DR RICK KNECHT
We get a tremendous amount of ethnographic information from Cook’s written diaries and records, and also the drawings. Because of the conditions, many things don’t survive, archaeologically-speaking, so we really rely on the historical records for that detail. We known the Unangan people lived in semi-subterranean houses. There are some we’ve found that are probably two thousand years old. Some of the largest house pits in Alaska are in the Aleutians. By the time Cook arrived, multiple families lived in long houses that could be up to one hundred metres long. But it’s a long way from the Arctic tree line so they were dependent on driftwood for wood supplies. One of the prime reasons for locating a village was to access driftwood. This timber was reused and recycled – probably for centuries. Some of those timbers used in these long houses were probably heirlooms.
It was down one of these hatches that David Samwell descended, along with a brace of other sailors, determined to sample the local women – whether they were interested or not. What followed was rape.
DAVID SAMWELL (1751–1798), Welsh Naval Surgeon on Cook’s third voyage
[We] immediately made love to the handsomest woman in the company, who in order to make us welcome refused us no favour she could grant though her husband or father stood by.
The Russian fur traders had already forced the Unangan people into servitude. Cook’s men were more than happy to take advantage of the fact the women would have been too terrified to say no to any demands made of them. The crew also very quickly worked out that the Unangan were gripped by the scourge of tobacco addiction, which proved to be most convenient for anyone looking for sex with one of the locals.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
There are few if any that do not both smoke and chew tobacco, a luxury that bids fair to keep them always poor.
CHARLES CLERKE
The compliment usually paid for a beauty’s favours was a hand of tobacco: for one of inferior charms, a few leaves of this valuable weed.
Cook concluded that the Unangan were ‘the most peaceable and inoffensive people I ever met with’. He couldn’t help but notice how they had incorporated Western conveniences into their daily lives – things like kettles and European fabrics. But he also suspected that this came at a heavy cost. Let’s consider, for a moment, why that might have been the case. The Russian occupation of the Aleutian Islands was not a state project. It was initiated by trading companies, and there were up to eighty of those operating in the region. As is the way with such enterprises, their only concerns were with commercial imperatives, and they had a short-term view of the exploitation and rapid depletion of resources no matter the cost to the local population. The Unangan were ‘peaceable and inoffensive’ because they had no choice.
*
In 1759 when the first Russian fur-trading company arrived under Stepan Glotov, Unalaska and Amaknak islands were home to twenty-four settlements and more than one thousand Aleut inhabitants. The locals had no intention of cooperating with the new arrivals, and between 1763 and 1766 the Aleuts destroyed four Russian ships and killed 175 hunters and fur traders. Predictably, the Russians retaliated. Brutally. After an attack that killed many hundreds of Aleut, the local women and children were held hostage until the men agreed to hunt furs for the Russians. The final blow came when Aleut men were stripped of their arms and their chieftains forced to pay tribute in the form of furs. Young men were taken from their families and raised as Russians, children were forced to work in the Russian fur-processing plants, and the great majority of Aleut at the very least paid lip service to being Russian Orthodox converts.
When Cook arrived, the Aleut were living as serfs under Russian overlords.
SAM NEILL
On Unalaska, Cook witnessed something he’d never seen before in his decade of voyaging – a traumatised people struggling to survive the first impacts of contact with Europeans. Russian fur traders had been at work for decades. He sensed it hadn’t gone well – but he didn’t know the half of it. The Russians called themselves traders but that was misleading. They were here to pillage – to take as many animal pelts as they possibly could, whatever it took. By the time Cook arrived half the population had been annihilated. It left Cook conflicted – it was a portent of things to come. The Unangan people were enslaved, raped, massacred, traumatised and ravaged by disease. Within a few years of Cook’s departure, 90 per cent would be gone.
Cook noted that the indigenous people had been disarmed and observed ‘the great subjection the natives are under’. Although he came from a society that was characterised by an extremely rigid hierarchy, serfdom as a form of quasi-slavery was – by the late eighteenth century in Britain – very much on the out. We can’t know for certain what Cook would have thought about the conditions the Unangan were living under. But it seems unlikely it would have sat at all well with him.
JOHN ROBSON, Map Librarian, University of Waikato
We would need to go get Doctor Who and go back a couple of hundred years to ask the Europeans why they did it. I think they had this attitude of superiority that led to the slave trade. It was very similar to what happened in the Pacific – this whole idea that the peoples of other countries were inferior to Europeans, and were there to work for them. So by acquiring land and peoples they were perpetuating that. There was a body of people at the time who were anti-slavery and amongst the most ardent anti-slavers were the Quakers. Cook had been strongly influenced by his time with a Quaker sea captain when he was growing up, and the Quaker influence was probably very strong with him. Most likely, he himself would have been anti-slavery. But, really, we just don’t know.
*
One person from Cook’s crew who had the opportunity to witness the relationship between the Russians and Unangans in person was the American marine John Ledyard. The encounter began in a most peculiar way. The British ships had been at anchor for a couple of days when a delegation of locals arrived bearing a surprising gift – a salmon pie.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
A very singular present considering the place – a rye loaf or rather a pie made in the form of a loaf, for some salmon highly seasoned.
