Captain Dixon, of H. M. S. “Queen Charlotte,” came during the summer of 1787, on a fur trading voyage. Dixon had just departed from the harbor when Captain Portlock, of the English ship “King George,” which was lying in Portlock Harbor, to the northward in Chichagoff Island, sent his ship’s boat through the passage behind Kruzof Island to about the present site of Sitka, and made the discovery for the civilized world that Mount Edgecumbe is on an island.
CHAPTER II
SETTLEMENT
The sea-otter, a marine animal about four feet in length when fully grown, with soft, long black pelage of silky texture, is one of the most valued of the fur-bearers. It was found abundantly all the way along the Northwest Coast, and especially in the passages about Sitka. It is now nearly extinct.
The Russians had been gathering the skins of the sea-otter in the northern waters for years, ever since Chirikof made his voyage to Sitka, and they were truly an El Dorado, in fur, to the traders who plied their trade along the coasts. Captain Cook and his sailors, when on their voyage in these waters, bought skins for mere trifles, some for a handful of iron nails. These same skins sold for as much as sixty dollars each in China where they visited on their way home. The story of the furs went over the world and English, French and American traders thronged to these waters to sail their ships into the straits and barter for the rich pelts. To secure a profit of $50,000 on a voyage was not unusual. Ingraham, the lieutenant of Captain Gray whom we all know so well for his discovery of the great River of the West, sailed to near Sitka before his principal entered the river which he named for his ship, the Columbia. The French ship “Solide,” in 1791, sailed from France to gather a portion of the harvest. Her captain, Étienne Marchand, anchored in Sitka Bay, and called it Tchinkitinay, as he declares it was known to the natives. To his ship flocked the painted and skin-clad natives with their peltries for barter. On their persons he saw articles of European manufacture, showing that other ships had visited there, and in the ears of one young savage were hanging pendant two copper coins of the colony of Massachusetts. His success in trade was not such as he might have wished, so he sailed way, remarking that, “The modern Hebrews would, perhaps, have little to teach to these people in the art of trade.”
March 31st, 1799, the Yankee skipper, Cleveland, of the merchant ship “Caroline,” sailed into the bay, dropped anchor and fired a cannon shot as a signal. He was one of those shrewd, lean traders, skilled in navigation, who sailed from Boston round the Horn, with their bucko mates, who could drive a tack with the prow of a ship, so to speak, and in those days there were no corners of the earth where they might not be found seeking for profit. He was wise to the ways of the sharp trading canoemen of these waters, and their aggressive proclivities, so he prepared his ship with regard for all the possibilities of the business. Around it as a bulwark he stretched a barrier of dry bull hides brought from the California coast. At the stern was a place prepared for the trading. Forward on the deck were planted cannon, shotted with shrapnel, trained so as to rake the afterdeck, and beside each was a gunner’s match.
On the first day, for two hundred yards of broadcloth, he purchased a hundred prime sea-otter skins, worth $50 each in Canton. Barter was going merrily on, when a scream from amidships startled the crew. The Thlingits sprang to their boats. The squaws backed the canoes away from the ship’s sides. Arrows were fitted to bowstrings, spears were poised and muskets primed. On the ships the sailors lighted the cannon matches and stood by ready to fire. A fight was hovering in the air when the cause of the disturbance was discovered. An inquisitive Thlingit pried between the bull hides opposite the cook’s galley, and the cook had saluted him with a ladle of hot water. In his surprise he upset his canoe and his family were struggling in the sea. His baby was rescued by a seaman, amends were made to his injured feelings, and the barter proceeded as before.
The waters were filled with ships. In a stay of a month the “Caroline” spoke the ship “Hancock,” the ship “Despatch,” the ship “Ulysses,” and the ship “Eliza,” all of Boston; and the English ship “Cheerful,” all trading for furs among the Sitkan Islands.
The Russians, in their colony on Kodiak Island, were jealous of the intruders on what they considered as their domain. Gregory Shelikof, a Siberian merchant, one of the wealthiest and most far seeing of the leaders among the Aleutian Islands, conceived the plan of combining the whole of the fur trade in one great monopoly. In pursuance of this policy he secured a charter from Emperor Paul in 1799, under the name of the Russian American Company, which gave the exclusive right to all profits to be derived from every form of resource in the Russian possessions in America for a period of twenty years. To the management of his business in the Colony he established on Kodiak Island he appointed Alexander Andreevich Baranof, a Siberian trader of great ability and experience. Baranof, the wise and far-seeing Russian ruler of the Russian American Company, at his factory in St. Paul’s Harbor on Kodiak Island, had long planned the extension of his settlements to the southeast. The sea-otter catch of the Russians was made by brigades of Aleuts from the western islands, who went along the shores and to sea as far as 20 miles, in their wonderful skin boats called bidarkas, to hunt. When a sea-otter lifted its head from the water to breathe, within sight of a detachment of Aleut hunters, its fate was sealed, for it seldom escaped.
The passages between the islands about Sitka were called the “Straits” by the Russians, and in them the sea-otter skins were taken by the thousands. It was not unusual for a Russian hunting party consisting of a hundred bidarkas to take on one expedition 2,000 skins of the Morski bobrov, as they called the sea-otter.