Now Baranov, clad in a suit of wood-and-leather armor, sword held high, waded ashore at the head of his men, determined to assault the walls and demand surrender. Supported by three small portable cannon, he stopped to listen for sounds of Tlingits inside the fort, heard none, and cried: 'They've abandoned it, just like they did the hill,' and with a bold, peasant heroism he led his men right up to the walls.
But as soon as they came well within musket range, the walls erupted with fire from hundreds of good Boston rifles, and the effect upon the invaders was disastrous, for the unexpected volley struck many full in the face.
When the Russians retreated in disorder, the Tlingits broke from their central gate guarded by the totem pole and descended upon the disorganized men, killing and wounding without having to dodge any counterfire. And had not Captain Lisiansky sped to Baranov's relief, a general slaughter would have occurred. The first round, clearly won by the Tlingits, had been a disastrous defeat for Commodore Baranov.
Back aboard the Neva, he revealed to his officers a major wound in his left arm, and after he was put to bed under a doctor's care, Lisiansky summed up the fracas: 'Three of my men dead, fourteen Russians wounded and countless Aleuts, who fled like rabbits at the first gunfire. But we gained one victory. Baranov is wounded just seriously enough to keep him from marching forth again. Now let's organize this siege and blow that fort apart.'
But before the cannonading could begin, there was an ugly portent that this battle was to be a no-surrender affair like the earlier assault on Redoubt St. Michael, where all Russians present were slaughtered, for onto the beach almost in range of their enemy's pistol fire came six Tlingit warriors bearing spears aloft, on whose tips was impaled the body of one of the dead Russians. At a whistle from their leader, the Tlingits jabbed their six spears sharply upward, driving the points so far through the body of the corpse that the metal tips shone red with blood. Then, at another signal, they threw their spears forward, allowing the body to splash into the bay.
Minutes later the cannonading began, and when word reached the deck that a fourth Russian had died from his wounds, the fire intensified. For two days the bombardment continued, and a sortie in strength under Lisiansky ranged the area before the fort, killing any Tlingits they encountered, but in doing so, they saw that the great wooden fence constructed by Kot-le-an and Raven-heart had sufficient thickness to repel even the biggest cannonballs.
'We won't win by trying to knock down the fence,' Lisiansky told his men, and after this was reported to Baranov he consulted with his captain, the elevation of the guns was raised, and cannonballs of destructive size and frequency began raining down into the fort's interior.
Lisiansky, watching them land with rarely a miss, assured Baranov: "They won't be able to tolerate this for long,' and grimly the fat little merchant smiled.
DURING THE FIRST DAYS OF THE SIEGE THERE HAD BEEN great jubilation inside the fort, for then the Tlingit defenders gained three significant victories: their palisaded walls had proved to be impervious to Russian fire, they had repulsed the first land attack with heavy loss to the enemy, and without suffering any retaliation they had successfully taunted the Russians at the seashore, spearing the corpse and tossing the body into the waves. 'We can hold them off!' Kot-le-an cried in those moments of initial victory.
But when the cannonading began in earnest, with the Russians firing over the walls, the tides of war shifted dramatically. There were, inside the stockade, some fifteen separate buildings clustered about the house that Raven-heart and Kakeena had started, and with hellish luck the Russian cannonballs began striking these wooden buildings, smashing them apart and killing or badly wounding the occupants. Children shrieked as the destruction continued, and there was a terrible moment when three shots in a row struck the Raven-heart house, scattering embers and starting a fire which quickly consumed the entire building. Raven-heart, watching the raging flames, had a premonition that he was seeing the demise of all things the Tlingits cherished, for this house had been a symbol of his release from slavery and his acceptance into the strongest of the Tlingit tribes.
However, knowing he must not allow either Kakeena or Kot-le-an to see his apprehension, he passed among the fort's defenders with words of encouragement: 'They'll stop.
