Alaska (26 page)

In 1761, Madame Zhdanko, eager to see the establishment of Russian control over the Aleutians and Alaska before she died, replaced Trofim's aging ship with a new one built with real nails, and in it she dispatched Innokenti, a mature man of thirty-four and ruthless in his ability to bring home maximum cargoes. To protect her investment in the ship, she suggested that Trofim captain it, even though he was fifty-nine: 'You look like a man of thirty, Cossack, and this ship is valuable. Keep it off the rocks.' The plea was not an idle one, for like the slain otters, of a hundred vessels built by the Russians in these parts, a good half sank because of faulty construction, and the half that remained afloat were apt to be commanded by such inadequate captains that a large number crashed on rocks and reefs.

In the decade ahead, the Zhdankos, father and stepson, leapfrogged many smaller islands in order to land directly on Lapak, the attractive one guarded by the volcano about which Trofim had spoken repeatedly when recounting his adventures with Captain Bering.

When the boat hove to off the northern coast and Trofim saw the unforgettable land which he and Georg Steller had explored back in 1741, he reminded his crew of how generously he had been treated and issued stern orders; 'No molesting of islanders this time,' and as a result of this humane caution, the first weeks ashore saw none of the atrocities that had befouled the other islands. Trofim, searching for the native who had given him the otter skins, learned that he was dead, but one of the fur traders who had acquired a few words of Aleut on a previous mission informed Trofim that the man's son, one Ingalik, had inherited the old man's two kayaks and his leadership of the island clan. Hoping to make friends with the young man and thus avoid what had happened on the other islands, Trofim sought him out, and learned to his dismay that word of Russian behavior had now penetrated all the islands and that the people of Lapak were terrified as to what they might expect.

Trofim tried to placate the young man, and things might have got off to a good start had there not been among the traders a very rough cossack with shaved head and big red mustaches named Zagoskin who was so obsessed by otter 166

pelts that he insisted the men of Lapak go out immediately to the hunting grounds.

Young Ingalik tried to explain that there was little chance of locating any animals now, but Zagoskin would not listen. So at his command a pair of traders lined six kayaks on the shore, and their owners, not yet identified, were ordered to get into them and go out to hunt sea otters. When no one responded to this stupid order, Zagoskin grabbed an ax and raged among the kayaks, destroying their delicate membranes and crushing the frail driftwood frames on which they depended.

This destruction was so insane that various islanders, unable to comprehend such folly, began to mutter and move toward the frenzied cossack, who continued slashing.

But Innokenti could not allow even the least sign of rebellion, so after ordering the Lapak men by sign language to retreat and seeing they were not going to obey, he stopped trying to dissuade them. Instead, he lifted his gun and ordered the rest of his men to do the same, and at a signal from his left hand, they fired.

Eight Aleuts died in that first volley and three more in a second, by which time Zagoskin, like a wild man, was prancing over their dead bodies and hacking at them with his ax. An awful hush fell over the beach, and then women began to wail, high-pitched, terrible wailing that filled the air and brought Trofim to the scene of carnage.

Having come late, he could not apportion the blame for this tragedy, but he was certain that his son and Zagoskin had been primarily responsible, but who had done what he could not decipher. He was revolted, but before long, he would have to endure two more acts so vile that the once-honorable Zhdanko name would be darkly stained.

The first occurred only two months after the initial slaughter on the beach. Under evil encouragement from Zagoskin, Innokenti intensified his normal proclivity for atrocious actions, and in the weeks following the first batch of killings, there were several other isolated incidents in which either Zagoskin or Innokenti murdered Aleuts who were tardy in obeying them.

Both of these ugly men enjoyed participating in the exciting hunt for otters, and they ordered islanders to build them a two-seat kayak in which they could together engage in the chase. Zagoskin, because his arms were stronger, paddled in the rear, Innokenti in front. In the fourteen thousand years since Oogruk had navigated his kayak in pursuit of the great whale, the men of the north had developed an improved paddle, one with a blade at each end, so that the paddler did not have to reverse the position of his hands when he wanted 167

to change the side from which he paddled. And both Zagoskin and Innokenti became expert in using these two-ended paddles.

