"God grant that they may not have paid dear for their rashness in trusting their lives to such a craft!" exclaimed Von Rezanof, as the gallant Yankee Captain spread sail and disappeared from Sitka harbour.
The Juno, a staunch, copper-bottomed fast vessel of two hundred six tons, built at Bristol, Rhode Island, in 1799, was now fitted out for the Russian trade and dispatched to Kadiak.
The storms that Lewis and Clark heard booming on the Oregon coast that winter, devastated Alaskan shores as well. When the breakers came thundering up the rocks and the winds shook Sitka Castle, Count Baranof in his stronghold could not sleep for thinking, "Oh, the ships!—the ships out on this stormy deep, laden with what I need so much!"
The little Juno returned from Kadiak with dried fish and oil, and news of disaster: "The Elizaveta has been wrecked in a heavy gale. Six large bidarkas laden with furs on the way to you went down. Two hundred hunters have perished at sea. Our settlement at Yakutat has been destroyed by an Indian massacre."
"My God! My God!" Baranof cried, "how can we repair all these disasters!"
But ever and ever the gray sea boomed upon the shore where the wretched inmates of Sitka Castle were dying. The relief from the Juno was only temporary. By February not a pound of bread a day dared they distribute to the men.
Long since Rezanof had declared they must have an agricultural settlement. Now he fixed his eye on the Columbia River. Sitting there in the dreary castle he was writing to the czar, little dreaming that in a hundred years his very inmost thought would be read in America.
Starvation at Sitka was imminent,—it was impossible to delay longer. Into the stormy sea Rezanof himself set the Juno's sail on his way to the Columbia.
While Lewis and Clark were writing out the muster roll to nail to the wall at Fort Clatsop for any passing ship, Rezanof was striving to cross the Columbia bar. None could see beyond the mists. Contrary winds blew, it rained, it hailed.
Rezanof sighted the Columbia March 14, 1806, but the current drove him back. Again on the 20th he tried to enter, and on the 21st, but the stormy river, like a thing of life, beat him back and beat him back, until the Russian gave it up, and four days later ran into the harbour of San Francisco.