Alaska's History, Revised Edition. Harry Ritter

information. The immense Malaspina Glacier, Alaska’s largest, is named in his honor. His stay at Yakutat also produced some wonderful drawings by de Suria and two other ship’s artists, José Cardero and Felipe Bauzá. At one point a sailor’s trousers were stolen by Tlingit residents, but a levelheaded chief prevented the affair from escalating by returning the pants, an incident captured in a drawing by Cardero.

      In a melancholy postscript, upon his return to Europe in 1794 Malaspina became entangled in intrigues at the Spanish court, was imprisoned for eight years, then banished from the country. The journals of the man sent to outdo Cook lay forgotten in the archives until resentments faded, and they were finally published in 1885.

LORD OF ALASKA: ALEXANDER BARANOV

       Alexander Baranov

      Alexander Andreyevich Baranov was a “doer,” just the sort of man demanded by the unforgiving conditions of the Great Land.

      Hired in 1790 to manage Russian America’s dominant fur trading company owned by Grigori Shelikov, the 43-year-old Baranov seemed an unlikely choice. His own Siberian fur business had recently failed. But his charisma, aggressiveness, and tough—sometimes brutal—political skills proved indispensable to the survival and expansion of Russia’s American empire. Within seven years he eliminated all competitors and secured the Alaska coast—from the Aleutian Islands to Yakutat—for Shelikov’s firm; renamed the Russian-American Company (RAC), Tsar Paul I granted it an Alaskan trade monopoly in 1799.

      Learning to handle an Aleut baidarka and navigate a seagoing sloop, he established a citadel at remote Sitka Bay in 1799 and, in 1804, reestablished the post following its destruction by Tlingit warriors.

      From his own small kremlin, Sitka’s Castle Hill, Baranov ruled like a now severe, now enlightened despot with a practical knack for making the colony prosper. He encouraged marriage between European men and Native women. His own Native wife, Anna, bore him a son and daughter. The settlement’s need for clerks and artisans led him to provide basic schooling for creole (Russian-Native) children and, in gifted cases, technical training in Siberia. One colony youngster later became a brigadier general in the Russian army.

      Baranov was equally pragmatic in dealing with foreign intruders. Lacking military support to exclude British and American vessels from Alaskan waters, he made a virtue of necessity by cultivating cordial relations with foreign captains. Boston traders—notably the enterprising Irishman Joseph O’Cain—supplied Baranov’s outpost with food and sold company furs in southern China, where Russians were forbidden to trade.

      Baranov’s lavish, alcoholic receptions for foreigners became legend. “They all drink an astonishing quantity, Baranov not excepted,” reported American captain John Ebbets. “It is no small tax on the health of a person trying to do business with him.” His reputation as host spread to Hawaii and even New England, where Washington Irving described him as a “rough, rugged, hard-drinking old Russian; somewhat of a soldier, somewhat of a trader, above all a boon companion.”

      Yet Baranov had a darker side. He had a stormy relationship with the Russian Church, which criticized his sometimes-abusive treatment of Natives and RAC workers. Arthritis became an excuse for heavy private drinking, and the bleak isolation of Alaska’s winters drove him to fits of depression. The worst came in 1809, after nine disgruntled colonists who considered him a tyrant plotted to murder him and his family. The plot was foiled, but Baranov sent his family to Kodiak, submitted his resignation, and passed the winter in an alcoholic stupor. After two intended replacements died en route to Alaska, however, Baranov declared that God had ordained that he continue as governor.

      Reinvigorated, he directed the company to its most profitable years to date in 1813 and 1814. When he finally retired at age 71, Russian influence in the North Pacific stretched from Siberia to an RAC farming station at Fort Ross in northern California. Yet his last few years as company director were not happy. Revenues were uneven, there were rumors of his physical and mental decline, and he was accused (falsely) of profiting at RAC expense. Neither Baranov—nor his successors—solved the problem of properly supplying Russia’s remote colony with food. In 1818 he was replaced as chief manager by the naval officer Leontii Hagemeister.

      The “Lord of Alaska,” the man who more than any other helped Russia tap the New World’s riches, died of fever aboard the ship Kutuzov on April 12, 1819, en route to St. Petersburg, off the coast of Java.

APOSTLE OF ALASKA: FATHER IVAN VENIAMINOV

      St. Michael’s Cathedral, Sitka. LaRoche photo, late 1800s.

      Near the Sitka waterfront stand two wooden structures that powerfully recall Alaska’s Russian heritage: the Russian Bishop’s House, completed in 1842, and the onion-domed St. Michael’s Cathedral, first dedicated in 1848. Both are products of a man whose work as a religious leader, craftsman, and scholar has been as enduring as the buildings themselves: Father Ivan Veniaminov.

      Veniaminov was born in Siberia in 1797, the son of a church caretaker. Young Ivan attended the Russian Orthodox seminary in Irkutsk, where he was not only the outstanding scholar of his class but displayed a restless interest in mechanical crafts. From a local artisan he learned the art of clock making. (Later, as Bishop of Alaska, he built the belfry clock of St. Michael’s.) In 1821 the young priest was ordained and, three years later, he traveled with his wife, son, and elderly mother as a missionary to the east Aleutian Island of Unalaska.

      Tall and athletic, Veniaminov had the practical genius of a Benjamin Franklin. He immediately established a sympathetic rapport with his Native parishioners. Using his craftsman’s skills, the artisan priest set to work on his own house, furniture, and a church. In the process he taught woodworking, blacksmithing, and brickmaking to Native apprentices. An amateur scientist, he compiled observations on local plant and animal life, the weather, and tides.

      Unlike some later American missionaries who tried to suppress Native dialects and customs, Veniaminov respected local traditions—at least when they did not directly contradict Orthodox teachings—and taught that Natives must receive Christian doctrine in their own tongue. A gifted linguist, Father Veniaminov preached in Aleut, prepared (with the help of Aleut headman Ivan Pan’kov) an Aleut dictionary, grammar, and primer, and laid the foundations of literacy among the Aleut people.

      In 1834 he moved to Sitka, where he did similar work among the Tlingit people, winning their trust by inoculating them against a smallpox epidemic in 1836. Among his greatest achievements was his Notes on the Islands of Unalaska District, a treasure of information on the early Aleut and Tlingit cultures. A tireless traveler, in 1838 he journeyed to California’s Fort Ross and San Francisco Bay to inspect Church affairs and Catholic missions.