"_God was high in the Heavens, and the Czar was far away_," as the Russians say, and the Siberian exiles--coureurs of the sea--who flocked to the west coast of America to hunt the sea-otter after Bering's discoveries in 1741 took small thought and recked no consequences of God or the Czar.
They timbered their crazy craft from green wood in Kamchatka, or on the Okhotsk Sea, or among the forests of Siberian rivers. They lashed the rude planks together, hoisted a sail of deer hide above a deck of, perhaps, sixty feet, and steering by instinct across seas as chartless as the forests where French coureurs ran, struck out from Asia for America with wilder { 81} dreams of plunder than ever Spanish galleon or English freebooter hoped coasting the high seas.
The crews were criminals with the brands of their crimes worn uncovered, banded together by some Siberian merchant who had provided goods for trade, and set adrift under charge of half a dozen Cossacks supposed to keep order and collect tribute of one-tenth as homage from American Indians for the Czar. English buccaneers didn't scruple as to blood when they sacked Spanish cities for Spanish gold. These Russian outlaws scrupled less, when their only hope of bettering a desperate exile was the booty of precious furs plundered, or bludgeoned, or exacted as tribute from the Indians of Northwest America. The plunder, when successful, or trade, if the crazy planks did not go to pieces above some of the reefs that cut up the North Pacific, was halved between outfitter and crew. If the cargo amounted to half a million dollars in modern money--as one of Drusenin's first trips did--then a quarter of a million was a tidy sum to be divided among a crew of, say, thirty or forty. Often as not, the long-planked single-master fell to pieces in a gale, when the Russians went to the bottom of the sea, or stranded among the Aleutian Islands westward of Alaska, when the castaways took up comfortable quarters among the Indians, who knew no other code of existence than the _rights of the strong_; and the Russians with their firearms seemed strong, indeed, to the Aleuts. As long as the newcomer demanded only furs, { 82} on his own terms of trade--the Indians acquiesced. Their one hope was to become strong as the Russians by getting iron in "toes"--bands two inches thick, two feet long. It was that ideal state, which finical philosophers describe as the "survival of the fit," and it worked well till the other party to the arrangement resolved he would play the same game and become fit, too, when there resulted a cataclysm of bloodshed. The Indians bowed the neck submissively before oppression. Abuse, cruelty, outrage, accumulated on the heads of the poor Aleuts. They had reached the fine point where it is better for the weak to die trying to overthrow strength, than to live under the iron heel of brute oppression.