The Sea Runners (3 page)

That voyage which deposited Melander and Karlsson into their indentured situation illustrates that here in the middle of the nineteenth century, this work of putting out the lines of star web across the planet had to be done with the slow white wakes of sailing ships. Hut done it was. Sea-lanes were extended and along them the imperial energies resolutely pulsed back and forth, capital to colony and colony to capital. Africa, Asia: the lines of route from Europe were converging and tensing one another into place for decades to come. North America: the gray-gowned wee queen of England reigned over Ojibwas and Athapaskans and Bella Coolas, the United States was taking unto itself the western vastness between the Mississippi and the Pacific, the tsar's merchants of Irkutsk and St. Petersburg were being provided fortunes by bales of Alaskan furs.

Such maritime tracework seemed, in short, to be succeeding astoundingly. Yet ... yet all this atlas of order rested on the fact that it requires acceptance, a faith of seeing and saying, "Ah yes, here is our Great Dipper, hung onto its nail in heaven," to make constellations real. So that what the makers of any imperial
configuration always needed be most wary of was minds—such as Melander's, such as Karlsson's, such as the one Melander was calculating upon next to ally with their two—which happened not to be of stellar allegiance.

Braaf would have given fingers from cither hand to be gone from New Archangel. He had after all the thief's outlook that in this many-cornered world of opportunity, an occasion would surely arrive when he could pilfer them back.

Put it simply, stealing was in Braaf like blood and breath. He was a Stockholm street boy, son of a waterfront prostitute and the captain of a Baltic fishing ketch, and on his own in life by the age of seven. Alaska he had veered to because after a steady growth of talent from beggary to picking pockets to thievery the other destination imminently beckoning to him was fängelse: prison.

So Braaf turned up as another in the 1851 contingent to New Archangel, and at once skinning knives and snuffboxes and twists of Circassian tobacco and other unattached items began to vanish from the settlement as if having sprung wings in the night. The Russians vented fury on the harborfront natives for the outbreak of vanishment, but the coterie of Swedes and Finns rapidly made a different guess, the new young Stockholmer among them having set up shop as a kind of human commissary in the barracks. Because Braaf stayed reasonable in his prices—interested less in renumeration than in chipping the monotony of Alaskan life, which he found to be a rain-walled prison in its own right—and was diplomatic enough not to forage from Ins own barrackmates, nothing was said against him.

How hard it would have been anyway to lodge a believable case against Braaf. At twenty, he displayed the round ruddy face of a farmboy—an apple of a face—and in talking with you lofted his gaze with innocent interest just above your eyes, as if considerately measuring you for a hat.

The morning after tea was taken outside the stockade of New Archangel by a pair of Swedes, it was taken by a trio.

"Me?" Braaf murmured when Melander loomed alongside him and Karlsson appeared at his opposite shoulder. "No, I was just about to ... Sorry, I've to ... Maybe the noon break, I'll..."

In his quiet manner Karlsson suggested Braaf had better shove a bung in his spout and hear out Melander's proposition.

"You put it that way," Braaf revised, "and my ears are yours."

On the slope of shore above the canoes, Braaf studied back and forth from Melander's forehead to Karlsson's as Melander once more outlined the plan.

"Austria, I've heard of that. But is it anywhere around here?"

"Astoria," Melander repeated with patience. "It's
the port for a part of this coast the Americans call Oregon."

"Imagine," said Braaf politely through a slurp of tea.

"Braaf, we need your skill of, umm, acquiring. It'll take supplies and supplies for such a journey."

"Why should I?"

"Because you're stuck here like a stump if you don't."

"That's a reason, I suppose. Why won't we drown?"

"God's bones, Braaf, these Kolosh canoes float like waterbugs. You'd need be an oaf to tip one over."

"I've been in company with an oaf or two in my time."

"Braaf, listen," Karlsson broke in. "I go in these canoes all the time, and I am undrowned."

"For all I know you have gills in the cheeks of your ass, too."

"Braaf," Melander resumed as if reciting to a limited child. "You have a choice here which comes rare in life. Join us and leave this Russian shitpile, or stay and be caught one day lifting one snuffbox too many. You've seen what these Russians can do with a knout. That sergeant of the sentries will sign his name up and down your back. Aye?"

"Pretty choice you paint. Rock and stony place."

