by Will Hobbs
“That’s a lot to think about, all right,” I managed. I was wondering if all this was legal.
“Is this a finders-keepers situation?” I asked as carefully as possible. “I mean, the plaques are yours to sell?”
“Treasure law,” Torsen said without hesitating. “Like finding gold from the wreck of a Spanish galleon.”
Doubling my fishing money, that was a phenomenal offer, especially if we could catch a lot of fish. Tor was going to head north and try new water. The man was used to filling his hold. Here was my chance to make some real money. I had to keep my eye on the ball.
“I’m game,” I announced, with a smile thrown in for good measure.
“That’s better,” Torsen said. “You make us some eggs and Alpo, I’ll steer for Kelly Cove. As soon as we sell, we’re on our way.”
“Alpo?”
“Spam, Robbie. Sliced and fried. Grab three of those big potatoes and make us some home fries. Fry everything in that bacon grease we saved from yesterday. You can cook, can’t you? Open a jar of salsa. Slice and butter some bagels, warm ’em, don’t petrify ’em. We’ll split a cantaloupe, and don’t forget the orange juice and coffee.”
“You’re on,” I said.
This was going to be something new. Breakfast at breakfast time.
We ate, and soon after that we cranked up the trolling poles. At nine knots, it wasn’t long until I was throwing the fenders over the side, and we were snubbing up to the Angie, a boat twice our size. I scrambled into the hold and Tor waved the big fish bucket down. I dug the salmon out by hand and laid them one by one in the wide bucket.
The last fish off-loaded, we motored off so I could muck out the old ice. Then we cozied up to the Angie again and they lowered the ice hose down to me. The guys on the Angie recognized Torsen from years back and were surprised he had a deckhand. They kidded him about getting soft. “Is he worth his salt?” I heard the fish buyer ask.
“The kid does it all,” I heard Tor reply. “I’m just along for the ride.”
10
BY NOON WE WERE BACK on the outside water. Tor steered north by northwest. On the way out to the Pedro grounds off of St. Joseph Island, the north wind picked up. Before long it was blowing twenty knots and the Storm Petrel was plunging over foaming crests and diving into the troughs. Big time, I thought. Big-time water. I felt like I was on Captain Cook’s ship, or Vancouver’s.
Visibility was poor on account of the rain and the bow spray lashing the wheelhouse windows. “Are we going to put the gear down?” I asked the captain.
“Why wouldn’t we?” he barked.
“I just haven’t fished in anything like this before.”
“There’s a first time for everything. Throw on some warm clothes before you put on your rain gear.”
There were only a couple of trollers in sight, and they were heading for cover. No whales were to be seen, and the Storm Petrel was the only bird in sight. It was just us, hobbyhorsing alone through wind and rain and heavy seas.
As I got dressed to go outside, I reminded myself that a man overboard in these freezing seas has no chance without a survival suit. Tor had the suits, but you can’t work in one. They’re too cumbersome. Stay focused, Robbie.
The fishing was tough. The wind tangled the leaders as I retrieved them; it was difficult for me to keep my feet. Heading north on the drag, we’d smack into the waves and get slowed down. Tor had to give it much more throttle than normal just to maintain trolling speed. Heading south, the following seas nearly broke into the cockpit. “How much wind can you still fish?” I shouted to Torsen over the weather.
“Twenty-five knots,” he shouted back. “But it isn’t much fun.”
A couple hours later, and not a single fish, we pulled the gear. “I can’t believe I’m out in weather this rough,” I yelled.
Tor shook his head. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Tor wanted to start working north and chew up some miles. After twenty miles of even rougher seas—the wind was blowing forty knots—we anchored in Aats Bay on the north end of Coronation Island. No other trollers kept us company. No wonder, after the open sea crossing we’d made to get there.
It kept blowing through the night. Twice, our anchor lost its grip on the bottom. Through layers of sleep, I was aware of the vibrations of the dragging anchor, but I didn’t fully wake up when the engine came to life. It was the captain’s responsibility to reposition and keep the boat off the rocks.
