Alaska (67 page)

Our Eskimos would live like kings.'

From Cape Prince of Wales he drifted down to the mouth of the Yukon River, where he dispatched two ship's boats to . go upriver thirty miles, dispensing medicines and news, and when he heard about life along the great river he said: 'I'd like to go up it about a thousand miles.'

He was now back in the Bering Sea, and with a long sweep toward the west he came to the north coast of big St. Lawrence Island, and when he anchored off the easternmost settlement of Sevak he expected to be greeted by many canoes, for the Corwin

was known to these natives, but in the entire village there was no sign of life.

He was in the prow of the first boat ashore, and what he found at first perplexed him and then aroused a bitterness beyond expression, for every single person in Sevak was dead.

As they walked about the village, trying to find out what had happened, one of the sailors pointed out that there were no seal bones lying about, no walrus or whale: 'They had nothing to eat, sir. They died of starvation. But why . . . ?'

The mystery was not solved at Sevak, or even at big Kookoolik, where many natives had lived; all there, too, were dead, and again there were no seal or walrus bones, but there were clear signs of kegs in which rum had been delivered and molasses distilled.

But it was not until the

Corwin

reached Chibukak that the solution was found, for there a pair of natives from the village of Powooiliak on the southern coast, the one that Captain Schransky had wanted to visit but could

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not because of the storm, had come to prospect among the ruins, and they said: 'Much rum. Much molasses. All July, August dancing, lovemaking along the shore. No men in umiaks chasing whales. At end they come to us, begging food. We have none to share.

They all d
ie.
'

'Who did this?' Healy fairly bellowed, standing amid desiccated corpses.

'Big dark ship, captain very big, white hair. He taught them molasses, took all their ivory.'

Healy did not ask his men to bury the corpses; there were too many. The major part of an island population had been wiped out, and the man responsible appeared to be outside the law, an empire to himself, bounded by the North Pole and Tahiti, by Lahaina in Hawaii and Canton in China. Now his apprehension became more obligatory than ever, for he was the defiler of a society.

But Healy in the Corwin was no match for Schransky in the Erebus, and when toward the finish of this year's tour of his domain, Healy saw the Erebus off to the west still shooting seals in midocean, he ignored the difference between their two ships and bore down upon him as if he would ram the poacher, but Schransky easily avoided him, moved off to the west, and told his first mate: 'The Erebus will never be disciplined by a goddamned nigger.'

CAPTAIN MICHAEL HEALY, LORD PROTECTOR OF THE Arctic Seas, was an American Negro.

As a young man striving to make his way in the customs hierarchy, he had learned to wear a hat that covered his dark forehead and a large mustache that obscured the blackness about his mouth, so that many people knew him for some time before they realized he was a black man.

His father, Michael Morris Healy, was a tough-minded Irish plantation owner in Georgia who took as his wife a marvelous slave woman named Elisa. Together they had ten children of such extraordinary grace and promise that Healy said: 'It would be a crime to have children like ours grow up to be slaves,' which would have been the legal situation had they grown to adulthood in Georgia. Therefore, with tremendous personal effort Healy and his wife accomplished the impossible: they spirited their ten children out of Georgia, enrolled them in cooperating Quaker and Catholic schools in the North, and watched them develop into what was probably the outstanding group of black siblings in American history.

Four of the boys made historic names for themselves: one became a leading bishop of the Catholic church; another 411

became a respected doctor of canon law; Patrick, the third son, early showed the unusual academic talents that carried him to the presidency of Georgetown University, and he was for some twenty years, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, one of America's leading and most respected educators; and the fourth son, Mike, ran away from school, went to sea, and became in time one of the most honored captains in the Treasury's revenue cutter service.

