d
he was keen with the excitement of adventure and discovery as he dropped
anchor. He sent a party ashore in the ship's longboat to explore, and
awaited the result. Days passed and no word or signal came, so the
remaining boat was sent to recall the party and it was swallowed up in
the labyrinth among the green islands. Signals indicated that it safely
landed but none returned to the ship although the orders were imperative
that both boats return at once. The last boat was gone. Three weeks
passed. Captain Chirikof could not reach the shore and could no longer
lie at anchor, so reluctantly and sadly he set his course for the far
off Kamchatkan shores and sailed away from the port of missing men.

Nearly two centuries have passed since the Russian seamen landed and no
word has come from them. For more than seventy years the Russian
Government sought for some sign of their fate.[1] Tales were told of a
colony of Russians existing on the coast but each upon investigation
proved but a rumor.

There is a dim tradition among the Sitkas of men being lured ashore in
the long ago. They say that Chief Annahootz, the predecessor of the
chief of that name who was the firm friend of the whites at Sitka in
1878, was the leading actor in the tragedy. Annahootz dressed himself in
the skin of a bear and played along the beach. So skillfully did he
simulate the sinuous motions of the animal that the Russians in the
excitement of the chase plunged into the woods in pursuit and there the
savage warriors killed them to a man, leaving none to tell the story.
The disappearance of Chirikof's men has remained one of the many
unsolved mysteries of the Northland, and their fate will never be known
to a certainty.

The faulty record of the navigation of a time that counted by dead
reckoning, and without a knowledge of the currents of those seas, does
not tell us the exact location of the anchorage, but beyond a reasonable
doubt it was in Sitka Sound, and the Russian seamen died at the hands of
the Sitka Kwan of the Thlingits. In this manner Sitka first became known
to the White Man's World.

On the 16th day of August, 1775, came the Royal Standard of Spain, flung
to the breeze from the little schooner "Sonora," only 36 feet in length,
under command of Don Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra. Quadra was one of
the greatest and best of the Spanish navigators in the North. His
voyages are among the most successful of those of the mariners of his
nat