The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [8]
Baranov had true need of Sitka. Along virtually all of that stupendous southeast Alaskan coast the mountains drop sheer to the Pacific, spruce slopes like green avalanches into the seawater. Except at Sitka, where miles of harbor indent the archipelagic shoreline; an inlet "infinitely sinuous," said an early observer. Sitka, where the deep notch of bay is sided by a handy shelf of shore. Sitka, where in further grudging bequest of topography, at the shelf's southmost hook a knoll of rock some forty feet in elevation and four times as broad pokes up. Amid the coastline of shoulder to shoulder mountains this single odd stone callus was the strategic bayside point: the Koloshes employed the mound as their stronghold and Baranov would lose no time in perching his own thick-logged bastion there. The Russian-American Company's frontier Gibraltar, perhaps say. So turn the issue this way, that, and the other—beyond doubt, Baranov whirled it dizzy—Sitka Sound represented the maritime ringhold into which Russian influence could be firmly knotted.
In this summer of 1852, the estimable Aleksandr Andreevich three decades dead, a double-storied governor's house still called Baranov's Castle squatted there in the air at the mound end of New Archangel's single street. At the opposite extent rose the onion dome and carrot spire of the comely little Russian Orthodox cathedral. Betwixt and around, the habitations of New Archangel amounted to two hundred or so squared-log buildings, many painted an aspiring yellow as though tint and nearby shore qualified them as seaside cottages. But their rooflines were hipped, the heavy style slanting down in all four directions from the ridgepole; and where gables were fashioned in, they were windowed with small spoked semicircles of glass, like half-suns which never managed either to set or to rise. A burly low-slung squinting town, New Archangel for all its best efforts was, beneath the lording styles of cathedral and Castle.
One aspect further, and this the true civic eccentricity. As large a fleet of ships lay permanently aland in this port of Russian America as was customarily to be found in its harbor. Make-do was the architect here. When they no longer could be safely sailed, hulks were winched out of Sitka Sound onto shore and then improvised upon as needed. ("The tsar's unsinkable squadron" of course is Melander's gibe.) Of the first two, beached into usefulness in Baranov's time, one hulk had been used as a church and the other as a gun battery—a pairing, canon and cannon, which may have caused the Koloshes to ponder a hit about their new landlords. This habit of collecting hull corpses over since lent New Archangel, as one visitor summed it, "an original, foreign, and fossilized kind of appearance."
The morning after Braaf joined the escape plan, Karlsson emerged from around a corner of the cathedral, on his way from the Scandinavian workmen's barracks a short span to its north, and began to walk the brief dirt street between God's domain and the governor's. So deft with an ax that he often was sent to help with the shaping of a sail timber, Karlsson was delegated to work this day with the shipwrighting crew.
He very nearly could have arrowed to the shipyard with his eyes bound over, merely following the delicious waft of yellow cedar. Yet before reaching the 'wrighting store of timbers the far side of Baranov's Castle, Karlsson veered west toward the stockade gate and the Kolosh village beyond.
Stepped