"What else is the world? Step in with us, Braaf, It'll take your fast fingers to get us from here. But we can get."

"My fingers should ever see the day they're fast as your tongue, Melander."

"Thank you, but we can race another time. With us, arc you, or not?"

"You know for heaven-certain that we'll find this American fort at—what's it, Astruria?"

"Astoria. It is there. I have known sailors whose ships have called there. Could be we'll not even need to go that far, maybe meet a merchantman or trading ship or whaler along the way. English, Spanish, Americans, or the devil, won't matter which. So long as they're not Russians. Aye?"

"And the downcoast natives? Koloshes and what-ever-the-hell-else they might be?"

"I already said the devil."

Only for an instant now, about the duration of a held breath, did Braaf's eyes come steady with those of Melander and Karlsson, Just before he nodded agreement to join the escape. And that is how they became three.

In the galaxy of frontier enclaves sparked into creation by colonialism, New Archangel was a map dot unlike any other. Simultaneously a far-north backwater port and capital of a territory greater than France and Spain and England and Ireland taken together, the settlement ran on Russian capacities for hard labor and doggedness, and was kept from running any better than it did by Russian penchants for muddle and infighting. New Archangel here fifty years after its founding still stood forth in the image of its progenitor, the stumpy and tenacious Aleksandr Andreevich Baranov.
Of Baranov historians exclaim that, like Napoleon, lie was a little great man, for Baranov it was who as first governor of Russian America began in 1791 to stretch Russian strength from the Aleutian chain of isles down the great arc of Alaska's coast, bending or breaking the native cultures along the route one after another: Aleuts chastened into becoming the Russians' seasonal hunters of fur seals and sea otters, people of the Kenai cajoled into allegiance by Baranov's mating with the daughter of a foremost chief, stubbornly combative Tlingits—whom the Russians dubbed Koloshes—at last in 1804 dislodged from Sitka Sound by the cannonades of one of the tsar's gunships.

Baranov had true need of Sitka. Along virtually all of that stupendous southeast Alaskan coast the mountains drop sheer to the Pacific, spruce slopes like green avalanches into the seawater. Except at Sitka, where miles of harbor indent the archipelagic shoreline; an inlet "infinitely sinuous," said an early observer. Sitka, where the deep notch of bay is sided by a handy shelf of shore. Sitka, where in further grudging bequest of topography, at the shelf's southmost hook a knoll of rock some forty feet in elevation and four times as broad pokes up. Amid the coastline of shoulder to shoulder mountains this single odd stone callus was the strategic bayside point: the Koloshes employed the mound as their stronghold and Baranov would lose no time in perching his own thick-logged bastion there. The Russian-American Company's frontier Gibraltar, perhaps say. So turn the issue this way, that, and the other—beyond doubt, Baranov whirled it dizzy—Sitka
Sound represented the maritime ringhold into which Russian influence could be firmly knotted.

In this summer of 1852, the estimable Aleksandr Andreevich three decades dead, a double-storied governor's house still called Baranov's Castle squatted there in the air at the mound end of New Archangel's single street. At the opposite extent rose the onion dome and carrot spire of the comely little Russian Orthodox cathedral. Betwixt and around, the habitations of New Archangel amounted to two hundred or so squared-log buildings, many painted an aspiring yellow as though tint and nearby shore qualified them as seaside cottages. But their rooflines were hipped, the heavy style slanting down in all four directions from the ridgepole; and where gables were fashioned in, they were windowed with small spoked semicircles of glass, like half-suns which never managed either to set or to rise. A burly low-slung squinting town, New Archangel for all its best efforts was, beneath the lording styles of cathedral and Castle.

One aspect further, and this the true civic eccentricity. As large a fleet of ships lay permanently aland in this port of Russian America as was customarily to be found in its harbor. Make-do was the architect here. When they no longer could be safely sailed, hulks were winched out of Sitka Sound onto shore and then improvised upon as needed. ("The tsar's unsinkable squadron" of course is Melander's gibe.) Of the first two, beached into usefulness in Baranov's time, one hulk had been used as a church and the other as a gun battery—a pairing, canon and cannon, which may have
caused the Koloshes to ponder a hit about their new landlords. This habit of collecting hull corpses over since lent New Archangel, as one visitor summed it, "an original, foreign, and fossilized kind of appearance."

