Highly educated and with a promising career before him during the reign of Peter the Great, Pisarev had been implicated in a conspiracy, branded a traitor, and sent to Siberia. At one time he had some proven skills, but his appointment as administrator was made without consulting him or anyone who knew him in the intervening fifteen years since his exile. Unbeknownst to Bering and Kirilov, he was now dissolute, unambitious, and lazy—hardly surprising given his fall from grace and the waste of his talents in Siberia. Nevertheless, orders were sent out advising him of his new responsibilities. Pisarev was to move to Okhotsk as the senior official of the to-be-expanded town and also all of Kamchatka and begin transforming the town into a significant port from which a regular commerce could be developed with Kamchatka. He was to begin organizing the construction of a new wharf, a church, barracks, and houses. He was to bring Russians and Tungus to the vicinity of Okhotsk to establish cattle and sheep ranching and other farming. To accomplish these goals, Pisarev was instructed to release hundreds of men from debtors’ prison in Yakutsk and bring them to Okhotsk for use as laborers. How were Bering and Kirilov to know that Skornyakov-Pisarev was now difficult to rouse from his torpor and had lost any warm, dutiful inclinations toward his government? In fact, he would prove more an obstacle than an aid, barely even arriving in Okhotsk until 1735, just before Spangberg reached the region with the first contingent of the expedition, anticipating and counting on infrastructure to accommodate him and his entourage.
THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE BETWEEN the first and second expeditions lay in the hugely expanded scientific goals of the second one. A ukase dated June 2, 1732, addressed to the Academy of Sciences, instructed it to select members for the scientific aspect of the expedition to study, as scientist Gerhard Friedrich Müller wrote, “what might be noteworthy in the manner of plants, animals and minerals.” The scientists’ job was to expand existing knowledge of Siberia and to make a detailed inventory of what was there—flora, fauna, minerals, trade routes, native peoples, and economic possibilities. It was to be a huge scientific endeavor, but it was science in the service of the state, imperial science rather than disinterested scientific inquiry.
Bering became concerned by the ever-increasing scope of his proposed expedition during the years of planning. It seemed new objectives were constantly added, all of which would no doubt be of great value—of that there was no real dispute—but how would Bering organize it all and be an effective commanding sea captain on a voyage of discovery? The scientific component, though a source of prestige for the government, meant added complexity for him. His increased pay did not cover the increased responsibility and fantastically complicated logistics. One of Bering’s junior officers, Lieutenant Sven Waxell, quoted him as saying, “There is no art in sending people off on a journey, for that is something they were accustomed to manage by themselves, but that to find them subsistence when they reach their destination was a thing that called for considerably more prudence and thought.” This observation was no doubt inspired by the vast distances, primitive conditions, sparse population, and harsh climate of Siberia, where procuring good food was a real challenge. Bering knew well what Siberia could throw at an unprepared party.
The scientists were led by three prominent members of the Academy of Sciences: Johann Georg Gmelin, Gerhard Friedrich Müller, and Louis Delisle de la Croyère. Gmelin was a young German naturalist, chemist, and mineralogist from Württemberg who moved to St. Petersburg in 1727 to teach chemistry and natural history. New animals and plants were his academic interest. He had also been asked by colleagues to investigate whether Siberian men produced milk in their breasts, as had been rumored, and whether they could move their ears at will. Müller was a German historian and geographer who had been in St. Petersburg since 1725. Now in his early thirties and a full professor, he was admired for his extensive studies in Russian history. Known for superior airs (he was proud of his academic position and distinction), he frequently locked horns with colleagues whom he saw as inferior. Müller’s portrait shows him to be plump and well groomed, surely not ready for the conditions of Siberia. “I also offered my services,” he wrote, “to describe the civil history of Siberia, and antiquities, the manners and customs of the people, and the story of the journey.” The third leader of the scientific contingent was a French astronomer and geographer, Louis Delisle de la Croyère, stylish and thoughtful, significantly older than the others in his midforties. He was also the brother of the well-known French cartographer and geographer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, whose maps erroneously showed a huge island just off the coast of Kamchatka. Croyère had already undertaken a journey to Siberia in the late 1720s during the time of the First Kamchatka Expedition. Some of the others later complained about his unsuitability for the job of geographer and his general incompetence.
