On 06/14/2017 12:17 AM, Michael Deckers wrote:
Is "kept American time" supposed to imply that Americans in Sitka did not use the same days of the week as the Russians?
Yes, that's what I think happened, at least for the Americans who sailed north to take over Alaska. The Americans who officially took charge that Friday (American time) were extremely unlikely to use Russian time, if only to remind themselves and everybody else that the US was in charge. These Americans arrived at Sitka late in the morning and officially took over in the afternoon, and it's not likely that they changed their calendars just for the four hours or so that Russia was still officially in control, or for the 37 hours or so before Sitka workers started celebrating their duplicate Sunday. I found a more-detailed account of the formal transfer from a reporter for the New York Herald, and it looks like I messed up what that 15:30 was about. The USS Ossipee and USS Resaca didn't salute until a few minutes after 15:30 (we don't know exactly when); it was the Russians who saluted at "precisely" 15:30. I installed the attached commentary patch to try to fix this.