The world had not been laid out correctly, but Bering held with fervor to his faith in that official chart for which his men were dying. At last Tschirikoff, unable to bear it any longer, deserted Bering, and sailing eastward many days, came at last to land at the mouth of Cross Straits in Southern Alaska.
Beyond a rocky foreshore and white surf, forests of pine went up to mountains lost in trailing clouds. Behind a little point rose a film of smoke from some savage camp-fire. Tschirikoff landed a boat’s crew in search of provisions and water, which vanished behind the point and was seen no more. Heart-sick, he sent a second boat, which vanished behind the point and was seen no more, but the fire of the savages blazed high. Two days he waited, watching that pillar of smoke, and listened to a far-off muttering of drums, then with the despairing remnant of his crew, turned back to the lesser perils of the sea, and fled to Siberia. Farther to the northward, some three hundred miles, was Bering in the Stv Petr, driving his mutinous people in a last search for land. It was the day after Tschirikoff’s discovery, and the ship, flying winged out before the southwest wind, came to green shallows of the sea, and fogs that lay in violet gloom ahead, like some mysterious coast crowned with white cloud heights towering up the sky. At sunset, when these clouds had changed to flame color, they parted, suddenly revealing high above the mastheads the most tremendous mountain in the world. The sailors were terrified, and Bering, called suddenly to the tall after-castle of the ship, went down on his knees in awestruck wonder. By the Russian calendar, the day was that of the dread Elijah, who had been taken up from the earth drawn by winged horses of flame in a chariot of fire, and to these lost mariners it seemed that this was no mere mountain of ice walls glowing rose and azure through a rift of the purple clouds, but a vision of the translation of the prophet. Bering named the mountain Saint Elias.
There is no space here for the detail of Bering’s wanderings thereafter through those bewildering labyrinths of islands which skirt the Alps of Saint Elias westward, and reach out as the Aleutian Archipelago the whole way across the Pacific Ocean. The region is an awful sub-arctic wilderness of rock-set gaps between bleak arctic islands crowned by flaming volcanoes, lost in eternal fog. It has been my fate to see the wonders and the terrors of that coast, which Bering’s seamen mistook for the vestibule of the infernal regions. Scurvy and hunger made them more like ghosts of the condemned than living men, until their nightmare voyage ended in wreck on the last of the islands, within two hundred miles of the Siberian coast.
Stellar, the German naturalist, who survived the winter, has left record of Bering laid between two rocks for shelter, where the sand drift covered his legs and kept him warm through the last days, then made him a grave afterward. The island was frequented by sea-cows, creatures until then unknown, and since wholly extinct, Stellar’s being the only account of them. There were thousands of sea otter, another species that will soon become extinct, and the shipwrecked men had plenty of wild meat to feed on while they passed the winter building from the timbers of the wreck, a boat to carry them home. In the spring they sailed with a load of sea-otter skins and gained the Chinese coast, where their cargo fetched a fortune for all hands, the furs being valued for the official robes of mandarins.
At the news of this new trade in sea-otter skins, the hunters of Siberia went wild with excitement, so that the survivors of Bering’s crew led expeditions of their own to Alaska. By them a colony was founded, and though the Straits of Anian were never discovered, because they did not exist, the czars added to their dominions a new empire called Russian America. This Alaska was sold in 1867 to the United States for one million, five hundred thousand pounds, enough money to build such a work as London Bridge, and the territory yields more than that by far in annual profits from fisheries, timber and gold.
XXXIX
A. D. 1750 THE PIRATES
There are very few pirates left. The Riff Moors of Gibraltar Straits will grab a wind-bound ship when they get the chance; the Arabs of the Red Sea take stranded steamers; Chinese practitioners shipped as passengers on a liner, will rise in the night, cut throats, and steal the vessel; moreover some little retail business is done by the Malays round Singapore, but trade as a whole is slack, and sea thieves are apt to get themselves disliked by the British gunboats.
This is a respectable world, my masters, but it is getting dull.
It was very different in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Sallee rovers, the Algerian corsairs, buccaneers of the West Indies, the Malays and the Chinese put pirate fleets to sea to prey on great commerce, when Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, Bartholomew, Roberts, Lafitte, Avery and a hundred other corsairs under the Jolly Roger could seize tall ships and make their unwilling seamen walk the plank. They and their merry men went mostly to the gallows, richly deserved the same, and yet—well, nobody need complain that times were dull.
There were so many pirates one hardly knows which to deal with, but Avery was such a mean rogue, and there is such a nice confused story—well, here goes! He was mate of the ship Duke, forty-four guns, a merchant cruiser chartered from Bristol for the Spanish service. His skipper was mightily addicted to punch, and too drunk to object when Avery, conspiring with the men, made bold to seize the ship. Then he went down-stairs to wake the captain, who, in a sudden fright, asked, “What’s the matter?” “Oh, nothing,” said Avery. The skipper gobbled at him, “But something’s the matter,” he cried. “Does she drive? What weather is it?” “No, no,” answered Avery, “we’re at sea.” “At sea! How can that be?”