Vikings of the Pacific | Page 5

a bit of the God in him, though
the hero may have feet of clay and body of beast. Such were the old
Vikings of the North, who spent their lives in elemental warfare, and
rode out to meet death in tempest, lashed to the spar of their craft. And
such, too, were the New World Vikings of the Pacific, who coasted the
seas of two continents in cockle-shell ships,--planks lashed with deer
thongs, calked with moss,--rapacious in their deep-sea plunderings as
beasts of prey, fearless as the very spirit of the storm itself. The
adventures of the North Pacific Vikings read more like some old legend
of the sea than sober truth; and the wild strain had its fountain-head in
the most tempestuous hero and beastlike man that ever ascended the
throne of the Russias.
[Illustration: Peter the Great.]
When Peter the Great of Russia worked as a ship's carpenter at the
docks of the East India Company in Amsterdam, the sailors' tales of

vast, undiscovered lands beyond the seas of Japan must have acted on
his imagination like a match to gunpowder.[1] Already he was
dreaming those imperial conquests which Russia still dreams: of
pushing his realm to the southernmost edge of Europe, to the
easternmost verge of Asia, to the doorway of the Arctic, to the very
threshold of the {5} Chinese capital. Already his Cossacks had scoured
the two Siberias like birds of prey, exacting tribute from the wandering
tribes of Tartary, of Kamchatka, of the Pacific, of the Siberian races in
the northeasternmost corner of Asia. And these Chukchee Indians of
the Asiatic Pacific told the Russians of a land beyond the sea, of
driftwood floating across the ocean unlike any trees growing in Asia, of
dead whales washed ashore with the harpoons of strange hunters, {6}
and--most comical of all in the light of our modern knowledge about
the Eskimo's tail-shaped fur coats--of men wrecked on the shores of
Asia who might have qualified for Darwin's missing link, inasmuch as
they wore "tails."
And now the sailors added yet more fabulous things to Peter's
knowledge. There was an unknown continent east of Asia, west of
America, called on the maps "Gamaland." [2] Now, Peter's consuming
ambition was for new worlds to conquer. What of this "Gamaland"?
But, as the world knows, Peter was called home to suppress an
insurrection. War, domestic broils, massacres that left a bloody stain on
his glory, busied his hands for the remaining years of his life; and
January of 1725 found the palaces of all the Russias hushed, for the
Hercules who had scrunched all opposition like a giant lay dying,
ashamed to consult a physician, vanquished of his own vices, calling on
Heaven for pity with screams of pain that drove physicians and
attendants from the room.
Perhaps remorse for those seven thousand wretches executed at one fell
swoop after the revolt; perhaps memories of those twenty kneeling
supplicants whose heads he had struck off with his own hand, drinking
a bumper of quass to each stroke; perhaps reproaches {7} of the
highway robbers whom he used to torture to slow death, two hundred at
a time, by suspending them from hooks in their sides; perhaps the first
wife, whom he repudiated, the first son whom he had done to death

either by poison or convulsions of fright, came to haunt the darkness of
his deathbed.
Catherine, the peasant girl, elevated to be empress of all the Russias,
could avail nothing. Physicians and scientists and navigators, Dane and
English and Dutch, whom he had brought to Russia from all parts of
Europe, were powerless. Vows to Heaven, in all the long hours he lay
convulsed battling with Death, were useless. The sins of a lifetime
could not be undone by the repentance of an hour. Then, as if the
dauntless Spirit of the man must rise finally triumphant over Flesh, the
dying Hercules roused himself to one last supreme effort.
Radisson, Marquette, La Salle, Vérendrye, were reaching across
America to win the undiscovered regions of the Western Sea for France.
New Spain was pushing her ships northward from Mexico; and now,
the dying Peter of Russia with his own hand wrote instructions for an
expedition to search the boundaries between Asia and America. In a
word, he set in motion that forward march of the Russians across the
Orient, which was to go on unchecked for two hundred years till
arrested by the Japanese. The Czar's instructions were always laconic.
They were written five weeks before his death. "(1) At {8}
Kamchatka . . . two boats are to be built. (2) With these you are to sail
northward along the coast. . . . (3) You are to enquire where the
American coast begins. . . . Write it