O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [17]
Fort Fisher did not fall that day. The Union, no longer as squeamish about casualties, made another assault later, and this time was successful.
That is how Tobias Storm became a Wart-Hog. After the conflict was done, the nation wanted war no more. Stationed mostly in Washington, he was promoted to first lieutenant and married a robust lady, Matilda Morris, whose inheritance allowed them to establish a home and a family.
Storm loved the military and refused to resign to open a branch of the family importing firm in Washington. He also thought less of himself for not having seen a single action in a war in which he was tossed overboard just as the battle had commenced.
* * *
The Marine Corps was now scraping around, looking for some sort of mission to help keep it relevant, when they were brought in to solve a domestic problem.
There was growing concern in the government regarding happenings in the territory of Alaska.
Alaska had been purchased for a pittance from a bankrupt Russian czar. Locked in and frozen a good part of the year as it was, only the most daring adventurer attempted to traverse the uncharted northern passages. Death pointed an icy finger at courageous but ill-advised men who penetrated too far north.
The current source of riches around the Bering Sea was being plundered by Russian poachers. The Aleutian Islands formed stepping-stones between Russian settlements in Siberia and the Alaskan mainland. The Russians had devastated the fragile Indian civilization, imposed a system of serfdom, and otherwise ravaged the region under their mangling rule.
Seals, otters, and other fur-bearing animals were the life-support systems of the natives and the victims of savage commercialism by the Russians.
During nesting season, Russian poachers came over the Aleutians to Alaska, though it was now an American possession, and slaughtered seals by the tens of thousands, often by club, to save ammunition and prevent damage to the valuable skins.
As with the American buffalo, the massacre of the seals brought the Indians close to ruin. The hunter received a half-dollar or less for a pelt. Three dollars was the rate the Russians got from the fur-hungry Chinese market.
The Hudson Bay Company was having the same problem with Canadian poachers who sold their pelts for four to five dollars in the exploding London fur industry.
The tribes who depended upon the seal for survival were in a dire condition and feared that the seal was being slaughtered to extinction.
Lieutenant Tobias Storm sailed north from San Francisco with a platoon of Marines. At the same time a company of British joined forces with them. Autumn quickly closed them down in their post on Unalaska Island, where they waited out the long winter’s night for the spring thaw.
That springtime, their joint operation stemmed the flow of seal blood and bagged two prison ships filled with poachers.
After twenty-two years in the Corps, Tobias Storm received his second promotion, a medal of commendation, and a soft cruise aboard the USS Kansas, which was doing a goodwill tour to open markets in the South Pacific and Asia.
• 7 •
THE GUNS OF NANDONG
1878—Nandong Province
Emperor Wu Ling Chow, as he insisted on being addressed, looked down from his hillside palace to the spellbinding harbor known as the Blue Pearl of the Orient. The USS Kansas skimmed into the bay at eventide with all ceremonial pennants aflutter.
The clever, dangerous warlord and self-proclaimed emperor had kept the breakaway province of Nandong and its population of twenty million as an independent state despite being hemmed in by contentious neighbors.
Wu Ling Chow had survived royal court treachery, provincial enemies, and forays by foreigners and had made the price for invading armies too high. The emperor’s hard-fisted rule had kept Nandong free of the opium scourge. With a master of artful pacts as its leader, Nandong had endured only a controlled smattering of Western intrusions.
But the guns of the foreign fleets were growing larger. Unvarnished