The Cradle of the Winds: Aleut Survival in Russian America
By Marcus Hollis Raines
Length4h 38m
About this audiobook
In a house dug half into the earth against the wind, a woman feeds a wick of twisted moss into a stone lamp of sea-mammal oil. Her name is not recorded; almost none of their names are. On most of the Aleutian chain there are no trees and nothing large to hunt on land, but the sea is generous, and for thousands of years it fed the Unangan, the people the Russians would call Aleut: urchins and mussels from the kelp beds, halibut as long as a man, and, from skin boats in fog that could swallow the next island whole, seals, sea lions, sea otters and whales.
In 1741 Vitus Bering's St. Peter was wrecked on the voyage home from America, and its survivors reached Kamchatka with sea otter pelts. The promyshlenniki, Russian fur hunters, followed island by island, holding hostages to force Unangan men to hunt for them, and when the Unangan rose against them in the 1760s, Russian reprisals destroyed whole villages. Unalaska became a colonial port and the Russian-American Company rose to its peak. After Russia sold Alaska in 1867, the Americans came for the fur seals of the Pribilofs. The history carries on to the Unangan towns of today.
The fur companies kept careful count of every pelt. The name of the woman at the lamp went into no ledger at all.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 38 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The Cradle of the Winds
2Chapter 2: The Sea of Kamchatka
3Chapter 3: Wreck of the St. Peter
4Chapter 4: The Promyshlenniki
5Chapter 5: Kayaks and Cartridges
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6Chapter 6: A Town Called Unalaska
7Chapter 7: The Governor and the Shipwright
8Chapter 8: The Company of Rulers
9Chapter 9: The Company at Its Peak
10Chapter 10: Rumors of the Czar's Regret
11Chapter 11: Americans and the Fur Seal
12Chapter 12: Aleut Today
13About the Author
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