE

OF the human beings who enable it to evolve make it impossible for a condition like that of Alaska in the post-1867 period to continue. Either revolution churns the chaos, as the uprising of the Tlingits nearly did, or some alien power steps in, as Canada might have done, or some giant like Abraham Lincoln or Otto von Bismarck steps forward to take command and reshape things sensibly. Alaska in these crucial times was blessed in having two giants of dissimilar character come to its shores and assume responsibility; between them they brought a semblance of government to an abandoned region.

The first of these men was an irascible dark-browed mariner with the good Irish name Michael Healy, who had a foul vocabulary, an insatiable craving for strong drink and an inherited willingness to use his fists. A hulking six feet two with a temper he could not control, he was hardly the kind of man one would expect to evolve into a respected leader, but that's what happened in the frozen seas of the north. Born in Georgia, he hated the cold, but of all the American seafarers of his time, he better than any other mastered the arctic seas and tamed the wild coasts of Siberia and Alaska.

He had been a junior officer during that humiliating experience in 1876 when the inadequate revenue cutter Rush tried to discipline the semipiratical Erebus for illegal sealing, and he would never forget the oath he took as he watched the insolent white-haired captain of that ship glide away with an insulting grin. 'I'll get that bastard,' Healy swore, and the rest of what he vowed to do with the German when he caught him would be unprintable. He was so infuriated that an American vessel, a warship really, had been demeaned that he retired to his quarters, sneaked out his smuggled liquor, and got drunk. Late at night, when he sobered a bit, he promised the tame parrot he kept with him on his cruises: 'By the saints, we'll get that cocksure bastard. Somewhere when the ice is thick and he can't run from us . . .' and his dark right fist punched at air.

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On duty in the little revenue cutters, Lieutenant Healy, Commander Healy and, finally, Captain Healy gained increasing praise from his superiors and repeated humiliation from the

Erebus,

but he did not lose these near-battles through incompetent seamanship or any lack of courage, but only because he sailed an inferior ship. Once while in charge of the

Corwin, the better of the two revenue cutters, he caught the Erebus engaged in illegal sealing at the Pribilofs: 'We have him, men! Hard to!' But almost as if aided by divine winds, the big indigo ship unfurled its square sails and ran right away from the cutter. Pursuit was impossible, and the government ship had to limp off to other duties as Captain Schransky, standing on the bridge of his sleek vessel, laughed once more at Healy's frustration.

If the profane and hard-drinking Irishman failed repeatedly in his attempts to discipline the dark rogue ship, what did he accomplish on his tours of duty through the northern oceans? To find the answer, one must accompany him on one trip made in the late 1870s.

In early spring, in command of the Corwin,

he sailed out of San Francisco with a full crew and considerable implied powers, for he was the major American representative in Alaska and the surrounding waters.

Putting in to Sitka on the way north, he listened to local complaints and summoned to his afterdeck scoundrelly men accused of selling hooch to Indians; these he fined, making careful duplicate copies of receipts showing his handling of the money involved.

From there, following the reverse of the historical course which had brought Aleksandr Baranov to immortality at Sitka, he crossed an arm of the Pacific that carried him to Kodiak, where a deputation of old-time Aleuts and newcomer Americans awaited his decision on a fishing-rights controversy which had embittered the two groups. Moving ashore this time, but taking a ship's scribe with him, he listened patiently as the contesting parties made their presentations, then surprised everyone by announcing: 'Let's think about this carefully,' and he invited the entire party back onto the ship, where a feast from the Corwin's supplies was provided. There was no public drinking, of course, since a major responsibility of the Corwin

or any other cutter was to end the illegal sale of alcohol to natives, but he did slip into his cabin for a healthy nip from the bottles he carried hidden there. At the conclusion of the feast he took the leaders of the two factions, some seven men, to the railings of the cutter and said: 'You Aleuts have ancient rights which must be respected. But you newcomers have rights too. Would it not be sensible if you shared the ocean in this way?' And when he handed down a 406

verdict worthy of a judge, the combatants accepted it, for on Kodiak as elsewhere in these waters it was understood that 'the word of Cap'n Mike is as good as we'll ever get.'

From Kodiak he sailed westward to the Aleutians proper, putting in at Unalaska, where he learned from six daring shipwrecked sailors, who had made it through great hardship to that haven, that twenty of their mates were still marooned on the north coast of the big Unimak Island to the east. Diverting his cruise to that bleak island, he rescued the men, sailed back to Unalaska, and paid with government funds for the forwarding of all twenty-six sailors to Kodiak, where they would transship to San Francisco.

From Unalaska he sailed across the Bering Sea for he always chose this in preference to the Pacific Ocean, since that sea was in a certain sense his body of water to one of his favorite towns, Petropavlovsk, at the southern end of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

In this beautiful land-protected harbor he met with old friends, learned from them what had been happening along the Siberian coast and where tribal wars were brewing.

Since Russian officials looked upon him as an arm of their marine police, the last nights ashore were riotous and drunken affairs, with Mike Healy being lugged back aboard the

Corwin in time for a dawn departure to the north.

His next stop, at Cape Navarin, far distant from Petropavlovsk, had great significance this year and would have even more for the years ahead. Heaving to off the forbidding coast, he fired a salute which brought ten or fifteen canoes speeding out to the Corwin,

where normally there would have been only a sullen silence. But Healy had raised the American flag, and now men and women who had some years before rescued sailors from an American shipwreck clambered up the sides of the Corwin

to greet these new Americans. When all were aboard, Healy lined them up as if they were dignitaries representing an alien potentate, then fired another salute and had his bugler blow assembly. In broken Russian, which only a few of the Siberians who spoke only Chukchi would have understood had it been perfect, Healy said with the visible emotion that possessed him at times of solemn significance: 'The Great Ruler in Washington always knows when someone of good spirit aids an American who is in danger. You and you and you went out into the sea to rescue our sailors from the doomed ship

Altoona,

and you kept them in your yurts for more than a year. You delivered them in good health to the rescue ship sent by the Russians, and the Great Ruler in Washington has told me to come here and thank you.'

