A cheerless gray sky hung dejectedly over the snow-covered island ahead of us. We knew by dead reckoning it must be Attu. We had reached the last hump in that volcanic chain of Aleutian Islands vomited from the depths of the Bering Sea.
Having identified the island, our next immediate problem was to get a fix and find the harbor of Chichagof. We didn’t have much to go on. No large scale charts had been available in the Hydrographic Office on the subject. Our best bet was the pencil sketch of the sky line obtained from a Coast Guard cutter prior to our departure from Dutch Harbor.
The sullen mountain peaks ahead gave ns practically nothing for an accurate cut. They resembled each other in monotonous confusion like gigantic headstones in a Gargantuan graveyard.
Suddenly a ray of hope. The lookout aloft reported a canoe on our starboard bow. A close-up through binoculars disclosed ten natives in a dugout paddling away from us as fast as they could go.
We tried to attract their attention. Rapid toots on the whistle seemed to accelerate their retreat. Dipping and two- blocking our colors didn’t faze them. There was only one chance left, a stern chase.
When we had arrived about 1,000 yards from the dugout they hove to and awaited our arrival. Five hundred yards away we could see them all grinning from ear to ear. It was completely mystifying.
Presently they ranged alongside our port Jacob’s ladder and came aboard. Then, for the first time, some light was thrown on their extraordinary conduct. They had been fishing, sighted us hull down on the horizon, thought we might be Japanese, and were making best of way back to their village of Chichagof to await developments. Not until they could see our faces at 500 yards were they reasonably assured of our peaceful mission.
The first inquiry of their chief, Mike, upon arrival on board was “Where Fred?”1
Before the first question could be answered, the second had been put: “Got bread?” A reply in the affirmative to the second question broke the ice. Mike beamed a wrinkled smile upon us. Cordial conviviality radiated from his motley crew who had been listening in breathless silence.
After we had fortified each of them with a huge ham sandwich and given assurance that a supply of bread would be forthcoming upon our arrival at Chichagof, we prevailed upon them to man their boat again and lead us, to the harbor.
Thirty minutes later we were anchored off the entrance to Chichagof, making preparations to sound the channel. Our homemade wire drag worked nicely. Supporting it between our two launches, we proceeded by trial and error to sweep and buoy a channel 16 feet deep which wound circuitously into the inner harbor.
The last buoy had scarcely been planted when our aerologist, Lieutenant Hutchinson2 came running up to predict a heavy- fog within the hour. Without waiting for the two boats to return we hove up the anchor and headed her in as our fathometer beat futilely for an echo off the several generations of kelp which carpeted the harbor bottom.
The inner anchorage was reached in the nick of time. A dripping fog swallowed us up 10 minutes after our chain ceased rattling through the hawse pipe.
The next day we called officially. On sighting our approach the little Indian tots hastily conveyed the news to Mike, who rushed down to the gravel beach to meet us. We were conducted from our boat to the village store, owned by Fred Shroeder, operated by Mike (his man Friday), and there given a brief history of their tribe, its fall and rise.
Generations ago, Mike said, there were several thousand of the Aleutian Indians, all beggarly poor but reasonably happy with their fishing, trapping, and weaving until the foreigners came into their lives. The onslaught of the belligerent advance terrified and bewildered them. Some few who attempted to defend themselves were killed by the strange iron sticks that spit fire. Hundreds of others were impressed into service as slaves to assist in hunting sea otter. Native women were treated promiscuously. In short, the unsavory story of the foreign encroachment in the Aleutian Islands, with its consequent tragedies of disease and death, might be said to compare favorably with the modern-day methods accorded by so-called civilized countries to several of the crude and undeveloped nations of today. Once strong, virile, and healthy, the Aleutian nation is now but a shattered remnant.
We shifted our seat from the cracker barrel in Mike’s store to his counter while he warmed up to his story. He said:
After American come, no better much. Aleut very much poor, have no clothes much, only animal skins, and eat fish—all time eat fish. Pretty soon Alaskan Commercial Company bring food, bring also clothes but cost very much, no tell us how much cost United States America, only say, “Take or leave.” My people they get sick, they die,’ cause nobody got medicine. Bye’n bye Mr. Shroeder, very kind man, he come. He get lease for Aleut on islands Attu and Agattu to hunt foxes. He give us big thick picture book, and say, “See picture clothes and cost price United States America; you name and me bring back next summer from United States America.” He very wonderful man, Mr. Shroeder. We sell him all our fox skins, but he not make much money ’cause not many foxes now, though get more bye’n bye. Last year he come build schoolhouse and next year he send us teacher. We die for him cause he is good. Very much good, very kind to us.