Cook rightly concluded it was an offering sent by the Russians – a fair assumption given it was highly unlikely the locals had independently mastered the art of European pastry-making.
SAM NEILL: So a kayak turns up. Remarkably, one of the crew members hands over a pie – it’s a gift from the Russians. It was a gesture of hospitality. Why a salmon pie?
DENIS ROBINSON, Unangan Tribe, Chief: Because that is probably the freshest protein they have on the island, unless they wanted to eat seal or sea lion. And in October, when he landed, it was right towards the end of a major salmon run. It was probably the freshest protein they could present – the Unangan people had been eating it for thousands of years, but the pie is a very Russian thing.
Curious to find out how long the Russians had been in residence, Cook tasked Ledyard with accompanying the Aleut guides back to the Russian settlement in Dutch Harbor to reconnoitre, arming him with bottles of wine and rum as a reciprocal gift. A full day’s trek across the island proved to be hard on Ledyard’s feet, though that was to be expected after such a long time at sea. On the second day, his Aleut companions stuffed him headfirst into the prow of a skin kayak to make the sea crossing to Dutch Harbor where he was greeted by the Russians and treated to a hearty meal of boiled whale as the Slavs tucked into the alcoholic beverages he’d carted along with him.
That evening, he joined the Russians and Unangans in an Orthodox prayer service.
JOHN LEDYARD (1751–1789), British American Explorer, crew member, Cook’s third voyage
The Russians assembled the Indians in a very silent manner, and said prayers after the manner of the Greek Church.
This was followed by a somewhat less wholesome exchange. A plug of tobacco bought Ledyard some time with one of the local women. After what must have been a welcome night’s sleep, he was introduced to the w
onders of a Slavic steam bath where he promptly passed out, only to be revived by a good slosh of brandy and a plate of whale meat, bear and walrus – ‘A composition of smells very offensive at nine or ten in the morning’, as he put it. This was a memorable experience, and one that made a mark on the Connecticut-born Ledyard, who got a taste for adventure and would go on to become one of the greatest solo explorers of the eighteenth century.
Ledyard escorted the three Russians who had entertained him at Dutch Harbor back to English Bay. Once on board the Resolution, they proceeded to drain the boat’s supplies of hard liquor and entertain the men with their first European contact outside the ship’s company in years.
JAMES KING (1750–1784), Officer, Royal Navy, crew member, Cook’s third voyage
To see people in so strange a part of the world who had other ties than that of common humanity was such a novelty and pleasure and gave such a turn to our ideas and feelings as may easily be imagined.
A change is as good as a holiday, right? One of the guests was of particular interest to Cook – Gerasim Gregoriev Izmailov, a student navigator. Ismailov gave Cook a letter of introduction to the Russian Governor of Kamchatka and Petropavlovsk, a letter that would be of no use to Cook but would prove extremely useful to the two men who would lead the expedition after his death, Charles Clerke and John Gore.
Cook also took advantage of the Russian presence to write a letter to the Admiralty, which would be his first contact with home since he had departed the Cape of Good Hope two years previously. The letter, in which he outlined his intention to return to the Arctic Circle in order to continue his search the following summer, would end up being a voice from beyond the grave – it arrived in London via St Petersburg in January 1780 after news of Cook’s death had already reached home.
The spirit of camaraderie embodied in this exchange did not persist in centuries to come as the dominant world powers came to blows over the region. In August 1788, the Spanish came into contact with the Russians on Unalaska for the first time. Esteban José Martínez and Gonzalo López de Haro weren’t to be discouraged after meeting Potap Zaikof, who was then commander of Russian Unalaska. The Spaniards brazenly claimed the island for their Crown and renamed it Puerto de Dona Maria Luisa Teresa. After returning to America and reporting to Manuel Antonio Flores – the Viceroy of New Spain – that the Russians intended to occupy Nootka Sound, Martinez and de Haro were dispatched again to protect Spanish interests in the region, so initiating the Nootka Crisis that brought Britain and Spain to the brink of war.
In the meantime, the inevitable wave of missionaries arrived – in this instance of the Russian Orthodox variety. Orthodox monks and priests turned up at the Aleutian fur-trading camps some fifteen years after Cook’s visit, and it’s fair to assume their appearance was greeted with some ambivalence by the Russians who – until that time – had been running the islands as personal fiefdoms without any answerability to a higher power.
For the Unangans who’d been subjugated by the traders, the arrival of the Church had two relatively positive outcomes.
LARESA SYRESON, Unangan Descendant
Like my grandma always told me, there was some slavery happening at the same time as the fur trade. But there were also some very good things that came out of Russian contact . . . like our language being documented and our alphabet being created. So that was very helpful for my generation and others who would like to learn the language. But there was also a lot of bloodshed and maltreatment due to the fur trade.
