Baranof and the
Russians with him fired off their muskets till all powder was used.
Then they shouted in the Aleut dialect for the hunters to embark. The
sea was the lesser danger. By morning the brigades had joined the
sloops on the offing. Thirteen more canoes had been lost in the ambush.
{331} Such was the inauspicious introduction for Baranof to the
founding of the new Russian fort at Sitka or Norfolk Sound. It was the
end of May before the brigades glided into the sheltered, shadowy
harbor, where Chirikoff's men had been lost fifty years before. A
furious storm of snow and sleet raged over the harbor. When the storm
cleared, impenetrable forests were seen to the water-line, and great
trunks of trees swirled out to sea. On the ocean side to the west,
Mount Edgecumbe towered up a dome of snow. Eastward were the bare
heights of Verstovoi; and countless tiny islets gilded by the sun
dotted the harbor. Baranof would have selected the site of the present
Sitka, high, rocky and secure from attack, but the old Sitkan chief
refused to sell it, bartering for glass beads and trinkets a site some
miles north of the present town.
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