THE GKEAT ALEUTIAN CHAI]>f. 159 



islands ! They are always stirring. A perfect calm has never been 

 recorded at Oonalaslika. They are strong and come from all points 

 of the compass ; they are freshest and most violent in October and 

 November, December, and March. Gales follow each other in quick 

 succession during these months every year, lasting iisually about 

 three days each. 



All sides of Oonalashka Island are deeply indented by bays and 

 fiords ; but the points on the southern coast are avoided and not well 

 known. They are not safe to approach on account of reefs and 

 rocks, awash and sunken, which extend out to sea a long distance, 

 and upon them the heavy billows of the Pacific Ocean break in- 

 cessantly, as well as against the cliff-beaches of this forbidding shore. 

 But around the northern and eastern margins of the island more 

 good harbors are located than can be found on all of the other islands 

 of the Aleutian archipelago put together. They call the bay which 

 we entered, as we sailed in from Akootan Pass, " Captain's Harbor." 

 It is the same place where the natives first gazed upon a white man 

 and his ship after the frightful massacres of 1762 and 1763. Here 

 in 1769 La^'.vashava, with a crew of those Siberian promishlyniks, 

 anchored during the whole of one autumn and engaged the aston- 

 ished inhabitants in active trade ; but it was a guarded and tedious 

 barter, since the Aleutes had a lively recollection of the terrible 

 past, so recent and so bloody. 



The island of Oonalashka chanced to be the scene of that only 

 real desperate and fatal blow ever struck by the simple natives of 

 the Aleutian chain at their Cossack oppressors. By 1761 the 

 Russians had advanced to the eastward as far as Oonimak, and up 

 to this time the relations between the natives and the white in- 

 vaders had been altogether of an outwardly friendly character, the 

 former submitting, as a rule, patientl}^ to the demands of the new- 

 comei's, but the Cossack Tartars, encouraged by their easy con- 

 quests, rapidly proceeded from bad to worse, committing outrages 

 of every kind, so that in 1762 they had reduced the Aleutes to the 

 verge of absolute slavery, and continued to act in this manner until 

 the patience and the timidity of the simple race were exhausted. The 

 arrival of a brutal, domineering, lustfvil party of over one hundred 

 and fiftj^ of these Cossack Russians at Chernovsky, on the north- 

 west coast of this island, in the summer of 1762, xmder the nominal 

 command of a Siberian trader named Drooshinnin, proved to be 

 " the last straw laid upon the camel's back." At a given signal the 



