Island of the Blue Foxes

by Stephen R. Bown

  The only way to circumvent this blockade of Russian commercial, and hence political, interests was to look north. Peter cast his eyes on the ill-charted eastern regions of Siberia that Russia had rudimentarily explored and conquered from various Tatar chieftains beginning in the later sixteenth century. Far to the east along the windswept rugged shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, where a Russian outpost was established in 1648 at the very edge of Russian territory, there was no one to block Russia’s advance. It was only a matter of time before English, French, Spanish, or Dutch mariners would begin exploring the North Pacific, as they had everywhere else in the world. Peter wanted that distinction for Russia. When Peter the Great became ill late in 1724, with the urinary tract infection that would kill him several months later, the planning for this long-dreamed-of expedition took on a new urgency. In December he tasked senior members of the Admiralty College to prepare lists of people who could take senior positions in the ambitious enterprise: surveyors, shipwrights, cartographers, and commanders. Bering’s name topped the list for commanders, and he was recommended by Vice Admiral Peter von Sievers and Rear Admiral Naum Senavin: “Bering has been in East India and knows the conditions.” His two-decade service in the Russian Imperial Navy combined with voyages that took him to North America and Indonesia made him the obvious choice to command an expedition that would sail uncharted waters in the Pacific. The expedition would encounter new peoples and cultures, and Bering possessed at least some experience in overseas foreign countries. Peter the Great wrote, “It is very necessary to have a navigator and assistant navigator who have been to North America.”

  BERING’S PRINCIPAL DISTINGUISHING SKILL as a commander during the Great Northern War had been in logistics, the organization and shipment of supplies, and this talent may have been one of the reasons he was selected to lead the First Kamchatka Expedition. Nothing like this expedition had ever been attempted before. To reach the Pacific Ocean, where the “real” expedition along the coast was to begin, Bering and his comrades would have to traverse all of Siberia, which consisted of several-level broad watersheds that flowed north from the mountainous regions of Central Asia to the icy sea in the North. The trip would, in essence, be a series of mighty portages between river systems stretched out over many thousands of miles. Although it was a well-established route, with numerous fortified outposts, situated on the major river junctions, it was used by small troupes of merchants, not by large expeditions carrying vast quantities of supplies and equipment. In the public mind today, Siberia has a reputation for harsh winters, howling winds, and sparse population—a convenient near wasteland for political dissidents and other Russian exiles. In the seventeenth century, it had the same reputation and was beginning to serve the same political purpose.

  Siberia was nominally just one of ten provinces of the Russian Empire, as established by Peter the Great in 1708. But it was a province like no other. Sprawling from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, covering most of Asia north of Mongolia and China, it was twice the size of the other nine Russian provinces combined and represented three-quarters of Russia’s landmass. Siberia encompassed an incredible 5.1 million square miles, 10 percent of the world’s surface, with terrain as varied as its size would suggest: windswept tundra, vast plains, enormous coniferous forests (or taiga), and multiple mountain ranges, including the Urals, Altai, and Verkhoyansk. It was, and remains, one of the world’s most sparsely populated regions. Peter had never traveled there, nor had anyone else from the Russian political elite (at least none that had returned). Barely three hundred thousand people lived in the whole region, which by the eighteenth century consisted mostly of ethnic Russians. Siberia was rich in furs, and the principal revenue from the region was a tax on the valuable pelts of animals such as sable and fox, which were plentiful in the sub-Arctic climate of short hot summers and long cold winters. Today, approximately forty million people live in Siberia, still only 27 percent of the Russian people.

  The region and its varied native peoples (primarily the Enets, Nenets, Yakuts, Uyghurs, and others) had been conquered by the Mongols in the early thirteenth century and had been ruled by various local rulers until the sixteenth century, when Russian Cossacks marched east of the Urals and established military outposts, small wooden forts called ostrogs, around which towns grew. Although the region was far too huge to administer properly, Russian officials sent out from Moscow used the existing loose political and taxation system of the khanates to further their exploration and expansion, essentially imposing a tax on furs (the extremely valuable minerals and oil were not exploited until later). By the early eighteenth century, Russian outposts extended as far as the Pacific in Kamchatka. But while these lands were technically under Russian administration, there were no roads west of Tobolsk, the small Russian city and Siberian administrative center just east of the Urals on the Irtysh River. Tobolsk consisted of a large stone fortress on a hill that served as the government and military capital of Siberia as well as the home of the highest officials of the Siberian Orthodox Church. The government and church buildings were surrounded by around three thousand wooden houses of various sizes and quality on the plains below, which were prone to seasonal flooding. The city had about thirteen thousand inhabitants. The only other supply base for travelers in Siberia was the town of Yakutsk, a fur-trading depot with a Russian official governor and population half that of Tobolsk, situated about halfway across Siberia. Irkutsk was also a growing town, nearly as large as Tobolsk, surviving on trade with China, but it was south of the regions where the First Kamchatka Expedition would be concentrating its efforts. The numerous Siberian ostrogs were small outposts and could not be relied upon for any food or supplies. Between Yakutsk and the tiny settlement Okhotsk, on the western coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, the terrain was rugged and mountainous. In 1716 Russians pioneered a sea route east from Okhotsk to the western coast of Kamchatka at the Bolshaya River. The obvious and easier route to the Pacific to the south, along the Amur River, had been closed to Russia by the Chinese after the Treaty of Nerchinsk.

