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 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 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, 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 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 Inno
kenti, 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 available 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.'
When sailors asked what they were, Cook allowed his officers to explain: 'Wort is a brew of malt, vinegar, sauerkraut, such fresh vegetables as we can procure, and other things. It smells bad, but if you drink it properly, you will not catch the scurvy.'
'Rob,' said another officer, 'is an inspissated mixture of lime, orange and lemon juice.'
'What's inspissated someone always asked, and the officer would reply: 'Captain Cook uses the word all the time,' and someone would persist: 'But what's it mean?' and the officer would growl: 'It means "You drink it."If you do, you'll never get scurvy.'
The officers were correct. Any sailor who consumed his wort and rob was miraculously immune from the gray killer of the seas; in wort about half the ingredients were by themselves ineffective, especially the malt, but the sauerkraut, and particularly its fermented juice, worked miracles, and of course, although the lime and orange juice were of small account, lemon juice was a specific. The inspissation, in which Cook put so much store, had no effect whatever; it was merely a process which thickened the lemon juice and made it easier to transport and administer.
By his stubborn insistence that scurvy could be cured, this quiet man and devoted leader saved thousands of lives and enabled Britain to build the world's most powerful fleet. Now, in the years when England was fighting her American colonies in places like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia, the British government had sent this great explorer forth once more to end speculation about the North Pacific, and he, having solved the various riddles of the South Pacific, eagerly accepted the challenge to confirm once and for all whether Asia did join with North America, whether there was a Northwest Passage across the top of the world, whether the Arctic Ocean was free of ice because a learned scientist had proved that unless ice was somehow moored to land, it could not form in an open sea and particularly, what the coastline of the newfound Alaska was. If he could solve these nagging questions, Great Britain would be in position to claim all of North America from Quebec and Massachusetts in the east to California and the future Oregon in the west.
On his famous Third Exploration, which would cover parts of four years, 1776-79, Cook would not only discover the Hawaiian Islands but also become the first European to explore properly the jagged coastline of Alaska. He would chart and name Mount Edgecumbe, that splendid volcano at Sitka; he would explore where the future Anchorage would locate; he would cruise the Aleutian Islands and position them properly in relation to the mainland; and he would run far north to where the frozen Arctic Ocean confronted him with a wall of ice eighteen feet high along its face, the ice that the earlier expert had proved could not exist.
It was a marvelous journey, a success in every respect, for although he did not find the fabled Northwest Passage which navigators had been seeking for almost three hundred years since Columbus discovered America, he did demonstrate that the supposed passage did not enter the Pacific in ice-free waters. In moving to the north to prove this point, Cook had to penetrate the wall erected by the Aleutians, and he did so by heading for the passage just east of Lapak Island. When he cleared the headland and looked west he saw rising from the Bering Sea the volcano Qugang, the Whistler, which now stood one thousand one hundred feet above the surface of the sea.
Cook, after surveying the construction of Lapak, was the first to deduce from its semicircular form that it had once been a volcano of immense dimension whose center had exploded and whose northern rim had vanished in erosion, but he was more impressed by the copious and inviting harbor, where he sent ashore a foraging party to procure such provisions as the islanders could provide. The two young officers in charge were men destined in later years to make resounding names for themselves. The senior was Shipmaster William Bligh; his assistant, George Vancouver. The first watched carefully everything that happened on the island, taking careful note of the two Russians who seemed to be in command, Zagoskin and Innokenti, whom he did not like at all and whose insolent manner he said he would correct in short time if the two served under him. Vancouver, a born navigator of unusual abilities, noted the posit
ion of the island, its harbor capacity, its capacity for provisioning large ships, and its probable climate insofar as that could be judged from a brief visit. It was obvious that Cook had picked his staff with care, for these two were among the ablest men sailing the Pacific that year.
The visit lasted less than half a day, for by midafternoon Cook felt that he must push the Resolution northward, but he took with him only a fraction of the information he could have had, and the fault was his. Amazingly, in view of his meticulous foresight in planning his cruises, on this one into northern oceans where it was known that the Russians had penetrated, he brought with him no one who could speak Russian, nor any dictionary of that language; authorities in London still refused to believe that Russia already had a sizable foothold in western North America and had every intention of enlarging it. However, Cook was able to make this entry:
We came upon a promising chain of treeless islands whose occupants came to greet us in two-man canoes wearing the most enchanting hats with long visors and decorations.
I encouraged artist Webber to make several depictions of both the men and their hats, and he complied.