The merchant and the Cossack were both finally punished by
the Russian government for the crimes of this voyage; but this did not
silence the blood of the murdered women crying to Heaven for vengeance.
In September 1762 the criminal ship came back to Avacha Bay. In
complete ignorance of the Cossack's diabolical conduct, four Russian
ships sailed that very month for the Aleutian Islands. Since 1741,
when Bering's sailors had found the kelp-beds, Aleuts had hunted the
sea-otter and Russians had hunted the Aleuts. For three years fate
reversed the wheel. It was to be a man-hunt of fugitive Russians.

Just before the snow fell in the autumn of 1763 Alexis Drusenin
anchored his ship on the north-east corner of Oonalaska, where the
rocks sprawl out in the sea in five great spurs like the fingers of a
hand. The spurs are separated by tempestuous reef-ribbed seas. The
Indians were so very friendly that they voluntarily placed hostages of
good conduct in the Russians' hands. Two or three thousand Aleut
hunters came flocking over the sea in their kayaks to join the
sea-otter brigades. On the spur opposite to Drusenin's {40} anchorage
stood an Aleut village of forty houses; on the next spur, ten miles
away across the sea, was another village of seventy people. The
Russian captain divided his crew, and placed from nine to twelve men in
each of the villages. With ample firearms and enough brandy half a
dozen Russians could control a thousand Aleuts. Swaggering and
bullying and loud-voiced and pot-valiant, Drusenin and two Cossacks
stooped to enter a low-thatched Aleut hut. The entrance step pitched
down into a sort of pit; and as Drusenin stumbled in face foremost a
cudgel clubbed down on his skull. The Cossack behind stumbled headlong
over the prostrate form of his officer; and in the dark there was a
flash of long knives--such knives as the hunters used in skinning their
prey. Both bodies were cut to fragments. The third man seized an axe
as the murderers crowded round him and beat them back; he then sought
safety in flight. There was a hiss of hurtling spears thrown after him
with terrible deftness. With his back pierced in a dozen places,
drenched in his own blood, the Cossack almost tumbled over the
prostrate body of a sentinel who had been on guard at a house down by
the ship, and had been wounded by the flying {41} spears. A sailor
dashed out, a yard-long bear-knife in his grasp, and dragged the two
men in