The next year
Russians were caught putting poison in the food of another village: the
men ate first among the Indians. The women would be left as slaves to
the Russians; and these same Russians carried a pagan boy home to {84}
be baptized in the Christian faith; for the little convert could come
back to the Aleutian Islands as interpreter. It was as thorough a
scheme of subjugation as the wolf code of existence could have entailed.
The culmination came with the crew of Betshevin, a Siberian merchant,
in 1760. There were forty Russians, including Cossacks, and twenty
other Asiatic hunters and sailors. Four of the merchant's agents went
along to enforce honest returns. Sergeant Pushkareff of the Cossacks
was there to collect tribute from Russia's Indian subjects on the west
coast of America. The ship was evidently better than the general run,
with ample room in the hold for cargo, and wide deck room where the
crew slept in hammocks without cover--usually a gruff, bearded, ragged,
vermin-infested horde. The vessel touched at Oomnak, after having met
a sister ship, perhaps with an increase of aggressiveness toward the
natives owing to the presence of these other Russians under Alixei
Drusenin; and passed on eastward to the next otter resort, Oonalaska
Island.
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