In 1745—four years after Russia's discovery of western America—a whole village in Attoo was destroyed so that the Russians could seize the women and children fleeing for hiding to the hills. The next year Russians were caught putting poison in the food of another village: the men ate first among the Indians. The women would be left as slaves to the Russians; and these same Russians carried a pagan boy home to {84} be baptized in the Christian faith; for the little convert could come back to the Aleutian Islands as interpreter. It was as thorough a scheme of subjugation as the wolf code of existence could have entailed.
The culmination came with the crew of Betshevin, a Siberian merchant, in 1760. There were forty Russians, including Cossacks, and twenty other Asiatic hunters and sailors. Four of the merchant's agents went along to enforce honest returns. Sergeant Pushkareff of the Cossacks was there to collect tribute from Russia's Indian subjects on the west coast of America. The ship was evidently better than the general run, with ample room in the hold for cargo, and wide deck room where the crew slept in hammocks without cover—usually a gruff, bearded, ragged, vermin-infested horde. The vessel touched at Oomnak, after having met a sister ship, perhaps with an increase of aggressiveness toward the natives owing to the presence of these other Russians under Alixei Drusenin; and passed on eastward to the next otter resort, Oonalaska Island.
Oonalaska is like a human hand spread out, with the fingers northeast, the arm end down seventy miles long toward Oomnak Island. The entire broken coast probably reaches a circuit of over two hundred miles. Down the centre and out each spur are high volcanic mountains, two of them smoking volcanoes, all pitted with caves and hot springs whose course can be traced in winter by the runnels of steam {85} down the mountain side. On the south side, reefs line all approach. North, east, and west are countless abrupt inlets opening directly into the heart of the mountains down whose black cliffs shatter plumes of spray and cataract. Not a tree grows on the island. From base to summit the hills are a velvet sward, willow shrubs the size of one's finger, grass waist high, and such a wealth of flowers—poppy fields, anemones, snowdrops, rhododendrons—that one might be in a southern climate instead of close proximity to frozen zones. Fogs wreathe the island three-quarters of the time; and though snow lies five feet deep in winter, and such blizzards riot in from the north as would tear trees up by the roots, and drive all human beings to their underground dwellings, it is never cold, never below zero, and the harbors are always open. Whaling, fishing, fur hunting—those were the occupations of the islanders then, as now.
Here, then, came Pushkareff in 1762 after two years' cruising about the Aleutian Islands. The natives are friendly, thinking to obtain iron, and knives, and firearms like the other islanders who have traded with the Russians. Children are given as hostages of good conduct for the Oonalaskan men, who lead the Russians off to the hunt, coasting from point to point. Pushkareff, the Cossack, himself goes off with twenty men to explore; but somehow things go wrong at the native villages on this trip. The hostages find they are not guests, but slaves. Anyway, Betshevin's {86} agent is set upon and murdered. Two more Russians are speared to death under Pushkareff's eyes, two wounded, and the Cossack himself, with his fourteen men, forced to beat a hasty retreat back to ships and huts on the coast. Here, strange enough, things have gone wrong, too! More women and children objecting to their masters' pleasure—slavery, the knout, the branding iron, death by starvation and abuse. Two Russians have been slain bathing in the hot springs near Makushin Volcano, four murdered at the huts, four wounded; and the barrack is burned to the ground. Promptly the Cossack wreaks vengeance by slaughtering seven of the hostages on the spot; but he deems it wise to take refuge on his ship, weigh anchor and slip out to sea carrying with him by way of a lesson to the natives, two interpreters, three boys, and twenty-five women, two of whom die of cruelty before the ship is well out of Oonalaskan waters.
