Vikings of the Pacific

Vikings of the Pacific, by Agnes
C. Laut

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Title: Vikings of the Pacific The Adventures of the Explorers who
Came from the West, Eastward
Author: Agnes C. Laut

Release Date: November 11, 2006 [eBook #19765]
Language: English
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VIKINGS OF THE PACIFIC
The Adventures of the Explorers Who Came from the West, Eastward
Bering, the Dane; the Outlaw Hunters of Russia; Benyowsky, the
Polish Pirate; Cook and Vancouver, the English Navigators; Gray of
Boston, the Discoverer of the Columbia; Drake, Ledyard, and Other
Soldiers of Fortune on the West Coast of America
by
A. C. LAUT
Author of "Pathfinders of the West," Etc.

[Frontispiece: Seal Rookery, Commander Islands.]

New York The MacMillan Company London: MacMillan & Co., Ltd.
1905 All rights reserved
Copyright, 1905, by the MacMillan Company. Set up and electrotyped.
Published December, 1905.

{vii}
Foreword
At the very time the early explorers of New France were pressing from
the east, westward, a tide of adventure had set across Siberia and the
Pacific from the west, eastward. Carrier and Champlain of New France
in the east have their counterparts and contemporaries on the Pacific
coast of America in Francis Drake, the English pirate on the coast of
California, and in Staduchin and Deshneff and other Cossack
plunderers of the North Pacific, whose rickety keels first ploughed a
furrow over the trackless sea out from Asia. Marquette, Jolliet and La
Salle--backed by the prestige of the French government are not unlike
the English navigators, Cook and Vancouver, sent out by the English
Admiralty. Radisson, privateer and adventurer, might find counterpart
on the Pacific coast in either Gray, the discoverer of the Columbia, or
Ledyard, whose ill-fated, wildcat plans resulted in the Lewis and Clark
expedition. Bering was contemporaneous with La Vérendrye; and so
the comparison might be carried on between Benyowsky, the Polish
pirate of the Pacific, or the Outlaw Hunters of Russia, and the famous
buccaneers of the eastern Spanish Main. The main point is--that both
tides {viii} of adventure, from the east, westward, from the west,
eastward, met, and clashed, and finally coalesced in the great fur trade,
that won the West.
The Spaniards of the Southwest--even when they extended their
explorations into the Northwest--have not been included in this volume,
for the simple reason they would require a volume by themselves. Also,
their aims as explorers were always secondary to their aims as treasure
hunters; and their main exploits were confined to the Southwest. Other
Pacific coast explorers, like La Pérouse, are not included here because
they were not, in the truest sense, discoverers, and their exploits really
belong to the story of the fights among the different fur companies,
who came on the ground after the first adventurers.
In every case, reference has been to first sources, to the records left by

the doers of the acts themselves, or their contemporaries--some of the
data in manuscript, some in print; but it may as well be frankly
acknowledged that all first sources have not been exhausted. To do so
in the case of a single explorer, say either Drake or Bering--would
require a lifetime. For instance, there are in St. Petersburg some thirty
thousand folios on the Bering expedition to America. Probably only
one person--a Danish professor--has ever examined all of these; and the
results of his investigations I have consulted. Also, there are in the
State Department, Washington, some hundred old log-books of the
Russian hunters which {ix} have--as far as I know--never been turned
by a single hand, though I understand their outsides were looked at
during the fur seal controversy. The data on this era of adventure I have
chiefly obtained from the works of Russian archivists, published in
French and English. To give a list of all authorities quoted would be
impossible. On Alaska alone, the least-known section of the Pacific
coast, there is a bibliographical list of four thousand.