As long as the locals converted, they were inoculated against smallpox, a disease that was laying waste to the Alaskan and Native American populations in the early 1800s. Forget the inconvenient truth that the Orthodox new arrivals had transmitted the disease to the indigenous communities in the first place. Between 1836 and 1840, epidemics of nasty imported bugs almost wiped out the population; by the end of the decade, only two to four hundred Aleuts remained in Unalaska.
What was the other upside of the Church’s arrival? In 1825, the Russian Orthodox Church of the Holy Ascension was established in Unalaska by its founding priest, Ivan Veniaminov, who was later canonised and became St Innocent of Alaska. St Innocent created the first Aleut writing system and translated scripture into Aleut.
Unfortunately, that positive development came with its caveats. As the Church schools were established, Aleut customs and forms of cultural expression were discouraged in preference to a Russian way of life. For a preliterate society that relied on oral storytelling in order to preserve its culture, that meant many links to the past were lost forever.
DENIS ROBINSON
There were two different waves of Russian arrivals – first were the fur traders. They were ruthless and killed a lot of people and enslaved the Unangan people. Next came the missionaries. They built schools and started trying to structure the life of the Unangan people. But Unangan culture is not a written history. It was passed along by word of mouth. So a lot of Unangan history and culture was lost.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is also the tale of the Pacific after Cook.
DR RICK KNECHT
It’s estimated only one in ten Unangans survived after European contact. But that may be conservative. They had very limited experience with the diseases from the old world – they had no immunity. In a preliterate culture, this mortality rate was like your library burning down . . . your entire repository of hard-won knowledge, lost. In one generation. Those who survived were younger and relatively unskilled, so you see evidence of a decrease in skill levels and knowledge in the very early ethnographic collections. Things are beautifully crafted and made but as time goes on that knowledge is lost.
But that wasn’t the end of the story for the Aleutian Islands. Scooped up in the United States’ 1867 Alaska Purchase when a cash-strapped Russian Empire sold its North American territories for USD$7.2 million – amounting to about AUD$130 million today – the archipelago became strategically important when the United States entered the Second World War after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. Dutch Harbor was attacked by Japanese forces in June 1942, and the indigenous residents were relocated and interned in ill-equipped camps in south-east Alaska for the duration of the war, ostensibly for their own protection.
DENIS ROBINSON
Prior to World War II, we had a really good economy here. All of our people worked in the salted herring industry. Hundreds and hundreds of barrels of salted fish were exported every year. Then in 1942 the Japanese bombed us. The US government decided they were gonna take all of the Unangan people out of the area. But nobody would tell them where they were going. So they were dropped off in south-east Alaska in abandoned fish-canning factories with no roofs, no windows, no doors. My mum remembers lying under the one blanket they gave her and looking up through the cracks of the roof to see the stars. And there were trees! Out here, we don’t have trees. Most of the Aleut people will tell you that trees block the view. I was talking to a lovely old lady who said she gets anxiety when she’s among trees. So when it was over the military had filled in the lagoon on Unalaska where the herring spawned . . . so that killed the herring industry.
Only several hundred made it back to their islands after the war. The Aleut on the islands occupied by the Japanese were taken to internment camps in Japan. Only twenty-five of those people survived.
The legacy of all these events, from first contact with the Russians and through the Second World War, endures today.
SAM NEILL: So that first contact means that 90 per cent of the people were dead. How do you recover from that?
DENIS ROBINSON: We didn’t – we haven’t. If we were wolves, we’d be on the endangered species list. In 1974, when the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act was enacted, there were only about three thousand Unangan people registered as a quarter blood or more. So we really are pretty much an extinct people.
Although there is a strong will among the Aleut to revive the traditions of the past, so much has been l
ost – particularly when considered in light of the number of them who died – that it seems to be a Sisyphean task. Not that it will stop them trying.
LARESA SYRESON
I got interested in tattooing because I saw one woman when I was very young – she was beautiful and she was very old. She must’ve been from up north. Just seeing her, it made me start asking my grandma about our traditions. The chin tattoos had to do with your status within the community. But it could also have been the status of your family within the community – maybe your husband was a well-established hunter for your village and that would be communicated in your tattoos.
Across the reaches of the far northern Pacific, indigenous people continue to find expression through traditional means and are fighting to keep their culture alive, even as it seems the world is doing its best to shut them down.
*
This future was already mapped out as Cook made his farewells and departed English Bay on 24 October 1778. He had been given an insight into the cultural disruption that would occur in the wake of his visits to previously isolated communities across the Pacific. His charts were exposing these worlds to foreigners and, in effect, mapping their demise.
SAM NEILL
Throughout his decade of voyaging, Cook had met Pacific peoples who’d experienced brief European contact. Unalaska was the first place where he saw the upheavals brought to indigenous culture after sustained contact with the Russians. For Cook, it must have been an unsettling preview of what potentially lay ahead for the societies he himself had opened up to the West.
Although Cook’s observations about the subjugation of the Unangan people reflect an unease about what he saw, it’s impossible to know whether that translated to a broader concern. All we can be certain of as he left the Aleutian Islands were his intentions for the rest of his voyage and the mission he had been sent to complete.
The Pacific Page 29
