Alaska (72 page)

The debate between Jackson and Healy continued for two stressful days, with the missionary arguing that since he had provided the lumber for the buildings, he had a right to say what kind of structure they should go into, and the captain arguing with equal force that since it arrived on the ship which he commanded, he had the privilege of saying how it should be used. Unfortunately, he had an imprecise understanding of the Russian Orthodox priesthood, and when on the second day he learned that Dmitri was planning to marry a local Eskimo girl who was at best a pagan, he became completely confused. His brothers who had high positions in what he called the real Catholic church did not run around getting married, nor did his sisters who were nuns. There has to be something terribly wrong, he said to himself, in a church which allows its priests to marry.

Nevertheless, he felt obligated to defend any Catholic 438

church, and he did so with vigor, but he had never before argued religion with a moral cyclone like Sheldon Jackson, and when the church and school were finished, they were consecrated as Presbyterian structures, with Father Dmitri taking passage on the

Bear

to Seattle, where he would, through the help of local Presbyterians, be converted into Reverend Afanasi, the first Inupiat Eskimo to bear that august title.

But during the trip south to Kodiak, Captain Healy argued with the young man so persuasively, defending Catholicism as the one universal church, that he almost prevailed upon Dmitri to leave the

Bear

in Kodiak, return by some other ship to Desolation, and operate the new buildings as Catholic structures. But then the matter of Dmitri's wedding came up, and Healy, who was now quite drunk, stopped trying to understand what was happening. Jackson, who had anticipated this moment, stepped in, took charge, isolated Dmitri from the captain, and kept him on board the Bear, which carried him to Seattle and the ministrations of the good Presbyterians in that city.

In this manner, Desolation Point became a fountainhead of Presbyterianism in the north.

DURING ONE OF SHELDON JACKSON'S LATER CRUISES, THE Bear was at sea for more than six months, and the missionary became aware that two of the junior officers were showing signs of irritation about having to serve so long away from home port and with a black captain. He overheard one of the young fellows complaining as they finished work on the school at Cape Prince of Wales: 'Have you noticed that Reverend Jackson, who's supposed to distribute money and materials impartially, always favors any school run by Presbyterians? Damn little for Baptists or Methodists, but it's only natural, him being a Presbyterian and so vehement about it.'

After the Bear

touched at Desolation Point, the other officer said: 'I'd like to see an accounting of Jackson's funds. He gave three times as much money to the young minister here, and when I asked him about that, he said: ”This is my church,”but what that meant he didn't explain and I didn't ask.'

The officers openly voiced their displeasure with Captain Healy when the Bear made a long detour to Cape Navarin for the ridiculous purpose of picking up Siberian reindeer for transplanting to Alaska to feed Eskimos who might otherwise starve.

When one man asked: 'Why are we doing this?'

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the captain replied: 'To enable good people to stay alive,' and the other said: 'If God wanted reindeer to feed Alaskan Eskimos, He'd have put some on our side of the Bering,' and Healy replied without rancor: 'Dr. Jackson might argue that we're doing work that God overlooked.'

But the young men had cause for complaint, because when the Bear returned to those very natives to whom it had so generously given gifts in appreciation of their assistance in rescuing American seamen, and the ones who had promised they would sell reindeer to help Alaskan Eskimos, the herders grew massively protective of their animals and would not part with a single one. The officers watched with growing bitterness as Healy sailed the Bear

more than a thousand miles along the coastline of Siberia, pleading in vain for the stubborn Asians to sell him reindeer, and the young men also noted that Jackson was just as ineffective in trying to buy animals. At the conclusion of this wasteful excursion, one of the officers wrote to his father: This trip has been a shameful waste of government time and money. I begin to suspect that Jackson and Healy are plotting to sell their reindeer, if they ever get any, for private gain. The U.S. Gov't. could well investigate this scandal.

Despite the fevered efforts of the two would-be humanitarians, they were able to purchase no reindeer at Cape Navarin, but farther north at Cape Dezhnev, where the Siberian coastline turned sharply eastward toward America, they came upon a village which allowed them to buy nineteen of their precious herd, but the same officer wrote: With persuasion so ardent that it was unbecoming in the representatives of a Great Democracy, they finally purchased nineteen animals, but at a cost per beast that was unconscionable. This whole affair smells.

