2.31 America: a.d. 1701 to 1800  (Page 23/20)

America

Back to America: A.D. 1601 to 1700

North america

Canada and the far north

When Vitus Bering found the strait which bears his name he also explored the Aleutian chain of islands and the Alaska shores, living on sea otters and starting a new fur trade. By 1745 ruthless Russian hunters were established on Attu Island, where they killed all male Aleuts and took their women. Later, however, they found that they had to keep Aleut males to help them hunt the otters in their ulluxtadags (similar to Eskimo kayaks) with harpoons and they then merged and lived together with the Aleuts. In 1784 Grigorii Shelekhov established a settlement on Kodiak Island and founded what became the Russian-American Company. They obtained otter and seal pelts, using 7,200 Aleuts to hunt full-time and taking 300 others as hostages to ensure work from the first group. This broke up the Aleut families and then disease appeared, so that in the two generations at the end of the century, the Aleut population fell by nearly two-thirds. (Ref. 234 , 199 ) Shelekhov was followed by Alexander Baranov, who greeted British ships and found English, American and even a few Spanish skippers had been trading for furs some 1,100 miles south. In 1799 he sailed along the shore with 450 two-man kayaks to establish a colony on Baranov Island, just 6 miles above a Tlingits Indian stronghold at what is now Sitka, Alaska. Those Tlingits had inhabited the lower coastal area of the Alaskan panhandle for a long period and had a high culture, living in gabled lodges housing a dozen families and producing canoes holding 60 men. One of their better known features were their 50 feet tall totem poles. North of the Tlingits were the Eskimoes along the Arctic shoreline living, as the Aleuts on the islands, by hunting chiefly seals and walruses. In central Alaska were the Athabascan Indians, bearing no cultural resemblance to the coastal people. They are linguistic cousins of the Apaches and Navajos and lived in small nomadic bands in bare simplicity, existing chiefly on the caribou. They did create the snow-shoe to facilitate getting about in deep snow. (Ref. 234 ) Additional Notes

By 1745 when the Russians were already well established in the Aleutians, the English had only a handful of isolated trading posts west of Hudson Bay. (Ref. 8 ) On the west coast of Canada, Don Juan Francisco de la Bodega sailed the "Sonora" beyond the 56th degree latitude and examined the coast belonging to Russia,- which is now the upper of British Columbia. Then in 1778 while Captain Cook was sailing up the coast to reach the Aleutians, he incidentally discovered Nootka sound on Vancouver Island. Spanish historians claim, however, that Juan Perez had discovered this sound previously in 1774.

On the Atlantic side, in 1711 Britain attempted to take French Quebec and Canada, by sending seven regiments of Marlborough's best, along with 1,500 colonials into the St. Lawrence. Ten of their ships were sunk and the expedition f ailed. The war in Europe ended 2 years later, however, and France's position in southeastern Canada was greatly weakened by the Treaty of Utrecht, which terminated the War of the Spanish Succession, or Queen Anne's war, as it was called in America. (Ref. 222 ) France lost Newfoundland,