Alaska (25 page)

and this became the consensus.

Nevertheless, in several of the thirty-odd huts the newcomers did find small piles of sealskin, though with whom the islanders could be trading no one could guess, and in two huts they found well-tanned pelts of the sea otter. Their long quest starting in Okhotsk and ending with their daring venture across the Bering Sea in their improbable boat seemed assured of success.

It was not difficult for Zhdanko, who was an ingenious man, to explain to the men of Attu that if they brought him sealskins, he in turn would trade them for things they wanted from the boat; and that was preliminary to informing them that what the strangers really wanted were pelts of the sea otter. But that was a different matter, because through the centuries the islanders had learned that the sea otter was the rarest creature in their ocean and that to catch him was not easy. But the traders finally convinced the islanders that the latter must go forth in their kayaks and bring back furs, especially those of the otter.

The name of the young paddler who now took it upon himself to instruct Innokenti in island rites was Ilchuk, some five years older and a skilled hunter who had been instrumental in bringing to shore the only whale that Attu had captured in ten years; its baleen had been used by Ilchuk's sisters in the creation of numerous useful articles and a pair of baskets that were not only practical containers but also works of art.

When Trofim saw these baskets and other things made 160

from whalebone and ivory, he began to alter his opinion of the Attu islanders; and when he and Innokenti were finally invited into Ilchuk's hut, he saw that they did not all live like animals. The hut was orderly and arranged much as a house in Siberia would be, except that it was mostly underground, and when the winds of winter began to blow, Trofim understood why the houses were kept so low; had they been any higher, the gales would have blown them away.

Now, in the dark winter, tensions between the two groups flared, because the newcomers, hungry for furs, wanted the island men to continue hunting regardless of weather, while the Attu men, well acquainted with the power of winter storms, knew that they must stay ashore till spring. The one who applied the greatest pressure was Innokenti, nineteen years old now and increasingly brutal in his relations with others. Always aware that it was his family that had built the fur trade, he found it impossible to accept an intruder like Zhdanko, so he placed himself in charge of the growing bales and of the operations which promised to bring in more. Trofim, a quarter of a century older than this callow youth, surrendered control of fur hunting but resolved to retain command of all else.

As soon as there was any cessation of storm, and sometimes two or three days in a row would be relatively calm, Innokenti ordered Ilchuk and his men to venture forth, and if they showed reluctance to do so, he raged until it became clear to the Attu men that they had somehow, by steps they could not now recall, become slaves of the strangers. This feeling was intensified when two of Innokenti's men appropriated young women of the settlement, with such, pleasing results that a third man plucked off one of Ilchuk's sisters.

There was resentment, but on Attu relations between adult men and women were customarily easy, so that the tempers which might have flared elsewhere did not erupt here, but what did matter was Innokenti's unwavering insistence that the men go out to sea when all their instincts and long experience warned them to stay ashore. This radical alteration of their life systems they opposed, and when, on a clear day, Innokenti demanded that Ilchuk and four of his men go out, there was a momentary flare-up, which ended quickly when Innokenti produced his gun and ordered the men with gestures: 'You go or I shoot.'

Grudgingly they went, pointing to the sky as if to say 'We warned you!' and before they were out of sight of land, a great wind blew in from Asia, bringing sheets of freezing rain that came parallel to the sea, destroying two of the kayaks and drowning their occupants. When Ilchuk led the surviving 161

boats back to shore he began to rage at Innokenti, who stood quietly for several minutes, but when the other Attu men joined the recriminations, surrounding him on three sides, he lost his composure, raised his gun, and shot one of the protesters.

Ilchuk, seeing the man fall and realizing that he was fatally wounded, started to leap at Innokenti, but he was seized by two of the Siberians, who threw him to the ground, then kicked him about the head.

Trofim, hearing the gunfire, ran from where he had been working on a driftwood house, and by virtue of his size and authority, brought order to what would otherwise have degenerated into a riot which might have caused the deaths of all the invaders. It was the last time he would exert his authority over the men, for when he shouted: 'Who did this?' Innokenti stepped brazenly forward: 'I did. They were attacking me,'

and when the others supported this claim, thrusting their chins forward belligerently, Zhdanko realized that leadership of the expedition had passed to Innokenti. Almost lamely he said: 'Warfare has begun. Each man to protect himself,' but it was the younger man who gave specific orders: 'Bring our boat closer to our huts. And each man to sleep with us, not with his native woman.'

