Island of the Blue Foxes

by Stephen R. Bown

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Stephen R. Bown

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  Merloyd Lawrence Book by Da Capo Press

  Hachette Book Group

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  @DaCapoPress

  First Edition: November 2017

  Published as a Merloyd Lawrence Book by Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBNs: 978-0-306-82519-4 (hardcover), 978-0-306-82520-0 (ebook)

  E3-20171011-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Timeline

  PROLOGUE The Edge of the World

  PART ONE. EUROPE CHAPTER 1 The Great Embassy

  CHAPTER 2 The First Kamchatka Expedition

  CHAPTER 3 The Best-Laid Plans

  PART TWO. ASIA CHAPTER 4 St. Petersburg to Siberia

  CHAPTER 5 Quarreling Factions

  CHAPTER 6 Phantom Islands

  PART THREE. AMERICA CHAPTER 7 Bolshaya Zemlya, the Great Land

  CHAPTER 8 Curious Encounters

  CHAPTER 9 The Scourge of the Sea

  PART FOUR. NOWHERE CHAPTER 10 Island of the Blue Foxes

  CHAPTER 11 Death and Playing Cards

  CHAPTER 12 A New St. Peter

  EPILOGUE Russian America

  Discover More Stephen R. Bown

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Selected Bibliography

  A Note on Sources and Further Reading

  Image Sources

  Notes

  Index

  Timeline

  1580s Russian Cossacks begin the conquest of Siberia.

  1587 Founding of Tobolsk.

  1632 Founding of Yakutsk.

  1648 Russian explorer Semyon Dezhnev first navigates the Bering Strait.

  1689 Peter the Great becomes co-czar of Russia with Ivan, his disabled stepbrother. Under the Treaty of Nerchinsk, Russia is denied access to the Pacific Ocean along the Amur River.

  1696 Vitus Bering first goes to sea as a ship’s boy on a voyage to India.

  1703 Founding of St. Petersburg.

  1724 Vitus Bering is promoted to be commander of the First Kamchatka Expedition.

  1725 Death of Peter the Great. He is succeeded by his wife, Catherine I, who continues to carry out his policies and priorities, including the plan to explore Siberia.

  1727 Catherine I dies, and Peter II becomes emperor. Bering sails the Archangel Gabriel north along the Pacific coast of Kamchatka.

  1729 Death of Peter II, succeeded by Peter the Great’s niece Empress Anna Ivanovna, who continues his vision of imperial exploration.

  1730 First Kamchatka Expedition returns to St. Petersburg. Bering forwards plans for a second expedition.

  1732 Empress Anna Ivanovna approves plans for a second expedition to be led by Vitus Bering.

  1733 April Contingents of the Second Kamchatka Expedition, also known as the Great Northern Expedition, depart St. Petersburg.

  1734 October Vitus Bering arrives in Yakutsk, headquarters for the expedition.

  1737 Fall Advance parties of the expedition arrive in Okhotsk.

  1738–1739 Martin Spangberg sails to northern Japan in three ships.

  1740 June The St. Peter and St. Paul are completed at Okhotsk and sail around Kamchatka to Avacha Bay. Georg Steller arrives at Okhotsk. Anna Bering and the wives and families of the expedition officers return west to St. Petersburg.

  October 28 Empress Anna Ivanovna dies.

  1741 May 4 Sea council of officers decides to sail southeast in search of Gama Land.

  June 4 The St. Peter and St. Paul depart Kamchatka for the coast of North America.

  June 20 The St. Peter and St. Paul are separated in a storm, head east independently.

  July 15 Aleksei Chirikov on the St. Paul sights the coast of North America.

  July 16 Bering and Steller on the St. Peter sight the coast of North America near Mount St. Elias.

  July 18 Chirikov sends eleven men ashore in the longboat for freshwater.

  July 20 Bering in the St. Peter approaches Kayak Island and sends crews ashore for water. Steller collects plants and animals.

  July 24 Chirikov sends four more men ashore to search for the missing shore excursion.

