Alaska (71 page)

'I'm not perfect,' Healy said. 'And if you were perfect, you wouldn't have so many good people mad at you ... I mean, disgusted with you.'

'Drunkards, miners with no conscience, the riffraff of Sitka I welcome their enmity, Captain.'

'But I'm talking about the good people. Oh, I learned a lot about you in Seattle before I met you.'

'I was put on earth by God to do His will, and I must do it my own way.'

'I was put on earth by who knows? I was put here to sail a ship, and I do it my way.'

So these two imperfect men, each of whom would have enemies as long as he worked in Alaska, sailed southward with visions of what they hoped to accomplish: to Christianize the Eskimos, to bring order to the oceans, to transfer deer from Siberia to Alaska, to educate, to educate. On this last ideal they both agreed, as the dramatic events of their second trip together would prove.

They were only a few days out when Jackson, under the cold northern stars of October, asked: 'Captain, you never mentioned the Erebus before we reached St. Lawrence, but it eats at your soul, doesn't it?'

'It does.'

'Would you care to tell me about it?' and in a flood of profanity Healy told of his endless struggle with this renegade ship, of the cruel way it flouted the laws that were supposed to protect not only Eskimos but walruses and seals: 'He lurks out there in the spring, against the laws of all nations, and he waits for helpless female seals, pregnant, swimming north to give birth, and he guns them down with rifles and rips out the baby seals to sell the soft skins to China.'

'He should be destroyed,' Jackson said, and Healy told him: 'With this ship under me, I could destroy him,' and he retreated to his cabin, where he got drunk.

In the latter days of the trip Jackson remained on deck a good deal, a small man decked out in sealskin garments obtained in Siberia. When sailors asked him what he was doing, he gave evasive answers, for he was on a kind of fool's chase: he wanted to spot the

Erebus,

a ship he had never seen but which he already hated, and late one afternoon he did spy a black ship, or so it seemed, far to the west, and he ran to inform Captain Healy.

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'It's the bastard,' Healy cried. 'Look, you can see his white hair in the glass,'

and there, commanding his outlaw ship, stood Emil Schransky, who had spotted the Bear

long before the

Bear

had spotted him. He had heard that Captain Healy had a new cutter but he did not believe the tales told of it, and especially he scorned the man in charge of it: 'No damned nigger can out sail me!'

But at the moment when in the past he had unfurled his great black sails to play cat-and-mouse with the slow cutters that Healy had been using, he realized that he was facing a much different kind of ship. He saw the smokestack belching a black cloud, the oversize square sails opening to embrace the wind and, most frightening, that formidable prow double sheathed in oak and ironwood.

Too late he shouted: 'Prepare to run!' for even as his sailors insolently broke out the last bank of canvas they saw to their consternation that the Bear had outsmarted them, had turned on a sixpence to head directly at them.

'He's trying to ram us!' Schransky cried in unhidden fear, and he was right, for Mike Healy, this despised black captain, was about to smash his terrible prow right into the midships of the

Erebus.

'Hard aport!' Schransky bellowed to his steersman, and the man tried to turn the dark ship parallel to the course of the Bear so that the latter would glide harmlessly past, as in former duels.

But this time Healy possessed his old wiles plus a powerful new ship in which to perform them, and standing amidships with his parrot screeching on his shoulder, he gave precise orders to his helmsman, who whipped the Bear about to send her crashing thunderously into the splintering timbers of the Erebus.

Grinding on, propelled by the engine, the prow locked tight in the vital innards of its great dark enemy.

Quietly Mike Healy, the loser in so many previous encounters, gave commands which he had rehearsed: 'Gunners, stand ready to rake their decks! Sailors, board!' And an astonished Schransky, rendered impotent by this combination of a superior ship captained by a superior mariner, had to stand mute in a posture of surrender as Healy's victorious men swarmed aboard.

As Healy left the Bear to stride onto the Erebus, he saluted its captain, as the rules of the sea required, and then, with his revolver at the ready, he smiled coldly at Schransky and sent his men rampaging through the bowels of the captured ship. His many previous humiliations were handsomely avenged, and both he and Schransky knew it.