The man who had taken as his bed-partner Ilchuk's sister ignored this last instruction, and two mornings later, when the winter fog lifted, his body was found on the beach stabbed in many places.

Now the warfare became hateful, sullen, a thing of dark shadows and sudden retributions.

With only twelve men left, including himself, Trofim tried to regain control by making peace with the more numerous islanders, and he might have succeeded had not an evil affair frustrated him. When Ilchuk, a wise islander who lamented the sad deterioration, came with two fellow fishermen to arrange with Trofim a kind of truce, Innokenti, who was watching nearby with four of his followers, allowed them to come close, then flashed a signal, whereupon the Russians leveled their guns and killed all three members of the peace team. Next day, when one of the island girls charged Innokenti with having murdered her brother in the ambush, he proved her correct by murdering her, too.

Vainly Trofim tried to halt the killings, and in quick succession six more islanders were slain, after which it was meekly accepted that a new order had come to Attu.

When spring made orderly hunting of sea otters practical, Innokenti and his group had life on the island so rigorously organized that kayaks went out regularly, and came back with the furs the traders craved. It would be difficult to 162

explain just how these elevenfive Siberians, three Russian petty criminals, two from other parts of the empire and the boy Innokentimaintained control over the population of an entire island, but they did. Murder was a prime persuader eight, two dozen, then thirty, all executed coldly and at such times and places as to create the most intimidating effect, till everyone on Attu knew that if fishermen-hunters were tardy in doing what the strangers wanted, someone was going to be shot, usually the delinquent fisherman and sometimes several of his friends.

Even more difficult to explain was how Trofim Zhdanko allowed all this to happen, but in the affairs of men under pressure, decisions are made as a consequence of events far beyond their control; chance determines, not planned thought, and each bloody incident on Attu strengthened Innokenti's hand and weakened Trofim's. Of all these episodes of killing, he participated in none, for as a cossack trained in killing at the tsar's command, he had learned that murder was justified only if it quickly brought a workable peace. On Attu, Innokenti's aimless slaughter brought no peace, only more furs, so by midsummer Trofim realized that the situation had degenerated so badly that the only sensible strategy was to leave the island with what furs had been accumulated and head for Petropavlovsk.

When he proposed this, many of the crew were so eager to leave Attu that he regained a modicum of leadership, but once more chance intruded to deny him that position, for when in mid-July 1746 he organized the men secretly for an escape, an island woman detected the strategy of flight and informed her men, who made plans to murder all the strangers before they reached their boat.

When the bales were aboard and the twelve survivors about to push off, the islanders tried to rush them, but Innokenti had anticipated this, and as the shouting men and women surged toward the boat, he ordered his men to fire straight into the middle of the crush and then to reload and fire again. They did, with terrible effectiveness.

As this first group of invaders from Russia to spend a winter in the Aleutians finally retreated to the safety of the Bering Sea they had slain, since the day of their first landing, sixty-three Aleuts.

THEIR SAIL HOME WAS A TALE OF HORRORS, FOR IN THEIR frail boat, with no deck and only a modest sail attached to a flimsy mast, they headed into adverse winds blowing out of Asia and had to confront in turn a broken spar, a near-163

swamping, rotten food, a raving sailor close to insanity and closer to death at the hands of Innokenti if he did not stop his rantings, and interminable storms which threatened for days to capsize them. Trofim, as the only one aboard experienced in navigation, was given control of the pitiful boat, keeping it afloat more by courage than by skill; and when survival seemed impossible and some counseled 'Throw the bales overboard to lighten ship,' he might have done so had not Innokenti, with iron resolve, cried: 'Don't touch them! Better dead trying to make port with our furs than alive without them.' When the storm abated, the boat limped home with bales intact, and the Aleutian fur trade was under way.

