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Updated: May 31, 2025
All Baranof's work to pacify the hostiles of the mainland was being undone; and what complicated matters hopelessly for him was the fact that the shareholders of his own company were also shareholders in the rival ventures.
Twice successors had been sent from Russia; but one died on the way, and the other was shipwrecked. It was easy for malignant tongues to rouse suspicion that Baranof's desire to resign sprang from interested motives, perhaps from a wish to conceal his own peculations.
Captain Yanovski became enamored with the beautiful daughter of Baranof, and if you search the old records of the Cathedral of St. Michaels at Sitka you will find the entry as made of the marriage of Simeon Ivanof Yanovski "with the late head governor of the Russian American possessions, Collegiate Adviser and Cavalier Baranof's daughter Irina, one of Creoles."
He warned Baranof's hunters not to be led off inland bear hunting, for the bear hunt might be a Sitkan Indian in decoy to trap the hunters into an ambush. Such a decoy had almost trapped Cleveland's crew, when other Indians were noticed in ambush. The new fort was christened Archangel. All went well as long as Baranof was on the ground. Sea-otter were obtained for worthless trinkets.
The plotters were handcuffed and sent back to Siberia. There was something inexcusably cruel in the termination of Baranof's services with the fur company. He was now over seventy years of age. He was tortured by rheumatism from the long years of exposure in a damp climate.
Ammunition was distributed to the fifty castaways; salmon bought from the Indians, whom Baranof's fair treatment won from the first; once a week, rye meal was given out for soup; and for the rest, the men had to depend on the eggs of sea-birds, that flocked over the precipitous shores in myriads, or on the sea-lions roaring till the surf shook on the rocky islets along the shore.
For the rest of Baranof's rule, Sitka became the great rendezvous of vessels trading on the Pacific. Here Baranof held sway like a potentate, serving regal feasts to all visitors with the pomp of a little court, and the barbarity of a wassailing mediaeval lord. But all this was not so much fireworks for display. Baranof had his motive.
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