On the second week of April, 1799, with two vessels, twenty-two
Russians, and three hundred and fifty canoes of Aleut fur hunters,
Baranof sailed from Prince William Sound for the southeast. Pause was
made early in May opposite Kyak--Bering's old landfall--to hunt
sea-otter. The sloops hung on the offing, the hunting brigades, led by
Baranof in one of the big skin canoes, paddling for the surf wash and
kelp fields of the boisterous, rocky coast, which sea-otter frequent in
rough weather. Dangers of the hunt never deterred Baranof. The wilder
the turmoil of spray and billows, the more sea-otter would be driven to
refuge on the kelp fields. Cross tides like a whirlpool ran on this
coast when whipped by the winds. Not a sound from the sea-otter
hunters! Silently, like sea-birds glorying in the tempest, the canoes
bounded from crest to crest of the rolling seas, always taking care not
to be caught broadsides by the smashing combers, or swamped between
waves in the churning seas. How it happened is not known, but somehow
between wind and tide-rip, thirty of the canoes {330} that rode over a
billow and swept down to the trough never came up.
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