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His officers found the kegs loaded with rum and molasses; others came upon the holds filled with sealskins. 'All overboard!' Healy commanded, and Schransky's men had to watch in sullen silence as the heads of the kegs were bashed in and the contents poured into the scuppers. Up came the illegal sealskins, worth a fortune in Canton, and into the dark Bering Sea they went.

It was only at this point that Sheldon Jackson felt free to leave the Bear and step onto the Erebus,

and when Captain Schransky saw him in his preposterous sealskin uniform he thundered: 'And who in hell is he?' and Healy replied: 'The man who brought us here, the one who spotted you first.'

'Throw him overboard too,' Schransky growled, but now Healy delivered his ultimatum: 'Look at my ship, Schransky. Study that prow which cut right through you, that engine.

There's a new day in Alaska, Schransky. If I ever see you in the Bering Sea again, I'm going to overtake you and ram you and send you to the bottom, with all hands.'

As he stood there in the growing darkness, preparing to give the orders that would retract the Bear from the gaping hole in the Erebus, he was two inches shorter than the German, many shades darker, but he spoke with an authority that had come late in his life and after many defeats, but at long last he was in command of the Bering Sea, and he was determined to remain so. When he returned to his own ship he left Jackson behind on the Erebus,

and there were many things about which the little missionary wanted to lecture the big blond captain, especially those destroyed villages on St. Lawrence Island, and he opened his mouth to start his preaching, but when he looked up at that mammoth head so much higher and tougher than his own, he judged that silence was advisable, so without speaking he stepped gingerly across the shattered timbers and returned to his quarters.

IT WAS JACKSON'S SECOND TRIP WITH HEALY THAT changed missions from mud-roofed hovels into true churches and schools, for when the rugged Bear steamed out of Sitka Sound, its smokestack belching sparks, every available corner of the deck was crammed with lumber, and ready-made doors and roof beams. Behind it trailed an old schooner piled with additional timber.

This year the Bear

did not stop at easy ports like Kodiak and Dutch Harbor; instead, it plowed ahead through heavy Bering Sea storms to a first stop at Cape Prince of Wales, where two Congregational missionaries had for two years tried to survive in a hovel half underground.

When the

Bear

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dropped anchor on the Fourth of July, these surprised young men saw three ship's boats setting out from the mother ship, laden with lumber and sailors, and when the latter climbed ashore and unloaded their cargo, they did not merely deposit it there for the missionaries to use; they turned to and began that afternoon building them a church and a school.

That evening, as if to celebrate the holiday, the trailing schooner pulled in with the bulk of the timber, and the next morning Captain Healy himself joined the work crew, while Dr. Jackson scurried about, helping to dig the foundation trenches for the walls. Every man aboard the Bear

except the cook worked on this mission church, and at the end of eight days they turned over to the astounded missionaries a center from which they could begin to Christianize this area.

When the Bear

moved on to Point Hope, one of the loneliest villages in the world, the sailors who went ashore to work on the mission building were introduced to the Alaskan mosquito: it came in three versions, one more ferocious than the next, each strain thriving about three weeks in late spring and early summer. They took turns, as if to say: 'We'll send in the little ones to make people nervous, then the medium size, and three weeks later the giants.' They were fierce enemies, able to penetrate any opening in the clothes and bite deeply, until they sent some men almost crazy.

'What do you do when these things hit?' a sailor asked the lone missionary, and he said: 'You give thanks they last only about nine weeks,' and the sailor whined: 'I want to go back to Cape Wales and civilization.'

On the second day at anchor, Healy and Jackson joined the workers ashore, and again a solid church was built, despite the mosquitoes, but the strongest wood was saved for the next anchorage, farthest Barrow, where the world ends and the Arctic Ocean piles its ice nine months of the year and the sun vanishes completely for three months and more or less for five. Here the sailors met a missionary who was striving to implement Jackson's vision of civilization advancing through the Word of God to the most remote corners of the world.

