The Sea Runners
This Karlsson was a part-time bear milker. That is to say, ordinarily he worked as an axman in the timber-felling crew, but also had sufficiently skilled himself as a woodsman that he was sent with the hunting party which occasionally forayed out to help provision New Archangel—to milk the bears, as it was jested. The sort with nothing much he cared to put to voice and of whom even less was remarked, Karlsson. It is told that at a Scandinavian free-for-all, Danes will be the ones dancing and laughing, Norwegians endeavoring to start a fight, Finns passing bottles, and Swedes standing along the wall waiting to be introduced. Melander constituted a towering exception to this slander, but Karlsson, narrow bland face like that of a village parson, would have been there among the wall props.
"They say it'll be rice kasha for noon again. A true Russian feast they're setting us these clays, anything you want so long as it's gruel, aye?"
"Seems so," answered Karlsson.
Sociability was nothing that Melander sought out of Karlsson. A time, he had noticed Karlsson canoeing in across Sitka Sound here, back from a day's hunting. Karlsson's thrifty strokes went beyond steady. Tireless, in a neat-handed, workaday fashion. The regularity of a small millwheel, Melander had been put in mind of as he watched Karlsson paddle.
What brought down Melander's decision in favor of Karlsson, however, was a feather of instant remembered from shipboard. Karlsson had been home to Alaska on the same schooner as Melander, and Melander recalled that just before sailing when others of the indentured group, the torsion of their journey-to-come tremendous in them at the moment, were talking large of the bright success ahead, what adventure the frontier life would furnish and how swiftly and with what staggering profit their seven years of contract with the Russians would pass, Karlsson had listened, given a small mirthless smile and a single shake of his head, and moved off along the deck by himself. Whatever directed Karlsson to Alaska, it had not been a false northern sun over his future.
"I don't see why that water doesn't pucker them blue. They must have skins like seals with the hair off."
As Melander and Karlsson stood arid sipped, a dozen natives had emerged from one of the nearest longhouses, men and women together and all naked, and waded casually hit‹) the channel to bathe.
Karlsson's reply this time was a shrug.
One further impression of the slender man's interesting constancy also was stored away in Melander. The observation that Karlsson visited more often to the women in the native village than did any of the merchants of wind who perpetually bragged in the barracks about their lust. Or as Melander mused it to himself, the mermaids had hold of Karlsson's towrope but he didn't go around yipping the news.
Melander swept the bay and channel east to west with an arm, as if in salute to the day. lie purposely had chosen this rainless morning of late June, gentle gray-silver overcast cupping the day's light to lend clarity down to the spruce islands of the harbor and the sudden spearing mountains behind the settlement, the usual morning wind off the bay lazed to a breeze, to approach Karlsson before work call. His thought was that if Karlsson would entertain escape on this most silken of New Archangel days, he truly was ready.
Melander's words, however, began where his motion ended, "Those canoes are longer than they look, aye?" In a row on the beach the natives' cedar shells lay; the line of lithe craft, like sea creatures dozing side by side on the sand, which his gaze had been drawn to when he stood atop the stockade. "We could step into one here and step out at Stockholm."
Karlsson's face, all at once not nearly so bland, suggested the standard skepticism toward talk of uncooping oneself from New Archangel. Because of the isolation so far into the North Pacific and because muskeg and sinkholes and an alpine forest so thick it seemed to be thatched began just beyond the stockade wall, the matter of escape always narrowed instantly to the same worn point. Where, except up to the sweet blue meadows of heaven, was there to go?
"The world has a lot of wheres," vouched Melander now. "We need just four of them,"
He drained his mug in a final gulp, folded himself down to rest one knee on the dirt, and with a stick began to trace.
A first south-pointing stab of shoreline, like a broad knife blade. "This one, we've got"—Baranof Island, on the oceanward side of which they squatted now.
A speckle of isles, then another large landform, south-pointing too, like the sheath Baranof had been pulled from. "The Queen Charlottes."
Another brief broken isle-chain of coast, then a long blunt slant, almost sideways to the other coastal chunks. "Vancouver's Island,"
At last, fourth and biggest solidity in tins geographical flagstone of Melander's, the American coastline descending to the Columbia River. The place where the dirt lines of coast and the river met, Icelander Xed large. "Astoria," Melander said this mark was.
Map lesson done, Melander recited to the close-tongued Karlsson the main frame of his plan. That if they selected their time well and escaped by night they could work a canoe south along the coast. That there at its southern extent, down beyond the Russian territory and that of the Hudson's Ray Company, the place called Astoria was operated by the Americans as an entry port. From there ships would come and go, ships to the docks of Europe. To, at last, Stockholm.
Six weeks' canoe journey, Melander estimated, to Astoria. If they caught luck, could manage to sail part of the voyage, a month.
"You talk us in royal style from here to there, Melander. But this God-forgotten coast, in a canoe..."
Karlsson fell silent again, looking off around the island-speckled bay and up into the timbered mountains. Verstovia's skirt forest showed every branch distinct today, almost every bristle; vast green lacework, it seemed.
Melander knew he was going to have a wait. There always was about this Karlsson a calm just short of chill. He was a Smålander, and that ilk were known to have in them whatever stone God had left over after He filled their fields with it. "One word, good as two"—• this was the anthem of Smålanders. Right now the lean man was appraising the horizon of Alaska as if someone had offered him the whole tumbled country for forty riksdaler.
Then again, Melander noticed Karlsson's glance come back twice and linger in the vicinity of the bathing native women.
On such a New Archangel day sound carried like light, and from the blacksmith shop within the stockade began to chorus the measured clamor of hammer against anvil.
As if roused by the clangor, Karlsson turned to the taller man.
"Two of us are not enough strength for that much paddling."
"No," Melander agreed. "Our other man is Braaf."
"Braaf ? That puppy?"
Melander tendered his new coconspirator a serious smile in replica of Karlsson's own aboard the schooner in Stockholm harbor.
"We need a thief," Melander explained.
That is the way they became two. Disquieted shipman, musing woodsman, now plotters both. Against them, and not yet knowing it, although habitually guardful as governing apparatuses have to be, stood New Archangel and its system of life. The system of all empires, when the matter comes to be pondered. For empires exist on the principle of constellations in the night sky—pattern imposed across unimaginable expanse—and the New Archangels of the planet at the time, whether named Singapore or Santa Fe or Dakar or Astoria or Luanda or Sydney, were their specific scintillations of outline. Far pinspots representing vastly more than they themselves were.
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 squin
ting 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.