04 Dec

Twice Sorry – A Russian Conspiracy Theory on the Alaska Purchase

Studying in Russia in 2003, I asked many Russians their thoughts on Alaska. One story I heard was that they never received any money for selling off the colony! I hadn’t heard that in my stateside history lessons, so I looked into it. Spoiler alert: I think it’s just a Russian conspiracy theory, but it did get me into some interesting history.

First, the American payment

America did pay out. We can all see a copy of the canceled check scanned from the Library of Congress.

Alaska-check

$7.2 million, reportedly cashed out as gold bullion by Riggs National Bank in Washington, D.C. The $.2 m was for Eduard de Stoeckl, the Russian agent who had brokered the deal, and I imagine a good deal of that was used for palm-greasing. This is the same time period as Mark Twain writes about in The Gilded Age, after all.

It works out to $0.02 per acre, which is the factoid about the Alaska Purchase you may have retained from grade school. And as far as most English-language accounts of the sale go, that’s the end of it.

The Russian Conspiracy Theory

But let me translate the rest of the story, as circulated on the Russian internet:

In early July of 1868 the gold was loaded onto a ship named Orkney. On July 16, 1868, the Orkney sank before it could reach Saint Petersburg. The insurance company backing it went bankrupt.

No one knew what had happened until nearly a decade later, when a terrible tragedy occurred in Germany. On December 11, 1875, there was an explosion on the steamship called Mosel, preparing to depart from Bremen/Bremerhaven. Over a hundred people were killed and more injured. One of the injured? A US citizen named William Thomson, whose package had caused the explosion. He tried to shoot himself, but managed to linger for six days, during which he revealed the fate of the Orkney and other lost ships.

Thomson had been a Confederate saboteur during the Civil War and later gone to England. The British refused his services–but while in jail for drunken brawling, he met a man who, upon hearing of his profession, offered him a profitable job. Upon release he went to the port, got a job as a stevedore, and left a time bomb on board the Orkney. For this he was paid 1,000 pounds, roughly $350,000 today — an unheard of sum of money. When the money ran out, he pulled the same job once a year, getting insurance money for lost cargo. With the Mosel, his clock mechanism failed and went off early, putting an end to his criminal activity.

As a post-script, in 1975 a Soviet-Finnish searched for and found the remains of the Orkney, confirming that it had sunk after an explosion and fire. But! No gold was found.

That version comes to you from a content farmer on a website as dubious as the story.

But is it true?

Let’s dig in, though, because certain parts of the story are correct: William Thompson made a bomb that went off during the loading of the Mosel in Bremen. As he’d labeled the barrel containing it “CAVIAR”, the stevedores didn’t realize anything catastrophic would happen if it was dropped. William Thompson was one of several aliases used by Alexander Keith, a Scottish born Canadian who had worked with Confederates on sabotage  and blockade running and lived in the United States before decamping to Germany. His bomb on the Mosel was part of plan to collect insurance money on his cargo (the “caviar”) when the ship didn’t complete the second leg of its journey (he would have debarked in Southampton, while the Mosel continued to America).

Here’s what doesn’t add up:
In this version, the Orkney sinks in mid-July, 1868. The canceled check from the US Treasury clearly shows a date of August 1, 1868. (Other variations I’ve seen do correct the sinking to 1869.)

Involvement of the Dynamite Fiend

Alexander Keith, alias William King Thomas, alias George S. Thomas, alias Mr. Garcie

Alexander Keith, alias Alexander King Thompson, alias William King Thomas, alias George S. Thomas, alias Mr. Garcie, etc. etc.

Sources on Alexander Keith (he gets his own Murderpedia page…) don’t mention the Orkney as a sunk ship he might have been responsible, though he has been suggested as responsible for  the sinking of at least two other ships: the SS City Of Boston in January 1875 and the schooner Marie Victoria in 1864. But his connection to the Marie Victoria is doubtful and contemporary government reports (his crime inspired new legislation on both sides of the Atlantic) give the Mosel as his only confirmed maritime bombing.

