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| The signing of the cession treaty of Alaska on March 30, 1867 |
In 1867, the Finn T. Ahllund ignored the advice of his comrades and agreed to work for the Russian-American Company in Alaska, then part of the Russian Empire. He and 47 other rookies set out, like this, for "the Siberia of Siberia."
Upon their arrival in New Archangel, they were brought before the governor, Dmitri Petróvich Maksútov, who awarded them the jobs and showed them their barracks. Ahllund was not impressed with his bedroom, an austere room that he had to share with fifty other people, and with an obvious sanitation problem.
On a visit a few years earlier, Britain's George Simons said that the town had seemed "the most miserable place he had ever visited." In addition, a diet without fruits or vegetables, based on dried fish and a rather scarce meat, made scurvy a constant, with deadly outbreaks in 1805 and 1821.
To make matters worse, almost at the gates of New Arcángel lived a hostile indigenous village, the Tlingit, then in a fragile truce. On one of his escapades beyond the palisade, Ahllund was able to witness the legends he had heard about her harshness. Otherwise, with their painted faces and piercings in their lips and ears, they seemed enormously enigmatic people.
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| New Arcangel in 1863 |
One night he saw a naked child being plunged into the icy waters of the Bering Sea, then his shivering body was whipped with a riding crop. The shaman's blows, intended to activate blood flow, were the only thing that kept the little boy from dying of hypothermia.
Not all tribes enjoyed the same freedom as the Tlingit. Driven from their native archipelago, the Aleuts were forced to hunt furs for the Russian-American Company.
Whether it was due to the abuses suffered or the mixed marriages, fully naturalized, the relationship between Aleuts and colonizers ended up giving birth to a generation of Creoles. As explained by Claus-M. Naske and Herman E. Slotnick in Alaska, a history of the 49th state (1979), this is because Russians at the time did not attend to differences in race.
In fact, it was common for indigenous people to get drunk alongside Europeans on the many days off offered by the orthodox calendar, full of saints. For Ahllund, that was practically the only good news he'd had since his arrival. Perhaps then he understood why there were rumors that the tsar was going to sell a colony that, in the last hundred years, had barely progressed.
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| Tsar Peter the Great |
It all started in 1725, when Tsar Peter the Great wanted to know what lay beyond the limits of his vast empire, and commissioned the Danish sailor Vitus Bering to explore the northwestern coast of North America. After a difficult journey through Siberia, he and his men reached the Kamchatka peninsula, ready to enter waters hitherto unknown to any European.
After a first unsuccessful attempt, they reached Alaska in 1741. They stayed there for a short time, the time necessary for Dr. Georg Wilhelm Steller, the expedition's naturalist, to collect some remedies to cut the outbreak of scurvy from the ship San Pedro.
As he himself regretted, they had invested ten years of their lives preparing an exploration that only lasted ten minutes. On his return, Bering ended up dying on an island, which, like the strait that separates the two continents, today bears his name.
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| The promyshlenniki |
Due to the neglect of St. Petersburg, in the early years the colonizing task was left in the hands of the promyshlenniki, Siberian hunters attracted by the Bering stories. They hunted sea otters in the Aleutian Islands, and when they became extinct there, they continued eastward into North America. Being men who traveled alone, the majority illiterate and inclined to drink, they ended up enslaving the native Aleuts.
But, probably unknowingly, the promyshlenniki had caused an earthquake thousands of miles away. In Madrid, Carlos III received with disgust reports of the growing Russian presence on the northwestern coast of North America. After all, since 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas gave him full sovereignty over the American Pacific. The time had come to make that right effective.
On January 24, 1774, the ship San Blas left New Spain heading north. Her mission: to know the extent of the Russian advance. Under the orders of the Mallorcan Juan José Pérez Hernández, they sighted Vancouver and reached a strait that they called the San Lorenzo surge.
