On the first day, for two hundred yards of broadcloth, he purchased a hundred prime sea-otter skins, worth $50 each in Canton. Barter was going merrily on, when a scream from amidships startled the crew. The Thlingits sprang to their boats. The squaws backed the canoes away from the ship's sides. Arrows were fitted to bowstrings, spears were poised and muskets primed. On the ships the sailors lighted the cannon matches and stood by ready to fire. A fight was hovering in the air when the cause of the disturbance was discovered. An inquisitive Thlingit pried between the bull hides opposite the cook's galley, and the cook had saluted him with a ladle of hot water. In his surprise he upset his canoe and his family were struggling in the sea. His baby was rescued by a seaman, amends were made to his injured feelings, and the barter proceeded as before. The waters were filled with ships. In a stay of a month the "Caroline" spoke the ship "Hancock," the ship "Despatch," the ship "Ulysses," and the ship "Eliza," all of Boston; and the English ship "Cheerful," all trading for furs among the Sitkan Islands. The Russians, in their colony on Kodiak Island, were jealous of the intruders on what they considered as their domain. Gregory Shelikof, a Siberian merchant, one of the wealthiest and most far seeing of the leaders among the Aleutian Islands, conceived the plan of combining the whole of the fur trade in one great monopoly. In pursuance of this policy he secured a charter from Emperor Paul in 1799, under the name of the Russian American Company, which gave the exclusive right to all profits to be derived from every form of resource in the Russian possessions in America for a period of twenty years. To the management of his business in the Colony he established on Kodiak Island he appointed Alexander Andreevich Baranof, a Siberian trader of great ability and experience. Baranof, the wise and far-seeing Russian ruler of the Russian American Company, at his factory in St. Paul's Harbor on Kodiak Island, had long planned the extension of his settlements to the southeast. The sea-otter catch of the Russians was made by brigades of Aleuts from the western islands, who went along the shores and to sea as far as 20 miles, in their wonderful skin boats called bidarkas, to hunt. When a sea-otter lifted its head from the water to breathe, within sight of a detachment of Aleut hunters, its fate was sealed, for it seldom escaped. The passages between the islands about Sitka were called the "Straits" by the Russians, and in them the sea-otter skins were taken by the thousands. It was not unusual for a Russian hunting party consisting of a hundred bidarkas to take on one expedition 2,000 skins of the _Morski bobrov_, as they called the sea-otter.