By morning the blow was all but over. We trolled back and forth across Windy Bay, the cleft in the island’s cliffy windward shore, picking up only four cohos. “Coronation is either really good or really lousy,” Tor said. “It’s lousy today. Let’s keep pushing north. If the fishing slows down, we’ll hunt for treasure instead.”
There was sea salt in his tangled beard and piracy in his voice. This Torsen seemed bigger than life, the reincarnation of some great seafarer. My mind drifted back to the plaques. “Finders keepers?” I wondered. Could that be? Or had I fallen in with a modern-day pirate?
With the snowcapped peaks of Baranof Island looming ever closer, we crossed Christian Sound. A dozen salmon trollers were working a drag at Baranof’s southern tip, outside the tide rips swirling around Cape Ommaney. We joined them, but picked up only a few kings.
Tor didn’t stay long to see if the fishing would improve. We pulled out and headed north along Baranof’s rugged western coast. With little success, we fished off of Snipe Bay. We spent the night of July 6 inside the bay. Come daylight we fished farther north, off of Whale Bay, but all we caught were some accidental additions to our dinner menu—red snapper and halibut—when the lures on our lowest spreads passed too close to the top of an undersea hill.
Before we could escape to deeper water, the port pole was jerking like we’d hooked a whale. One of the cannonballs was dragging bottom; we could have lost major gear and time. Tor cursed a blue streak but had only himself to blame. He’d let too many minutes go by without checking the GPS monitor and the Fathometer.
That evening we ran past the mouth of Sitka Sound. Our bow was pointed northwest, toward the colossal volcano of Mount Edgecumbe, on the southern flank of Kruzof Island. Sunset found us sheltering in the lee of tiny St. Lazaria Island, where small dark birds by the tens of thousands—nesting storm petrels—were swarming the skies, making their last feeding runs before dark. Shortly after dawn we joined thirty or more trollers working the drag off Cape Edgecumbe’s dark volcanic cliffs.
Tor had hit it big there in years past, but fifteen hours of fishing yielded a grand total of six kings. After anchoring in Gilmer Bay, along Kruzof’s northern shore, Tor listened closely to the radio. There was still no talk of king season closing, which meant the quota for Southeast wasn’t close to being met. There were still plenty of salmon out there that hadn’t been caught. The talk among the fisherman had it that the action was picking up around Cape Addington, back where we’d started. Some of the trollers working the drag between Gilmer Bay and Cape Edgecumbe were going to speed south come first light.
“Not us,” Tor said. “We keep working north.”
“Are we getting closer to a plaque?”
“I’ve got a metallic taste in my mouth.”
“Do you know what number it has on it?”
“It should be Number 11. It’s the one they planted before the one at the original Sitka fort.”
“Do you have the journal aboard?”
“Only the information I need. The journal itself is in a nice safe place.”
“Whose was it?” I asked.
Torsen gave me a glance as sharp as the pirate’s knife I was picturing in his teeth.
“I guess I don’t really need to know,” I said before he had the chance to.
“You got that right.”
As we sat down to baked halibut a few minutes later, the storyteller in him won out. By now I was used to his ups and downs and should have expected it. “The man who kept the journal was named Re
zanov,” Tor said, a wide smile suddenly crossing his face. “Listen close, I’ll tell you a story.
“Nikolai Rezanov was the man back in the capital—St. Petersburg—who was the driving force behind the Russian-America Company. He aimed to expand Russian America as far south as possible, to the Columbia River and even to the fringes of Spanish territory in San Francisco Bay.”
“Didn’t the Russians build a fort in northern California?”
“Fort Ross.”
“Was that Rezanov’s idea?”
“His idea, yes, but it came after his time, and never amounted to much without him. Who’s telling this story, me or you?”
“You are, Captain.”
“Then give me the chance,” he said with a scowl that put me on notice not to call him Captain. “In the summer of 1803, Rezanov began a monumental ocean journey to the northern Pacific. He had two goals: to open Japan to Russian trade and to survey Russian America. The Russian-America Company was his baby, but he’d never laid eyes on Alaska.
“Two sailing frigates that he bought from the British took him around Europe, down the length of Africa, across the Indian Ocean and then the Pacific to Hawaii. That’s where, in 1804, he learned about the Tlingit rebellion at Sitka, and that Baranof was regrouping at Kodiak. Rezanov dispatched one of his ships to Alaska to help Baranof fight the Tlingits, and headed for Japan to take care of his mission there.
“He arrived at Nagasaki with three hundred thousand rubles worth of gifts for the ruler, but the Japanese were a closed society and he had to wait six months just to get an interview with an official. Take a hike, was the answer he got. The Japanese didn’t care spit for his gifts or for commerce with Russia.
“Rezanov left in a rage for Russian Siberia. From the Kamchatka Peninsula, he sailed on to the Aleutian Islands, where he found out that Russian America was more primitive than he had ever imagined. The good news was, they treated him like royalty. People ran in front of him laying boards on the ground so he wouldn’t get his feet muddy.
“Rezanov sailed on to Kodiak Island, but Baranof wasn’t there—he’d already reconquered Sitka. Before Rezanov went on to Sitka, he stored the materials for his university in a small, unused building at Kodiak.”
“You never mentioned anything about a university.”
“What do you mean I didn’t?”
“You just didn’t.”
“The maps, the ship models, the scientific instruments, the books—I never mentioned all that?”
“I guess not.”
Torsen looked doubtful. “More likely you weren’t listening.”
“It’s not important.”
“What do you mean it’s not important? You think I’m crazy or something? You think I’m making this all up?”
His face was turning red. “Hold on, Tor. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“By what?”
“I dunno,” I said. “By whatever I said.”
Torsen threw down his fork. “You’re trying my patience, you know that?”
He was staring at me like he was thinking about retrieving that fork and sticking me with it.
“Really, Tor, I’m interested. I’m way interested.”
“You’ve got me off my game,” he sputtered. “Where was I?”
“When Rezanov got to Kodiak Island, Baranof wasn’t there. He’d already returned to Sitka and reconquered it.”
“Alright then, maybe you were listening. Rezanov sailed on to Sitka—actually, it was called New Archangel back then. Rezanov’s first glimpse of Sitka would have been of the knoll commanding the approaches to the harbor, the old village site. Now it was bristling with twenty cannons.
“Alaska being so wild, Rezanov was amazed with what Baranof had been able to accomplish with little help from home. Baranof got most of his supplies for the colony’s far-flung settlements by trading with the American merchants sailing out of Massachusetts and the native king in Hawaii.
“The winter of Rezanov’s visit, 1805–1806, the Tlingits were waging guerrilla war up and down the southeast coast. They succeeded in wiping out the nearest Russian settlement, at Yakutat. At Sitka, where Baranof was expecting an attack at any moment, it became impossible to continue hunting and fishing, and there were four hundred mouths to feed. People were dying of scurvy. A winter gale took one of the few company ships, with no survivors. Baranof dispatched a sloop to Hawaii for food relief, but there was no guarantee it would return.
“Rezanov decided to take action. He would journey south for food supplies, expanding Russian territory while he was at it. His plan was to trade for food with the Indians of the Columbia River, in the wilds of what we now call Washington and Oregon. While he was there he would scout for the site to build a Russian outpost. If he kept pushing down the coast, he could scout a second site where wheat could be grown, on the fringes of the Spanish possessions in California. Every Russian in Alaska had a craving for bread.
“He set sail in late February in the Juno, a well-armed schooner he’d bought from a Yankee skipper who’d traded in Sitka in the fall. Rezanov loaded it with all sorts of trade goods and many of the gifts originally intended for the mikado of Japan. By the time he reached the mouth of the Columbia River, eight of his sailors had died of scurvy. The rest of the crew was in pitiful condition. Rezanov had to abandon his plan of crossing the bar and sailing up the Columbia to trade with the Indians.”
“What bar? What do you mean by ‘crossing the bar’?”
“The sandbar. Before the jetties were built in the twentieth century, the river dropped stupendous amounts of sand as it met the ocean. The channel where you entered the river was narrow, and its position was always shifting from one season to the next. In years to come, it would become known as the Graveyard of the Pacific.”
