Island of the Blue Foxes

by Stephen R. Bown

  So Bering divided his troupe. Spangberg was the first to depart on barges loaded with about 150 tons of flour and equipment as well as the anchors and cannons—the other equipment that couldn’t be transported overland due to the terrain. He took more than two hundred men and a dozen newly constructed boats. Bering sent a smaller second group ahead from Yakutsk to Okhotsk by the overland route, which he soon followed with his own contingent, a pack train of hundreds of horses, dozens of them alone carrying Bering’s personal trade goods. Wagons or carts were useless on the rugged, rocky, and steep mountain trails. Chirikov remained in Yakutsk until the following spring, awaiting the final deliveries of more flour and other supplies.

  Bering’s cavalcade, a dusty snake of burdened beasts enveloped in noise, dust, and dung, wound its way up the treacherous trails through the mountains and down to Okhotsk. Conditions were staggeringly difficult, far worse than what Bering’s bland comment conveyed: “I cannot put into words how difficult this route is,” he wrote in his report. The journal of Peter Chaplin, one of the junior officers charged with keeping accurate records of daily events, is a litany of problems, a tally of dying horses, food shortages, and deserting men during days that were frequently “gloomy” and mornings that were “icy cold.” Horses starved to death because they had no grass to feed on, the men were delayed cutting the stunted trees to build corduroy roads to get the pack train across swampy land, and sometimes they forded freezing rivers six times a day, back and forth up narrow valleys. As fall progressed, snow and deathly cold temperatures moved in. Three men and dozens of horses died, while forty-six deserted with supply-laden horses, disappearing in the night. Mounds of supplies were left by the trailside to be retrieved later. When Bering and a remnant of his cavalcade arrived in Okhotsk on October 1 after forty-five days of hard travel, he was dismayed to find that Okhotsk was smaller than he had anticipated and unprepared for his arrival. Okhotsk was a minor administrative principality for the collection of tribute; it had no amenities other than some local horse ranches, several native huts, and a contingent of Russians in a town of about eleven small houses. So instead of resting and recuperating, he and his men had to quickly begin the construction of winter houses and storage warehouses, no easy task with most of the horses dead and the men conscripted into carrying logs. Then they had to start building the ship they would need to cross the Sea of Okhotsk to Kamchatka the next summer. They also were busy catching fish in the ocean and making salt to preserve the beef from the cattle they would slaughter. Most troubling, by December Bering still had no word from Spangberg, until he and two of his men staggered into Okhotsk to announce a disaster.

  THE RIVER ROUTE TAKEN by Spangberg had been much worse than Bering’s. Winter came early, in August, and it was the worst winter in the memory of any of the locals. After floating down the Lena River on the barges, Spangberg started on the journey up the Aldan and Maja Rivers. The rivers were filled with rapids, and the men had to march along the shore, hauling the boats with ropes through a tangled mess of overgrown scrub and rocks. The work was so tiring and tedious that they sometimes covered less than a mile in an entire exhausting day. By the end of September, forty-seven men either had been dismissed or deserted, and then the boats became frozen in the ice. Spangberg, a dauntless and resourceful man, set to building winter cabins and sleds, while the men became sulky and surly, restless and mutinous. Spangberg bullied his men into action with threats of flogging, in true naval disciplinary tradition. He had them unpack the boats and load the new sleds and then begin hauling the sleds east through the snow. He carried eighteen tons of equipment on ninety sleds, the men dragging them through waist-deep snow that covered the land by late October. Soon they were worn out from exhaustion and began tossing things from the sleds, such as cannonballs, a cannon and gunpowder, and nautical equipment. Detritus lay strewn along the trail. By December they were starving, eating chunks of dead horses, saddlebags, harnesses, boots, and belts. Spangberg and two strong men dashed ahead to a place called Yudoma Cross, at the height of the land. It was an unremarkable spot, notable only for the crude cross that someone had placed in a clearing. From there, it was downhill to Okhotsk. It was also the place Bering had passed months earlier on the overland trail. They uncovered supplies of flour that had been left for them and rushed back to the others and brought them up to Yudoma Cross. Four men starved or froze to death on the way. Spangberg left some of the weaker men and set off downriver for Okhotsk with about forty sleds and their drivers. They ate frozen dead horses that they came upon on the trail. Finally, Spangberg and two companions rushed ahead, slogging through the snow day and night with light sleds carrying the most vital supplies, until they arrived in Okhotsk on January 6. About sixty others staggered into town ten days later.