Their kayak was not really needed in the hunt, and they realized that sometimes it seemed to do more harm than good, but the chase was so exhilarating that they insisted on participating. A hunt went like this. Some keen-eyed Aleut would detect what appeared to be an otter out toward Qugang, the whistling volcano, and signaling, he would speed directly to that spot while other craft would swing wide and take up positions forming a circle around where the otter was presumed to be. Then silence, no blade moving, and before long the otter, not being a fish, would have to come up for air.

Then all would swarm down upon it; it would dive; and quickly the boats would form another circle, in the center of which the otter would surface. When this was repeated six or eight times, with the poor otter always forced to come up for breath in the midst of the tormenting kayaks, it would approach exhaustion, until, finally, it would surface almost dead. Then a club over the head, a swift grab before it sank, and the prized animal was lashed to one of the kayaks, its head smashed in, its fur undamaged.

Zagoskin and Innokenti had their greatest fun when the circle enclosed a mother otter floating on her back with her baby on her belly, the creatures moving along as if on a summer's outing. Then Innokenti, in the front, forced the mother to dive. But the infant could not stay under water as long as its mother, so as soon as the latter felt her child struggling for air, she returned to the surface, even though she knew that this meant danger for herself. Once more afloat, she became the target for the circling canoes, which, driven by Innokenti's wild cries, closed in upon her again.

Again she dived, again her child struggled for air, and again she rose amid the threatening kayaks.

'We have her!' Innokenti would shout, and with a burst of speed he and Zagoskin would virtually leap at the anguished mother, clubbing at her till the babe fell from her protective grasp. When the pursuers saw the little one afloat, Zagoskin would club it, reach out with a net, and pull it into the kayak. The mother, now bereft of her child, would begin swimming madly from one boat to another, searching for it, and as she approached each one, lamenting like a human mother, she suffered the blows that came from the gloating men and swam on to the next, pleading all the while in a high-pitched wail for the return of her child.

Finally, so weakened and so bewildered by her fruitless search that she dared not dive, she remained on the surface, 168

her almost human face turned to her tormentors as she sought her baby, and thus she remained till someone like Innokenti bashed her over the head, knocked her senseless, pulled her into his kayak, and cut her throat.

One day as they returned to shore, after two such killings, some of the Aleut fishermen protested against the slaughter of the baby otter and its mother, pointing out to Innokenti in their sign language that if he and Zagoskin continued doing this, the supply of otters in the seas surrounding Lapak Island was bound to be depleted. 'And in that case,' the protesters reasoned, 'we will have to go too far to sea to find the otters you seek.'

Innokenti, showing his displeasure with such an interruption, brushed aside their objections, but Trofim, when he heard about the argument, sided with the Aleuts: 'Don't you see what killing the mothers and babies will mean before long? No otters for us to use in trade or for them to use as always.'

This warning coming from his own stepfather infuriated Innokenti, who replied insolently: 'It's time they learned, that we all learned. Their job from here on is to kill sea otters. Nothing else. I want bales of those pelts, not a few handfuls.' And ignoring Zhdanko's counsel, he and Zagoskin initiated the harsh routine of sending the Aleut men out every day to hunt the otter and of disciplining them by means of blows and deprivation of food if they were not successful.

In the meantime the two leaders continued to sail forth, and with the forced assistance from others, to chase mother otters with their babes, and one afternoon when the sun was clouded Innokenti saw such a pair and shouted to the attendant Aleuts: 'Over here!' The chase ended as always, with the baby slain and the mother otter swimming almost into the arms of an Aleut, pleading piteously. This Aleut, a fine hunter, mindful of his relationship to all things living, refused to kill needlessly when neither food nor fur was really needed, and ignored Innokenti's shrieks of 'Kill her!' The Aleut allowed the mother to escape and looked in disgust as Zagoskin beat the water with his paddle in frustration.

