Baranov, you know, spent last summer in extending the Company's operations to a point a few thousands versts or so from here, and far to the eastward of Mt. St. Elias. Here's to St. Elias! I was with him—not Elijah, you stupid—in the St. Paul, my present command, and he had all the natives that could be mustered, in some three hundred skin canoes. Most of them, by the way, were drowned in Icy Bay, but when Baranov makes an omelet he likes to hear the eggs splash. We founded a post in the country of the Sitka tribes, and called it New Arkangel. On our return westward in the autumn, we left behind some twenty-three men as garrison, but they have foolishly allowed themselves to be done to death. So we sail in a few days to massacre the Sitkas, the only amusement there is to look forward to at present.
Meanwhile I have put in for repairs here at St. Petr; and beyond some little diversion of which it is the purpose of this present writing to advise you, I have little to do except play cards with the priest, and listen to the oddest lot of legends that ever came out of a monastery. Yum! Yum!
I do not suppose that you care to hear about the conditions of the country and the fur trade, or I would regale you with an account of all the hunters drowned, stabbed, or starved since I last wrote. Nay, I will not weary you with commonplaces. It is enough that men such as ourselves of the first fashion are condemned to be bored all day with the affairs of the canaille, without letting them intrude upon our private correspondence. Verily our revered grandparent deserved to be exterminated and heavily fined for his idiocy in discovering such a country.
As a matter of fact, however, I am not writing to amuse either myself or you, but to tell you how I managed to fall out with Baranov. As the insolent old fool has written to Golovnin and others to get me sent home in disgrace. I want your Excellency to have his paws burned. How such a base-born, red-haired, shopkeeping, bald-headed, shriveled-up he-bear came to be Governor of Russian America I cannot imagine.
Well, early in June I arrived at Ounalashka, in the Aleutian Islands, with supplies from Petropavlovsk; found the Governor there, and began to unload. From the first I heard of little else but the charms of Olga—the Little Fur Seal—they called her—daughter of a big Aleut chief from Oumnack. I entertained the old gentleman on board the St. Paul, until he grew mellow with my particular vodka, now, alas! no more. Olga sat in a corner with her big dark eyes fixed on me, her red lips just a little parted, and her black hair streaming down on either side of her face: only a savage, of course, but one cannot expect court ladies from the entourage of Her Imperial Majesty. When I thought the chief was in a sufficiently amiable humor—you could have buttoned his grin behind his neck—I asked how many skins he required for his very plain daughter. Not that I wanted her. But still I felt some curiosity. It would not be good for his morals to encourage his avarice.
To which he replied that all my skins wouldn't buy her, because the great lord Baranov demanded her for wife. Now the Governor has more skins than I have hairs; but I have wisdom, and wisdom is better than many skins; so I told the chief that if he would give me Olga I would tell him all about everything. You know I picked up ventriloquism at the Naval College, so that when the chief derided me, voices were heard laughing at him from under his chair, out of the vodka bottles, in the beams overhead and all over the cabin. He said I was a great doctor, and knew everything; but how could he give me Olga when he had also promised her to Ivan, a young chief in the village? Moreover, she was in love with a fourth party. I told him that I was very wise, and that I loved Olga.
Now, to make a long story short, I disposed of the pretenders as follows: The fourth party I won over by giving him an old cocked hat and a broken sword, together with the degree of Sublime Exaltation in the Ancient and Hereditary Order of Mystical Gluttons. The initiation was a most imposing ceremony. I read the ritual from the ship's big medicine book, and in token of the ancient and hide-bound traditions of the Order, encased his head in plaster of Paris and painted his nose red. After marching thrice round the cabin on all fours we concluded the ceremony with an oath, whereby he is bound to present himself in person at Irkutsk, and there to deliver letters credential to His Excellency the Venerable and Supreme Grand Master of the Order, take him into his arms, rub noses in token of amity and a joyful heart, and to receive the appointment of Minister of Stolen Goods in the government of the province. He sails in the ship of my little friend Hans Schlitz, and I hereby commend him to your brotherly love.
Now for the third party, Ivan, the young Chief: I sent him to Baranov in the dead of the night to ask why he has red hair; but instead of having his mind enriched with the important revelations which were to have been uttered by the Governor on hearing this mystic password, my poor friend Ivan had his body decorated with quite other forms of enrichment, and was found next morning on top of the church belfry with one eye and three fingers missing and his nose pointing round the corner. Baranov is inclined, at times, to be a little playful.
The fourth party being under your Excellency's care, and the third suitor ignominiously rejected by the Little One as damaged goods, I had now to compensate her father for not getting Baranov's skins. Wherefore I proceeded to instill the most subtle wisdom into the head of my future father-in-law. I taught him a little sleight of hand, and some card tricks; showed him how to run a sword through his body by means of a tin tube in the shape of a half belt, invented for him a beautiful system of fortune telling, and gave him the ship's speaking trumpet with which to bellow at the people through his big medicine mask. I showed him the effects of phosphorus upon the face at night, and how even white people turn black when painted with nitrate of silver. But the most polite of his new accomplishments is the ventriloquism—a trick which he has raised to the dignity of a fine art. Suffice it to say that I qualified that savage to become such an intolerable nuisance that he is to-day the recognized terror of all Aliaska, and possesses more skins than even Baranov could have offered for his daughter.
But alas for all my virtue and my discretion! Just as I had won the Little Fur Seal, for whose sake Baranov piled up his skins in vain, the young Aleut Chief was undergoing repairs, and the fourth party proceeding to rub noses with your Excellency at Irkutsk, the old chief came to me, crouched down on the cabin floor, and began to wail.