  Bering dispatched rescue parties to retrace the route and bring food to any survivors, but at first they refused to go because it was dark, snowy, and freezing cold and they feared for their lives. Bering was not to be deterred, so he had some men build a gallows and threatened the men with hanging if they refused their orders. The rescue party of ninety men and seventy-six dog teams led by Spangberg slowly departed on February 14, grumbling and muttering. At Yudoma Cross they found four dead frozen bodies and rescued seven destitute stragglers. The hardship was so great that twelve men recruited from Siberia had grabbed axes and knives and deserted once they had reached Yudoma Cross, declaring, “We do not want to die like the others did, so we are going straight to town [Yakutsk] and you can’t stop us.” During the remainder of the winter and spring, Bering sent groups back along the route to retrieve the abandoned supplies, while others worked on constructing the ship that would take them across the Sea of Okhotsk to Kamchatka. By late spring, however, starvation was again their most immediate threat. The spring salmon runs were far lower than usual, and the men were starving by the time Chirikov arrived with a pack train in June, carrying tons of flour and other supplies from Yakutsk.

  CARPENTERS HAD BEEN WORKING on the new ship through the winter, and by early June it was ready to be launched. They named it Fortuna, in hopes of better things to come. The carpenters had also repaired an older ship, the Vostok. While Chirikov returned to Yakutsk to bring a second load of flour and cattle for the expedition (losing 17 out of 140 horses but no men and experiencing no great hardship), Spangberg took command of both ships and transported forty-eight men (blacksmiths, carpenters, and the shipbuilder) 630 nautical miles across the Sea of Okhotsk to the tiny town of Bolsheretsk, a town of fourteen modest houses, upriver from the mouth of the Bolshaya River on the west coast of Kamchatka. Once dropped off, these men were to follow a trail across the peninsula to the Pacific coast and begin work on the larger ship needed for the voyage north. The winds were fair, and Spangberg brought both ships back across the sea to Okhotsk, picked up Bering and the remaining men on August 22, and sailed again to Bolsheretsk. Since they had no accurate maps of Kamchatka, which had been explored only by Russians coming from the north in the seventeenth century, they were unaware that Kamchatka is a peninsula. They could have sailed around it and dropped the equipment directly on the Pacific coast, saving themselves another arduous overland journey.

  For the final leg of the trek to the Pacific, Bering had to transfer his equipment from the larger ships to smaller boats to get upstream on the Bolshaya. The plan was then to portage inland to the headwaters of the Kamchatka River, to another Russian outpost called Upper Kamchatka Post, and then travel by dogsled or boat 15 miles to Lower Kamchatka Post farther north on the Pacific coast. Spangberg again led the way with an advance party, while the others reorganized the equipment, hunted, fished, and got organized for the mountain crossing by sled during the winter and boat in the spring. It was to be a grueling slog, hauling all the equipment upstream and over portages, loading and unloading boats, while it rained and then snowed and winds howled. Bering tried to enlist Kamchadal dogsled drivers, but other than this he had little contact with them. It took eighty-five sleds and
weeks of hard travel, crossing the more than 500-mile round trip from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Pacific several times.

  The Kamchatka Peninsula is about 750 miles of heavily forested, mountainous terrain divided by a broad central valley. It is known for abundant wildlife, particularly large brown bears; chilly, damp summers; and cold winters. Snow blankets the land from October to May. Arctic winds blow down from the north, and cold sea currents surround it on both coasts. It is much wetter than Siberia, with glaciers on the highest peaks and fog routinely clinging to the coasts. It is also the most volcanic region on the Eurasian continent, with many active volcanoes and innumerable thermal springs issuing steam, and it is prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. The storms are legendary: one British traveler in the nineteenth century wrote, “The poorga [blizzard] raged with redoubled fury; the clouds of sleet rolled like a dark smoke over the moor, and we were all so benumbed with cold that our teeth chattered in our heads. The sleet, driven with such violence, had got into our clothes and penetrated even under our parkas and into our baggage.” Describing his own experience, Bering stated, “Each evening we made a camp in the snow and covered the opening.… [I]f a storm catches anyone out in the open and he fails to prepare a shelter for himself, then he will be covered by snow and die.”