When they reached shore, Innokenti rushed up to the man who had refused to kill the otter, berating him for his disobedience, and the man was so outraged that he threw down his paddle, indicating in terms that could not be misunderstood that he would no longer hunt otters, male or female, with the white men, and that from this day on neither he nor his friends would kill mothers and babes. Innokenti, enraged by this defiance of his authority, grabbed the islander by the arm, swung him around, and struck him so solidly with his 169

fist that the man fell to the ground. The other islanders began to mutter among themselves, and soon there were signs of such general defiance that Zagoskin, frightened, fell back, and the Aleuts, judging mistakenly that they had made their point, now swarmed at Innokenti to persuade him to stop abusing them.

His reaction was radically different from what they expected, for Innokenti, calling for all his men to assist him, ran to fetch his and Zagoskin's guns, and when the Russians in tight assembly marched on the startled Aleuts, the latter retreated, having learned what guns were capable of. But Innokenti did not intend this show of power to end with a mere display, and when the islanders were cowed, he uttered that dreadful phrase which was so often resorted to in these years when civilized Europeans were meeting uncivilized natives: 'It's time we taught them a lesson.'

Utilizing three of the willing Russian traders, he had them choose at random twelve Aleut hunters, who were lined up one behind the other, with the man who had started the protest in front. When each Aleut was prodded forward, so that he stood tightly wedged against the man in front, Innokenti cried: 'We'll show them what a good Russian musket can do,' and he loaded his gun heavily, moved close to the head of the file, and took careful aim right at the heart of that first troublemaker.

At this moment Trofim Zhdanko came on the scene and saw the hideous thing that was about to happen: 'Son! What in God's name are you doing?'

His unfortunate use of the word son so infuriated Innokenti that with the butt of his gun he struck Trofim in the face.

Then, with icy rage he fired, and eight Aleuts, one after the other, dropped dead while the ninth fainted, for the bullet had ended against his ribs. The final three stood transfixed.

Innokenti had taught the Aleuts a lesson, and it was as a result of this that he was able to establish on Lapak Island, once so pleasant a place to live if one loved the sea and was unaware that in other parts of the world trees existed, a dictatorship so complete that every man on the island, Russian or Aleut, had to work at his command and the women to serve at his pleasure. Lapak Island became one of the more ghastly places on this earth, and the honorable old cossack, Trofim Zhdanko, huddled alone in his hut, steeped in shame and powerless to oppose the evil his stepson had created.

AS THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY DREW TOWARD A CLOSE, the governments of many nations learned of the riches availa 170

ble in the northern waters, and also of the vast territories waiting there to be discovered, explored, and claimed. The Spaniards, moving north from California, would send out a fleet of daring explorers, Alessandro Malaspina and Juan de la Bodega among them, and they would contribute significant discoveries, but since their government did not follow with settlements, they accomplished nothing lasting except the naming of certain headlands along the coast.

The French would dispatch a gallant man with a glowing title Jean Francois de Galaup, Comte de La Perouseto see what he could find, and he left a record of daring adventure but little hard knowledge of the island-studded seas among whose reefs future navigators would have to move.

In 1778 the English sent to these waters a slim, nervous man of ordinary parentage who, by virtue of his maritime brilliance, resolute courage and general common sense, would make himself into the world's foremost navigator of that day and one of the top two or three of all time: James Cook. On two flawless voyages to the South Pacific he had in a sense cleaned up the map of the ocean, locating islands where they belonged, defining the shorelines of two continents, Australia and Antarctica, informing the world of the glories of Tahiti and finding in the process a cure for scurvy.

Before Cook, a British warship could leave England with four hundred sailors and expect one hundred and eighty to be dead by the time the voyage was over, and sometimes the toll reached the appalling figure of two hundred and eighty. Cook, unwilling to captain a ship that was little more than a floating coffin, decided in his quiet, efficient way, to change this, and he did so by instituting a few sensible rules, as he explained to his crew at the beginning of their memorable third voyage: 'We have found that scurvy can be controlled if you will keep your quarters clean. If you wear dry clothes whenever you can. If you follow our rule of one watch on, two off so that you get plenty of rest. And if you will each day consume your portion of wort and rob.'