Mike told us that during the year 1930 the 31 natives on the island realized about $3,020.10 from the sale of their fox skins. This amount was prorated on a scale of six, three, and one to the native men, women, and children, each man receiving $181.20, each woman $90.60, and $30.20 to each child. All work was socialistic in that every job and its profits was divided among the community as a whole, from fishing, trapping, hunting, and gathering wood for their fires to the building of the village church and school.
Presently our host started us on a personally conducted tour of the village, commencing with a call on a native family residing in one of their typical barabaras, a single room the size of a kitchenette, half-way submerged in the earth, with the two slopes of the roof covered with sod extending clear down to the ground. To enter we walked down three earthen steps, stooping in the doorway to avoid dislodging the turf overhead. Inside we were formally presented to the second chief, but not to his wife and three children who were seated on the middle bunk. Following Mike’s example and that of his second, we left our hats on our heads, lit up cigarettes, sat down on the edge of one of the two remaining bunks, and said nothing. Presently Mike said to his second, “Head man on warship.” His assistant only grunted and showed a toothless smile.
The strain on our veneer of civilization soon snapped, however, and we offered a cigarette to the squaw. As she reached out her hand to sample our wares, the children, ages seven, five, and three years old, respectively, all joined in the demand. Presently without the faintest shadow of emotion we were all puffing merrily away, listening to the simmer of the sea lion blubber boiling away over the wood fire in the stove.
After our cigarettes were singeing the ends of our fingers and the odor of filth in the room had combined to such exquisite nicety with the smell of boiling blubber that we were verging on the stage of nausea, we suggested to Mike that we had better be going and “bye’n bye” come back.
From there we were conducted to their Graeco-Russian mission, a one-stored affair, floored, walled, and roofed with hand- hewn timbers but devoid of the customary benches which are so essential in some of our more comfortable religions. We were allowed to linger only for a moment, however, before Mike hustled us out of that consecrated place into their new church where he could elaborate on the infinite improvement which had been wrought.
Truly they should have been grateful to Mr. Shroeder for his work with them, for he had apparently exhausted every effort in endeavoring to please both God and Aleut, from the tiny altars in front, with ornamented kerosene lamps suspended above them, to the colorful prints of the Saints on the walls, which Mike very carefully and repeatedly pointed out as products of the United States of America and not of Russia.
“Maybe,” said he, “Fred, he bring bells for tower when he come bye’n bye, and then she be real church.”
Outside of this building were located graves of the dead, each burial place apparent because of the custom of building up a rectangular pile of clay 12 inches deep over each grave, with a peculiarly shaped cross at the head of each. He pointed with pride to the little painted fences which he had placed around the burial place of each of three of his children who had died—one of a tonsil operation, another when their house was blown down by a williwaw,3 and the third from a pain in her side. Mike had performed the burial ceremony in each case since he had been duly appointed as minister for the community by the Bishop of the Russian Greek Church of Alaska.
“When oldest girl die,” he said, “my wife she cry like hell. In winter time she die. Cold, plenty cold, too bad.”
Our hope of buying wholesale quantities of the famous Attu basket4 was snuffed out when we discovered that native product, so widely known, rapidly becoming extinct because of a growing scarcity in the necessary grasses from which they are made, coupled with the fact that a more lucrative profit is derived from the selling of fox skins.
By 1630 on May 30 we had completed a thorough sounding of the inner and outer harbors of Chichagof and obtained profile and oblique photography of Attu, Agattu, and the Semichi Island. Meantime a dispatch had been received from the radio station that the Eunice was en route to Attu with mail for us, provisions for the natives, and the famous Mr. Shroeder on board.
Needless to say, the sailing of the expedition was delayed. We took advantage of the delay, however, to investigate further into the life and habits of our new friends ashore. Especially were we intrigued with their manner of fox hunting, which constituted practically the only financial support of the inhabitants.