They'll see they can't conquer us and they'll go away.' But as he uttered such words during the third day of the bombardment he was interrupted by a scream from Kakeena, and supposing that she had been hit by one of the cannonballs, he ran toward where he had last seen her, but when he reached her he found her standing, mouth agape and looking toward the sky. Unable to speak, she pointed heavenward, and then he saw what had caused her outcry: a shot from the Neva had struck his totem halfway up and had shattered it, knocking away the carefully carved top with the raven and leaving a jagged stump, still tall but forever decapitated.
Remembering the legends of his people and their spirits which he had carefully carved in the pole, he was distraught, but still he did not allow himself to show his distress at the loss of yet another aspect of the life he loved and had hoped to defend. And the bombardment continued.
As daylight waned on the sixth day, Kot-le-an came to Raven-heart with a message the latter had not expected to hear: 'Trusted friend, take the white flag and go to them.'
'Asking for what?'
'Peace.'
'On what terms?'
'Any they propose.'
For some minutes, while Kot-le-an gathered a team of six to accompany his messenger, Raven-heart stood in the middle of the wreckage and felt the ground swaying under him. A dream was coming to an end, a world was being lost, and he had been selected to be the man to do the surrendering, but before putting into effect the signal of submission, his entire body revolted eyes refused to see, feet to move, and mind to accept the horrid duty and he cried to no one: 'I cannot!'
It was Kakeena, not Kot-le-an, who persuaded him: 'You must. Look,' and she pointed to the destroyed houses, the row of corpses not yet buried, the universal signs of loss. 'You must go,' she whispered.
Astonished that it was his resolute wife who was uttering these words of defeat, he turned to stare at her, and saw that she was grimly smiling: 'This time we've lost. Save what we can. Next time, when they've grown careless, we'll crush them.'
And when he moved toward the gate through which he would lead his messengers of surrender, she walked beside him to the beach, where he called in English to the Russians, who halted their bombardment when they saw his white flag: 'Baranov, you win. We talk.'
Through a brass trumpet came a reply in Russian: 'Go to bed. No more bombardment.
In the morning we will come.'
At these words, which meant that the siege was over and that Tlingit hopes of recovering Sitka were doomed, Kakeena began a high-pitched wail which Russian listeners interpreted as a lament for lost hopes; they would have been astounded could they have understood her words: 'Ai me, the waves have left our shore and only rocks remain. But like the rocks we will endure and in the years to come we shall return like the waves and smother the Russians.' And as the enemy sailors listened in the falling darkness, they heard one Tlingit voice after another join in the supposed lament until the shore was filled with what they construed as grief but which was, under Kakeena's leadership, a commitment to revenge.
When Raven-heart and his contingent returned to the fort, they were greeted by silence.
The cannonading had stopped, but so had purposeful movement by the Tlingits. Standing in confused groups, they discussed what to do next, and as Raven-heart went from one gathering to the next, he found only consternation and lack of any plan as to what action they must take after the surrender, but toward midnight Kot-le-an and the toion assumed command, and their directives were short and brutal: 'We shall cut across the mountains and leave this island forever.' And as those fateful words were whispered through the fort, their awful meaning became clear, for to cross Sitka Island at any point was a monstrous undertaki
ng, considering the jagged mountains and the lack of trails. But the Tlingits had decided to flee, and in the four hours after midnight there was in this destroyed fort a hurricane of activity.
Only Raven-heart and Kakeena had actually lived on this beautiful point between the salmon creek and the bay, so only they had mementos which they wished to take with them for him, a fragment of the totem; for her, a shattered wooden plate but all who prepared to flee carried recollections of their majestic hill overlooking the bay, and all were heavyhearted.
As dawn approached, two groups of refugees had special and heartbreaking tasks: appointed men roamed through the fort killing all the dogs, especially those who had attached themselves to specific families, for to take them on the journey ahead would prove impossible, and there were moments of grief as some animal that had bounded with love at the sound of a child's voice was slain, but this sadness was soon forgotten, because a comparable team of women led by Kakeena was passing through the assembling crowd, killing all the Tlingit babies.