Three of the girls became nuns, one ending her career as Mother Superior in a major convent. It is interesting to speculate on where these extraordinary black children acquired their unusual talents, which were recognized by so many white people in so many diverse areas of performance. Certainly, from the courageous behavior of their father they could have inherited the strong character they manifested, but there seems little in this Irishman's background which would account for their intellectual preeminence, and one can speculate that perhaps this sprang from the remarkable slave girl Elisa. At any rate, they formed in these years one of the most distinguished groups of brothers and sisters in America, matched perhaps by a comparable group from the Adams family of Massachusetts, but one must remember that the Adams children enjoyed every advantage from childhood on and suffered from no fear of being stigmatized as slaves. The contribution the ten Healys made to America was incomparable, but none of the other children attained the headline prominence of Mike.

His feats in the northern seas became legendary, and newspapers reveled in writing about his heroics. Did a group of careless whalers tarry too long off Desolation Point and become icebound, with starvation threatening? Mike Healy in one of his frail cutters would speed through ice floes that would have crushed an ordinary ship six times over and miraculously find open tracks leading him to the stranded sailors.

Did tragedy strike in some remote village on the Siberian coast? Mike Healy dauntlessly arrived on the scene to save the Russians. Did a whaler sink during a storm in the Bering Sea? Who rescued the castaways six months later but Mike Healy, who chanced to stop at their unpopulated Aleutian island on a hunch. And whomever he rescued, no matter in what lost corner of the arctic, that person could be relied upon to sing his praises when returning to civilization.

His popularity extended across the nation, and one Canadian in a small western town when asked who the President of the United States was, said without hesitation: 'Mike Healy. He runs everything.'

But knowledgeable maritime people were not fooled by the 412

adulation he received from the unwitting public; they were aware that frustration gnawed at him because he proved powerless to drive Emil Schransky from the seas which Healy had taken under his protection. Whenever men who knew the oceans gathered, they marveled at the impunity with which the German captain acted in the seal islands, the way he operated at will in the pelagic-sealing areas, and his flagrant abuse of alcohol and rum and molasses in devastating native villages. Not even the disaster on St. Lawrence Island, which by now was well known among seamen, deterred Schransky from repeating his performance elsewhere, and then running to Hawaii or China with his corrupt bounty. He was a thorn in Mike Healy's side, and the excuse was always given by Mike's apologists: 'If only he had a ship as good as Schransky's, the duel would be even. As it is, he has no chance.' And because of this imbalance, the image of the huge captain with the white mass of hair and beard continued to haunt the former slave from Georgia.

BUT HELP WAS FORTHCOMING, THROUGH A ROUTE SO INtricate that no one could have planned it. Dundee, on the east coast of Scotland, was not a major shipbuilding city by any means, but in 1873 a shipyard there, with a reputation for constructing unusual crafts to specification, received an order to build a ship stout enough to withstand the ice fields off Labrador and Greenland, and as a result, in 1874 a stubby, rugged vessel was launched which would, when it finally sank eighty-nine violent years later, be remembered as one of the great small ships of history. It was christened the Bear,

198 feet 6 inches stem to stern, 29 feet 9 inches beam, 18 feet 8 inches draft, 1,700

tons displacement. Its construction was an eclectic marvel: hull of Baltic oak, ribs of a heavier Scottish oak, decks of Burma teakwood, prow and sides sheathed with Australian ironwood, bottom of American yellow pine, iron fittings cast in Sweden and the navigation instruments assembled from seven different European and North American maritime nations.

The Bear

was a three-master rigged as a barkentinebig square sails on the foremast, deft little fore-and-aft sails on the main and mizzen masts but what made it look like the awkward little powerhouse it proved to be was a fullfledged steam engine forward of the mainmast served by a huge, squat smokestack at midships. When it was delivered to its future owners for work in the North American ice field, its builders promised: 'Square sails will give you drive, fore-andafts maneuvering quickness, and the engine the ability to

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plow through ice. But the real secret? Look at that prow!' It was treble thick, fortified by oak and ironwood, and capable, said the proud marine architects who devised it, 'of breaking its way through any ice it faces.'

