The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [1]
Horn on the isle of Gotland and thinking of himself as a Swede, Melander actually numbered in the landless nationality, that of the sea. Beyond memory his people on Gotland were fisherfolk, generation upon generation automatically capable with their reaping nets as if having happened into the world with hands shaped only for that task. So it came as a startling flex of independence when Melander, himself beginning to resemble a sizable height of pine spar, went off from his village of Slite to tall-masted vessels. Aboard ship he proved rapidly apt, the type of sea roamer of whom it was appraised that each drop of his blood was black Stockholm tar and his every hair a rope yarn. Ten or so years of sailing the Baltic and the North Sea bettered his position almost voyage by voyage, and then—"Had I been born with brass on my corners, you'd one day be calling me Admiral," Melander half-joked to his deckhands the day he was made first mate.
Just such a billet, second in command of a schooner bearing twenty fresh seven-year men from Stockholm in the spring of 1851, was the one that shunted Melander to Alaska. Russian America, that world-topping wilderness yet was known as, its wholesale purchase by the United States—and consequent rechristening of New Archangel to what the coast's natives knew this vital speck of site as, Sitka—waiting a decade and a half into the future.
Although he had no farthest thought of new endeavor at the onset of that voyage, a pair of outlooks swerved Melander into staying on at New Archangel. The first loomed square ahead—the eleven-month expanse of return voyage in the company of the schooner's captain, a fidgety little circle-faced Finn who was veteran in the Baltic trade but had proved to be quite literally out of his depth on the ocean. The other lay sidewise to Mister First Mate Melander's scrutiny, berthed there against a backdrop of Alaskan forest the spring morning when he reached final exasperation with his dim captain: The Russian-American Company's steamship, the Emperor ANicholas I.
In a time and place earlier, Melander would have been the fellow you wanted to set a spire on a cathedral ; in a later, to oversee a fleet of mail planes. But on an April clay in 1851 at one of the rim ends of the known world, what sat at hand was this squatty wonder of self-propulsion. This, and a proclaimed shortage of gifted seamen in these northern Pacific waters which the fur-trading Russians historically had navigated, pro-Nicholas and pre-Melander, like men lurching across ice.
"If the wind were clever enough," Melander observed to the baffled Finnish skipper upon taking leave of him, "it ought to snuff out these steam snorters before they get a start, aye?"
Melander maybe under different policy would have gone on to earn his way up the ranks of the Russian-American Company at New Archangel like a lithe boy up a schooner's rigging; become a valued promyshlen-nik, harvester of pelts, for the tsar's Alaskan enterprise in the manner, say, of occasional young Scotsmen of promise who, along the adjoining fur frontier of northmost North America, were let to fashion themselves into field captains of the Hudson's Bay Company by learning to lead brigades of trappers and traders, keep the native tribes cowed or in collaboration, deliver a reliable profit season upon season to London; and, not incidentally, to hold those far spans of map not only in the name of their corporate employers but for the British crown, which underlay the company's charter terms like an ornate watermark. Simpson, McLoughlin, Douglas, Campbell, Rae, others: Caledonians who whittled system into the wilderness, names known even yet as this continent's northern roster of men of enterprise and empire, lint maybe