EARLY ON THE MORNING OF 7 OCTOBER, AS THE MISTS lifted and the bright autumn sun appeared, sailors from the Neva and the three other ships lined up on the beach behind Commodore Baranov and started their triumphal march to accept the surrender of the Tlingits, but as they approached the fort they saw no people, heard no sounds, and with uncertainty they drew closer, whereupon a cackle of ravens took to the air, and one superstitious sailor muttered: 'They feed on the dead,' and when Baranov peered past the sagging gates, knocked awry by some cannon shot, he saw the desolation, the litter of dead dogs and the tiny human corpses. It was a moment of dreadful victory, accentuated by the sudden appearance from a shattered house of two old women too ancient to travel who were guarding a six-year-old boy with a crippled leg.
'Where have they gone?' Baranov demanded of the women, who pointed to the north.
'Across those mountains?' the interpreter asked, and they said 'Yes.'
As they spoke, Kot-le-an, Raven-heart and the toion who had lost his kingdom were leading their people across rough land covered by immense spruce trees, each trunk as tall and straight as a line drawn in sand. The going was so difficult that only a few miles would be covered that day and it would be painful weeks before they reached the northern limits of Sitka Island. When they did, they would have to halt for the building of canoes to ferry them across Peril Strait, after which they would have to find some kind of refuge on inhospitable Chichagof Island, a place infinitely more brutal and unyielding than Sitka Sound.
But they persisted, and finally reached the northern edge of the island, and when they saw, across the strait, the mountains of their new home, some wept, for they knew they were making a miserable exchange. But Raven-heart, having been dispossessed before in his turbulent life, told Kakeena: 'I think we can make a home over there,' and as he spoke, a fish jumped in Peril Strait and he told his wife: 'Good sign.'
NOW CAME THE FIFTEEN AMAZINGLY PRODUCTIVE YEARS, 1804 through 1818, which confirmed the reputation of Aleksandr Baranov as the father and chief inspirator of Russia's fragile empire in North America. Fifty-seven years old when his burst of energy began, he displayed the enthusiasm of a boy going after his first deer, the wisdom of a Pericles building a new city, the patience of an island Job.
As a builder he was indefatigable, for as soon as the last fragment of the Tlingit fort was burned, including all parts of the totem pole, he hurried his people back to start work on the hilltop, where he built himself a modest cottage from which he could survey the sound, the volcano and the surrounding mountains. During his lifetime that cottage would be rebuilt into a more imposing house of many rooms, and after his death, into a grandiose mansion three stories high and crammed with rooms of all sorts, including a theater.
And even though he would never see or occupy it, it would always be known as Baranov's Castle, and from it Russian America would be governed.
At the foot of the hill he outlined a generous area including a large lake, and this he enclosed within a high wooden palisade; it would be the Russian town. But now a curious problem arose, for Baranov called his settlement New Archangel, while ship captains of all nations, and the Tlingits and Aleuts who shared the site, continued to call it Sitka, the name by which it would ultimately be known. So the fine town would have two names used interchangeably, but only one important rule: 'No Tlingits allowed inside the palisade.'
But even as he proclaimed that law, Baranov made plans for the day when the Indians would return to help him build a greater New Archangel, and when a huge area adjoining the palisade was cleared, he explained to the townspeople: 'That's to be kept for the Tlingits when they start to come back. They're sensible people. They'll see we need them. They'll see they can live better sharing this spot with us than hiding out in the wilderness, wherever they are now.'
That crucial decision made' Russians inside the walls, Tlingits outside 'Baranov turned his energies to the construction of a major town, and with the help of Kyril Zhdanko in a time so short it startled the workmen doing the building, he had a huge barracks for his soldiers; a school which, as in the case of the orphanage in Kodiak, he paid for out of his own meager salary; a library; a meeting hall for social affairs, with a treasured corner in which a piano imported from St. Petersburg was housed for the dances he sponsored and a stage for the one-act plays he encouraged his men and their wives to perform; plus a dozen other necessary buildings like sheds for the overhaul of ships putting in to New Archangel and shops in which their instruments of navigation and their cannon could be overhauled.