At that moment, at the beginning of the Bear's life at sea, it was thought that the ship would serve some routine purpose, but later, when it was dragooned into a rescue operation, it achieved fame on front pages across the world: the American arctic explorer Adolphus Greely had gone bravely into the northern waters of the Atlantic, lost his ship in a crushing ice pack and nineteen of his men in the ensuing attempt to walk back to civilization. All rescue efforts by normal ships having failed, the Bear

was purchased by the American government for the huge price of a hundred thousand dollars and hurried to the supposed scene of the disaster.

Now an entirely different kind of ship was in the arctic, and its double-stout construction enabled it to break, its way through ice fields that no other could have penetrated and, to great acclaim, to rescue Greely and six other survivors. In the aftermath, while the world was applauding this extraordinary ship, someone had the clever idea of transferring it to the revenue cutter service in Alaska, where it would be most useful.

Around the Horn it went in November 1885, arriving in San Francisco after only eighty-seven days at sea. By chance, when the Bear docked, Captain Mike Healy was available for a new command, and without much forethought he was given this well-regarded ship which already had a reputation as exalted as his own. It was a remarkable wedding of man and machine, for when he moved his gear into the captain's quarters and arranged a perch for his parrot and a hiding place for his booze, he said: 'This is home,' but it was only when he saw that amazing prow with its fantastic thickness of ironwood that he dared reissue his earlier oath: 'Now we drive that bastard from the seas.'

In 1886, Healy took his new command north, all the way to icebound Barrow at the tip of the continent, where he muscled his way through floes that no ordinary vessel would even have attempted, and luck was already sailing with him, for he rescued three groups of sailors whose ships had been crushed by the ice. When he delivered them back to San Francisco they spent half their praise on Healy, half on the Bear,

and thus the legend of the ship was augmented: 'It can go anywhere. It'll save a thousand lives up there. And with Healy in command, the seas will be safe.'

In going to and from Barrow, the Bear passed in sight of 414

St. Lawrence Island, and the memory of those three dead villages tormented Mike Healy's soul, and it infuriated him to think that the Erebus was still prowling these waters and breaking all laws with impunity. Time and again he would cast anchor off some village on the Alaskan coastline, only to find that the

Erebus

had already been there with its cargo of rum and molasses for which it had obtained two or three years' supply of ivory and pelts.

Powerless to punish the marauder or even catch him, he had to sail disconsolately back to San Francisco and report that 'the brig Erebus, Captain Schransky, out of New Bedford, has been selling rum to the natives and engaging in pelagic sealing and poaching the rookeries, but an attentive patrol failed to apprehend him.' Even with his more powerful ship, the Negro Healy could not catch the Nordic Schransky.

BUT WHEN A GIANT ENGAGES IN VALIANT BATTLE, AND

Mike Healy was a giant, he is often joined by another eager to lend support, and together the two, who might have been strangers six months earlier, achieve miracles.

Such a second giant was approaching Alaska from the hilly region around Dead horse, Montana, on a wintry afternoon in February.

Sheldon Jackson was that amazing man. Even though he had been warned in the last settlement that a blizzard might be brewing, he was traveling alone. Forty-three years old, he had a complete beard and heavy mustache to make his little face look more dignified, a matter which concerned him deeply, for he wished always to impress strangers favorably despite his diminutive stature. His exact height would always be a matter of debate, for his detractors, a numerous band, claimed that he was under five feet, which was preposterous; he referred to himself as five four, which was equally absurd; because he favored built-up shoes, he looked to be about five two.

But whatever his height, he often looked a dwarf among men markedly taller than he.

Now he plowed ahead through the snow that was beginning to drift, but he had no worry about his ability to make his destination before dark. God wants me to get there, he assured himself, and this was more than enough to fuel his energy, for he was a missionary of the Presbyterian church, absolutely convinced that God intended him for some great work and increasingly suspicious that it might be outside America that he would perform his miracles of conversion. Therefore, when he came to the top of a small hill from which he had been certain, as he climbed it, that he would see the town of Deadhorse, population 381, and found before him no 415