Oddly, the three members of the academy were to report directly back to the Academy of Sciences. They were not technically under Bering’s authority; in fact, subsequent events made it almost seem that they believed that he should have been under their authority. The scientists and their assistants, entourage, and equipment added significantly to the size of the expedition, which was starting to resemble a resettlement migration—starting a new Russian society in northern and western Asia—more than an expedition of geographical discovery. The core members of the expedition consisted of more than five hundred people—the expedition officers, scientific assistants, artists, surveyors and students, boatmen, carpenters, blacksmiths, laborers, and others. Then there were around five hundred soldiers to keep order and ensure Bering’s orders were followed. Bering also planned on calling up to two thousand Siberian laborers at any time, to be recruited, or compelled, into service as needed. The scientists in particular required a great deal of baggage. And many of the scientists and soldiers’ officers and the expedition officers such as Bering, Chirikov, Spangberg, and Waxell were bringing their wives and children, which also significantly increased the tonnage of goods that would need to be transported across two continents. This was, of course, along with the same type of equipment that had so burdened and slowed the first expedition—all the shipbuilding materials and tools, clothing, and manufactured goods needed by people for an estimated decade-long journey. Unusual items included twenty-eight iron cannons; geodesic, astronomical, and surveying equipment (usually made of heavy bronze); and other instruments for measuring climate and temperature. There would be thousands of horses and hundreds of dogs. Riverboats were to be constructed at key watersheds. It was, even on paper in St. Petersburg, a staggering proposition.
Bering opposed including the scientists, not exclusively because he didn’t want the extra responsibility, but due to the anticipated food shortages and lack of shelter for so many flooding into a region of sparse population and marginal living conditions. Bering remembered the reality of Siberia from his first expedition—the extreme harsh weather, lack of any significant cities, poor and meager agriculture, and low and widely distributed population. Okhotsk, which was where Skornyakov-Pisarev was supposed to focus his attention and create infrastructure for the expedition’s arrival, was nothing but a few primitive huts in a wind-lashed plain of harsh grasses and stunted trees, with a great deal of sand and poor stony soil. The members of the first expedition almost starved there awaiting the spring salmon migration. How were all these thousands of people going to find food, and where would they be housed during the winter? The biggest city, Tobolsk, just to the east of the Urals, had only thirteen thousand people, and nothing else in Siberia compared to it; Yakutsk had only around four thousand by this date and a few thousand more in the vicinity. The officers, particularly the three scientists and their assistants, were prickly about securing accommodation suitable to their higher status and would be packing large quantities of goods not strictly necessary for the journey or their scientific endeavors but personal creature comforts: plenty of brandy and wine, table linens and utensils, clothing, libraries, and so on. The situation was ripe for conflict. A chasm ex
isted between what was possible and what was expected, and Bering was being held accountable for these misaligned dreams and expectations.
How could this monstrously complicated octopus of an expedition, with its competing demands, interests, and objectives, snake across two continents without starving, let alone haul all their equipment and survive once they arrived in Okhotsk? Bering was not without resources and important contacts, and he brought up the issue with his brother-in-law Saunders and his commander at the Admiralty College, Count Nikolai Golovin, who was one of the three men responsible for dreaming the expedition into something larger than Bering had ever envisioned. After many meetings in Moscow and St. Petersburg, discussing the options and sketching out numbers, and with Bering’s input on Siberian travel conditions, which may have been hard to appreciate by anyone who had never been there, Golovin proposed something radical to the empress. He offered to take command of several ships and sail from St. Petersburg west to the Atlantic Ocean and then south around the Cape of Good Hope before crossing the Indian Ocean and then turning north through the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk to the town of Okhotsk, or Avacha Bay in Kamchatka, to deliver the needed supplies. It would show the world, he argued, Russia’s nautical power and ability on a voyage of noteworthy duration and location (this was decades before James Cook led any of his famous voyages of discovery in the South Pacific or North Pacific Ocean). It would provide training for hundreds of young Russian seamen and greatly aid the establishment of new colonies in the Pacific and make Russia stand out as a mighty empire. The expedition could also help construct a naval base and fort to protect the new trade they would establish with Japan, with livestock and agriculture being introduced to Kamchatka as a side bonus. It all looked appealing on paper, and not the least benefit would be that Russia could beat the British to the Pacific Ocean; it was already known that Dutch ships routinely sailed this route and traded with the Japanese at Nagasaki.