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He then asked that members of the visiting party line up before him so that each could receive a gift of considerable valuea saw, a set of tools, enough cloth for three dresses, a parka, a set of kitchen pots, a ceremonial hat with feathers for the chief. On and on the gifts appeared, each one personally chosen by Captain Healy, each one delivered personally by his hands. When the presentations were over, he mumbled to his first mate: 'Next time an American ship gets wrecked along this coast, the sailors will have no fear.'

But the lasting outcome of this good-will visit came by accident, for the Siberians were so gratified by this gesture of appreciation that they insisted upon taking Captain Healy back onshore with them, and while there, his restless imagination forced him to ask: 'How can you live so well on land that is so poor?' and he poked his forefinger into the fat that covered these healthy people, and they explained: 'Reindeer,'

and they showed him how, at the edge of their village, they maintained pens made of wooden timbers, inside which clustered herds of reindeer, nine owned by one family, thirty to a group of families, perhaps sixty in a community-owned group.

'What do they eat?' and they pointed to a far hill where a shepherd boy tended a herd of free-roaming reindeer that grazed on the tundra moss, and he sent runners, one to replace the shepherd, one to bring him back to the village, and when the boy arrived Healy gave him the belt off his own trousers and said that the Great Ruler in Washington wanted him to have it for his brave behavior three years ago.

FROM CAPE NAVARIN HE PROCEEDED UP THE SIBERIAN coast past St. Lawrence Island and the Diomedes and into the Chukchi Sea, where he stopped at a lonely village whose residents had once traded with him, and they too had troubles which they placed before him, and in his dark-browed way he listened to words he did not begin to comprehend, but finally a sailor who knew some Russian found a Siberian who knew a little, and they pieced together what the problem was and what a reasonable solution would be.

Delivering this judgment, he resolved the matter for the time being at least, and one of his men said to him when they were back aboard the Corwin:

'The Russians at Petropavlovsk would be afraid to come up here and listen to a problem like that,' and he said with some truth: 'But this is my ocean. These are my people.'

He ran from Siberia across the Chukchi Sea to an anchorage he knew well, Desolation Point, where he learned with dismay and personal sorrow that a fine missionary, Father 408

Fyodor, had been murdered by a demented man who still roamed loose after all this time because there was no jail in which to incarcerate him. When he was caught and brought before Healy on the

Corwin,

only a few questions sufficed to show that the poor fellow was incompetent, so he was locked in the brig, which all the cutters had. Healy then went ashore to visit with Mrs. Afanasi and her two children, and he heard how Dmitri with his Russian gun had protected his mother against the crazy man, and Healy said: '1 have aboard ship a medal for a brave lad like you,' and when the ship was about to sail southward to its other duties, Dmitri was rowed out and Captain Healy rummaged through his pile of gifts and came up with a medal he had bought along the waterfront in San Francisco. It showed an eagle, and as he pinned it on the boy's tunic he said in his deep, solemn voice: 'This belongs to a real hero.'

His next stop on this particular trip was at forlorn Point Hope, where winds from the north were incessant and where his lookout spotted a group of white men huddling among sand dunes, and when small boats were sent to investigate, they discovered something so terrible that when Captain Healy, back aboard the Corwin,

was told of it, his face turned almost black as he thundered: 'I want no record of this. No entry in the log. We did not stop here,' but then impulsively he jumped down into the longboat, sped ashore and gathered the marooned men, treating them gently as if they were his children, and brought them to safety aboard his ship.

Then he fled to the sanctuary of his cabin, where his first mate found him caressing his parrot and mumbling: 'Who knows? Who knows?'

'We know damned well who knows,' the mate said in great anger. 'They're cannibals.

They ate the flesh of their own companions, and from what I can piece together, they probably killed some before they died naturally.'

'Who knows?' Healy mumbled, whereupon the mate grew bitter: 'I know, that's who knows.

Henderson knows. And so does Stallings. They're goddamned cannibals and we won't have them aboard this ship.'

Almost pathetically, Mike Healy looked up at his righteous mate and asked: 'Who knows what you and I would do? Who goddamned bloody knows?' And during the remainder of the trip, till the marooned sailors could be handed over to other authorities, they ate apart, ostracized by the other men, but Captain Healy sat with them to talk of how they had lost their whaler in the ice pack, and he listened attentively as they told of how the timbers strained and cracked and tore apart as the relentless ice continued its crushing advance.

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Before the next stop he summoned the first mate and said: 'I want to make an entry in the log. ”At Point Hope we rescued six sailors marooned when their whaler Cassiopeia out of New Bedford was lost in the ice.”'

'Is that all? No dates? No disposition?'

'That's all,' Healy roared, and when the entry was made he signed it.

He next put in at Cape Prince of Wales, a place which was to be of great importance to him in later years and of a determining influence now, for when he was rowed ashore he found a sizable group of Eskimos starving because the catch of seals and whales had been disastrous, and no other food was available. It was here, for the first time, that he said to his officers after they had fed the emaciated natives: 'How ridiculous? Over there in Cape Nnvarin the Eskimosthey must be the same people, you go back far enough they had rolls of fat, with no more food from the land than these people over here. What's the difference? They have reindeer . . .'It was then that his great idea was born: 'Why not bring a hundred, a thousand reindeer over here?