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By Root 727 0

is only maybe, and the facts enough are that on the broad map of mid-nineteenth-century empires Alaska lies apart from the Hudson's Bay span of Canadian dominion. ("It was but natural," the magistrate of America's frontier history, H. H. Bancroft, would aver, "in the gigantic robbery of half a world, that Russia should have a share; and had she been quicker about it, the belt might as well have been continued to Greenland and Iceland.") That, indeed, this colossal crude crown of northwestmost wilderness is tipped sharply, as if in deliberate spurn, away from London to the direction of Siberia and St. Petersburg. That within the tsar's particular system of empire-by-proxy, Swedes and other outlanders who signed on with the Russian-American Company's fur-gathering enterprise did so as indentured laborers, seven-year men. And that the name Melander thus is not to be discovered anywhere among the frontier baronage.

For as will happen, Melander after pledging to the Russian-American Company did find his life altered by the alluring new nautical machinery, right enough. But not in the direction hoped. Only seldom the Russians fired up the Nicholas, whose boilers proved to require approximately two days of woodchopping for each day of voyage—a visiting Hudson's Bay officer once amended the vessel's name to Old Nick, on the ground that it consumed fuel at the rate you might expect of Hell—and on the occasions when its paddle-wheels were set into ponderous thwacking motion, positions aboard were snatched by bored officers of the small Russian navy contingent stationed at New Archangel. Melander's service aboard the Nicholas occurred only whenever the Russian governor, Rosenberg, took his official retinue on an outing to the hot springs at Ozherskoi, an outpost south a dozen miles down Sitka Sound. In Melander's first Alaskan year this happened precisely twice, and his sea-time-under-steam totaled six days.

The rest of his workspan? A Russian overseer conferred assignment on Melander as promptly as the supply schooner vanished over the horizon on the voyage back to Stockholm and Kronstadt. "Friend sailor," the overseer began, "we are going to give you a chance to dry out your bones a bit," and Melander knew that what followed was not going to be good. Because of his ability of handling men and, from time on the Baltic, his tongue's capability with a bit of Russian—and his Gotland knowledge of fish—henceforth Melander was in charge of the crew that salted catches of salmon and herring for New Archangel's winter larder.

Seven-year men. "The Russians' hornless oxen," as Melander more than once grumbled it.

"Deacon Step-and-a-Half is at it again."

Melander peered with interest along the cardplayers and conversationalists in the workmen's barracks to see where the gibe had flown from. A fresh turn of tongue was all too rare in New Archangel. Melander himself had just tried out his latest declaration to no one in particular: "A seven-year man is a bladeless knife without a handle." That had attracted him the anonymous dart, not nearly the first to bounce off his seaman's hide.

These shipmates—Melander corrected himself: barrackmates—were an everysided lot. Finns and Swedes under this roof, about all they could count in common were their term of indentureship and the conviction that they were sounder souls than the Russian work force in the several neighboring dwellings. The Scandinavians after all had been pulled here. Most of the Russian laborers simply were shoved; stuffed aboard ship at Okhotsk 011 the coast of Siberia and {¡itched across the North Pacific to the tsar's Alaskan fur field, lie it said, these Siberian vagabonds had not been encouraged onward to Russian America for habits such as nudging ducks into puddles. Thugs, thieves, hopeless sots, 110 few murderers, the flotsam of any vast frontier, jostled among them. ("Where," an appalled governor of New Archangel once wrote home to a grandee of the Russian-American Company, "do you get such men?") But so did debtors, escaped serfs, those whose only instinct was to drift.