The plunder,
when successful, or trade, if the crazy planks did not go to pieces
above some of the reefs that cut up the North Pacific, was halved
between outfitter and crew. If the cargo amounted to half a million
dollars in modern money--as one of Drusenin's first trips did--then a
quarter of a million was a tidy sum to be divided among a crew of, say,
thirty or forty. Often as not, the long-planked single-master fell to
pieces in a gale, when the Russians went to the bottom of the sea, or
stranded among the Aleutian Islands westward of Alaska, when the
castaways took up comfortable quarters among the Indians, who knew no
other code of existence than the _rights of the strong_; and the
Russians with their firearms seemed strong, indeed, to the Aleuts. As
long as the newcomer demanded only furs, {82} on his own terms of
trade--the Indians acquiesced. Their one hope was to become strong as
the Russians by getting iron in "toes"--bands two inches thick, two
feet long. It was that ideal state, which finical philosophers
describe as the "survival of the fit," and it worked well till the
other party to the arrangement resolved he would play the same game and
become fit, too, when there resulted a cataclysm of bloodshed.
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