During this wild and bloody fight an English ship was lying at anchor far down the harbor, some ten miles from the scene; three Russians and five Aleutes only, out of the hunting parties absent at the time of the attack, managed to secrete themselves in the woods, and hide until they could gain the decks and protection of this vessel, and thus acquaint her captain, Barber, of the outrage; he contrived to entice two of the leading Sitkan chiefs on board of his ship, plied them with drink, and soon had them securely ironed, and then, having quite a battery of guns, he was able to make his own terms for their release; this was done after the surrender of eighteen women (captured outside of the stockade) and 2,000 sea-otter skins was made to Barber, who at once sailed for Kadiak. Here the British seaman demanded from Baranov the salvage of 50,000 rubles for rescuing his men and women and property; with this demand the Russian could not or would not comply; but, after many days in amicable argument, Captain Barber received and accepted 10,000 rubles in full settlement.
While the lurid light of the burning wreck of this first Sitkan post was flashing over the sound, and the Koloshes were howling and dancing around it in their fiendish exultation, nearly two hundred Aleutian hunters were surprised and slaughtered at various points in the vicinity, and a party of over one hundred of these simple natives perished almost to a man, on the same day, from eating poisonous mussels which they detached from the rocks in the strait that separates Baranov Island from Chichagov; that canal still bears the name commemorative of this dreadful accident—it is called “Pogeebshie”[14] or “Destruction” Strait.
The enraged Russian manager was unable, by reason of a complicated flood of troubles with his subordinates elsewhere, to revisit Sitka until the spring of 1804; he then came down from Kadiak in a squadron consisting of three small sloops, in all considerably less than 100 tons burden; these craft he had built and fitted out in Prince William Sound and Yakootat Bay during the preceding winter. He had with him forty Russians and three hundred Aleutian sea-otter hunters. With this small force the indomitable man resolved to attack and subjugate a body of not less than five or six thousand fierce, untamed savages, who were flushed with their cruel successes, and eager to shed more blood. He was unexpectedly strengthened by the sudden appearance in the bay of the Neva, 400 tons, which had sailed from London to Kadiak, and arrived just after Baranov’s departure, but Captain Lissiansky, learning of the object of his trip, determined to assist in rebuilding the Sitkan post and to punish the Indians, so he sailed at once for the place.
Baranov found the Sitkans all entrenched behind a huge stockade that was thrown up on the same lofty rocky site of the governor’s castle in the town to-day. They reviled him and defied him, taunted him with his misfortunes, and easily succeeded in exciting him to a ferocious attack, in which, despite his demoniacal bravery, he was beaten off at first with the loss of eleven white sailors and hunters, he himself badly wounded, together with Lieutenants Arbuzov and Povalishin. The darkness of a violent rain and sleet storm, with night close at hand, caused a cessation, for the time, of further hostilities, but in the morning the ship and the little sloops approached the beach and opened upon the startled savages a hot bombardment—the splintering of their log bastions and the terrible, unwonted noise accompanying, was too much for their self-control, and though, during the whole day they refused to fly, yet when night again came round they abandoned their fortification, and retreated silently and quickly in canoes to Chatham Strait.
The Castle of Baranov: 1809-1827.
[Wholly remodelled and rebuilt by his successors.]
The Russians then took possession of the present town-site of Sitka. The rocky eminence which the savages had so bravely held was cleared of their rude barricades, and the foundations were laid then to the castle that still stands so conspicuous. Around this nucleus the Russian settlement soon sprang up in a few months, a high stockade was then erected between the village and the Indian rancheries, which still stands in part to-day; it was bastioned and fortified with an armament of three-pounder brass guns. From this time on the supremacy of the Russians was never questioned by the Indians of the Sitkan archipelago. The reckless daring of Baranov, evinced by his personal bearing at the head of a handful of men in repeated attacks upon the castle-rock encampment was exaggerated by the savages in repetition among themselves, until his name to them became synonymous with a charmed life and supreme authority. Baranov himself called this spot the final headquarters of the Russian American Company, and henceforth it became so, and it was officially known as New Archangel; but the tribal name of the savages who lived just outside the stockade fence was “Seet-kah,” and soon the present designation was used by all visitors and Russians alike, brevity and euphony making it “Sitka.”
It is not probable that the beautiful vistas of this sound influenced Baranov in the slightest when he selected it for his base of operations; but there must have been mornings and evenings when this hardy man looked at them with some responsive pleasure, for certainly the human being who could remain insensible to their scenic glories must be one without a drop of warm blood in his veins. Those high-peaked summits of the Baranov Mountains, which overshadow the town on the east, destroy, in a great measure, the effects of sunrise; but the transcendent glow of sundown colors is the glow that floods the crown and base of Mt. Edgecumb on the western horizon of the bay, and repeats its radiance in tipping with golden gild the host of tiny islets which stud the flashing waters, to burn in lingering brightness on the peaks of Verstova and her sister hills, when all else is in darkness or its shades around about.
The most characteristic and expressive single view of Sitka is that one afforded from Japan Island, which is close by and right opposite the town: the place was in its greatest architectural grandeur prior to the departure of the Russians, in 1866. The lofty peak which rises abruptly back of the village is Verstova, to the bald summit of which a champagne picnic by the Russians was religiously made every summer. Although the mountain is slightly under three thousand feet in altitude and seemingly right at hand, yet the journey to its crest is one that taxes the best physical energies of strong men. The forest is so dense, so damp, the underbrush so thick and so tangled, that the walk requires a supreme bodily effort, if the trip be made up there and back in the same day.