When these day-to-day essentials had been ensured, he turned to Father Vasili: "With this safe start behind us, Father, we'll now build you a church,' and with a zeal twice what he had shown before, he plunged into the construction of St. Michael's Cathedral, which he liked to call 'our cathedral.' Converted from an abandoned ship, it was a wooden affair, taller than any of the previous buildings, and when its lower stories were well finished, Baranov himself supervised the erection of a modified onion dome, and on the day of solemn dedication, with a choir chanting in Russian, he could truthfully tell the parishioners: 'With our fine cathedral in place, New Archangel becomes Russian forever and the center of our hopes.'
Some weeks after the dedication he received a confirmation of his dreams, which gave him profound joy, for an aide came rushing up the hill, shouting: 'Excellency! Look!' and when he ran to the parapet surrounding his cottage, he saw a score of Indians looking tentatively toward the palisade in the hope of permission to build houses in the space Baranov had set aside for them.
If the Russians on guard were perplexed by the arrival of these former enemies, Baranov was not; he had been expecting them, and now he shouted as he hurried down the hill:
'Bring food! Those old blankets! A hammer and nails!' And with gifts spilling out of his fat arms, he went to the Tlingits, forcing the goods upon them, and when an old man who spoke Russian said: 'We come back, better here,' Baranov had to fight back the tears.
However, this moment of exaltation was soon lost as he began to experience the frustrations which would cloud the remaining years of his life, and he himself caused the unpleasantness, because the more important he made New Archangel, the more frequently the Russian government sent naval ships to support the island, and this meant inevitably that Russian naval officers would be appearing in blue-and-braid to inspect 'what the merchant Baranov was doing out there.' And as he had been warned in that famous meeting in Irkutsk so many years ago, when he was being interrogated as to his ability to manage The Company's properties, 'there's nothing on earth more insolent than a Russian naval officer.'
The one that Tsar Alexander I selected in 1810 to prowl the Pacific in the warship Muscovy and torment local officials in Kodiak and New Archangel, especially the latter, was a prime dandy. Lieutenant Vladimir Ermelov, a brash twenty-five, was almost a caricature of the young Russian nobleman perpetually ready for a duel if his honor was in any way impugned: tall, thin, mustachi
oed, hawklike in countenance, severe in deportment, he considered enlisted men, servants, most women and all merchants as not only beneath contempt but also beneath civil courtesy. Brave in battle, a fairly good naval officer, and always prepared to defend his behavior with either sword or pistol, he was a terror on any ship he commanded and a dazzling white-uniformed cynosure wherever he came ashore.
Lieutenant Ermelov, scion of a noble family that had provided Russian rulers with some of their most pigheaded and ineffective counselors, was married to the granddaughter of a real grand duke, which gave her an unchallenged patent of nobility, and when she traveled aboard ship with her husband, both she and he believed that she served as personal representative of the tsar. Alone, Ermelov was formidable; when supported by his arrogant wife, he was, as a junior officer told Father Vasili without being reprimanded, 'damned near insufferable.'
When Ermelov sailed out of St. Petersburg in command of the Muscovy, he had known almost nothing about Aleksandr Baranov toiling away in the farthest east of the Russian possessions, but during this long voyage, which would take him around the world, he anchored in many ports, and in conversation with Russian or English or American captains who had stopped at either Kodiak or Sitka, he began to hear strange tales about this unusual man who had stumbled by accident, it seemed, into a position of some importance in the Aleutians, 'those damned, fog-ridden fur islands, or was it Kodiak, which isn't much better,' and the more he heard, the more perplexed he was that the imperial government had placed such a man in charge of one of its increasingly important areas.
Madame Ermelova, who had been called Princess before her marriage to Vladimir and who was still authorized to use that title, was especially irritated by what she kept hearing about 'this damned fellow Baranov,' so that by the time the Muscovy left Hawaii in 1811, they were crammed with tales about 'that crazy Russian up in New Archangel, as they're calling it now,' and the Ermelova were pretty well fed up with the man they both considered an interloper, Ermelov for political reasons, his wife for social: 'Vladimir, I know a dozen fine young men in St. Petersburg worthy of a position as governor, and it's damned irritating to think that a clown like this Baranov has outdistanced them.' Her irritation manifested itself in her first letter home from New Archangel; it was addressed to her mother, the Princess Scherkanskaya, daughter of the grand duke and a person attuned to social niceties: