Sir Edward Belcher, the English circumnavigator, while on his voyage round the world, stopped there. From him we have an account of the executive mansion and fortifications, which will not be out of place in this attempt to portray the existing Government. The house is of wood, described as “solid,” one hundred and forty feet in length by seventy feet wide, of two stories, with lofts, capped by a light-house in the centre of the roof, which is covered with sheet-iron. It is about sixty feet above the sea-level, and completely commands all the anchorage in the neighborhood. Behind is a line of picketed logs twenty-five feet in height, flanked at the angles by block-houses, loopholed and furnished with small guns and swivels. The fortifications, when complete, “will comprise five sides, upon which forty pieces of cannon will be mounted, principally old ship-guns, varying from twelve to twenty-four pounders.” The arsenal is praised for the best of cordage in ample store, and for the best of artificers in every department. The interior of the Greek church was found to be “splendid, quite beyond conception in such a place as this.” The school and hospital had a “comparative cleanliness and comfort, and much to admire,--although a man-of-war’s man’s ideas of cleanliness are perhaps occasionally acute.” But it is the social life which seems to have most surprised the gallant captain. After telling us that “on their Sunday all the officers of the establishment, civil as well as military, dine at the governor’s,” he introduces us to an evening party and dance, which the latter gave to show his English guest “the female society of Sitka,” and records that everything “passed most delightfully,” especially, that, “although the ladies were almost self-taught, they acquitted themselves with all the ease and elegance communicated by European instruction.” Sir Edward adds, that “the society is indebted principally to the governor’s elegant and accomplished lady--who is of one of the first Russian families--for much of this polish”; and he describes sympathetically her long journey through Siberia with her husband, “on horse-back or mules, enduring great hardships, in a most critical moment, in order to share with him the privations of this barbarous region.” But, according to him, barbarism is disappearing; and he concludes by declaring that “the whole establishment appears to be rapidly on the advance, and at no distant period we may hear of a trip to Norfolk Sound through America as little more than a summer excursion.”[66] Is not this time near at hand?