  July 27 Chirikov abandons shore crews as dead or captured and sets sail for Kamchatka without obtaining freshwater.

  August Scurvy spreads through the crew of the St. Peter, including Bering, who seldom emerges from his cabin.

  August 30 The St. Peter stops in the Shumagin Islands for freshwater. Nikita Shumagin is the first member of the expedition to die of scurvy.

  September 4–9 Crew of the St. Peter meet Aleuts, in first encounter with native Americans.

  September 9 The St. Paul crew encounter Aleuts at Adak Island but are unable to trade for freshwater. Scurvy is showing in the crew.

  Late September and October Scurvy epidemic and storms ravage the St. Peter.

  October 10 The St. Paul returns to Avacha Bay. Fifteen men are abandoned in Alaska, and six are dead from scurvy.

  November 6 The St. Peter is driven into Commander Bay on Bering Island. Men die of scurvy daily. Feral blue foxes attack.

  December 8 Bering dies. Lieutenant Sven Waxell becomes new leader of the shore camp.

  1742 January 8 Last scurvy death. With hunting and Steller’s medicinal plants, conditions on Bering Island improve.

  April 25 Peter the Great’s daughter Elizabeth crowned empress after a coup the previous November.

  May 2 Work begins to dismantle the wrecked vessel and build a new, smaller St. Peter.

  August 13 Departure from Bering Island.

  August 26 Arrival of survivors in Avacha Bay.

  1743 Russian Senate officially disbands the Second Kamchatka Expedition.

  PROLOGUE:

  THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

  IN THE FALL OF 1741, the Russian vessel St. Peter, more a wreck than ship, with tattered sails and snapped masts, limped west across the stormy North Pacific Ocean. A chill descended from the north, turning the rain to snow. Ice crusted the rigging and the railings. But the deck was curiously free from activity, as most of the men were lying below in their hammocks, despondent and immobilized from scurvy.

  When the waves subsided and the skies cleared from the latest squall, a handful of mariners came on deck and stared at a distant outcropping of land that one of the officers assured them was Kamchatka. The vessel floated quietly into a harbor and dropped anchor as night fell. When the tide changed, however, a great current spun the ship about, snapped the anchor cable, and dragged the helpless vessel toward a concealed reef. Panic-stricken men dashed about, crying out questions as the hull ground sickeningly on the jagged rocks. If it were sundered, they all knew they would be sucked to their doom in the frigid waters. At the last moment, however, a large wave lifted the battered ship over the reef and deposited it in a shallow lagoon near the shore
. Scarcely believing their deliverance, the few reasonably able-bodied men began ferrying the sick, the dead, and supplies to the stony beach, a task that consumed many days because of winds and snow flurries.

  The sight that greeted them was bleak. Wind-lashed grassy dunes stretched back to a base of low snow-covered mountains. No sooner had the mariners shambled up the beach than a pack of snarling blue foxes swarmed toward them, began tearing at their pant legs, and had to be driven away with kicks and shouts. A small band of mariners, still strong enough to walk, set out to survey the coast and discovered they were on a treeless, uninhabited, and uncharted island. They had not, in fact, reached Kamchatka, their home base, but, as they later learned, were somewhere between America and Asia at the end of the Aleutian chain. The men immediately set about searching for shelter against the rapidly approaching winter and decided to enlarge a series of burrows they found near the dunes and a creek. They collected a rude framework of driftwood, to which they affixed fox hides and the tattered remnants of the sails.

  Hordes of starving foxes swarmed about the makeshift camp, drawn from the barren hills by the scent of food. They stole clothing and blankets, dragged away tools and utensils, and became increasingly aggressive. Scratching at shallow graves, the foxes dragged away corpses and gnawed on them within sight of the enfeebled mariners. For the several dozen men who had scrambled ashore from the ship, things could not have seemed bleaker. The pitiable survivors were to spend the dark winter huddled in a collection of primitive shelters on this stony beachhead, subsisting on whatever animals they could hunt, sucking nourishment from withered roots and grasses, while their numbers dwindled. They had no proper clothing and only meager provisions and supplies from the ship. As winter wore on, they endured relentless Arctic winds, waist-deep snow, the ravages of scurvy, and continuous assaults by the feral blue foxes.

