to the Spanish Captain Bodega y Quadra for 75 prime skins. But the most famous of those sailing in Cook’s wake was George Vancouver, a veteran of Cook’s last voyage.
In a four-year expedition between 1791 and 1795, Vancouver charted the Inside Passage, and became the first European to sight from Cook Inlet “distant stupendous mountains covered with snow”—now known as Mount Foraker and nearby Denali, the continent’s highest peak.
By 1805, at least 200 European scientific and commercial voyages had been made up the Northwest Coast by the Russians, British, Americans, Spanish, and French. Most tragic of the early expeditions was that of Jean François Galaup de la Pérouse, master of the French vessel Boussole, which visited Lituya Bay near Yakutat in July 1786. In a humbling display of nature’s power, two of the ship’s small boats attempting to chart the bay’s mouth were caught in violent rip tides, killing all 21 crewmen. Later on the ill-starred voyage, the expedition’s second-in-command and nine others were killed by Natives in Samoa. Their troubles did not end there. La Pérouse, along with the Boussole and his remaining crew, disappeared in a 1788 typhoon in the southwest Pacific.
MALASPINA AND THE SPANISH INCURSIONS
“Return of the Stolen Trousers.” Drawing by José Cardero, 1791–92.
The luster of Spain’s American empire—created in the age of Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro—had tarnished considerably by the time the Russians landed in Alaska in 1741. Still, Spain’s proud tradition compelled her to contest all rival claims to America’s Pacific shore. From her naval base at San Blas in Baja California, Spain sent 13 voyages northward between 1774 and 1793 under such commanders as Bodega y Quadra, Arteaga, Martínez, Lopez de Haro, and Malaspina.
Some expeditions pushed as far as Prince William Sound and the Aleutians. Spanish charts of Alaska’s waters and fjords were often more thorough and precise than those produced by Russian or British cartographers. This helps explain why so many Spanish place names stuck: present-day Ketchikan, for instance, is located on Revillagigedo Island, named for a viceroy of New Spain, and the site of modern Valdez (today pronounced val-DEEZ by Alaskans) was christened Puerto de Valdés by Captain Salvador Fidalgo in 1790.
Though Spain never controlled Alaskan soil, Russian-Spanish tensions had far-reaching consequences for the North Pacific region. Partly out of fear of Russian expansion southward, the Spanish moved into what was known as Upper California, where they founded missions and presidios in San Diego (1769), Monterey (1770), and San Francisco (1776).
Among the most notable Spanish incursions was the expedition of Captain Alejandro Malaspina, which sailed from Cádiz, Spain, in July 1789. Malaspina’s ships, the Descubierta (Discovery) and Atrevida (Daring) were lavishly outfitted, and the Spanish crown hoped the expedition’s scientific achievements would exceed those of the great British navigator, Captain James Cook. After two years mapping the shores of South America and Mexico, Malaspina received orders to head for Alaska to search for the fabled Northwest Passage, believed to link the Pacific and Atlantic oceans at the top of the globe. The mission led him to Yakutat Bay in June 1791. “Great was the joy of the commander and all the officers,” wrote Tomás de Suria, the ship’s artist, “because they believed… that this might be the much-desired and sought-for strait.” Two weeks of exploration, however, produced only disappointment. Malaspina named the inlet Bahia de Desengaño (“Disenchantment Bay”) when he discovered that it ended abruptly at the face of a great glacier.
Though he had failed in his major purpose, Malaspina remained in the area for over a month, charting the coasts and collecting scientific information. The immense Malaspina Glacier, Alaska’s largest, is named in his honor. His stay at Yakutat also produced some wonderful drawings by de Suria and two other ship’s artists, José Cardero and Felipe Bauzá. At one point a sailor’s trousers were stolen by Tlingit residents, but a levelheaded chief prevented the affair from escalating by returning the pants, an incident captured in a drawing by Cardero.
In a melancholy postscript, upon his return to Europe in 1794 Malaspina became entangled in intrigues at the Spanish court, was imprisoned for eight years, then banished from the country. The journals of the man sent to outdo Cook lay forgotten in the archives until resentments faded, and they were finally published in 1885.
LORD OF ALASKA: ALEXANDER BARANOV
Alexander Baranov
Alexander Andreyevich Baranov was a “doer,” just the sort of man demanded by the unforgiving conditions of the Great Land.
Hired in 1790 to manage Russian America’s dominant fur trading company owned by Grigori Shelikov, the 43-year-old Baranov seemed an unlikely choice. His own Siberian fur business had recently failed. But his charisma, aggressiveness, and tough—sometimes brutal—political skills proved indispensable to the survival and expansion of Russia’s American empire. Within seven years he eliminated all competitors and secured the Alaska coast—from the Aleutian Islands to Yakutat—for Shelikov’s firm; renamed the Russian-American Company (RAC), Tsar Paul I granted it an Alaskan trade monopoly in 1799.
Learning to handle an Aleut baidarka and navigate a seagoing sloop, he established a citadel at remote Sitka Bay in 1799 and, in 1804, reestablished the post following its destruction by Tlingit warriors.
From his own small kremlin, Sitka’s Castle Hill, Baranov ruled like a now severe, now enlightened despot with a practical knack for making the colony prosper. He encouraged marriage between European men and Native women. His own Native wife, Anna, bore him a son and daughter. The settlement’s need for clerks and artisans led him to provide basic schooling for creole (Russian-Native) children and, in gifted cases, technical training in Siberia. One colony youngster later became a brigadier general in the Russian army.
Baranov was equally pragmatic in dealing with foreign intruders. Lacking military support to exclude British and American vessels from Alaskan waters, he made a virtue of necessity by cultivating cordial relations with foreign captains. Boston traders—notably the enterprising Irishman Joseph O’Cain—supplied Baranov’s outpost with food and sold company furs in southern China, where Russians were forbidden to trade.
Baranov’s lavish, alcoholic receptions for foreigners became legend. “They all drink an astonishing quantity, Baranov not excepted,” reported American captain John Ebbets. “It is no small tax on the health of a person trying to do business with him.” His reputation as host spread to Hawaii and even New England, where Washington Irving described him as a “rough, rugged, hard-drinking old Russian; somewhat of a soldier, somewhat of a trader, above all a boon companion.”
Yet Baranov had a darker side. He had a stormy relationship with the Russian Church, which criticized his sometimes-abusive treatment of Natives and RAC workers. Arthritis became an excuse for heavy private drinking, and the bleak isolation of Alaska’s winters drove him to fits of depression. The worst came in 1809, after nine disgruntled colonists who considered him a tyrant plotted to murder him and his family. The plot was foiled, but Baranov sent his family to Kodiak, submitted his resignation, and passed the winter in an alcoholic stupor. After two intended replacements died en route to Alaska, however, Baranov declared that God had ordained that he continue as governor.
Reinvigorated, he directed the company to its most profitable years to date in 1813 and 1814. When he finally retired at age 71, Russian influence in the North Pacific stretched from Siberia to an RAC farming station at Fort Ross in northern California. Yet his last few years as company director were not happy. Revenues were uneven, there were rumors of his physical and mental