On the choppy trip across the Chukchi Sea three of the reindeer died, but sixteen did survive to become the foundation of a herd in the Aleutians, with more to follow in later years.

THE COURT-MARTIAL IN WHICH CAPTAIN HEALY WOULD

soon find himself enmeshed was partly his own fault, because once he had delivered the reindeer, he should have headed back to his home port of San Francisco to allow his sea-weary crew shore leave. But he was so enamored of the Bering Sea 440

that he decided to make one last, quick scout north Jackson would ultimately make thirty-two different trips to the land of the Chukchis and it was on this sortie that he spotted an American whaler, the Adam Foster,

engaged in pelagic sealing. Running forward at full sail-and-steam, he drew alongside the offender and ordered his men to board, and when some thirty energetically obeyed, he and Jackson followed suit, leaping adroitly onto the captured ship.

However, the sealers, who stood to make a great deal of money if they could get their illegal catch to either Hawaii or China, put up a surprising defense, during which Healy suffered a wound to his left shoulder and a bleeding slash along his cheek.

Infuriated by this act of what he deemed warfare, he urged his men to subdue the attackers, and when they did he calmed his temper and ordered three reprisals: 'All rum and molasses into the scuppers. AH pelts into the Bering. These six ringleaders and those three who assaulted me, trice them up!”

Jackson did not know what this horrendous word meant, but the young officers did, and as it was uttered, one moved to Jackson's side and whispered: 'Oh, this should not be done! They're Americans.' He made this protest because, erroneously, he believed that in a crisis the clergyman would have to side with him against Captain Healy and his drunken, profane behavior, but in this supposition, as he was about to find out, he was wrong. Jackson was not his man; he was Healy's.

So, much to the officers' horror, the nine sailors were trussed up, that is, their hands were handcuffed behind their backs and ropes were passed through the cuffs and over a yardarm. Crewmen from the Bear

then pulled on the loose ends of the ropes, and the miscreants were hauled just far enough aloft so their toes could barely reach the deck, and there in fierce agony they remained dangling for seven minutes, after which they were dropped, some of them senseless, to the deck.

Standing over them, Healy said: 'You'll not take arms against a ship of the United States government,' and one of the officers whispered to Jackson: 'But they didn't take arms,' and the missionary, who believed that crime deserved punishment, defended Healy: 'The punished men were selling rum and killing pregnant seals.'

Back aboard the Bear,

two relevant things happened: Mike Healy, agitated by the pain from his wounds and the excitement of boarding a ship in midocean, got drunk, and one of the officers sought out Sheldon Jackson for an impassioned 441

discussion of the afternoon's events: 'No captain has the right to storm aboard another ship and trice up nine of its sailors.'

'Captain Healy serves under orders to do just that. Stop unlawful sealing. Punish men and ships that sell alcohol to natives.'

'But certainly not to trice men up by their wrists behind their backs. Reverend Jackson, that's inhuman!'

'It's the law of the sea. Always has been. An alternative to hanging. You ought to be glad he didn't keelhaul them.'

The officer, appalled that a clergyman should defend such behavior, was goaded into saying something which, had he been a more sensitive young man, he would have regretted later: 'You don't sound much like a Christian, defending a man like Healy.'

Jackson rose from where he was seated on the edge of his bunk, pulled himself to his full height, looked up into the young man's eyes, and said: 'Michael Healy in the Bering Sea reminds me of St. Peter on the Lake of Galilee. I'm sure Sailor Peter was a rough-and-tumble man, but he was Christ's chosen apostle on whom he founded his first church. The church in Alaska depends upon the good works of Captain Healy.'

This comparison was so odious that the officer cried: 'How can you say that about a man who blasphemes and gets drunk all the time?' and when Jackson snapped in reply: 'I dare say Peter used rough language aboard his ship, too,' the young man stormed from the cabin.

Late that night, when Healy was more or less recovered from his bout with the bottle, Jackson went to the captain's quarters, allowed the parrot to rest on his left shoulder, and said: 'Michael, I'm afraid you and I have constructed permanent enemies in your young officers. They can't understand why you don't behave like a storybook sea captain, and they certainly think I ought to be like every minister they knew back home.'