The morning after Braaf joined the escape plan, Karlsson emerged from around a corner of the cathedral, on his way from the Scandinavian workmen's barracks a short span to its north, and began to walk the brief dirt street between God's domain and the governor's. So deft with an ax that he often was sent to help with the shaping of a sail timber, Karlsson was delegated to work this day with the shipwrighting crew.

He very nearly could have arrowed to the shipyard with his eyes bound over, merely following the delicious waft of yellow cedar. Yet before reaching the 'wrighting store of timbers the far side of Baranov's Castle, Karlsson veered west toward the stockade gate and the Kolosh village beyond.

Stepped outside arid along the wall toward the beach.

Hunkered and began to scour the blade of his ax in the pale sand. Polishing away rust, this conscientious timberwright.

And second work too, for as lie squatted, Karlsson from the corner of his eye studied the Kolosh canoes, prows rising in extension like the necks of fantastic horses, in their graceful rank along the beach.

All of New Archangel, stockade and cathedral and Castle and hulks and enterprises and dwellings, sat
dwarfed this day by the Alaskan mountains, Verstovia and its throng of minions. Virtually atop the town in the manner that the spire and dome crowned the cathedral, the peaks were those a child would draw. Sharp tall pyramids of forest, occasionally a lesser summit rounded as a cannonball for comparison's sake. Topknots of snow showed here and there, but the color everywhere else on these stretching peaks was the black-green that only a northern coastal forest enmixes. A kind of colossal constancy breathes at you from form and tone of this sort, the surety that beyond such mountains, wherever you could peer there would stand only more such mountains. Except, of course, west into the ocean, where there was only more ocean.

As Karlsson set at his shipyard hewing, Braaf materialized at the western extent of the settlement, beside the elder most of two schooner bulks beached there.

When Braaf arrived to New Archangel and it became evident that he was not, as listed on one manifest, a shipwright, nor, as supposed on another item of record, a shoemaker, and Braaf with shy innocence denied knowing how such misunderstandings possibly could have come about, a perplexed Russian-American Company clerk assigned him to the readiest unskilled job, as a cook's helper. Daily Braaf managed to use this livelihood to manufacture free time for himself, much of it spent hiding out somewhere within this maritime carcass. The hulk neighboring it yet was in service as a cannon battery aimed into the Kolosh village, but dry rot had made a casualty of this vessel of Braaf's.

After a moment of endeavor at the doorlock with a small hook of metal, he slipped through the gangway carpentered into the ship's hull when it became a storehouse and crept to the forecastle. Within a particular one of the several stave-sprung barrels there he made a deposit, a walrus ivory snuffbox which hitherto was the possession of a Russian quartermaster.

Then, per Melander's instructions, Braaf began to measure by handwidths the depth and breadth—which is to say, the cache capacity—of other of these abandoned and forgotten receptacles.

Perpetually at combat with the massed mountains around Sitka Sound was the weather, darkening even now, for New Archangel lived two days of three in rain and oftener than that in cloud. "Always autumn," it was said of this diluted climate. One minute, vapor would flow along the bottoms of the mountains to float all the peaks like dark icebergs. The next, the cloud layer would rise and immerse every crag, leaving a broad, broad plateau of forest beneath. Or imprint of stranger sort, clumps of wan light, warmths fallen through chinks in the overcast, now would pinto the forest flanks. Between times a silken rain probably had sifted into the New Archangel air, a dew standing in droplets on clothing before anyone quite became aware of it, and it could be a hundred hours before a man cast his next shadow. Yet the diminutive port within all this swirl was a place of queer clarity as well, its rinsed air somehow holding a tint of blue light which caused everything to stand forth: smallest swags of spruce limbs on mountains a mile off, rock skirts of the
timbered islands throughout tho harbor, the gold-and-russet trim of seaweed along those stone hems. Voices and the harking of dogs carried extraordinarily.

At midmorning; Braaf reluctantly emerging toward chores for the noon meal, Melander on workbreak presented himself from within the saltery being constructed on the point of shoreline southeast of the cathedral. Sitka Sound shares amply in the wide tides of this region of Alaska, and on the broad exposed tideflat a pig was rooting up clams. His finds, one after another, were snatched from him by crows.