But, determined to find the Russians, they ignored another threat. Unbeknownst to them, in 1778, the legendary British sailor James Cook had reached the rise of San Lorenzo and renamed it Nutka. As soon as they heard that news, Captains Esteban José Martínez and Gonzalo López de Haro set out again for Alaska to establish a settlement before the English.
Too late. Upon reaching Nutka, Martínez discovered that a ship in the service of the British Crown was already anchoring in those waters. He decided to seize it, and later secured the position by building a fort which he called San Miguel. If that incident did not end in an open war between the two powers, it was because of the weakness of Spain.
Without the support of France, immersed in a revolution, and in frank decline in America, the Hispanic Crown had to end up yielding. In 1794 Nutka was handed over to the British. Today only the nomenclature of some places recalls the Spanish past of Alaska, such as the Malaspina glacier or the cities of Cordova and Valdez.
The withdrawal of the Spanish made things easier for Grigory Shélijov, a Russian merchant who wanted to turn the small fur economy of the promyshlenniki into a large-scale business. His business prospered so much that, in 1799, Tsar Paul I gave him a monopoly on all trade in Alaska. The Russian-American Company was born.
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| Aleksánder Baránov |
That fell like a stone on the director of operations in America, Aleksánder Baránov. Despite being a man only interested in obtaining profits for his company, he was now responsible for governing and evangelizing that land.
For Baránov, the immediate problem was the lack of men. Many of his employees were Aleut slaves, ex-convicts, or forced Russian serfs. There was nothing better, since not many Russians were willing to endure the harsh living conditions in the colony.
According to the historians Naske and Slotnick, more than one drunk of those who populated the port of Okhotsk, in Siberia, ended up against his will on the way to Alaska. By the time they woke up from the melopea, they were already on board the ship. With such a group of people, the governor had to resort to severe physical punishment to impose discipline.
Baránov would be fought in the summer of 1805, when his substitute appeared in the port of Nuevo Arcángel. Nikolai Rezanov was a virtuous man, with refined tastes and who, at fourteen years of age, had already mastered five languages. Besides, he did really believe in the colonizing project.
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| Aleut in a baidarka, the boat used to hunt marine mammals. In the background, a Russian ship. Illustration from 1817 |
As soon as he arrived, he worried about evangelization, until then in the hands of some Finnish monks who did not even bother to learn the language of the natives. After reprimanding the religious, he began an ambitious project to write a dictionary of indigenous languages, which was to serve to make sermons more intelligible.
Despite certain achievements in sanitation, in the following years the colony would face insurmountable challenges. When Dmitri Petróvich Maksútov assumed the position of governor in 1864, the fur trade, his main source of income, was already in decline.
In St. Petersburg, patience with the American company was running out. The first to speak out was Grand Duke Constantine, the Tsar's younger brother. He saw the United States as an emerging power whose duty it was to claim the entire continent for itself.
And what better way than to take advantage of it, then, to put land in the middle with the British, who, after defeating Russia in the Crimean War (1853-1856), could well invade the Empire from neighboring Canada.
In March 1867, they sat down to negotiate with the American Secretary of State, William H. Seward, a staunch defender of the purchase. At four in the morning of March 30, the sale was agreed for 7.2 million dollars. At today's exchange rate, they would be approximately 132 million.
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| The check used to buy Alaska for the United States |
The price may seem low, but Seward still had to take a lot of teasing because of him. Many criticized the purchase of a territory that seemed sterile to them. With a sense of humor, some media referred to the "madness of Seward", who had invested taxpayers' money to buy a "garden for polar bears."
For Ahllund, the news of the purchase came with the appearance in the port of Nuevo Arcángel of two North American steamers. A column of soldiers descended from these and marched in formation to the governor's house.
There the Russian garrison awaited them, which, at Maksútov's direction, began to solemnly lower their flag. At least they tried, since it got tangled up halfway. It took three attempts to free the post, as if the double-headed eagle did not want to leave America.
