(2 of 3)
Baranov's disciplinary rules were rigid. There was a parade before the flag every Sunday. Gambling was sternly forbidden. Baranov forbade prostitution, encouraged his men to live with the Aleutian girls. Men with venereal disease were banished to the woods to treat themselves with "mercurials dissolved in vodka." Moonshining was also banned, but Baranov himself kept "a vat of crab apples, rye meal, and cranberries fermenting with kvass-yeast. Any man off duty was welcome to as much of the stuff as he could hold." This brew supposedly prevented scurvy, certainly helped morale. Said Washington Irving: "He is continually giving entertainment by way of parade, and if you do not drink raw rum and boiling punch as strong as sulfur he will insult you. . . ."
At last Russian missionaries and naval officers arrived in Alaska. The missionaries hated Baranov for allowing his men to live with Aleutian women, haunted his own "wife" so unmercifully that she threw Baranov's child into the sea. The officers despised Baranov because he was a merchant. Intrigues and revolts were started against him. At last he received the title of Governor and a decoration from the new Emperor, Alexander I.
Baranov longed to go home. "The place," he wrote, "has made me old before my time. . . ." But by then the Russian Government wanted him to stay in Alaska. The writings of Explorers Vancouver and Puget had opened the eyes of his Government. The Northwest became officially Russian and was ruled by Baranov until a few months before his death in 1819. He left behind 24 settlements, "ranging in size from simple hunting stations to New Archangel, whose worth alone was estimated at two million, five hundred thousand rubles."
The phrase "He who controls Alaska may control the Pacific" was revised by famed U.S. General "Billy" Mitchell. "Alaska," said Mitchell, "is the most important strategic place in the world . . . the most central place in the world of aircraft. . . . Whoever holds Alaska will hold the world."
It was with this comment in mind that Jean Potter, a researcher working for FORTUNE, was packed off to Alaska not long before Pearl Harbor.
Miss Potter sailed with a lusty boatload of ditch diggers, carpenters, welders, structural iron workers and cat-operators from Seattle. "There were not many women aboard—only a few school teachers and Army and Navy wives, a prostitute and a giggling 250-pound redhead who had arranged her trip through a matrimonial bureau." Miss Potter "heard one well-soused carpenter tell the purser 'Who the hell wants to go up there anyway?' "