United States or Niger ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Three other Russian vessels were on the grounds before him, Glottoff and Medvedeff at Oomnak, Korovin halfway up Oonalaska. No time for Drusenin to lose! A spy sent out came back with the report that every part of Oomnak and Oonalaska was being thoroughly hunted except the extreme northeast, where the mountain spurs of Oonalaska stretch out in the sea like a hand.
Ismyloff was neither better nor worse than his kind. Heavy squalls pursued the ships all the way from Oonalaska, left on October 26, to the Sandwich Islands, reached in the new year 1779. A thousand canoes of enthusiastic natives welcomed Cook back to the sunny islands of the Pacific. Before the explorer could anchor, natives were swimming round the ship like shoals of fish.
But in the sortie, there had been flaunted in their very faces, the coats and caps and daggers of the five hunters Drusenin had sent fox trapping. Plainly, the fox hunters had been massacred. The four men were alone surrounded by hundreds of hostiles, ten miles from the shores of Oonalaska, twenty from the other hunting detachments and the ship. But water was becoming a desperate need.
Norton Sound was explored on the way back; and October saw Cook down at Oonalaska, where Ledyard was sent overland across the island to conduct the Russian traders to the English ships. Three Russians came to visit Cook. One averred that he had been with Bering on the expedition of 1741, and the rough adventurers seemed almost to worship the Dane's memory.
June saw Benyowsky far eastward at Kadiak on the south shore of Alaska, gathering in a cargo of furs; and from the sea-otter fields of Kadiak and Oonalaska, Benyowsky sailed southwest, past the smoking volcanoes of the Aleutians, vaguely heading for some of those South Sea islands of which he used to read in the exile village of Kamchatka.
The Russians of Oonalaska and Kamchatka resented the English intrusion on their hunting-ground, while the English refused to acknowledge that they were invading Russian territory. It was planned to winter and repair the ships at the Sandwich Islands. This part of Cook's voyage does not concern Canada.
In spring both sailed for the best sea-otter fields then known Oonalaska and Oomnak, Korovin with thirty-seven men, Medvedeff, forty-nine. In order not to interfere with each other's hunt, Medvedeff stopped at Oomnak, Korovin went on to Oonalaska.
Those gathered at Kadiak have totalled as many as six thousand in a year during the heyday of the hunt, at Oonalaska three thousand, on the Prybilofs now noted for their seal, five thousand. In 1785 Cook's Inlet yielded three thousand; in 1812, only one hundred. Yakutat gave two thousand in 1794, only three hundred, six years later.
Drusenin was outward bound and must have heard the tales told of Pushkareff's crew; but the latter had brought back in all nearly two thousand otter, half sent by Drusenin, half brought by himself, and Oonalaska became the lodestar of the otter hunters. The spring of '63 found Drusenin coasting the Aleutians. Sure enough, others had heard news of the great find of the new hunting-grounds.
The terrible position to which loss of supplies had reduced the traders of Kadiak when his own vessel was wrecked at Oonalaska on the way out, demonstrated to Baranof the need of more ships; so when orders came from his company in 1793 to construct a sailing boat on the timberless island of Kadiak without iron, without axes, without saw, without tar, without canvas, he was eager to attempt the impossible.
Word Of The Day