  There were only about 150 Russians in all of Kamchatka, mostly soldiers and tax or tribute collectors living near the three ostrogs. The remainder of the population consisted of the culturally and linguistically similar Kamchadals in the North and the Kurils in the South. Although Bering was supposed to make notes about the various native peoples who lived in the disparate regions of Siberia, he was not much of an ethnographer. “The Yakuts have many horses and cattle which supply them with food and clothing. Those who have only a few head of livestock live on fish. They are idolaters and worship the sun, moon and certain birds such as swans, eagles, and ravens. They hold in high esteem their priests, whom they call shamans. They have crudely carved little statues they call shaitans [devils].… [T]he rest have no faith at all and are quite devoid of any good habits.” In Kamchatka he wrote, “The Kamchatka people are very superstitious. It is customary to take anyone who is very ill and near death, even one’s own father or mother, out into the forest with only enough food for a week, winter or summer, and many die.”

  These grim but less than revealing observations, nearly always focused on perceived negative aspects of the culture, were partly due to the fact that the expedition had little interaction with any of the non-Russian or Russian-influenced people on this expedition. The near lawlessness that reigned under the loose administration of the ostrogs prior to Bering’s arrival had caused much decline in Kamchatka’s native population, previously perhaps as high as twenty thousand. By the late eighteenth century, only a few thousand remained; many others had blended with the Russians to form a distinct culture. The Kamchatka natives, like those in Siberia, were often compelled to labor and provide service above the official amount of tribute demanded by St. Petersburg. While this was against regulations, Kamchatka was so far from Russia that there was no one there to keep officials honest. The expedition placed a crushing strain on the Russians and the Kamchatkans.

  By the spring of 1727, the expedition had traveled a staggering distance: the air distance in a direct line between St. Petersburg and eastern Kamchatka is more than 4,200 miles. But the expedition covered many times this distance, up and down rivers, weaving across the trackless Siberian plateau, often having to backtrack, and going over rugged mountain ranges without roads, mostly along the sixtieth parallel of longitude. The journey had so far taken close to three years. This distance and the wild terrain were the main obstacles to Peter’s ambitious plans for a Russian Pacific empire. Now, at the Pacific coast, Bering had a new objective—to build a large seagoing ship and set out for the Arctic Ocean.

  SPANGBERG AND HIS CREW spent the fall and winter of 1727 beneath the mighty 14,580-foot Klyuchevskoy Volcano. They chopped trees near a small native settlement about 100 miles inland from the coast where the largest trees grew and then floated them closer to the coast where the shipbuilders and carpenters were laboring. Others distilled liquor from grass, known as slatkaya trava, following a local recipe; boiled seawater for salt; churned fish oil into butter; and caught and dried vast quantities of salmon on wooden flakes. By late April, the skeleton of the ship was taking shape, its ribs and frame were already set, and the planking was well under way. It was 60 feet long and 20 feet wide and stood 7 feet tall from keel to deck. Within weeks the two masts, sails, rigging, and anchors were ready and the ballast, three cannons, and food loaded. They christened the small ship Archangel Gabriel and launched it on a warm day, July 9. They had provisions for forty-four men for a year, much of it brought from afar: 15 tons of flour, 3 tons of sea biscuit, and twenty barrels (for freshwater), in addition to local supplies of 12 tons of fish oil and 760 pounds of dried salmon. Four days later, the men climbed aboard, and the ship pushed off and sailed 120 miles to the open ocean and then north along the Pacific coast of Kamchatka to complete the final task of their epic assignment.