There’s an 1895 report on to the United States Secretary of the Treasury on high & low explosives, which is nowhere near as thorough as the one given to the British Parliament by Her Majesty’s Inspector of Explosives, V.D. Majendie, Major R.A., directly after the Mosel bomb. In Majendie’s report, Keith’s deathbed confession is that he has a device on another ship, the Salier, which hadn’t yet left port — but when the Salier was searched, no bomb was found.  Major Majendie also goes into some detail on the process which Keith went through to get his timebomb mechanism built, as does an article in the Australian Town & Country Journal, March 26, 1876. These details rather make me doubt that Keith/Thomas had been sending out timebombs for the last decade — wouldn’t he have had a system down? Instead, he’s running all over Germany, talking to different clockmakers and giving them conflicting stories about what he needs the specialized mechanism for.

It needs to run for 10 days and then strike once, which the force or a 30 pound hammer. That’s, umm, for cutting silk threads in a factory. No, it’s a kind of a timer for the workmen in a factory… Look, can you just build the thing and not ask so many questions?

dynamite-fiend

The Dynamite Fiend by Ann Larabee

Plus, I grabbed a copy of Keith’s biography from the library. And while some of the reviews have quibbled with the author’s narrative excesses, she does give him a direct route from America to Germany — with $45,000 in his pocket — in 1866 as he flees from the various people in North America he’s bilked out of large sums of money. In 1868 he’s still in Germany, living the high life in Dresden and presumably on hand for the birth of his wife’s first two children, born 1868 and 1869. There are no side stories about Keith being picked up for drunken brawling in England. Plus, while he doesn’t seem like the sort of guy to pass up £1,000 (between $8,000 and $9,000 at the time), he also does not look like the sort who would pass for a stevedore. His schemes are all about pretending to be an upperclass business partner.

 

Here’s the relevant passage on page 102 of The Dynamite Fiend. Judge for yourself.

keith-1868

 

The mysterious ship Orkney

And there’s the part where I can’t find any mention whatsoever of a ship called the Orkney going missing in 1868. The Lloyd’s Register of Shipping does have an Orkney Lass in the 1868-69 register, but as far as I can decipher, she’s on a route to South America, not Saint Petersburg. That’s how she’s listed in the 1866-67 register — and the 1870-71 register, too. That’s a 318 ton ship listed with Lloyd’s — there’s also a 66 ton smack of the same name in England, which is around in 1885 to help another smack in distress, and a 267 ton lumber schooner on the Great Lakes between 1874 and 1891.

I do have a vague memory of looking for information on this theory in the past and coming across a mention of a pocket watch found off the coast of Sweden that was linked to the lost Orkney — but I can’t find it now.

 

Finally, an an answer from an academic

In the 2002 edition of the journal Amerikanskii Ezhegodnik (American Yearbook), we have an article by A. Yu. Petrov titled “Money received after Alaska Purchase were spent on the Rail Road Construction in Russia.” Petrov went to the State Historical Archives and found a document on how the monies were spent. Specifically, it was spent abroad on supplies to build the Kursk-Kiev, Ryazan, Kozlovsky, Moscow-Ryazan and other railway lines.

Okay, yes — that does mean the cold hard cash never made it to Saint Petersburg. But only because international economics didn’t actually involve shipping massive amounts of gold around the world in 1868 any more than it does today. I know the Spanish Empire did it in the 16th century, but by the 19th century we have the telegraph and the ability to wire money.  Sorry, conspiracy theorists – no mysterious sabotaged ships, just international finance and economic development. The only remaining mystery is whether the Russians got any accrued interest from the United States after the year delay in payment — and I’m going to guess “no” on that one.

 

20 Sep

Blowing **** up in the woods, Part 2

The first thing to do after a blast is to make sure you still have all your fingers!

Visiting Canadian blaster counts his fingers. 
Or maybe he’s just doing a conversion from metric?

Just kidding! The first thing to do after a blast is to wait a minute for everything that went up in the sky to come back down to earth. Then the Blaster In Charge goes up to the blasting site to do a safety check, looking for unexploded explosives, large rocks and/or logs precariously balanced in trees, deaf bears traveling at high speeds, that sort of thing. The rest of the crew follows when the ‘all clear’ is given over the radio.

Foreground: Blaster. Background: Cautious approach by crew.
Returning to the first blasting sites was definitely a bit shocking. We’re in a (coastal temperate) rainforest, everything is lush and green and there are trees and the whole roadbed is overgrown to the point that if you wanted to bring any sort of heavy equipment in you’d have to rebuild the whole thing, and then…
Oh! Hi, muddy brown trench that we just created.