“If Rezanov had tried it and wrecked, you would have never ended up with his journal.”
“You got that right. Picture his situation. He was in desperate straits. The nearest civilization was the Spanish mission in San Francisco Bay. He knew full well that Spain had declared California off-limits to foreigners. What was he going to do? He had to find food for Sitka. He sailed all the way down the coast—”
“Burying plaques as he went?”
“That’s for me to know,” Torsen snapped. “Holding his breath, Rezanov sailed into San Francisco Bay. He anchored close to the presidio and said his prayers, hoping to avoid a repeat of what happened in Japan.
“Lucky for him, the commander of the presidio, Arguello, was away at Monterey, down the coast, and so was the Spanish governor, Arillaga. Arguello’s young son was in charge. The son allowed Rezanov to come ashore, and told him he could talk to his father and the governor when they got back from Monterey.
“The only man on Rezanov’s ship who spoke Spanish was Rezanov himself. In the days before Arguello returned from Monterey, Rezanov spoke it often with the commander’s beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter, Maria de la Concepcion Arguello, nicknamed Concha.”
“Aha, the plot thickens.”
“Concha’s father returned from Monterey to find that the foreigners had been made welcome. What’s worse, his daughter had fallen deeply in love with Rezanov. Concha told her father that this was the man she would marry.
“Her father was plenty angry, but once he cooled down, he decided his daughter had chosen well. As for Rezanov, no question this was political as well as personal. He was picturing an alliance between Russia and Spain. The marriage would enable him to negotiate with Spain for the Pacific Northwest clear down to its northern outposts, two missions north of San Francisco.”
“Would Spain have agreed to that?”
“Rezanov thought so; my hunch is, he was right. Spain was in a weakened position at the time. It knew it had more of the world than it could hang on to. The English and the Americans could be kept at bay if Spain and Russia worked together.
“There were complications. Rezanov and Concha weren’t the same religion. With her father’s approval,
they were betrothed anyway, pending a dispensation from the pope and the approval of the king of Spain. Now that the Russian was virtually a relative, Arguello got Arillaga to agree to trade with Rezanov. The Juno’s trade cargo was off-loaded and replaced with wheat and beans and so on.
“The cloth-of-gold intended for the mikado of Japan went to Concha. Rezanov was able to return to Sitka in June with his precious cargo. He left for home as soon as he could, on fire to get back to St. Petersburg and the czar with all his news and his plans involving the Spanish. He lacked the ship, crew, and provisions that would have made it possible to sail home around Asia and Africa, so he sailed to Siberia. He lost time outfitting a ship to make a raid that would punish Japan, then set out for St. Petersburg on horseback. It was a journey of thousands of miles with winter staring him in the face.
“Rezanov came down with pneumonia along the way. He holed up for five months and got started again in March of 1807. Weak and still sick, he fell from his horse and died from a head injury nearly four years after his journey began.”
“What a story! What happened to Concha?”
“Legend has it she waited forty years for him, but the truth is, she found out about his death within six. She never married. In a trunk that Rezanov had left behind—a sea chest with the imperial double-headed eagle on the clasp—Concha put away the wedding dress she had made from the cloth-of-gold. She became a nun, and lived out her long life in a convent.”
“What about the journal? Did she know about the journal hidden in the trunk?”
“Yes, she even wrote in it. She discovered the false bottom and the journal many years later, after California had passed from Spanish to Mexican to American hands. After the gold rush in 1849.”
“Why did Rezanov leave the journal behind, if it had the locations of the plaques?”
“My guess is, he thought it would be useful when he returned to California. Who knows, he might have meant to take it out of the trunk before he left for Alaska, and forgot. At any rate, it’s unlikely that his journal would have been the only record of the locations. Baranof would have had a record, at least of the ones planted between the Aleutians and Sitka in the late 1700s. Who knows, a record of the plaque locations might have been in Sitka when the Americans raised the Stars and Stripes in 1867. Some lout of an American lieutenant, who couldn’t read the language, might have thought it was worthless Russian trash, and destroyed it.”