He may have intended dropping the captives at some near island on his way westward; for only blind rage could have rendered him so indifferent to their fate as to carry such a cargo of human beings back to the home harbor of Kamchatka. Meanwhile a hurricane caught Pushkareff's ship, chopping the wave tops off and driving her ahead under bare poles. When the gale abated, the ship was off Kamchatka's shore and the Cossack in a quandary about entering the home port with proofs of his cruelty in the cowering group of Indian women huddled above the deck. {87} On pretence of gathering berries, six sailors were landed with fourteen women. Two watched their chance and dashed for liberty in the hills. On the way back to the ship, one woman was brained to death by a sailor, Gorelin; seeing which, the others on board the jolly-boat took advantage of the confusion, sprang overboard, and suicided. But there were still a dozen hostages on the ship. These might relate the crime of their companions' murder. It was an old trick out of an ugly predicament—destroy the victim in order to dodge retribution, or torture it so it would destroy itself. Fourteen had been tortured into suicide. The rest Pushkareff seized, bound, and threw into the sea.
To be sure, on official investigation, Betshevin, the Siberian merchant, was subjected to penal tortures for this crime on his ship; and an imperial decree put an end to free trade among the fur hunters to America. Henceforth a government permit must be obtained; but that did not undo the wrong to the Aleutian Islanders. Primal instincts, unhampered by law, have a swift, sure, short-cut to justice; to the fine equipoise between weak and strong. It was two years before punishment was meted out by the Russian government for this crime. What did the Aleut Indian care for the law's slow jargon? His only law was self-preservation. His furs had been plundered from him; his hunting-fields overrun by brigands from he knew not where; his home outraged; his warriors poisoned, bludgeoned, done to death; his women and children {88} kidnapped to lifelong slavery; the very basic, brute instincts of his nature tantalized, baited, tortured to dare!
It was from January to September of 1762, that Pushkareff had run his mad course of outrage on Oonalaska Island. It was in September of the same year, that four other Russian ships, all unconscious of the reception Pushkareff's evil doings had prepared for them, left Kamchatka for the Aleutian Islands. Each of the ships was under a commander who had been to the islands before and dealt fairly by the Indians.
Betshevin's ship with Pushkareff, the Cossack, reached Kamchatka September 25. On the 6th there had come to winter at the harbor a ship under the same Alexei Drusenin, who had met Pushkareff the year before on the way to Oonalaska. Drusenin was outward bound and must have heard the tales told of Pushkareff's crew; but the latter had brought back in all nearly two thousand otter,—half sent by Drusenin, half brought by himself,—and Oonalaska became the lodestar of the otter hunters. The spring of '63 found Drusenin coasting the Aleutians. Sure enough, others had heard news of the great find of the new hunting-grounds. Three other Russian vessels were on the grounds before him, Glottoff and Medvedeff at Oomnak, Korovin halfway up Oonalaska. No time for Drusenin to lose! A spy sent out came back with the report that every part of Oomnak and {89} Oonalaska was being thoroughly hunted except the extreme northeast, where the mountain spurs of Oonalaska stretch out in the sea like a hand. Up to the northeast end, then, where the tide-rip thunders up the rock wall like an inverted cataract, posts Drusenin where he anchors his ship in Captain Harbor, and has winter quarters built before snow-fall of '63.
An odd thing was—the Indian chiefs became so very friendly they voluntarily brought hostages of good conduct to Drusenin. Surely Drusenin was in luck! The best otter-hunting grounds in the world! A harbor as smooth as glass, mountain-girt, sheltered as a hole in a wall, right in the centre of the hunting-grounds, yet shut off from the rioting north winds that shook the rickety vessels to pieces! And best of all, along the sandy shore between the ship and the mountains that receded inland tier on tier into the clouds—the dome-roofed, underground dwellings of two or three thousand native hunters ready to risk the surf of the otter hunt at Drusenin's beck! Just to make sure of safety after Pushkareff's losses of ten men on this island, Drusenin exchanges a letter or two with the commanders of those other three Russian vessels. Then he laid his plans for the winter's hunt. But so did the Aleut Indians; and their plans were for a man-hunt of every Russian within the limits of Oonalaska.
A curious story is told of how the Aleuts arranged to have the uprising simultaneous and certain. A bunch of sticks was carried to the chief of every tribe. {90} These were burned one a day, like the skin wick in the seal oil of the Aleut's stone lamp. When the last stick had burned, the Aleuts were to rise.