The parting of the road bed

From green to brown in 60 seconds or less. Actually, it’s probably more like 60 milliseconds or less. And that’s a good thing — one split-second boom, a few seconds of thunder rolling in the hills, and the work is done. It’s quick, it’s cheap, and it’s green.

The alternative to explosives is, actually, to rebuild the road so that excavators (you know, the sort of yellow digging machines that little kids like to play with in the sandbox) can get up the end of the road and then start back, digging out the culverts as it goes. That would take a barge to bring in the equipment, fuel and oil to keep it running. Blasting brings the explosives in by helicopter, drops them where they’re needed, and the crew walks in and sets them off. After the blast, the explosives, and anything right next to them, have vaporized and disperses into the atmosphere. There’s no residue of any sort left in the forest – compare that to the inevitable grease trail left by heavy machinery.

Watershed coordinator contemplating stream bed.

After the blast, the main remnant was hunks of culvert. However, since they’ve been exposed to the explosives, the galvanization which was keeping them intact is gone. The crew made sure to remove the leftover culvert bits from the stream bed, but left them in the forest to rust away.
 

Removing the end of a culvert from the steam.

While more explosives would probably vaporize all of the culvert, the blaster in charge of the project, Rob Miller (also the Master Blaster for all the Forest Service’s operations in Alaska) has spent a fair of time and calculation to work out what is the minimum amount of explosive needed to get the job done. Many of the culverts are removed with $100-$200 worth of explosives – pretty cheap! More explosives could make a bigger hole, sure, but a big hole isn’t the point – the point is to make sure that instead of a narrow passageway under a road that could get plugged with rocks and dirt or possibly cave in, there is instead a free flowing stream bed that will be able to flow naturally and do its part for ecosystem function, and support the bigger streams downhill where there are salmon.

Run free, little stream, run free!

In the pouring rain, the mud washed away quickly, and the water turned clear. In another month, part of the crew will return to the sites to see how they’re doing. Next summer they’ll be back to take out the second half of the road. It’s probably a long shot, but I hope I’ll be able to go, too!

07 Sep

Blowing **** up in the woods, Part 1

Explosives look like sausages. Sausages that come in fifty pound boxes and convert sections of road into little valleys for streams to run through. Sausages that are not filled with meat, but something that looks a bit like vanilla frosting. Sausages that are used, as one of the blasters said, to kill culverts.

First, you get your explosives a few miles up an overgrown ex-logging road. This involves a helicopter. Then you get yourself up there, too. This involves your legs, but might involve an ATV to carry your backpack partway.

Then, at your site, you lay out your string of sausages, like so.

Mmm, sausages…

Then, you tape them together with detonating cord (the purple stuff you see on the spool above). Each sausage, aka ‘chub,’ needs to have intimate contact with either the det cord or another chub, to make sure it all explodes together.

Taping up chubs

Once that’s set, you move on to the next site. For efficiency, you set up 3-6 shots to go off at the same time.

The blasters keep careful notes on each shot.

Then, you go back and load each string into the culverts. The culverts range from 18 to 48 inches in diameter. For the smaller ones, you can send a rope through and then pull the string. For a 24 inch culvert, you can send in an intern.

Elizabeast! My fearless intern.

For a 48 inch culvert, even a fish and wildlife biologist will fit.

A full grown biologist can be over 6 feet tall!
Then a passle of people wrassle this python like conglomeration of explosives into one end of the culvert while someone at the other end pulls on the rope to coax it through. 
Feeding python into the pipe.

When there are a few shots all set up, the blasters string them together with a thin yellow plastic tubing coated inside with an explosive powder. The tubing is called shock cord, and they unspool 1200 feet of it, to make sure they’re setting the explosions off from a safe distance. To be doubly safe, everyone takes cover behind the larger trees.

Just so you know, this is what the road looks like before anything explodes.

Tune in next time for the after view….

29 Aug

Wildlife in the Field

Now, you already saw Cappy the Blasting Bear, but here’s some of the other wildlife from the field.

Of course there were bears. Not too far up the road from the camp was a bridge over a stream, where you are pretty much guaranteed to see bears this time of year. I went out there the first night, and we saw three brown bears, fishing for pink salmon. It was pretty dark for the camera equipment I’ve got, but here’s a picture of one of the bears.

