rents
tempestuous with the spring thaw had to be forded--ice cold and to the
armpits of the drivers; and in winter time, the packs of timber wolves
following on the heels of the cavalcade could only be driven off by the
hounds kept to course down grouse and hare {299} for the evening meal.
If an exile forced to act as transport packer fell behind, that was the
last of him. The Russian fur traders of America never paused in their
plans for a life more or less. Ordinarily it took three years for
goods sent from St. Petersburg to reach the Pacific; and this was only
a beginning of the hardships. The Pacific had to be crossed, and a
coast lined with reefs like a ploughed field traversed for two thousand
miles among Indians notorious for their treachery.

The vessels were usually crammed with traps and firearms and trinkets
to the water-line. The crews of forty, or seventy, or one hundred were
relegated to vermin-infested hammocks above decks, with short rations
of rye bread and salt fish, and such scant supply of fresh water that
scurvy invariably ravaged the ship whenever foul weather lengthened the
passage. Having equipped the vessel, the Siberian merchants passed
over the management to the Cossacks, whose pretence of conquering new
realms and collecting tribute for the Czar was only another excuse for
the same plunder in gathering sea-otter as their predecessors had
practised in hunting the sable. Landsmen among Siberian exiles were
enlisted as crew of their own free will at first, but afterward, when
the horrors of wreck and scurvy and massacre became known, both exiles
and Indians were impressed by force as fur hunters for the Cossacks.
If the voyage were successful, half the {300} proceeds went to the
outfitter, the remaining half to Cossacks and crew.

The boats usually sailed in the fall, and wintered on Bering Island.
Here stores of salted meat, sea-lion and sea-cow, were laid up, and the
following spring the ship steered for the Aleutians, or the main coast
of Alaska, or the archipelago round the modern Sitka. Sloops were
anchored offshore fully armed for refuge in case of attack. Huts were
then constructed of driftwood on land. Toward the east and south,
where the Indians were treacherous and made doubly so by the rum and
firearms of rival traders, palisades were thrown up round the fort, a
sort of balcony erected inside with brass cannon mounted where a sentry
paraded day and night, ringing a bell ev