Russians, grasping the situation, and
ready to cope with its difficulties.

[Illustration: John Jacob Astor.]

This was Gregory Ivanovich Shelikoff, a fur trader {304} of Siberia,
accompanied to America and seconded by his wife, Natalie, who succeeded
in carrying out many of his plans after his death. Shelikoff owned
shares in two of the principal Russian companies. When he came to
America accompanied by his wife, Baranof, another trader, and two
hundred men in 1784, the Russian headquarters were still at Oonalaska
in the Aleutians. Only desultory expeditions had gone eastward.
Foreign ships had already come among the Russian hunting-grounds of the
north. These Shelikoff at once checkmated by moving Russian
headquarters east to Three Saints, Kadiak. Savages warned him from the
island, threatening death to the Aleut Indian hunters he had brought.
Shelikoff's answer was a load of presents to the hostile messenger.
That failing, he took advantage of an eclipse of the sun as a sign to
the superstitious Indians that the coming of the Russians was noted and
blessed of Heaven. The unconvinced Kadiak savages responded by
ambushing the first Russians to leave camp, and showering arrows on the
Russian boats. Shelikoff gathered up his men, sallied forth, whipped
the Indians off their feet, took four hundred prisoners, treated them
well, and so won the friendship of the islanders. From the new
quarters hunters were despatched eastward under Baranof and others as
far as what is now Sitka. These yearly came back with cargoes of
sea-otter worth two hundred thousand dollars. Shelikoff at once saw
that if the Russian traders were to hold their own against {305} the
foreign adventurers of all nations flocking to the Pacific,
headquarters must be moved still farther eastward, and the prestige of
the Russian government invoked to exclude foreigners. There were, in
fact, no limits to the far-sighted ambitions of the man. Ships were to
be despatched to California setting up signs of Russian possession.
Forts in Hawaii could be used as a mid-Pacific arsenal and halfway
house for the Russian fleet that was to dominate the North Pacific. A
second Siberia on the west coast of America, with limits eastward as
vague as the Hudson's Bay Company's claims westward, was to be added to
the domains of the Czar. Whether the idea of declaring the North
Pacific a _closed sea_ as Spain had declared the South Pacific a
_closed sea_ till Franc