Brown bear fishing for pinks

We also had the awesome experience of watching a group of humpback whales bubble feed. This is a technique (perhaps unique to southeast Alaska?) where the whales blow a string of bubbles underwater, creating the illusion of a wall in the water. The fish think they can’t swim through it, are confused, and thus can be trapped in a net of bubbles. So the whales make a shrinking net of bubbles to get the fish (probably herring in this case) all together, and then — whoosh! — they come reverse diving up through the school of fish, mouth first. It’s like bobbing for apples, except that they’re underneath the surface. After the whales come up, they seem to spend a few minutes catching their breath before diving again. They are down for 4-5 minutes making the bubble net, and then appear without warning at the surface, so I didn’t manage to catch that part, but here’s video of them catching their breath before going down for another round.

Then there were the Sitka pythons. The biologists swore up and down that we needed to watch out for these creatures, which apparently live on the west side of Baranof Island and the east side of Chichagof. Or was it the other way around?

In any case, they told us, Sitka pythons feed once a year on large mammals, and the culverts we were blowing up were just the sort of place that a python might like to den.

So of course we sent my intern into a culvert at the very first blasting site, or ‘shot,’ as they like to call it.

Fearless intern enters culvert!

She survived this test and was renamed Elizabeast.

As the trip continued, we didn’t see any pythons, unless perhaps you count the long snaky lines of explosives we were making up and sticking into the culverts.

Sitka python waits to enter culvert


I’ll explain more about these explosive pythons and the rest of the blasting process next time!
25 Aug

I have not been blasted

I am back from the trip to blow up culverts. We went 1200 feet away from all the explosives before setting them off, so I have all my limbs and digits, but no exciting explosion pictures. That’s okay, because I like all my limbs and digits as they are, i.e. attached to me.

Cappy the Blasting Bear

Here’s Cappy the Blasting Bear. He’s made out of used shot cord, which attaches to detonating cord which attaches to the actual bombs and explody bits. The shot cord makes up most of the 1200 feet separating people from the blasts, so there’s lots of it left over for art projects.

I’m leaving tomorrow morning for Prince of Wales, where I’ll be for about 36 hours, I’ll update more after that trip.

16 Aug

Upcoming Adventures

On Thursday I’m leaving for what will probably be my last field trip this year. The fireweed blossoms are near the top and the end of the Alaskan summer is near. The summer intern who’s been working with me has less than two weeks before she heads back to college. (FYI, you can read her summer blog, too.)

However, we’re ending the summer with a bang. Literally.

The purpose of this trip is to remove culverts and bridges from an old logging road, leaving streams and salmon to move freely. This involves dynamite. Lots and lots of dynamite. $10,000 of dynamite, or 18,000 pounds of dynamite–that’s the numbers I’ve heard tossed around.

We’ll be out for 8 days, with 10 people, and remove 50 structures.

I still don’t know exactly what this will be like, but I’ve had discussions with a number of the people who be involved. First, the guy in charge, the main blaster, is a big guy. One of the fish biologists described him to me as someone who could cross the Mississippi in hip boots. Now that I’ve met him, he definitely has a Paul Bunyan thing going on.

One of the main forms of entertainment and bonding here is telling stories about coworkers. The story on Paul Bunyan the Blaster is that he is a meat eater, and really should not be allowed to shop for the food for these trips without supervision. On a previous trip he famously purchased, in addition to meat, one bag of red delicious apples, one head of iceberg lettuce, and a large quantity of Pringles. Varying reports have said that there were enough for each person on the trip to have a can with every meal, that it was 30 cans, that there are still cans of Pringles in the warehouse somewhere. Apparently they were on sale.

My intern and I, both being mostly vegetarian, will be meeting him at the grocery store tomorrow morning to help with the shopping for this trip. As he said to me, if we don’t help him, we’ll probably hate him for what he buys.

In addition, there is another blaster coming in from Canada to help with this project. They refer to him as “Daisy.” I don’t even know what to say at this point. I’ll just have to report back after the trip.

Anyway, I had a conversation with some of the fish techs about this trip–of the ten or so participants, the intern and I will be the only girls–and said that I didn’t know what the stereotypes about blasters were, but I could probably come up with some real quick. Later, I realized that I do actually have an image of a blaster in my mind: Edgar from the Red Green Show. If you’re not familiar with this marvel of Canadian television, you’ve been missing out.

Here’s Edgar. I’ll report back on the trip at the end of the month–I’m sure it’ll be a blast!