oaching
cautiously for fear of ambuscade, they clambered over the {314}
palisades and looked. The fort was deserted. Naught of the Sitkans
remained but thirty dead warriors and all their children, murdered
during the night to prevent their cries betraying the retreat.

New Archangel, as it was called, was built on the site of the present
Sitka. Sixteen short and forty-two long cannon mounted the walls. As
many as seven hundred officers and men were sometimes on garrison duty.
Twelve officers frequently dined at the governor's table; and here, in
spite of bishops and priests and deacons who later came on the ground,
the revellers of the Russian fur hunters held high carnival.
Thirty-six forts and twelve vessels the Russian American fur hunters
owned twenty years after the loss of Sitka. New Archangel became more
important to the Pacific than San Francisco. Nor was it a mistake to
move the capital so far south. Within a few years Russian traders and
their Indians were north as far as the Yukon, south hunting sea-otter
as far as Santa Barbara. To enumerate but a few of the American
vessels that yearly hunted sea-otter for the Russians southward of
Oregon and California, taking in pay skins of the seal islands, would
fill a coasting list. Rezanoff, who had failed to open the embassy to
Japan and so came across to America, spent two months in Monterey and
San Francisco trying to arrange with the Spaniards to supply the
Russians with provisions. He was received coldly by the Spanish
governor till {315} a love affair sprang up with the daughter of the
don, so ardent that the Russian must depart post-haste across Siberia
for the Czar's sanction to the marriage. Worn out by the midwinter
journey, he died on his way across Siberia.

[Illustration: Sitka from the Sea.]

Later, in 1812, when the Russian coasters were refused watering
privileges at San Francisco, the Russian American Company bought land
near Bodega, and settled their famous Ross, or California colony, with
cannon, barracks, arsenal, church, workshops, and sometimes a
population of eight hundred Kadiak Indians. Here provisions were
gathered for Sitka, and hunters despatched for sea-otter of the south.
The massacres on the Yukon and the clashes with the Hudson's Bay
traders are a story by themselves. The other doings of these "Sea
Voyagers" became matters of international history when they tried to
exclude American and British traders from the Pacifi