'They're young, Sheldon. Never had to captain a ship. Never chased the Erebus back and forth across the Bering Sea.'

'They think I ought to condemn you because of your blasphemy and your drinking.'

'I think you should, too. But on the other hand, I think you forgot you were a minister of the Lord when you made young Father Dmitri turn Presbyterian in order to keep the church we gave him.' To halt such lugubrious thoughts, Healy snapped his fingers: 'They want us to be gods, but we're only men.'

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The two reprobates talked long into the cold night, speculating now and then on what the young officers might be plotting.

THEY SOON FOUND OUT, FOR WHEN THE BEAR

DOUBLED back to Kodiak with three prisoners taken at the Pribilofs, the officers dispatched a telegram to the headquarters of the revenue cutter service in San Francisco, lodging serious charges against their commanding officer: Michael Healy, captain of the revenue cutter Bear, has been consistently drunk on duty to the impairment of his responsibilities, has repeatedly used vulgar and abusive language against his officers and men, and has behaved with extreme cruelty to nine American sailors from the whaler Adam Foster.

As officers under his command, we request that he be court-martialed.

By the time the Bear returned to its duty station off the coast of Siberia, the Adam Foster

had docked in San Francisco, giving the local newspaper people a horrendous account of its run-in with the

Bear and of Captain Healy's unwarranted tricing up of nine American sailors.

However, in the scandal that developed in the California papers, a force much more powerful than the captain of the Adam Foster entered the guerilla warfare against Mike Healy. Mrs. Danforth Weigle, president of the San Francisco Woman's Christian Temperance Union, had been searching for some time to find a foolproof case against some ship's captain who abused his men while under the influence of John Barleycorn, and when she read the lurid accounts of Mike Healy's behavior, she and her entire membership lodged formal complaints against him, demanding that he be summoned home, court-martialed, and dismissed from the service. Now all the envious people who had felt that this Negro mariner was growing bigger than his britches united to call for his trial and dismissal.

Bowing to the public clamor and especially to the pressures brought by the W.C.T.U., Healy's superiors had no alternative but to wire him at Kodiak to return immediately to San Francisco to defend himself in a general court-martial against charges of drunkenness, gross and improper behavior toward subordinates and, in the case of nine American sailors, the use of cruel punishment long outmoded in the navies of civilized nations.

He had left Kodiak long before the telegram arrived and 443

spent the summer in the far reaches of the northern seas. During his sail south at the end of the season he learned of the statements made against him, and discussed them with Reverend Jackson: 'They mean to do me in, Sheldon. The captain of the Adam Foster bringing charges! I should have had him hanged from his own yardarm.'

It was Jackson who foresaw the real danger in the threatened court-martial: 'The women, Michael. They'll prove the most powerful of your enemies. I've always found the women to be the final arbiters,'

'Can I count upon you for support?'

'To the end, but I am worried.'

'You'll come to San Francisco? Testify for me?'

'You're the best captain there's ever been in the Bering Sea, Russian or American.'

'James Cook was up here, you know.'

'I didn't include the English.'

So it was agreed that Healy and Jackson would make a united stand against the considerable forces arrayed against the former, but Jackson's promised testimony did not come to pass, because when the

Bear

put into Sitka to disembark him, the doughty little clergyman faced a kind of court-martial of his own, for a special investigator with plenipotentiary powers had been dispatched from Washington to check upon the numerous charges of malfeasance lodged against him. Although he was not thrown into jail this time, it was obvious that he would not be able to go to San Francisco to testify in defense of his friend, for he had to save his own neck.

THE COURT-MARTIAL OF MICHAEL HEALY WAS A SOLEMN, miserable affair. Five senior officers from the nation's armed services sat in judgment of a popular hero gone sour, and the very newspapers which had inflated his reputation as the savior of the north now seemed to revel in his debasement as a tyrant, a brute, a foul-mouthed rascal and a drunk, but this was understandable, because in the opening days of the trial the evidence against him was devastating. Clean-looking young sailors from the