  The expedition would have to cross one-third of the globe, contending with a hostile climate and no roads. The farther east they traveled, the worse and more unknown the conditions would become, and the possibility of finding people associated with Russia to offer aid to an imperial enterprise would diminish. Bering’s small army would have to haul all their equipment and supplies across Siberia, including everything they would need to build their ships once they arrived in Okhotsk. This included all metal goods, including anchors, nails, tools, and weapons, as well as ropes and sails. Even food would be difficult to obtain in large quantities, given the sparse population, the corrupt officials, and an unskilled labor force given to hard drinking. One of the main tasks of the expedition was to make a new map of the route from Tobolsk to Okhotsk, detail the route across the Sea of Okhotsk to Kamchatka, and then chart the Pacific coast north to the so-called Icy Sea. With this detailed, accurate, and verified travel knowledge, others could follow and the territory could become more firmly attached to the empire. It was a daunting and unprecedented undertaking. Peter’s instructions were sweeping but vague, as there was no accurate knowledge of how to accomplish the goal or any appreciation of the difficulties that might present themselves. It was clear, however, that the enterprise would take many years.

  In January 1725, Bering returned to Viborg “to attend to his affairs,” such as arranging for the financial support of his family from his salary during his commission and spending time with his wife and his children, who would be much changed by the time he returned many years later. Bering was also planning some personal business transactions. In addition to his significant salary of 480 rubles per year, his position offered him the opportunity to make his fortune—as commander he was allowed a significant baggage allotment and the right to use expedition resources to transport personal trade goods, which, if he chose and planned wisely, would be worth a fortune when he sold them in distant Siberian outposts.
Anna’s father, a well-known and successful merchant, no doubt offered advice to his son-in-law, a career naval man with little experience in trade or commerce. Despite the years apart the commission would require, both Bering and Anna embraced the opportunity to enrich themselves and advance Bering’s career in the Russian service. Wealth and status were the goals of this couple.

  In St. Petersburg, Bering had also by now met the men who would be his junior officers. Lieutenant Martin Spangberg, at age twenty-seven, was a fellow Dane seventeen years younger than Bering. He had served in the Russian Navy for several years, made at least one voyage to the American colonies, and earned a reputation for being tough, decisive, and tenacious, if not highly educated or literate. Aleksei Chirikov, in contrast, was only twenty-two and had served in the Russian Navy for only one year before being promoted to lieutenant for the expedition. A Russian native, he had begun his career at the Moscow School of Mathematics, where he excelled, before transferring to the Naval Academy in St. Petersburg, to which he returned as a teacher only one year after graduation. His technical skills and training in astronomy, cartography, and navigation, all dependent on a solid foundation in mathematics, were key for cartographic exploration. The remaining thirty-four men of the expedition included sailors, skilled artisans, animal handlers, midshipmen, carpenters, mechanics, a surgeon, a chaplain, a geodesist, a quartermaster, a shipbuilder, and general laborers.

  AFTER PETER THE GREAT died in February 1725, Empress Catherine I continued with most of her late husband’s projects, including the First Kamchatka Expedition. Chirikov had already departed St. Petersburg on January 24, leading a cavalcade of twenty-six men traveling with twenty-five horse-drawn sledges, loaded with equipment that would be unavailable east of the Urals: six 360-pound anchors, eight cannons, dozens of guns, hourglasses, rigging, canvas for sails, ropes, chests of medicines, and scientific instruments. He followed well-known roads as far as the city of Vologda, where they waited for Bering and Spangberg to finish their meetings at the Admiralty College. They would then receive their official orders and documents from the senate, commanding the governor of Siberia, Prince Vasiliy Lukich Dolgorukov, to provide them with all manner of assistance. The senate’s note to the governor was brief but clear: “We have sent to Siberia Navy Captain Vitus Bering with the requisite number of servitors to organize an expedition. He has been given special instructions regarding what he is to do. When the Captain reaches you, you are to render him every possible assistance to enable him to carry out those instructions.” On February 6, Bering and Spangberg set off, lightly loaded, with six men on sledges, and met Chirikov before continuing together through the dark days of winter over the snowy low passes of the Urals to Tobolsk. They arrived on March 16, having covered a distance of 1,763 miles, the simplest part of the journey.