We learned that the fox was not a native inhabitant of the Aleutian Islands but had been imported by early Russians from the continent. Here on the Islands these animals run wild but are fed frequently by the natives, who kill sea lions and throw them up on the beach or distribute the flesh of dead whales which have been washed ashore. In December and January when the fur of the fox has reached its prime, the natives commence their trapping and forsake their village to live in the innumerable barabaras which they have built at advantageous points throughout the island. When the fox is trapped, it is carefully killed in order that no damage may be done to its fur, the latest approved native process being that of twisting its head by hand until the neck is broken, although another school of trappers prefers the procedure of tossing “Br’er Fox” on his back and stepping over his heart to do the trick. The more humane and satisfactory method, however, appears to be the injection of a solution of strychnine sulphate, which painlessly terminates the life of the fox in less than a minute. Apparently there is slight danger of being bitten as the blue fox especially is quite small, scarcely larger than a small dog.
The natives are far more afraid of foreign marauders than they are of any of the other hazards concerned in their occupation. They recall vividly when six of their brothers were fox hunting in 1910, and were last sighted heading for their boat at the northwest shoulder of Attu Island with 60 blue fox furs, representing their year’s catch. They were never seen again; even the furs were missing, and nothing remained to tell the tale except scraps of their clothing found along the beach and a foreign “fishing” boat seen disappearing over the distant horizon.
As Mike very quaintly put it:
Now us sleep with gun by side, take no chance. Not afraid no animals, cause only blue fox on island, but maybe come bye’n bye ’nother foreigner, and if he no say “High” when I yell at him at night I shoot to kill. Yes, by God!
When we inquired why blue foxes only were raised on the island, we were informed that they were more prolific and their fur superior to that of the silver fox in the Islands; that neither the red nor cross fox (the latter a cross between the red and silver) could be cultivated with the blue since the red were death and destruction to the latter. An illustration of this race prejudice is cited by Underwood in his Alaska, an Empire in the Making, in which he points out an experience had by Thomas Vesey Smith, who experimented with the raising of foxes on Middleton Island. In referring to the episode, Mr. Underwood said:
When he took the island over it was stocked with gray foxes. Smith thought that by crossing these with the blue variety he would be able to produce the silver-gray variety. The differently coloured animals, however, far from associating with each other on terms of amity, fought savagely on every conceivable occasion. A feud sprang up between them. It was a case of the survival of the fittest in muscle and cunning, and in a very few months all the grays had been killed off and a new dynasty of foxdom was established with blue as the national colour. Then internecine strife broke out. The conquering blues formed themselves into small colonies which were constantly at war with each other.
The Eunice arrived on the first of June, putt-putting her way slowly into the harbor. All hands of both ships manned the rail as this 60-foot Diesel driven motor ship was swung alongside the Gannet. Eight men and a boy were sent over to get our mail, but the boy alone would have been sufficient because a lean bag and a half constituted all that was received to reward our expectant vigil.
Mr. Shroeder was on board, not the “Man who played God,” but “The Man who was.” We invited both him and Captain Nelson of the Eunice on board for lunch. The former was a man of medium height, black hair, and dark eyes, his calm, placid presence radiating a tremendous strength of character. The latter was a specimen true to the type of your medieval Viking, a perfect tower of a man, who talked readily of this and that m his broken English, describing the woolies” (as he called the williwaw), and “the sea yust a shmokin,” now and again breaking readily into his jovial augh as we prodded him about his getting seasick or about the new school teacher on the island of Atka.
On finding that Mr. Shroeder had just obtained 125 blue fox furs from the island of Semisopochnoi, on which he held a government lease, we presented our formal application for as many as he could spare. When he agreed to release 15 skons at $35 apiece, we gathered around his $5,000 pile of furs which were spread out over the floor in his store, and watched with envy while he and his assistant Mike, with the eye and touch of experts, grasped a skin by head and tail, giving it a glance as they’d shake it, and pronounce with an air of finality “There’s a fur,” or “There’s a cull.”
It was touching to see the reaction of the natives to the arrival of the Eunice with their god on board. They had talked of nothing else since we had been there, yet when that little motor ship wound its way into the harbor not a soul went out to meet it. We were informed that his arrival always had this effect. All year long their hopes and expectations are tuned up for this—the biggest of all events. They sleep, eat, and talk of nothing but their “Fred”; but when the hour arrives the exquisite excitement is just too much, and they prolong the thrilling sensation by hiding themselves in their barabaras like little children on Christmas morn, peeking out through their windows while “Fred,” their god, is rowed ashore.
It gave us some idea of the fascination which a missionary must derive from his work in a heathen country. There his gentle word and healing cures for body aches establishes him as a direct emissary from the Lord in the eyes of those simple souls, whereas at home your missionary, like the remainder of the clergy of today, is faced with the cold and cynical apathy of the upper crust of civilization.
