380 HISTORY AND METHODS OF THE FISHERIES 



nally by the directors ; his powers were supposed to be limited aiid defined by regulations drawn 

 up and signed by him in St. Petersburg; but, in fact, they were absolute, and irresponsible to any 

 court on earth. 



THE IRON-WILLED BAEANOV. The person who filled the office of governor-general soon after 

 the organization of the Russian-American Company and for many years afterward, was Alexander 

 Baranov ; he was a man of iron will, of dauntless courage, shrewd, and wholly devoid of tender 

 feeling. Under his autocratic management the afi'airs of this company prospered pecuniarily, and 

 its stock rose accordingly in value ; hence his proceedings were always approved at St. Peters- 

 burg. 



BAD REPUTATION OF PROMYSHUNEKS. In addition to the natives themselves, the company 

 transported to Alaska some four or five hundred Russians, who were termed " promyshlineks," or 

 "hunters." They were employed as trappers, fishermen, seamen, soldiers, or mechanics, just as 

 their superiors might demand, and they were under the same rule as that I have just described as 

 applicable to the natives ; their lot. according to Krusenstern, a Russian who voyaged thither in 

 1804-1805, seems to have been more uninviting even than that of the wretched natives. 



BARANOV'S ATTEMPT TO COLONIZE CALIFORNIA. Prior to 1812 Sitkawas the extreme south- 

 ern limit of the Russian-American Company. But old Baranov, greatly annoyed by the loss of 

 supply ships from the Okhotsk, by which their bread at Kadiak and Sitka was cut off for years 

 at a time, determined to settle somewhere south, where these necessaries to a comfortable physical 

 existence could be raised from the soil ; so he asked the Spanish governor at Monterey permission 

 to erect a few houses on the shore of the small bay of Bodega, California, in order to ''procure and 

 salt the meat of the wild cattle," which overran that part of the country north of the harbor of 

 San Francisco, for the "use of the governor's table at New Archangel" (Sitka). The Castilian 

 was only too happy to oblige a peer ; but in the course of two or three years after this permit was 

 given, the Russians had formed a large settlement and built a fort. The Spanish governor at first 

 remonstrated, then commanded Baranov to move off, in the name of his most Catholic Majesty, 

 the King of Spain. The Spaniard could not enforce this order. The Russian-American Company 

 remained here unmolested until 1842, when they sold their fixtures to General Sutter, a Swiss- 

 American, for $30,000, and vacated California. 



ATTEMPT TO SECURE THE SANDWICH ISLANDS. In 1815 Baranov, instead of feeling chilled 

 b,\ the California unpleasantness, then in full headway, turned his ambitious eyes to the Sandwich 

 Islands, and actually dispatched a vessel, or rather two of them, under the direction of Dr. Shaeffer, 

 a German surgeon, who landed on Atooi, with one hundred picked Aleuts ; but they were, at the 

 lapse of a year, so discouraged by the open opposition of the Russian Government to this scheme 

 that they abandoned the project. 



RAPID DECAY OF THE RUSSIAN-AMERICAN COMPANY- AFTER DEATH OF BARANOY. In 

 1862, when the third extension of twenty years' lease had expired, the affairs of the Russian- 

 American Company were in a bad condition financially deeply in debt, and the Imperial Govern 

 ment was not disposed to renew the charter. This state of affairs gave rise in 1864-'1867 to negotia 

 tion with other trading organizations for the lease, which finally culminated in the purchase of 

 Alaska by our Government July, 1867. Such, in brief, was the Russian-American Company ; it 

 flourished under Baranov, but declined steadily to bankruptcy twenty years after his removal, 

 when eighty years old, on account of extreme age, in 1818. In short its great compeer, the 

 Hudson Bay Company, was very much earlier initiated in the same manner June, 1670, then it 

 organized with the Northwest Company under its present title, with renewed royal prerogatives 



