Hostilities began on 12 June 1802 when the Tlingit of Kake and Kuiu Island attacked a Russian-led hunting party on the shores of Yakutat Bay. A hundred and sixty-five Aleut hunters were killed; only the Russian commander, Urbanov, and twenty-one hunters made it back to Kodiak alive. A few days later, on the morning of Sunday, 26 June 1802, a large war party led by Katlian, nephew of the Sikta Tlingit chief Skatleut, without warning attacked and overran the unfinished palisade of Fort St Michael. The hunter Abrosim Plotnikov returned from a nearby pasture with the community’s small herd of cattle to find ‘buildings on fire and the storehouses looted’. As he later told Company officers in Kodiak, ‘I saw Navaskin jump over the balustrade from the upper balcony and start to run. Perhaps his clothes caught in the brush because he fell and four Kolosh [the Russian term for the Tlingit] lifted him on their spears and carried him to the barracks where they cut his head off.’13 Ekaterina Pinnuina, the (presumably native or mixed-race) wife of the Russian hunter Zakhar Lebedev, tried to take refuge in the main storehouse.
‘The Kolosh broke the shutters and began shooting continuously through the windows. Soon they smashed the door leading to the back porch and cut a hole in the main door . . . Tumakaev fired the cannon which was aimed at the main door and killed several Kolosh.’14 There was no time or gunpowder to reload the cannon so the men escaped to the upper floor through a hole hacked in the ceiling, but the building was already on fire. The men were forced to jump from the upper floor of the burning building and were all speared one by one. Pinnuina and the other women, who had hidden in the cellar until the door was broken down, were divided as slaves among the Tlingit warriors.
Plotnikov himself was seized by a party of Tlingit braves but escaped by slipping out of the jacket they were holding him by and hiding in a hollow tree trunk. He and a handful of fellow survivors lived in the woods for eight days without food, emerging only when they heard cannon fire roll across Sitka Sound. An English ship, the Unicorn under Captain Henry Barber, had anchored in the bay and sent a boat ashore to survey the still-smoking ruins of the settlement. All of the twenty-nine Russian and fifty-five Aleut men who had been in the camp at the time of the attack had been decapitated; their heads were stuck on sticks along the stony shore.
The Company’s directors often suspected that the subversive, republican Americans had not only sold guns to the Tlingit but also encouraged them to eject the Russians from their shores. This was unfair: the reality was that commercial rivalry was forgotten when fellow white men were threatened, as the Sitka Tlingit found to their cost when they tried to sell the 4,000 sea-otter pelts they had looted from Fort St Michael to British and Yankee ships.
Barber acted quickly and ruthlessly. When the Sitka Tlingits’ supreme chief ‘Mikhail’ – Skatleut – came alongside asking warily whether there were any Russians aboard, Barber assured him there were none but seized Skatleut and his nephew Katlian as soon as they were aboard. Two more ships, the Alert and the Globe of Boston under Captains Ebbets and Cunningham, sailed into the Sound the next day and took two other Tlingit trading parties prisoner as well, firing grapeshot for good measure to keep the rest of the tribe at bay. Barber demanded the return of all Russian and Aleut prisoners in exchange for their hostages. To speed negotiations, Cunningham had one of his Tlingit prisoners tried for murder by a kangaroo court convened on the Globe’s quarterdeck. The man was hanged from the yardarm in full view of the Tlingit braves ashore. The Tlingit, getting the message, surrendered their captives and retreated into the forest.
Abandoning his trading mission, Barber sailed to Kodiak with five (or eight, depending whether you believe Barber or Baranov) Russian men and eighteen women and children he had rescued from Tlingit slavery. European solidarity went only so far, however. Barber demanded a reward – or ransom – of 50,000 rubles’ worth of furs in compensation for choosing to hang the locals rather than buy stolen Russian pelts from them at a discount. Otherwise, Barber told Baranov, he would destroy the village of St Paul with the Unicorn’s twenty guns. Even under such disadvantageous circumstances Baranov still managed to bargain Barber down to 10,000 rubles, sealing the deal with a celebratory dinner.
News of the massacre resonated across the Pacific, reaching the ears of the Nadezhda and the Neva in Hawaii on their outward journey to Japan. Revenge would have to be taken, but without warships Baranov was powerless. The keels of the brigs Svataya Ekaterina and Svyatoi Alexander Nevsky were hurriedly laid at Kodiak. By April 1804 Baranov had assembled an impressive war party – 300 baidarkas under 36 loyal chiefs, over 800 natives in total, plus 120 Russians. Baranov himself captained the Yermak, a shallow-draughted, 51-foot oared galley perfect for inshore attacks, carrying the heaviest guns in the colony mounted on her prow.
They began by ravaging the Tlingit villages of Kake and Kuiu in revenge for the attack on the Urbanov party in June 1802. The villagers had wisely deserted their homes on the approach of the Russian party, and Baranov was able to collect a large number of Tlingit ritual objects such as battle masks, wooden armour, a shaman’s raven rattle and intricately carved halibut hook. Lisiansky later took the artefacts to St Petersburg, where they are now on display in the Kunstkammer Museum.15
On arriving at Sitka on 19 September, Baranov, to his surprise and relief, found the Neva waiting for him. Lisiansky had missed Baranov at Kodiak, but on hearing that the manager was already on the warpath he had raced the Neva directly across the open sea to Sitka and spent four weeks mapping Sitka Sound. The canoe party had taken the slower but safer Inside Passage. Despite the arrival of a warship, the Sitka Tlingit were nonetheless in no mood to bargain. A stray Kodiak baidarka was captured by Tlingit braves and its two Aleut hunters beheaded on the spot before their seaborne companions could come to the rescue. O’Cain, who had come down from Kodiak in his eponymous ship with Lisiansky, attempted to trade but got his boat shot up for his pains. O’Cain himself got a musket ball through his uniform collar, doubtless causing the Bostonian to rue the high quality of the muskets he had sold the natives over the years.
The Tlingit had spent the two years since their raid on Fort St Michael making themselves as hard a target as their sketchy understanding of ballistics and fortification allowed. Having had a taste of the effects of naval gunfire from the Unicorn and Globe, Chief Skatleut had abandoned the old tribal stronghold on a natural promontory dominating Sitka Sound and moved his settlement half a mile up the shallow inlet to what is now called Indian River. They constructed a high palisade built of whole redwood trees ‘so heavy that a man and even two men could not encompass them, placed both horizontal and vertical’16 with two openings for cannon (also acquired from Yankee traders, it emerged) and a small gate for sallies. Inside were timber-covered dugouts in which the See’Atika clan of the Sitka Tlingit prepared themselves for the coming attack.
The Russians quickly occupied the abandoned heights of the old Tlingit citadel of Sitka, where they would remain until the ceremony of handover of the colony to the Americans was enacted on the same hill in 1867. Lisiansky’s men dragged their largest cannon to the top, from where they successfully sank a large canoe bringing gunpowder and supplies to the Indian fort – it exploded impressively, boosting Russian morale. A hundred baikarkas then towed the Neva up the shallows of the sound as close to the Tlingit fort as Lisiansky dared without running aground. But even the Neva’s nine-pounder guns could do little damage to the fort – the cannonballs just bounced off the five- and six-foot-thick logs. Meanwhile the Tlingits’ small-bore cannon ‘did much damage to our rigging’,17 forcing the Neva to retreat out of range.
The war party of ‘our new countrymen’, as Lisiansky called the flotilla of Aleuts,18 Chugach and Koniags, readied for a frontal assault. The Chugach chiefs – a mainland tribe culturally close to the Tlingit – performed war dances using an old brass kettle as a drum, their hair covered in grease and bird down. On the morning of 1 October Baranov personally led an amphibious assault with his 120 men, struggling throug
h the shallows onto a stony beach that offered the Tlingit cannon a clear field of fire. The defenders showed impressive discipline, holding their fire until the Russians were within fifty yards of the walls before unleashing a devastating volley of musket fire which felled nearly thirty of the attackers, including fourteen of Lisiansky’s twenty sailors. Baranov himself was shot through the arm.
The Tlingit, pressing their advantage, poured out of the fort in full warpaint and musket-ball-proof armour made of hoops of hardwood covered in elk hide. Prominent was Katlian, who wore a wooden helmet in the shape of a raven and carried a heavy blacksmith’s hammer looted from the smithy at Fort St Michael – both articles are now in museums in Alaska. Only a fierce rearguard action by the surviving sailors and covering gunfire from the Neva prevented the Tlingit from driving the Russians into the sea and capturing their field cannon. As they retreated to the fort the Tlingit dragged at least one wounded Russian with them. The unfortunate sailor was ritually impaled on the fort’s walls.
The Russians had failed to take the fort, and Baranov, to whom most of the Aleut force were personally loyal, lay seriously wounded. But the Tlingit were also exhausted, many of their best warriors cut down by the Neva’s grapeshot on the beach. More seriously, they had used almost all their powder and would not survive another assault. ‘If it were not for the want of powder and ball . . . they would have defended themselves to the last extremity,’19 wrote Lisiansky, now acting Russian commander.
Skatleut and Lisiansky began cautious negotiations, interspersed by bombardment from the Neva’s guns. One Aleut slave released by the Tlingit as a gesture of goodwill reported that the chief was playing for time until reinforcements came from the north of the island. None arrived. A week after the attempted assault, the Russians heard the prearranged signal that Skatleut was ready to leave – a cry of ‘Oo – oo – ooo!’ – which raised a feeble answering cheer from the Russians. All night a shaman woman keened in mourning. In the morning Lisiansky entered the fort to find it abandoned except for one old woman and a little boy. Piled in the centre of the settlement were the bodies of thirty Tlingit warriors killed in battle. More horrifying were the bodies of infants and dogs, killed to ensure that the Tlingit retreat would be silent. ‘O man, civilized or uncivilized, [of] what cruelties is not thy nature capable?’20 lamented Lisiansky.
The RAC flag flying over Castle Rock at Sitka, sketched by Langsdorff.
In this place of blood and horror, on the bluff overlooking Sitka Sound, Baranov decided to re-found the capital of Russian America. He called it New Archangel in memory of the lost Fort St Michael, a mile and a half up the Sound from the new settlement. Baranov kept his war party close, putting them to work erecting a stockade on the rock, then storehouses and barracks. The Tlingit did not return until the following summer, when a party in a canoe bearing peace offerings of white feathers, which they cast on the water, approached the fort. A nephew of Skatleut, held hostage by the Russians through the winter, was returned to his people. A peace feast followed, at which the natives were drunk under the table.
‘So much honour did they do the feast that in the evening they were carried to their apartments in a state of perfect inebriety,’ reported Lisiansky.21 Skatleut accepted one of Baranov’s copper double-headed eagles, mounted on a pole, as a gift – though almost certainly not as a sign of fealty, as the Russians intended. Katlian even appeared, and Baranov had him carried into the Russian stockade on the shoulders of Aleut hunters, a Tlingit custom for welcoming an honoured guest. Rather than hang the warrior for his actions, as Captain Cunningham would had done, Baranov wisely chose to behave as one chief would to another. Their two tribes had fought, and now they made peace through a ritual exchange of gifts.*22
By late August 1805 the Neva, loaded with furs from Kodiak and New Archangel, was provisioning for her delayed onward journey to Canton. Despite the drama of the recapture of Sitka, the previous hunting season had been good: Lisiansky carried over 450,000 rubles’ worth of furs. The Canton trip was a gamble, however, because no one in Russian America had any way of knowing if the diplomatic mission to China had been successful or even if Rezanov’s efforts in Nagasaki had borne fruit.
The Maria Magdalena, bearing Rezanov and his party, arrived just after the Neva left. They missed each other by a week. Three hundred native canoes came out to greet the new arrival. The courtier who had brought Russian America to the attention of Napoleon, the Tsar and St Petersburg society finally met the man who had actually forged Russian America in blood. To a ragged salute of cannon fire, Rezanov was shown ashore to his humble accommodation. The most solid structures in New Archangel were its impressive stockade with two squat towers, and the manager’s house, and it was here that the chamberlain was installed. The colony was ringed with cannon – pointing not at the sea, but towards the endless threatening forest around.
Footnotes
* Named by James Cook after a hill overlooking Plymouth harbour – the Russians called it Mount St Lazarus.
