There was only one thing to do—abandon the ship. Arkhimandritov ordered the men to lower the ship’s small boats. Fortunately, no one had been injured during the crash, and all hands were quickly at work. Keeping them busy was also a good way to prevent them from getting out of hand or starting to panic. Turning away, he ran back down to his cabin to grab what he could. If he could salvage anything, it would be the tools of his trade: sextant, compass, spyglass, and chronometer. And, of course, the company books. After throwing them all into his seabag, he dashed back out on deck. The only thing he couldn’t take was his seatrunk; it was too heavy, and there wasn’t enough time. Anything left in it would have to go down with the ship.
Most of the crew were in the boats by now; a few stood by on deck, waiting for him. After the last man entered the lifeboats, Arkhimandritov climbed in, and they shoved off. The mood was somber. For a while they sat still and watched as the ship drifted and sank ever so slowly. It seemed to take forever. No one talked. They thought about their narrow escape, about things left on board, about their lost wages, their expectations for the trip, now all dashed. They thought about how sad it was to lose the only home many of them had known for some years.
Captain Arkhimandritov looked around and caught their mood. He knew he had to do something. “Is everybody here?” he shouted. “Is anyone missing?” No one was; all the men had escaped unharmed and were present in the boats. “Then grab the oars,” he ordered, “it’s time to go.” Reluctant to leave their ship but happy to be alive, they started rowing. As far as they could tell, the captain was still in control, doing his job. Whatever agonies of doubt and self-criticism may have crossed his mind were not something he would share with them or that they could fathom. A few hours later they dragged the boats ashore at St. Paul Harbor, tired and dispirited, but relieved to be on terra firma.
CHAPTER 2
THE
SAINT
THE NATIVES OF KODIAK BELONG to a branch of the Alutiiq people called the Koniag, and the name Kodiak comes from the Alutiiq word Kikh’tak. As usual in the days of European expansion, the explorers misinterpreted Native place and tribal names, often substituting the general for the specific. When asked who they were, Native Americans would respond by saying, “We are the People” in their local language, whether it was Iroquois, Cheyenne, Lakota, or Klinkit. But to the invaders, these became the names for each specific tribe. The Russians were no different. Upon arriving in Kodiak, they asked for the name of the place. “Kikh’tak,” the locals answered, meaning “island.” And so, the Natives’ word for “island” became the name of one particular island. Over time, its pronunciation was changed to Koniag, then Kad’yak or Kadiak, and then finally Kodiak. In the days of colonization by the Russian-American Company, the island was commonly known as Kad’yak. Thus, when a new ship was purchased for use in the Alaskan trade, it was named the Kad’yak, in honor of the island that would become its home port.
Russians first came to Alaska in 1741, with the expedition of Vitus Bering. Bering’s men were the first to see the continental landmass of the Alaskan mainland, but only the mountaintops of what is now the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park were revealed through the mist. Bering’s men never set foot on the mainland of Alaska, but they did go ashore to Kayak Island and the Shumagin Islands west of Kodiak, where they traded with Alaska Natives. Continuing westward, Bering’s ship was finally wrecked on an island off the coast of Kamchatka, now known as Bering Island, where he died in December 1741. After spending the winter there, the survivors constructed a small boat from the wreckage of Bering’s ship and returned to Kamchatka, which was only a three-day sail away. Of the seventy-six men who started the voyage with Bering, only forty-five returned to Russia, the remainder having died from sickness or scurvy. The survivors brought with them hundreds of sea otter pelts and told stories of vast numbers of sea mammals they had encountered. These stories encouraged other hunters and explorers to follow the Aleutian Island chain east to the American continent. Over the next fifty years, numerous outposts were established, often in association with Alaska Native villages, in order to hunt sea otters and other marine mammals.
The first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska was established by Grigorii Shelikhov, a fur trader from Kamchatka. He chose Kodiak Island as the location for his settlement and set out to establish his colony in 1783 with three ships, one of which was named the Tri Sviatitelia, or Three Saints. He landed in a bay on the southwest end of the island, now called Three Saints Bay, in August 1784. From the outset, Shelikhov’s plans were to create an extensive Russian empire in Alaska. Although Russian Imperial edict prohibited mistreatment of Alaskan Natives, he fully intended to establish his colony by force. At Three Saints Bay, the Russians attacked the Native village and massacred a large number of Kodiak natives at Refuge Rock on Sitkalidak Island. Thus, Russian-American relations were off to a rocky start.
Over subsequent years, though, Shelikhov’s views moderated, and he learned that the only way to maintain his colonies was to improve his relations with Alaska Natives, which he did through gifts and better treatment. He admonished his workers for mistreatment of the Natives, and eventually established a school where Native boys (mostly captured) would be taught the Russian language, mathematics, and navigation. Shelikhov returned to Russia in 1786 and eventually hired a local merchant named Alexander Baranov to take over management of his American colony. In 1799, Shelikhov’s company was granted a charter by Russian Emperor Paul and became known as the Russian-American Company (RAC). The charter was to last for twenty years and gave the Company a monopoly to extract resources from the Alaskan territories, with the main goal being to hunt for furs from sea otters and sea lions, which would be traded to China for a lucrative profit. At that time, the region was referred to simply as Russian America; the word Alaska was not applied to it until it was sold to the United States in 1867.
Alexander Baranov arrived in Three Saints Bay in 1791 to find a struggling outpost populated by Russian fur hunters, or promyshleniki. The location was unsuitable for many reasons, including the lack of a deep water bay. In 1792, the settlement at Three Saints Bay was wiped out by a seismic sea wave (what we now call a tsunami), forcing the Russians to abandon it. Searching for a better location, Baranov resettled at the northeast tip of the island where a deep water channel between small islands formed a protected harbor, which they named Paul’s Bay, after Emperor Paul. This became the town of Kodiak.
To call the Russians fur hunters was generous; fur slaughterers is more appropriate. Wherever animals with fur existed, the Russians killed them mercilessly until they were wiped out. When Vitus Bering first explored the Aleutian Islands in 1741, there were millions of sea otters, thousands of seals, and a healthy population of Steller sea cows. By the time that Kodiak was settled fifty years later, the sea cows were extinct, and there were precious few seals and otters left in the Aleutian Islands to hunt. During the year after the discovery of the Pribilof Islands, hunters killed five thousand fur seals, but numbers declined so rapidly that hunting was suspended in 1804. Within fifty years of settling Kodiak, there would be no otters left to hunt in Russian America.
The great value of sea otters was based on the density of their pelts. Lacking an insulating layer of blubber, sea otters depended on their fur for warmth, which is denser than any other animal’s on earth. For comparison, the densest human hair is found on your average Nordic blonde, at 190 follicles/cm2. The density of sea otter fur is an astounding 400,000 follicles/cm2, over 2,000 times denser than human hair. It was like nothing the Russians had ever seen, and denser than the closest animal to which they could compare it, which was the beaver. Because of this, the Russians referred to sea otters as boobry morski, or “sea beavers,” and the furs as miagkaia rukhliad, or “soft gold”. As late as 1868, sea otter furs were valued at $50 each.
Despite the slaughter and near extinction caused by unfettered hunting of sea otters throughout their range, the idea that they could be eliminated was virtually inconceivable to the Russians. Early attempts by Shelikhov to restrain the slaughter were met with derision from Russian authorities, who decried conservation as an assault on individual rights and private enterprise. Baranov even