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Updated: June 19, 2025
Just to make sure of safety after Pushkareff's losses of ten men on this island, Drusenin exchanges a letter or two with the commanders of those other three Russian vessels. Then he laid his plans for the winter's hunt. But so did the Aleut Indians; and their plans were for a man-hunt of every Russian within the limits of Oonalaska.
When he came to America accompanied by his wife, Baranof, another trader, and two hundred men in 1784, the Russian headquarters were still at Oonalaska in the Aleutians. Only desultory expeditions had gone eastward. Foreign ships had already come among the Russian hunting-grounds of the north. These Shelikoff at once checkmated by moving Russian headquarters east to Three Saints, Kadiak.
He shut his eyes, and tried to place himself in his position of a month before, and failed. Why had there been no callers? His own branch of business was in a laggard way, but of that he made no account. He thought of Oonalaska, and decided that there were worse places in the world than on that shore, even with the drawback of the howlings. He seemed to be in space.
Westward toward the Aleutians, where driftwood was scarce, the Russians built their forts in one of two places: either a sandy spit where the sea protected them on three sides, as at Captain Harbor, Oonalaska, and St. Paul, Kadiak, or on a high, rocky eminence only approachable by a zigzag path at the top of which stood cannon and sentry, as at Cook's Inlet.
They put in at Oonalaska and other places, which were taken possession of in the name of the King of England. On August 3, Mr. Anderson, surgeon of the Resolution, died from a lingering consumption, under which he had been suffering more than twelve months. He was a young man of considerable ability, and possessed an amiable disposition.
Now the majority of voyagers don't care to coast this part of Oonalaska at night during the winter in a safe ship; and these men had nothing between them and the abyss of the sea but the thickness of a leather sack badly oiled to keep out water. Their one hope was a trader's vessel.
On land, the skin side of the coats could be turned in and the fur out. Oonalaska, westward of the Aleutian chain of islands and Kadiak, just south of the great Alaskan peninsula, were the two main points whence radiated the hunting flotillas for the sea-otter grounds. Formerly, a single Russian schooner or packet boat would lead the way with a procession of a thousand bidarkas.
He then explored the coasts in Behring's Strait both in Asia and America; and on October 2 again anchored at Oonalaska to refit; and here they had communication with some Russians, who undertook to convey charts and maps, etc., to the English Admiralty, which they faithfully fulfilled.
Some one has said that Oonalaska and Oomnak are the smelting furnaces of America. Certainly, the volcanic caves supplied sulphur that the natives knew how to use as match lighters. The savages were without firearms, but might have burned out the Russians had it not been for the constant fusillade of musketry from door and roof and parchment windows of the hut.
Oonalaska, the most important and middle of these, is as far from Oregon as Oregon is from New York. Near Oonalaska were the finest sea-otter fields in the world; and the Aleutians numbered twenty thousand hunters men, women, children born to the light skin boat as plainsmen were born to the saddle.
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