On the afternoon of the Eunice’s arrival Lieutenant Harrell, Lieutenant Vest, and Lieutenant Moss warmed up the planes and gave our new friends a bird’s- eye view of their island home.
Particularly were we impressed with Mike’s negative reactions. He had scarcely ever glanced at the planes when he came on board, didn’t bat an eye when we dressed him up in helmet and goggles, climbed into the cockpit as casually as if he’d been stepping into a bidarka, “took off” with an air so nonchalant we wondered if, of all people, he could be smoking a Murad.
Upon his return, we gathered around to sound out his reaction. “Good,” was all he said. It reminded us of other stories we had heared about the apparent lack of interest of Alaskan Indians and Eskimos in any new sight. A horse, plane, or automobile seen for the first time in their lives will provoke from them only a momentary glance as seen by the casual observer. That glance, however, has been photographic. After the white man has gone with his strange contraption the natives have obtained sufficient impression to provide contemplation and conversation for many, many months to come.
Their keenness and originality in providing ingenious methods of repair is amazing. An Evinrude motor in the village of Attu was in its fourth year of use. Breakdowns happened but it never occurred to them but that it could be easily fixed. New parts were never needed “from below.”5 Always, they managed to contrive some sort of an adequate spare part out of the limited equipment and facilities at hand.
Mike even volunteered to repair a camera which had been damaged when dropped by our paymaster.
Two of their bidarkas, or native canoes —similar in design to the Greenland kyak,6 were brought on board. The ribs of these boats were made of hard cedar which had been water-soaked and bent into shape by using their teeth as a vise, the entire canoe being covered with the skin of the hair seal.
The weather on this Island of Attu differed considerably from that of the islands farther east in that the mountains were completely covered with snow clear down to the water line. According to one school of thought, its temperature and meteorological characteristics are controlled by elements emanating from northern Siberia, in which the mean low temperature point of the Northern Hemisphere is located. There the mercury falls as low as 50 degrees below zero in winter and is colder even than the far-famed northern pole because of its rock and earth foundation, which holds cold temperature much longer than the water at the North Pole. Cold air particles thrown off from northern Siberia throughout the year are given a clockwise movement by the earth’s rotation, swinging 400 miles or more out into the Pacific Ocean, chilling off the westernmost Island of Attu in its path. East of Attu this Siberian wind loses its effect, and warmer temperatures are set up by reason of the Japanese Current which sweeps up south of them.
To our regret we were unable to carry two of their natives with us back to Dutch Harbor, where their mission was, to obtain a wife apiece in accordance with Mike’s orders—that sage having decreed that their population of 13 men and 7 women “not good,” and, “must get more women, have more baby for build new school.”
On the afternoon of June 2, we bade farewell to Mr. Shroeder, Captain Nelson, and Mike and set our course out of the harbor. The hand lead was heaved continuously. The fathometer still failed to record. Beat after beat was hurled from its underwater diaphragm toward the bottom of the channel but the layers of kelp there, like huge pitcher plants, only swallowed the sound.
As we neared the entrance, the lookout reported the natives trying to overhaul us in their canoe. We lay to until they came alongside. Mike was standing up in the bow holding a package. “My wife, she sendum Attu basket to doctor,” he said. “She say tellum doctor she better now. Castor oil she done fine.”
* Editor’s Note.—The author commanded the U.S.S. Gannet during the Alaska survey expedition, 1932 and 1933. This article recounts one of many interesting experiences he had in the Aleutian Islands.
- Mr. Fred Shroeder, fur trader at Attu
- See an article on the subject of Alaskan and Aleutian weather by this officer in the Alaska number of Naval Institute PROCEEDINGS, July, 1937
- Mike's wife always feared the weak American frame houses thereafter, and swore she would Jive the remainder of her life in a barabara.
- Approximate cost in the United States, $40 to $80.
- United States
- Eskimos on the north coast of Alaska call a one-man canoe of this design "kyak," a two-man canoe a "bidarka."
★
There was plenty of naval strategy before; for in war the common sense of some, and the genius of others, sees and properly applies means to ends; and naval strategy, like naval tactics, when boiled down, is simply the proper use of means to attain ends; . . . and if it had produced no other result than the profound realization by naval officers of the folly of dividing the battle fleet, in peace or in war, it would by that alone have justified its existence and paid its existence and paid its expenses.