  THE ST. PETER WAS ONE of two ships commissioned for the Great Northern Expedition (1733–1743), also known as the Second Kamchatka Expedition. It was the most ambitious and well-financed scientific voyage in history. Lasting nearly ten years and spanning three continents, its geographic, cartographic, and natural history accomplishments are on par with James Cook’s famous voyages, the scientific circumnavigations of Alessandro Malaspina and Louis Antoine de Bougainville, and Lewis and Clark’s cross-continental trek. The observations of the expedition’s naturalist, German Georg Steller, gave Europe its first scientific description of Pacific America’s flora and fauna, including the Steller’s sea lion, Steller’s sea cow, and Steller’s jay. Conceived by Russia’s Peter the Great in the early 1720s and led by Danish mariner Vitus Bering, the cost of this incredible enterprise was about 1.5 million rubles, an astonishing one-sixth of the annual income of the Russian state. Yet despite the lavish financing and lofty goals, the Great Northern Expedition is also one of the Age of Sail’s darkest tales of shipwreck, suffering, and survival.

  The Great Northern Expedition was intended to show Europe the grandeur and sophistication of Russia, while extending its imperial boundaries throughout northern Asia and across the Pacific Ocean to America. The scientific goals, though tethered to the interests of the state, were staggering in their scope. Russia had only recently been transformed, in the estimation of western European nations, from a barbarous backwater to a somewhat civilized state. The politics in Russia at the time were dangerous, corrupt, and fickle, as many of the expedition members found out during and after their years on the frontier.

  Bering’s original proposal for a voyage of exploration was modest, but when he saw his final instructions from Empress Anna, they had swollen to grandiose proportions. He would be at the head of a huge troop of nearly three thousand scientists, secretaries, students, interpreters, artists, surveyors, naval officers, mariners, soldiers, and skilled laborers, all of whom had first to cross through Siberia and many of whom had to travel as far as the eastern coast of Kamchatka. They had to trek across five thousand miles of roadless forests, swamps, and tundra, along with a supply of tools, iron, canvas, food and medicine, libraries, and scientific implements. Bering’s second in command would be the impetuous and proud Russian officer Aleksei Chirikov, both men veterans of a previous major expedition. The scientific objectives were equally vast and included investigating the flora, fauna, and minerals of Siberia as well as settling outlandish rumors about the Siberian peoples. Most important, the expedition was intended to consolidate Russian political control over the entire region and somehow promote the Russian settlement of Okhotsk and Kamchatka, found schools, introduce cattle raising, discover and operate iron mines and a smelter, and construct a dockyard for deepwater ships. Once the weary cavalcade arrived in Okhotsk, Bering was supposed to build ships and sail south to survey the northern coast of Japan and the Kuril Islands. Then he was ordered to build two more ships and sail to Kamchatka, found an outpost, and then sail east to Pacific America, where it was hoped the group would explore the coastline as far south as California.

  It was a wildly ambitious project that an absolute dictator with unlimited resources might possibly have accomplished. But Bering had to contend with both limited supplies and an awkward hierarchy. At any time, Bering’s commands could be, and sometimes were, unexpectedly countermanded by additional directives from St. Petersburg, usually a result of slanderous letters dispatched by those under his command who didn’t agree with his decisions. The expedition was a venomous circle of striving, conniving, and self-interest.

  Ill fortune plagued the expedition. In June 1741, after years spent crossing Siberia and just as shipwrights had finally built and outfitted the St. Peter and the St. Paul, a supply ship carrying most of the provisions for the voyage ran aground on a sandbar. When the two ships sailed to America, they did so with food for only one summer, not the period of two years that was originally planned. Disagreements between the officers began as soon as the shore receded from sight and the sister ships headed east with no clear directive. The approximately 150 men on board were destined for one of the most tragic and ghastly trials of suffering in the annals of maritime and Arctic history.