As Trofim and Innokenti climbed ashore at Petropavlovsk they found a surprise awaiting them, for in their absence Madame Poznikova had moved her headquarters to this excellent new harbor and built on a prominent rise along the shore a spacious two-story house with a lookout on the top floor. When Trofim asked: 'Why so big a house?' she said bluntly: 'Because we three are going to live here.' He gasped, but she pressed on: 'You're getting to be an old man, Cossack, and I'm not getting younger.' He was forty-four that year, she thirty-seven, and while he did not feel old, he was aware, from his experience in losing the leadership of his men on Attu Island, that he was no longer the tireless young Ukrainian for whom the world was an endless adventure.

Asking for time to consider what she was suggesting, he roamed the waterfront, looked at the small boats resting there, and visualized the islands to which they would in time be sailing, and two facts remained rooted: Madame Poznikova is a remarkable woman. And I long for the islands and the lands to the east. He would be honored to have a woman like Madame for a wife and pleased to work with her in the fur trade, but before committing himself, certain things would have to be agreed upon, so he walked back to the new house, called her to the front room, where he sat rigidly like a nervous businessman asking a banker for a loan, and said: 'Madame, I admired your husband and respect what you and he accomplished. I would be honored to associate with you in the fur trade. But I will not ever again sail to the Aleutians without a proper ship.'

Astonished by this extraordinary response to her proposal that they marry, she burst into laughter, and cried robustly: 'Cossack, come see!' And she led him down the main street of Petropavlovsk to a formal shipyard which had not been there when he sailed out two years before. 'Look!' she said with pride. 'That's the ship I've been building for you,' and

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when he saw how sturdy it was, he said: 'Perfect for the Aleutian trade.'

After the wedding she forced her son Innokenti to take the name Zhdanko and to call Trofim father,

which he refused to do: 'He's not my father, that damned serf,' and he bristled even if someone called him the cossack's stepson. His mother, embarrassed by such behavior, summoned the two to stand before her: 'From this day on we're all Zhdankos, a powerful new life for everyone. You two will conquer the islands one by one. Then on to America.'

When Trofim protested that this might prove to be more difficult than supposed, she cried: 'We're destined to move east, always east. My father left St. Petersburg for Irkutsk. I left there for Kamchatka. The furs, the money are waiting for us out there.'

And in this way the Ukrainian cossack Trofim Zhdanko acquired a ship he wanted, a wife he admired and a son he abhorred.

WHEN, THANKS TO THE EXAMPLE SET BY MADAME Zhdanko, the court at St. Petersburg discovered what a bonanza they could reap in the Aleutian fur trade, companies of adventurous men were encouraged to test their fortunes in the islands. These informal groups were composed mainly of cossacks, especially those trained in the harsh disciplines of Siberia, and a more cruel group of invaders never descended upon a primitive people.

Accustomed to dispensing harsh discipline among the unlettered tribes of eastern Russia, they devised new barbarisms for dealing with the gentle, simpleminded Aleuts.

The brutal precedents set by Innokenti Zhdanko during the first encounter on Attu Island became the norm as the cossacks pressed eastward, and more outrages were invented as the marauders approached the larger islands in the middle of the chain.

Of course, when the first group after Trofim and Innokenti came in their flimsy sealskin boat to Attu and tried to land, the enraged natives, remembering what had happened before, stormed down to the beach and slaughtered seven traders, an event which enshrined in Russian folklore the belief that the Aleuts were savages who could be tamed only by gun and knout. But when the second expedition sailed on to Kiska, the next sizable island in the chain, it encountered natives who knew nothing of white men, and here the cossacks initiated a reign of terror which produced many furs and more dead Aleuts.

On sprawling Amchitka, next in line, the islanders were quickly subdued by the relentless invaders. The natives had

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to remain mute when these men stole their women. They had to sail forth in all weathers to hunt for sea otters. Of the otters killed in the new and wasteful ways introduced by the Russians, far more than half sank useless to the bottom of the Bering Sea, but since those brought to shore fetched increasingly high prices when caravanned down to the Mongolian border, the pressure to continue hunting mounted, and with it the barbarities.