It was clear that Russia was prepared to sell Alaska. But was the United States prepared to purchase it? In the years before the Stoeckl-Seward negotiations, American enthusiasm for Alaska was negligible at best, and it was viewed as a perfectly useless expanse, quite unnecessary for the already land-rich country. “A dreary waste of glaciers, icebergs, white bears and walrus fit only for Esquimaux,” one politician opined.
As early as 1857, Stoeckl began to feel out possibilities of a sale. William Gwin of California initially rebuffed him, saying that he had no interest in Alaska — it was simply too far away to be of any value to his state and to the country. Vocal California lobbies, however, and others in the Washington territory gave him pause to reflect. The rich fishery potential of the Alaska coast, it was argued, should not to be overlooked and neither were the equally promising resources of inland furs. The senator eventually acquiesced and indifferently proposed that $5 million might be allocated for the purchase.
Russia was prepared and so seemed the United States — it was now a matter of price. President Johnson and the cabinet authorized Seward to offer the Russians $5 million, which is what he did. (This figure, coincidentally, matched the minimum amount Stoeckl was authorized by St. Petersburg to accept.) In December 1866, Seward presented the American offer, which Stoeckl agreed to take under consideration. It soon became clear to the Russian that his American counterpart was not only enthusiastic about the deal, but was also anxious to conclude it expeditiously. The wily Russian therefore determined to protract discussions, which he successfully did in the months that followed. Agreement was at last reached on a figure of $7 million but not without Steward’s bitter complaint that he was exceeding all authorization. But Stoeckl, encouraged with the outcome of his bargaining, held out for more. To the agreed figure, he now insisted, must be added an additional sum to cover related expenses. Ostensibly, these included coverage of the Russian-American Company’s debts and the cost of London banking houses, fees for carrying out the gold exchange transaction. In fact, “related expenses” were also a provision for the requisite bribes to certain members of Congress if any hope was to be had of passing an Alaska purchase bill.
“I consider the price too high as it is,” countered Seward. “I have gone far beyond the wishes of my Government in order to prevent unnecessary bickering. But I will not for one moment entertain any suggestion of taking over the obligations incurred by a chartered company. And my Government will not clear the transaction in London. We had our bellyful of London in the late war.”[3] But, after continued deliberation, it was at last agreed to conclude the matter with a $7.2 million figure. Alaska at that price would become American, “free and unencumbered by any reservations, privileges, franchises, grants, etc.” And this was the deal the two friends wrote into a treaty in the middle of that March night in the State Department offices.
Whatever Stoeckl’s success, the Alaskan purchase price was a virtual giveaway. The tsar spent twice the amount annually merely to operate the imperial navy. A gift it was: American territory had expanded by 369,529,600 acres — at less than two cents an acre. A paltry sum it was if one considers that sixty years later United States purchased from Denmark three Caribbean islands for $25 million, or $249 an acre.
The bill providing for the purchase passed the Senate in record time, and after languishing in the House of Representatives for fifteen months, it was finally ratified. On October 18, 1867, the Stars and Stripes were ceremoniously raised in New Archangel (renamed Sitka) and United States became an Arctic land.
It didn’t take long for southern-based entrepreneurs, tradesmen, and adventurers to begin shuffling into the newly acquired territory on one ambitious project or another. But even before the United States takeover of Alaska, Americans had been working not only in those Arctic and sub-Arctic wildernesses, but in Siberia, as well. One such hardy was a self-educated twenty-three-year-old from Norwalk, Ohio, bearing the same name as his great-nephew, George F. Kennan, the iconic twentieth-century American diplomat and historian. In 1865, the elder Kennan set off for northeastern point of Siberia, where he spent two and a half years working for the Russian-American Telegraph Company. In order to appreciate more fully the soul of the Arctic, it’s essential to dwell a bit on George and his memoir, Tent Life in Siberia. But first, how did this young provincial find himself there?
In October 1861, an attempt was made to lay a telegraph cable between America and Europe. It failed, as did three subsequent tries, all checkmated by the seemingly invincible Atlantic; the technical challenges of the 1,600-mile distance and the wild ocean currents were judged insurmountable. Vast sums had been expended to no avail. The Western Union Company therefore decided to tackle the problem by passing through the west. It would hook up America with the capitals of Europe by establishing a telegraph via the Bering Strait. The plan called for a line that would move north from San Francisco, already connected with New York, through Oregon, British Columbia, and Alaska and then across the strait, down to the mouth of the Amur River in northeast Siberia. There it would meet the proposed extension of a Russian line that had already connected Europe with central Siberia. A continuous length of wire would thus be completed, circling nearly half the globe. An additional attraction of the proposed Bering Strait route was the easy possibility of extending service to Peking and the rich Chinese markets.
Thus it was that the Russian-American Telegraph Company came into being, with $10 million being raised within two months at a hefty price of $75 dollars per share. Not only was it the biggest public offering to that time, but it was the world’s largest bilateral venture in its day — Yankee entrepreneurialism at its best. A call went out for manpower, with a special need for applicants having experience in telegraphic work. The eager Kennan unhesitatingly responded, volunteering his services as an “explorer” and announcing that he was ready “to leave for Russian-America [Alaska] within two hours.”
George was born into a family of modest means, a precocious child who grew into an intelligent, quick-witted youngster with an abiding passion for books. He read voraciously and eclectically; but it was travel, adventure, and fantasy that attracted him most. The family’s financial difficulties were such that at age twelve he was forced to quit school in order to help bring bread to the table, and he found a job with the Cleveland and Toledo Railway Company as a messenger in the telegraph office. He took to the world of telegraph quickly and at age seventeen was promoted to manager of the local office. Within two years, however, George became listless and utterly bored, not only with the repetitive nature of his work, but also with the parochial life of his small hometown. Thus it was that on July 8, 1865, he found himself on board the Olga, a Russian trading vessel setting sail north from San Francisco, excitedly waiting to start the adventure of a lifetime.
The first step of the ambitious project was to lay out the route of the proposed line and to fabricate and erect the required poles. For the implementation of the task, the path of the line was divided into four sectors, and Kennan was given the responsibility of joint command with a Russian counterpart of the northeastern Siberian segment, the most inhospitable and difficult of the four.
Twelve months later, George and his party of seventy-five Americans and scores of Natives found themselves isolated in the depths of the Siberian Arctic, incommunicado, unaware that transatlantic cable had been successfully laid and was in operation, and that the mega-project of the Russian-American Telegraph Company had been brought to a grinding halt. Blissfully oblivious of these developments they steadfastly pursued their now pointless mission for a further eighteen months. Before it was all over, he wrote bitterly on his return home, “We had explored and located the whole route of the line from the Amur River to the Bering Strait. We had prepared altogether about 15,000 telegraph poles, built between forty to fifty station houses and magazines, cut nearly fifty miles of road through the forest in the vicinity of Gamsk and Okhotsk, and accomplished a great deal of preparatory work along
the whole extent of the line.”[4] It turned out to be a fool’s mission.
There Kennan and his party lived in every imaginable condition of hardship with temperatures at times remaining steady at -35°F for days at a time (one midday temperature was recorded at -53°F). “For almost a month we had slept every night on the ground or the snow; had never seen a chair, a table, a bed or a mirror; had never been undressed night or day; and had washed our faces only three or four times in an equal number of weeks!” Imagine the joy of Kennan’s party when, after weeks in the frozen steppe with no sign of human habitation and with depleted rations, the party arrived at Gizhiga, a tiny town south of the Arctic Circle, where they were able to rest for a few days in relative comfort.
The provincial administrator greeted George warmly and offered him the hospitality of his modest home. The first order of business was a luxuriating hot bath followed by a dinner the sort of which the young American had never experienced. “After the inevitable ‘fifteen drops’ of brandy [vodka],” he wrote:
[A]nd the lunch of smoked fish, rye bread, and caviar, which always precede a Russian dinner, we took seats at the table and spent an hour and a half in getting through the numerous courses of cabbage soup, salmon pie, venison cutlets, game, small meat pies, pudding and pastry, which were successively set before us. We discussed the news of all the world, from the log villages of Kamtchatka to the imperial palaces of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Our hospitable host then ordered champagne, and over tall, slender glasses of cool beaded Veuve Cliquot we meditated upon the vicissitudes of Siberian life.
Premium French champagne in 1867 served in the shadow of the Arctic Circle sixteen thousand miles from Paris — Russian hospitality gone wild.
It was Kennan who brought to the west knowledge of the Koryaks, the peoples living south of the Bering Strait, closely related to the Chukchi. He described a home:
The settlement resembled as much as anything a collection of Titanic wooden hour-glasses, which had been half shaken down and reduced to a state of rickety dilapidation by an earthquake. The houses — if houses they could be called — were about twenty feet in height, rudely constructed of driftwood which had been thrown up by the sea and could be compared in shape to nothing but hourglasses. They had no doors or windows of any kind and could only be entered by climbing up a pole on the outside, and sliding down another pole through the chimney — a mode of entrance whose practicability depended entirely upon the activity and intensity of the fire which burned underneath. The smoke and sparks, although sufficiently disagreeable, were trifles of comparative insignificance.
The interior of a Korak yourt … presents a strange and not very inviting appearance to one who has never become accustomed by long habit to its dirt, smoke, and frigid atmosphere. It receives its only light — and that of a cheerless, gloomy character — through the round hole, about twenty feet above the floor, which serves as window, door and chimney, and which is reached by a round log with holes in it, that stands perpendicularly in the centre. The beams, rafters, and logs which compose the yourt are all of a glossy blackness, from the smoke in which they are constantly enveloped. A wooden platform, raised about a foot from the earth, extends out from the walls on three sides to a width of six feet, leaving an open spot eight or ten feet in diameter in the centre for the fire and a huge copper kettle of melting snow … on the platform are pitched three or four square skin pologs, which serve as sleeping apartments for the inmates and as refuges from the smoke, which sometimes becomes almost unendurable. A little circle of flat stones on the ground, in the centre of the yourt, forms the fireplace, over which is usually simmering a kettle of fish or reindeer meat, which, with dried salmon, seal’s blubber and rancid oil makes upthe Korak bill of fare. Everything which you see or touch bears the distinguishing marks of Korak origin – grease and smoke.
We had not been twenty minutes in the settlement before the yourt which we occupied was completely crowded with stolid, brutal-looking men, dressed in spotted deer-skin clothes, wearing strings of colored beads in their ears and carrying heavy knives two feet in length in sheaths tied around their legs.
Further in his memoir, he wrote of a December midday some two hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle: “The sun although at its greatest altitude, glowed like a red ball of fire low down in the southern horizon, and a peculiar gloomy twilight hung over the wintry landscape.” One day passed like the other and with the few exceptional overnights in isolated yourts the group lived on the steppe literally under the stars, and it is here that Kennan tells of the aurora borealis. Arctic literature is not well endowed with lyrical descriptions of surrounding nature although some travellers do pass comment on the spectacle of the aurora. No one, however, gives more thorough justice to the mystical beauty and hypnotic quality of this phenomenon than our young American. In the world of travel literature, does this school drop-out take back seat to the likes of Kipling or Trollop? Listen to him:
Among the few pleasures which reward the traveler for the hardships and dangers of life in the far north, there are none which are brighter or longer remembered than the magnificent auroral displays which occasionally illumine the darkness of the long polar night, and light up with a celestial glory the whole blue vault of heaven. No other natural phenomenon is so grand, so mysterious, so terrible in its unearthly splendor as this. Its veil conceals from mortal eyes the glory of the eternal throne seems drawn aside, and the awed beholder is lifted out of the atmosphere of his daily life into the immediate presence of God.
On the 26th of February, while we were all yet living together at Anadyrsk, there occurred one of the grandest displays of the Arctic aurora which had been observed there for more than fifty years, and which exhibited such unusual and extraordinary brilliancy that even the natives were astonished.
It was a cold, dark but clear winter’s night, and the sky in the earlier part of the evening showed no signs of the magnificent illumination which was already being prepared. A few streamers wavered now and then in the North, and a faint radiance like that of the rising moon shone above the dark belt of shrubbery which bordered the river — but this was a common occurrence and it excited no notice or remark.
As we emerged into the open air, there burst suddenly upon our startled eyes the grandest exhibition of vivid dazzling light and color of which the mind can conceive. The whole universe seemed to be on fire. A broad arch of brilliant prismatic colors spanned the heavens from east to west like a gigantic rainbow, with a long fringe of crimson and yellow streamers stretching up from its convex edge to the very zenith. At short intervals of one or two seconds, wide, luminous bands parallel with the arch, rose suddenly out of the northern horizon and swept with a swift, steady majesty across the whole heavens, like long breakers of phosphorescent light rolling in from some limitless ocean of space.…
Every portion of the vast arch was momentarily wavering, trembling and changing color, and the brilliant streamers which fringed its edge swept back and forth in great curves, like the fiery sword of the angel at the gate of Eden. In a moment the vast aurora rain how, with all its wavering streamers, began to move slowly up toward the zenith and a second arch of equal brilliancy stormed directly under it, shooting up another long seined row of slender colored lances toward the North Star, like a battalion of the celestial host presenting arms to its commanding angel.
I could not imagine any possible addition which even Almighty power could make to the grandeur of the aurora as it now appeared. The rapid alternations of crimson, blue, green and yellow in the sky were reflected so vividly from the white surface of the snow, that the whole world seemed now steeped in blood, and then quivering in an atmosphere of pale, ghastly green, through which shone the unspeakable glories of the mighty crimson and yellow.…
Never had I even dreamed of such an aurora as this and I am not ashamed to confess that its magnificence at that moment overawed and frightened me. The whole sky, from zenith to horizon, was one molten mantling sea of color a
nd fire, crimson and purple, and scarlet and green, and colors for which there are no words in language and no ideas in the mind — things which can only be conceived while they are visible.
I am painfully conscious of my inability to describe as they should be described the splendid phenomena of a great polar aurora, but such magnificent effects cannot be expressed in a mathematical formula, nor can an inexperienced artist reproduce, with a piece of charcoal, the brilliant coloring of a Turner landscape. I have given only faint hints, which the imagination of the reader must fill up. But be assured that no description, however faithful, no flight of the imagination, however exalted, can begin to do justice to a spectacle of such unearthly grandeur. Until man drops his vesture of flesh and stands in the presence of Deity, he will see no more striking manifestation of the “glory of the Lord, which is terrible,” than that presented by a brilliant exhibition of the Arctic aurora.
The foregoing is an abridged version of the original, which runs nearly twice the length. Eventually Kennan’s team arrived at the Amur River, their work completed. Here the men awaited the arrival of the company’s ship from San Francisco to return them home. “It seemed hard to give up at once the object to which we had devoted three years of our lives, and for whose attainment we had suffered all possible hardships of cold, exile and starvation; but we had no alternative, and began at once to make preparations for our final departure ... [and soon thereafter] to close the book on our Siberian experience.”[5]
Arctic Obsession Page 19
