ears. Again and again he bade good-by to his old comrades, comrades
of revel with noble blood in their veins, comrades of the hunt,
pure-blooded Indians, who loved him as a brother, comrades of his
idleness, Indian children with whom he had frolicked--but he could not
bear to tear himself from the land that was the child of his lifelong
efforts. The blow had fallen when he was least able to bear it. His
nerve was gone. Of all the Russian wreckages in this cruel new land,
surely this wreck was the most pitiable--the maker deposed by the thing
he had made, cast out by his child, driven to seek some hidden place
where he might die out of sight. An old sea-captain offered him
passage round the world to Russia, where his knowledge might still be
of service. Service? That was the word! The old war-horse pricked up
his ears! Baranof sailed in the fall of 1818. By spring the ship
homeward-bound stopped at Batavia. There was some delay. Delay was
not good for Baranof. 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. They were not men of milk and
water type, with little good and less bad. Neither their virtues nor
their vices were lukewarm; but _they did things_, these men; added to
the sum total of human effort, human knowledge, human progress. Sordid
their motives may have been, sordid as the blacksmith's when he smashes