* The local Tlingit came to believe that Baranov was a wizard, and that the rockets fired from Sitka were in fact Baranov himself rising to the skies to spy on the Indians’ plans. Baranov, who always wore chain mail, reinforced his reputation for invincibility by inviting Tlingit prisoners to fire arrows into his heart, which bounced off.
16
Hunger, Disease, Shipwreck and Death
Truly in all my life I have never witnessed such drunkenness and debauch . . . drinking as they do and letting the hunters drink I would not be surprised if one day they would cause the Company more ruin than the Kolosh did.
Nikolai Rezanov, letter to the directors of the Russian American Company1
Russians are everywhere hated by the natives and murdered whenever the opportunity arises.
Georg Heinrich Langsdorff, Voyages and Travels2
After ‘several days passed in festivity and mirth, during which business was entirely suspended,’3 Rezanov’s party, with the officers of the Maria, settled in for the winter. They squeezed into what primitive huts were to be had at New Archangel. ‘The habitations are for the most part unfinished, small chambers without stoves and with so thin a thatch that the rains which we had continually often came through,’4 complained Langsdorff. Most of the Russian hunters were even worse off, still living in tents. ‘As soon as the roof is on a new building, the men move straight in.’ Baranov himself lived scarcely less miserably than his men.
‘We live quite crowded here but the winner of this land lives worse than any of us,’ Rezanov reported to the Company on 5 November. ‘He inhabits a kind of plank yurt that is so damp that the mildew has to be wiped off every day. The shack is so full of holes that with the continuous rains it leaks like a sieve. A wonderful man! He thinks only of the comfort of others but is so careless of his own that once I found his bed standing in water and asked him “perhaps the wind tore off a board somewhere”. “No,” he replied calmly, ‘it seems to have run in under the floor,” and went about his business.’
Despite the feasting and exchange of presents with the Tlingit earlier that summer, the Russians considered themselves to be in unequivocally hostile territory. ‘We live on the rock with some men armed at all times and the cannon primed,’ Rezanov wrote to Gideon in Kodiak on 11 September 1805. ‘I fear . . . the knives under the threat of which we live here will again be used to annihilate the Russians. It is amazing how barbaric the local people are. They are at the moment held in check by fear, but malice remains and indescribable inhuman acts we hear are being committed against our people who are held prisoners by them.’5
Rezanov’s fear was not mere paranoia. That summer, while Skatleut’s shamans had been scattering chicken feathers on the waters as peace offerings to the Russians, a tribe of Tlingit to the north of Sitka had attempted to seize a Boston ship. The Atahualpa, under Captain Lemuel Porter, had come inshore in Milbanke Sound to trade. Once on board, the Tlingit chief stabbed Porter in the belly. Producing pistols fr
om under otter skins they had brought aboard, his men shot down two American sailors as more Tlingit swarmed up the companionway. The Bostonians escaped only by raking their own deck with grapeshot from a falconet – a small cannon – mounted on the quarterdeck. Every officer was killed in the melee and only six crewmen remained unwounded; Captain Porter also narrowly survived. In the five years Boston men had been trading on this coast, six ships had been lost to such native attacks. Rezanov was understandably unconvinced by the Sikta Tlingits’ professions of friendship. ‘Our cannons always loaded . . . even in our rooms weapons are considered the best and most valuable part of our furnishings. Strict military discipline is upheld and we are ready to receive our “dear guests” any minute.’6
The Russians rarely ventured outside their stockade. When they did they found a hostile world. The forests of southern Alaska are damp, dark, weirdly quiet and as impenetrable as jungles. ‘The forest is so dense that I think until the Russians came the sun never shone within it from the day of Creation,’ wondered Rezanov. ‘Their wildness is frightening. A few steps in the woods and one sees curious sights: piles of stumps lying one on top of the other and big trees growing out of them.’ Rezanov found cavities full of water ‘which seem to have no bottom . . . in these woods one has to crawl and climb instead of walk’. The Russians attempted to clear some of the redwoods and hemlock thickets around their settlement, but even after felling 10,000 trees they had ‘barely made perceptible clearings’. The wood was too damp to be burned for charcoal and too hard to be easily sawn for planks. Stacks of firewood rotted instead of drying in the constant drizzle. ‘Autumn is the worst season,’ complained Rezanov. ‘From October on the rains pour continuously day and night . . . Our life here is very tedious.’
Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Page 26
