for calico and beads, blankets and
ammunition.[16] This market was closed by a portcullised door which
permitted entrance through the stockaded wall, and was enclosed by a
railed yard. Armed guards stood on duty, and at the least dispute in the
market, down came the door and they proceeded to punish the delinquents.

The warehouses were stored with thousands on thousands of the richest
furs of the Northland; sea-otter, worth today from $800 to $1,000 per
skin, and not to be had at any price, were numbered by thousands in the
earlier years; sealskins by shiploads, some killed off the harbor, but
mainly from the Seal Islands; of land otter, the Hudson's Bay Company
paid them two thousand skins each year for the lease of the territory
from Portland Canal to Cape Spencer. The martin, the American sable,
with its fluffy pelage. Foxes, blue, white, black, silver gray, red and
cross, were there by thousands, brought from the Arctic, from the
Aleutian Islands, from the Valley of the Yukon; mink, ermine, muskrat,
beaver, land otter, pile on pile. Tons of ivory from the walrus herds of
Morzhovia and bearskins and wolfskins from Cook Inlet and the Copper
River. The right to the fur trade belonged exclusively to the Company by
Royal ukase, and any employe who was found attempting to infringe on
their rights was arrested and sent to Russia for punishment.[17]

From the top of the Castle, over 100 feet above the sea, a light burned
as a beacon to mariners entering the harbor, and this was the first
light-house to throw its beams over the waters of this northern ocean.
In the cupola which rose from the roof were four little square cups into
which seal oil was poured and wicks burned in grooves rising from them,
while back of the flame was a reflector that threw the light far out to
sea among the islands.

The stock of goods in the magazines was large and varied. It covered
almost every article carried in the general European trade as a
necessity, and many of the luxuries--sugar and sealing wax, tobacco,
both Virginia and Kirghis, silk and broadcloth, calico and Flemish
linen, ravens duck and frieze, arshins of blankets and poods of yarn;
vedras of rum, cognac and gin; butter from the Yakut, from California
and from Kodiak; salt beef from Ross Colony, from England and from
Kodiak; beaver hats and cotton socks.

In the arsenal were kept about a thousand muskets, three hundred
pistols, two hundred rifles, as well as sabres, cutlasses,