He was ill, deadly ill, of that most deadly of
all ailments, heartbreak, {337} consciousness that he was of no more
use, what the Indians call "the long sickness of too much thinking."
When the vessel put out to sea again, Baranof, too, put to sea, but it
was to the boundless sea of eternity. He died on April 16, 1819, and
was laid to rest in the arms of the great ocean that had cradled his
hopes from the time he left Siberia.
To pass judgment on Baranof's life would be a piece of futility. His
life, like the lives of all those Pacific coast adventurers, stands or
falls by what it was, not what it meant to be; by what it did, not what
it left undone; and what Baranof left was an empire half the size of
Russia. That his country afterward lost that empire was no fault of
his. Like all those Vikings of the North Pacific, he was essentially a
man _who did things_, not a theorizer on how things ought to be done,
not a slug battening on the things other men have done.
They were not anaemic, these old "sea voyagers" of the Pacific, daring
death or devil, with the red blood of courage in their veins, and the
red blood of a lawless manhood, too.
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