Through Captain Healy's energetic intervention, space was secured in a government building to serve as temporary school-mission until his sailors could erect a regular structure, one strong enough to withstand the rigors of Barrow, where in this year not one house rose more than three or four feet above the ground. So Healy and his men worked with special care to make this Presbyterian mission a building that would withstand the pressures of the arctic for decades. After eleven days they turned over to the young missionary a rural masterpiece, a church that would illuminate the little village

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to which whaling vessels came in June, and where they perished in ice if they lingered too long in October.

Not long after leaving Barrow, and firing a parting salute to the new church which loomed like a beautiful volcano above the shacks of the village, the Bear swung into shore and anchored

off

the little wind-swept village of Desolation Point, where the residents clustered on the shore to greet the captain who in the past had meant so much to the security and prosperity of their settlement.

Healy waved to them all, but not seeing a certain individual, he called out: 'Where's Dmitri?' and a villager said: 'He's Father Dmitri now. Here he comes,' and from up the shore came an umiak containing a young man and one passenger, a woman. When it came closer, Healy saw that the man was the same young man who as a boy some years ago had protected his mother from the madman Agulaak. He was twenty-three now, a self-ordained missionary who had assumed in Desolation the leadership position once filled by his murdered father.

When Jackson met him, the young man explained that he supposed he was responsible to the Russian Orthodox Church to which his father belonged, and now began one of the uglier demonstrations of Jackson's behavior in remote areas. When he went ashore with Dmitri and his mother he said bluntly: 'We've brought you a real church. The sailors will start building it tomorrow, but it's to be a Presbyterian church, so you really must become a Presbyterian missionary.'

'We're Russian,' the widow of the martyred Father Fyodor said, but Jackson overrode this: 'You're American, and there's no place in our society for a Russian church.'

When he learned that Dmitri, who was revered as Father Dmitri by everyone in Desolation, was teaching the children in the village the Cyrillic alphabet, he said to the crew of the

Bear:

'The wrong religion in the wrong language,' and forthwith he launched an unabashed campaign to persuade and when this failed, to forced mitri to convert to Presbyterianism: 'After all, you must remember, Dmitri, that we Presbyterians were given responsibility for the northern reaches of Alaska.'

When Dmitri refused apostasy, in which he was supported by his mother even though she had herself been born of Athapascan parents who now favored Methodism, Jackson became unpleasant, threatening him with the loss of the church and school the sailors had begun to build: 'We didn't bring all that lumber here to build a church for Russians.

It's an American church and it's to have an American missionary.'

The likelihood that his obstinacy might cost his village the bright new buildings it so badly needed caused Dmitri so 437

much grief that he consulted with his mother, who surprised him by taking from the little store of treasures she kept wrapped in a cloth behind a log pole in their underground hut the medal that Captain Healy had given her son so many years ago: 'He gave it to you because you had been brave. You should still be brave and not allow the little one to make you surrender your father's religion.'

At her insistence, Dmitri waited till Reverend Jackson was busy with floor plans for the school, which he was prepared to build despite his threat not to do so, for he was convinced that Dmitri would eventually appreciate the tremendous advantage of turning Presbyterian, both for himself and for the village. Then, making sure that Jackson did not see him, Dmitri jumped into the small umiak he had used when the

Bear

first anchored, and before long he was aboard the ship. Asking for permission to speak with the captain, he was ushered into Healy's quarters, where he was startled both by the parrot and the fact that the captain was close to being drunk. But when Healy, a good Catholic, learned what his trusted friend, the little missionary, was up to the conversion of a good Russian Catholic into a Presbyterian he sobered in a hurry, jumped down into Dmitri's umiak, and ordered the young priest, or would-be priest, to take him ashore.

Once there, he hurried to where the school was being built, grabbed Jackson by the sealskin under his chin, and demanded: 'Sheldon, what in hell are you doing to this boy?'

There was a confused attempt at explanation, a charge of kidnapping by Mrs. Afanasi, who came running up, and a great embarrassment on the part of Dmitri, who had not wanted the incident to develop in this manner.