As I had once leaned over the bow of the Tyee, so
now I leaned on the railing of a modern steamer,
watching the fog that had begun swiftly to lift. Out of
the mist appeared the winding channel edged with
boulders and swaying rockweed; then the spruce-
ranked shores with bits of vapour tangled in the tallest
tree-tops. When the last veil was whiffed upward,
clean-cut mountain ridges lay in violet silhouette
against a clear, saffron sky.
Though it was midnight, it was also June, when
there is no darkness in the North. Through the
mystic light the steamer throbbed on around a point
into a quiet, shadow-fringed bay, where the water was
flecked by the high broken spangle of the moon. In
the west the white crater of Mount Edgecumbe lifted
itself over long-dead fires — a truncated Fujiyama on a
throne of amethyst hills.
Off the port bow the distant slopes of Mount Ver-
stovia showed powder-blue in the half-light. Hidden
at its feet along the curve of the sea there slumbered,
I knew, the historic old-world village of Sitka, the
New Archangel of Alexander Baranov. New Arch-
angel, the stronghold which that courageous, roister-
ing, indomitable little Russian had erected in the
very midst of the most bloodthirsty of Indian tribes !
Thousands of miles from any base of supplies he had
made it not only the capital of the Czar’s domain in
the new world, but the centre of trade and civiliza-
tion on the whole northwest coast of the continent.
And here, for over a quarter of a century, as governor
of the Russian-American Fur Company, he had ruled
like a king, ‘ his retinue, convicts from Siberia, his
subjects, the hostile Indians.
When San Francisco was little more than an adobe
mission, the foundries of Sitka were casting bells with
which the Spanish padres later woke the echoes in the
honey-coloured hills of California. Thirty-five years
before the Golden State was adopted by Uncle Sam,
the flour mills of Sitka were grinding wheat grown
where Sacramento stands to-day — wheat tilled with
agricultural implements fashioned in Alaska. When
Chicago was an Indian colo-
nisers at Sitka building ships for comrnerce, cast-
ing cannon, rnaking nautical instruments, and weaving
In ‘those days this Northern town was the port
of call for vessels fronl all parts of the world, and
fanwus annong traders and adventurers for its generous
hospitality.
