barricade erected on the site of the present Sitka.
Here {333} the fort was rebuilt and renamed New Archangel--a fort
worthy in its palmy days of Baranof's most daring ambitions. Sixty
Russian officers and eight hundred white families lived within the
walls, with a retinue of two or three thousand Indian otter hunters
cabined along the beach. There was a shipyard. There was a foundry
for the manufacture of the great brass bells sold for chapels in New
Spain. There were archbishops, priests, deacons, schools. At the hot
springs twenty miles away, hospitals and baths were built. A library
and gallery of famous paintings were added to the fort, though Baranof
complained it would have been wiser to have physicians for his men.
For the rest of Baranof's rule, Sitka became the great rendezvous of
vessels trading on the Pacific. Here Baranof held sway like a
potentate, serving regal feasts to all visitors with the pomp of a
little court, and the barbarity of a wassailing mediaeval lord.

But all this was not so much fireworks for display. Baranof had his
motive. To the sea-captains who feasted with him and drank themselves
torpid under his table, he proposed a plan--he would supply the Aleut
hunters for them to hunt on shares as far south as southern California.
Always, too, he was an eager buyer of their goods, giving them in
exchange seal-skins from the Seal Islands. Boston vessels were the
first to enter partnership with Baranof. Later came Astor's captains
from New York, taking sealskins in trade for goods supplied to the
Russians.

{334} How did Baranof, surrounded by hostile Indians, with no servants
but Siberian convicts, hold his own single-handed in American wilds?
Simply by the power of his fitness, by vigilance that never relaxed, by
despotism that was by turns savage and gentle, but always paternal, by
the fact that his brain and his brawn were always more than a match for
the brain and brawn of all the men under him. To be sure, the liberal
measure of seventy-nine lashes was laid on the back of any subordinate
showing signs of mutiny, but that did not prevent many such attempts.

The most serious was in 1809. From the time that Benyowsky, the Polish
adventurer, had sacked the garrison of Kamchatka, Siberian convicts
serving in America dreamed of similar exploits. Peasants and officers,
a score in number, all convicts from Siberia, had plotted to rise in
New Archangel or Sitka, assassinate the gove