  Chirikov was calculating latitude and longitude and sketching a rough chart of the coastline. To his surprise, the coast trended northeast. As they kept the course, for weeks land was visible as a giant fog bank to their left. They stopped only twice, to go ashore and search for freshwater, as the mountains “were all very high and equally steep, like a wall, and variable winds blew from the ravines between the mountains.” They saw and made note of all prominent land features and the abundance of marine animals such as whales, sea lions, walrus, and porpoises. The weather was generally foggy and drizzly. Near the end of July, the Gabriel passed the mouth of the Anadyr River. The weather remained good for sailing, with fine winds and no storms. On August 8, the lookouts spied a large skin boat approaching, with eight men aboard who spoke a language they could not understand very well (probably Chukchi Inuit). Even with his local Kamchatkan interpreter, Bering could obtain no information about the geography farther north or west other than that “they do not know how far the land extends to the east… but later he said that there is an island that can be seen from land on a clear day, if one moves not far from here to the east.” Nevertheless, they kept sailing north until they reached latitude 65 and were faced with a choppy open sea stretching to the northern horizon: the Icy Sea. Although they did not know it, they were sailing through the strait that British mariner Captain James Cook would name for Bering nearly fifty years later on his third famous voyage of discovery. An earlier Russian explorer first made a voyage along this coast, Cossack merchant Semyon Dezhnev. In 1648 Dezhnev led ninety men in seven small single-masted boats from the mouth of the Kolyma River 1,500 nautical miles along the Siberian coast and south along the Kamchatka coast. Some of the boats were wrecked and many perished, but at least two dozen men made it south along Kamchatka and founded a small trading post. Unfortunately, the scant reports of this voyage were never sent back to Moscow or to any Russian officials east of Yakutsk, and so the story of the daring and deadly voyage was unknown until 1736 and not of help to Bering.

  On August 13, Bering felt that they had sailed far enough to meet the orders he had been given. He called the officers, in the Russian tradition, into his cabin for a conference. In the Russian Navy, any major decisions had to be made by a joint council, not just by the captain. He asked them: Had they answered the question of whether Asia and America were connected by land? The opinions varied. Chirikov wanted to sail farther and perhaps overwinter; Spangberg suggested sailing north for three more days before returning, since they had seen nowhere to safely harbor the ship and survive an Arctic winter. Bering pointed out that basically the entire coast as far north as they had sailed was “mountainous, almost as straight as a wall, and covered in snow even in winter.” He did not want the ship to be iced in or wrecked on this barren, unknown coast, and he suspected that they would soon encounter sea ice.

  After the discussion and the
submission of Chirikov’s and Spangberg’s written arguments, Bering made his choice and wrote his reasons:

  If we remain here any longer, in these northern regions, there will be the danger that on some dark night in the fog we will become beached on some shore from which we will not be able to extricate ourselves because of contrary winds. Considering the condition of the ship, the fact that the leeboards and keel board are broken, it is difficult for us to search in these regions for suitable places to spend the winter.… In my judgement it is better to return and search for a harbor on Kamchatka where we will stay through the winter.

  Bering was a cautious and informed commander rather than a daring gambler; it was probably these traits that made him stand out to Peter the Great for this assignment, but also held him back in the navy during the war. He was pragmatic and goal oriented, looking for what could be accomplished with safety and the best chance of success. In this case, he was probably correct in his assessment of the risks and rewards: if some accident were to befall them on this coast, no help would be forthcoming, all the information would be lost, and probably there would be no further exploration. Bering evidently saw his job as paving the way for the future of Russia’s presence in the Pacific. He did not have the resources to go farther and did not think there was much to be gained. He ordered the ship to sail north for three more days, as Spangberg suggested, but when they saw nothing, they turned around and returned south. Although they were sailing through the Bering Strait, no one aboard spied the Alaska coastline due to continuous clouds and fog.

  Much ink has been spilled by historians unsatisfied with Bering’s accomplishments, whether Bering was overly timid or too quick to retreat, should have gone farther or searched for land to the east, or relied too much on the opinions of native peoples. But at the time, nothing was known of this land, and he probably did not view discovery as the main purpose of his expedition. He was chiefly sent out to establish the route across Siberia for future better-equipped expeditions and to chart the Kamchatka coastline, not to risk everything on a gamble that land could be found or that they could survive an Arctic winter here.