  PART ONE

  EUROPE

  Peter I, the Great, emperor of Russia, 1672–1725, modernized the Russian state and conceived of the First Kamchatka Expedition as a way of consolidating Russian dominance of Siberia and exploring the farthest reaches of his empire.

  Empress Catherine I, shown here in an eighteenth-century painting, was a Lithuanian domestic servant who became Peter the Great’s second wife and succeeded him as empress of Russia in 1725, where she proved a surprisingly competent and adept ruler.

  Empress Anna Ivanovna ruled Russia between 1730 and 1740, continuing with the progressive reforms of her uncle Peter the Great and approving the overarching plan for the Great Northern Expedition.

  The Kremlin, the seat of Russia’s government before Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg, shown in this eighteenth-century engraving, was the scene of Peter’s dramatic beard-trimming incident in 1698.

  Peter the Great ordered the creation of St. Petersburg, shown here thirteen years after its founding in 1703, and made it the new capital of imperial Russia and Russia’s first Baltic Sea port.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE GREAT EMBASSY

  ON THE MORNING OF September 5, 1698, Peter Alexeyevich Romanov awoke in the chambers of his wooden house near the Kremlin with purpose and determination. He had just returned from eighteen months of travel in western Europe, full of new ideas to modernize the traditions of the Russian state and eager to begin implementing them. Soon a crowd of boyars, the most senior aristocrats, and prominent officials had gathered on the street to welcome him home and to publicly demonstrate their loyalty, for a rebellion had only recently been suppressed. Several of the closest courtiers prostrated themselves, groveling before him in the traditional manner. A few murmurs spread through the crowd when, instead of accepting as his due “the promptitude of their obsequiousness,” he instead “lifted [them] up graciously from the
ir grovelling posture and embraced them with a kiss, such as is due only among private friends.” This breach of protocol was mildly disturbing, but Peter had set his mind on a course of action, and it was merely the first departure of the day from Muscovite propriety.

  The young czar, then twenty-six years old, moved among the crowd, embracing his officials and nodding at their welcomes. He then reached into his coat, produced a razor, and without warning grabbed the long beard of the commander of his armed forces, Alexis Shein. He cut through the dense strands, letting them fall to the ground. Too astonished to do anything, Shein stood immobile while Peter finished a rough shave of his beard. Peter then reached for the next closest boyar and rudely trimmed that man’s beard. He worked his way through nearly all of those present, his most loyal and senior inner circle of advisers, until they had been shorn of their beards. Each one stood silent, none daring to voice opposition to the power of the czar, and in particular Peter, who had already earned a reputation for ruthlessness and an unpredictable temper.

  Only three men were spared the indignity: an older man who Peter felt had earned the right to a beard, the patriarch of the Orthodox Church, and the personal bodyguard of his estranged wife, Eudoxia Lopukhina, whom he was about to force into a convent. Astonished and speechless, many of the highest-ranking social, political, and military men in the nation now sported new faces. There were a few bouts of nervous laughter. To some, the shaving of a beard was a direct assault on their religion. Under Peter’s reign, it would be not only foreign merchants, engineers, and military personnel who strode the streets of Moscow beardless in the later seventeenth century, but Peter himself wore no beard, in defiance of convention, and others soon followed.

  Peter’s grand tour of western Europe, sometimes called his “Great Embassy,” had convinced him that Russia was a backward country in serious need of reforms on many levels of society and that it had failed to benefit from the technological advances then sweeping nations like Germany, the Netherlands, and England. He was saddened to discover that these nations considered Russia not quite part of Europe, a semi-Oriental backwater with its onion-dome architecture, rigid Orthodox Church, and medieval political institutions. Russia had not yet felt the touch of the Enlightenment. People’s minds, in Peter’s estimation, were still shackled to outmoded social belief systems, and he was determined to haul his country by whatever means into the orbit of Europe and into an era of what he considered modern thinking. The elaborate and ornate robes that impeded walking and physical work and the long coiffed beards made Russia a laughingstock in western Europe, and Peter was determined to put an end to these symbols of backwardness.