Leaving Protection

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Authors: Will Hobbs
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islands of southeast Alaska, the homeland of the Tlingits.”
    â€œWho fought back.”
    â€œWith a vengeance. Alexander Baranof, the head of the Russian-American Company, was away when the Tlingits stormed the fort in 1802. They leveled it. But in 1804, Baranof returned with a bigger and better gunship and hundreds of his Aleut slaves. The Tlingits fought hard, until one night they retreated. Baranof built his new fort on the best high ground available—the Tlingits’ former village—and ringed it with cannons. The Tlingits were never enslaved, but they did come around to trading with Baranof. They’d already been trading with the Americans—the ‘Boston men’—for more than a decade.”
    â€œWhat’s this all about? Where do the possession plaques fit in?”
    Torsen looked at me long and hard, as if trying to make up his mind about me. If he didn’t trust me, why was he telling me all this?
    â€œYou made this your business,” he said with a cold stare, “snooping around on my boat like you did.”
    A chill went down my spine. “I thought we could forget that.”
    â€œHistory and eggs, neither can be unscrambled. Just listen. You’re involved, we can’t change that. Maybe it will come out to your benefit. In the Bishop’s House, they’ll tell you there were twenty plaques all together. There are records of how many, but not where they were planted.”
    â€œPlanted?”
    â€œThat’s right, buried in the ground. Each had its number engraved on it, along with the words ‘This land belongs to Russia.’ They knew about the Spanish exploring up here not so long after Bering’s discovery, and they knew about Captain Cook’s search for the Northwest Passage in 1778. They knew that another English captain, Vancouver, had charted all these islands and waters in the early 1790s.”
    â€œVancouver named Port Protection,” I said. “He ducked in there to ride out a storm.”
    Tor nodded gruffly at my interruption, then plowed ahead. “The Russians were eager to take possession of as much of the sea otter habitat as they could beforethe U.S., England, or Spain did. They made twenty of these plaques, and planted them along the northwest coast, in order to stake their claim.”
    â€œIf the plaques were buried, how would the other countries know that the land had been claimed?”
    Torsen laughed. “You have to get into their mindset. Spain and some of the other colonial powers had been doing the same thing for centuries. Theoretically, it was so they could trump some Johnny-come-lately. Let’s say a ship’s captain was about to claim the area for his own country. They could dig up the plaque for him and say, ‘Look here, fellow, we’ve been here since way back.’”
    â€œBut there’s no date on this thing.”
    â€œMy guess is, the Russians left that out on purpose.”
    â€œBecause the plaques were made after the Spanish, the English, and the Americans were already in the area?”
    â€œThat’s what I’m thinking.”
    â€œYou found Number 13 and Number 15. How?
    With a sly smile, he said, “An antique dealer I know put me on to them. He has a warehouse in Port Angeles. It’s small, but he moves a lot of stuff through it. He hits every garage sale and antique auction within a hundred miles. A couple of years back, in Port Townsend, he came by an old sea chest with the imperial eagle of czarist Russia on its clasp.”
    â€œI’ll bet that was valuable.”
    Torsen shrugged. “Not like you might think. It hadto be restored; some fool had kept it in a leaky woodshed. On account of the rusty Russian eagle, it was appraised at three hundred dollars. The owner wanted four hundred. The antique dealer bought it for three fifty. By the time he got it home, he was thinking it was heavier than it appeared, and he was wondering

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