  During the next two months, while waiting for the river ice to thaw, Bering met the governor, showed his letter from Empress Catherine, and requested an additional fifty-four men to help with the expedition. Skilled men were scarce in Siberia, and only thirty-nine could be found, enough to more than double his contingent. Bering needed more carpenters and blacksmiths, but they were not to be found. He also arranged for the sale of his horses and sledges because east from Tobolsk there were no more roads. The way forward would be by river barge along the Irtysh River to the Ob River—he needed carpenters to build the rafts and laborers to unload the sledges of the thousands of pounds of equipment and repack it into the boats. The four flat-bottomed riverboats were each forty feet long and equipped with a mast and sails. Bering sent a small contingent ahead in smaller boats to announce the arrival of his expedition and to requisition supplies and food, a procedure that he repeated at each fort or settlement along the route. The system of generally north-flowing rivers and their tributaries that cross the Siberian plain formed part of a well-established, if sparse, commercial network, with furs moving either back to Europe or to China and Chinese goods trickling north and east. But nothing on the scale of Bering’s expedition had ever crossed the country before. To cross Siberia as far as Yakutsk, they would have to ascend the Ob River, cross a 46-mile portage to the Yenisei River, and then follow smaller tributaries to float down the Lena River to Yakutsk—each river system required a new set of boats, and each offered its own unique set of obstacles and challenges.

  In May the expedition took off again, pushing the loaded riverboats into the fast-flowing Irtysh, scattered with small icy bergs, and still in wind and snow they began the long journey east to the confluence with the next river, the mighty Ob. They floated all night in the swift current under the dark skies, occasionally pulling into a tiny village for warmth and shelter. After a week of disagreeably cold and blustery downstream travel, they reached the confluence with the Ob on May 25. They pulled ashore, and the carpenters made large rudders for the mighty boats to augment the barge poles and oars. Periodically, men had to get out and haul the huge boats upstream, exhausting, unrewarding work against headwinds and with clouds of mosquitoes swarming and feasting on them as they dragged the boats along the river. They struggled for nearly a month, into June, to reach the Ket River tributary and continued along this shallow, winding waterway toward the ostrog of Makovsk, where they readied for the interminable portage to the town of Yeniseisk, the commercial center of the Yenisei River system. The Yenisei was the next river system on their eastward sojourn, which they reached on June 20. Their reception was less than cordial now that they had passed into Siberia, and Bering was beginning to note a pattern: local officials appeared to be a power unto themselves and had little respect for imperial decrees from the Far West, a land they themselves may have never seen. On one occasion, when asked for support, a commander of an ostrog spat and threw Bering’s official letter on the ground. Here the man refused to get his people to help unload the boats for the portage, claiming, “You are all swindlers and you should be hanged.”

  Bering could be a domineering man, and he had a lot of men and soldiers in addition to his imperial letter, so he soon got what he wanted: many dozens of horses and carts for the portage. They managed the exhausting trek, but further disappointment awaited them at Yeniseisk. Although the governor provided Bering with additional laborers, Bering complained that “few were suitable, and many were lame, blind, and ridden with disease.” It was mid-August by the time they unloaded the tons of equipment and supplies from the carts onto a new batch of riverboats and set off along the Tunguska River to the Ilim River, where they again unloaded and loaded the vast mountains of material into smaller boats and worked through numerous short portages around rapids. The main expedition arrived at the town of Ilimsk on September 29, just before the river froze for the winter. The next portage, to the ostrog of Ust-Kut on the Lena River, would be a farther 80 miles of hard travel. During the winter, Bering divided his men and sent Spangberg and thirty men with dozens of laden horses ahead on the portage to build more riverboats so that in the spring when the ice thawed, they would be ready to float the 1,200 miles down the Lena River northeast to the town of Yakutsk. The expedition was supposed to have reached Yakutsk before winter and was at least half a year behind schedule. They had covered only half the distance to Kamchatka.

  Meanwhile, during the winter, Bering made an overland trek south to the town of Irkutsk on Lake Baikal, where he interviewed the governor about the conditions ahead over the mountains from Yakutsk to Okhotsk. This would be the most challenging part of the journey. There was no official or well-established route or trail to Okhotsk through the mountainous terrain, where the rivers were shallow, circuitous, and riddled with rapids. The transport of thousands of pounds of equipment through this terrain had never been done before and was on Bering’s mind as the greatest problem of the entire trek. The locals usually traveled by hauling sleds in the winter, a trip that could take between eight and ten weeks in each direction. “The snow is very deep here, up to seven feet,” Bering reported, “and in places even more. When people travel in winter they have t
o shovel the snow off right down to the ground every evening in order to keep warm during the night.”

  It wasn’t until June 1726 that all contingents of the expedition and all the supplies had floated down the Lena River to Yakutsk, one of the largest towns in the entire region at more than three thousand inhabitants in at least three hundred buildings, with a surrounding population of natives perhaps ten times as large. A quick departure was imperative to make the dangerous and dreaded mountain crossing before winter, but all was not well. In Yakutsk nothing had been organized before their arrival. Bering was incredulous—he had sent men ahead with official requests for hundreds of horses, tons of grain, and dozens of laborers, yet none of it was ready. Bering marched to the governor’s office and argued and fought, finally threatening the governor with being blamed for the entire expedition’s failure, the imperial wrath that would descend upon him, and the certainty of the loss of his job. Only then did the governor finally secure the men and supplies, sixty-nine men and 660 horses, earning great resentment from the local people, as there really wasn’t much to spare here, so far from everything. Perhaps most frustrating, the men’s pay was unavailable, and there were grumbling and discontent.