iberia, and the summons {328} was sheer bluff? He was so
terrorized at the long hand of power reaching across the Pacific to
clutch him back to perhaps branding or penal service in Siberia, that
he did not even ask to see Baranof's documents. Coming post-haste, he
offered explanations, excuses, frightened pleadings. Baranof would
have none of him. He clapped the culprit and associates in irons, put
them on Ismyloff's vessel, and despatched them for trial to Siberia.
That he also seized the furs of his rivals for safe keeping, was a mere
detail. The prisoners were, of course, discharged; for Baranof's
conduct could no more bear scrutiny than their own; but it was one way
to get rid of rivals; and the fur companies at war in the Canadian
northwest practised the same method twenty years later.

The effect of the bandit outrages on the hostile Indians of the
mainland was quickly evident. Baranof realized that if he was to hold
the Pacific coast for his company, he must push his hunting brigades
east and south toward New Spain. A convict colony, that was to be the
nucleus of a second St. Petersburg, was planned to be built under the
very shadow of Mount St. Elias. Shields, the Englishman employed by
Russia, after bringing back two thousand sea-otter from Bering Bay in
1793, had pushed on down south-eastward to Norfolk Sound or the modern
Sitka, where he loaded a second cargo of two thousand sea-otter. A
dozen foreign traders had already coasted Alaskan shores, and southward
of Norfolk Sound was a flotilla {329} of American fur traders, yearly
encroaching closer and closer on the Russian field. All fear of
rivalry among the Russians had been removed by the union of the
different companies in 1799. Baranof pulled his forces together for
the master stroke that was to establish Russian dominion on the
Pacific. This was the removal of the capital of Russian America
farther south.

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 w