Before Golovin got too excited, however, others raised objections: Russian expansion to the Pacific would best proceed if it was a secret from other European powers, lest they foresee Russia preempting them in prestige and geography and attempt to interfere. Kirilov contributed his opinion that crossing Siberia should be easy, even with tons of food and equipment, owing to its numerous “natural canals” with only three portages. He appears not to have believed Bering’s report of the earlier expedition’s tribulations, near starvation, and deaths along these canals and “easy portages.” In any case, the expense of sailing around the world was too great, and Golovin’s proposal was turned down. In an official note, the Admiralty College assured the senate that the expedition was thought out, the problems foreseen, and actions taken for “all necessary supplies” to be sent to Siberia. Moreover, all the Siberian authorities in Tobolsk, Irkutsk, and Yakutsk would be officially notified and ready to give Bering all the assistance he needed so that “when Captain Bering arrives, everything will be ready for him.”
PART TWO
ASIA
The infamous packhorse trail from Yakutsk to Okhotsk is shown in this engraving from an eighteenth-century atlas. “I cannot put into words how difficult this route is,” Bering wrote in a report.
The beautiful natural harbor in Avacha Bay. Illustration from Stephen Krasheninnikov’s Account of the Land of Kamchatka from 1755.
Yakut woman and child astride an oxen, from an eighteenth-century atlas. Many of the Yakut natives were driven to penury through conscripted labor and the requirement to supply horses to the Great Northern Expedition.
Dogsled caravan in northern regions of Kamchatka, from an eighteenth-century atlas. Many hundreds of dogsleds were conscripted to haul equipment across Kamchatka for the Great Northern Expedition.
CHAPTER 4
ST. PETERSBURG TO SIBERIA
TO AN OBSERVER OF a parade or an army on the march, such as the cavalcade Bering led over the mountainous roads to Tobolsk in 1733, all may appear in order: the timing impeccable and the different components working harmoniously and efficiently, leaving nothing but clouds of dust as it winds over the horizon. In the view of the one responsible for making sure it operates so smoothly, this is rarely the case. When the grand and well-laid plans of the Admiralty College and the senate came up against the reality of Siberia, Bering, who was ultimately in charge, faced a series of logistical problems, struggles, and complaints. The difficulties Bering had to contend with on the second expedition were actually greater than on the first, due to the greater quantity of people and baggage, unmatched by a proportionate increase in resources for transportation.
The expedition was an unwieldy and diverse contingent, with different and competing interests all looking to Bering to see to their comfort and needs and with insufficient people to whom to delegate tasks. This logistical nightmare was compounded by an often hostile reception. When the advance contingents rode into Siberian communities, they were seldom met with smiles and open arms. People still remembered the hardships caused by the First Kamchatka Expedition. The official demand letters for labor, food, and supplies severely strained local economies and brought hardship to local peoples. Some of the Russian Siberians were former serfs who had fled east in search of more freedom, some had been Swedish prisoners of war, and others were criminals or political exiles (including many from the highest ranks of the old nobility). But the majority were Cossacks, the real conquerors of Siberia. The Cossacks hailed from the region north of the Caspian and Black Seas, greatly increasing the population of Siberia at the expense of the native populations. These descendants of the original Cossacks were technically Russians and certainly spoke the language, but they were just as hostile to the intrusion of traditional Russians like Bering’s massive entourage as they were toward the natives. They were not inclined to accept the authority of western Russians or to offer assistance just because someone produced a letter of command from a distant empress or because scientists used to life in St. Petersburg expected to be treated with deference on the frontier. A certain lawlessness pervaded the entire massive region, which few in the Russian court had ever visited. The various nomadic tribes frequently launched raids and stole livestock when they felt they could escape retribution, while the Cossacks subjugated the people and extracted tribute, usually in the form of furs. In addition, during Empress Anna’s reign more than twenty thousand new deportees were sent east to Siberia for various crimes against the state, increasing the “Wild West” atmosphere.
THE LOGISTICAL PROBLEMS BECAME apparent as soon as the expedition crossed the Urals and arrived in Tobolsk in early 1734 after months of travel on roads. This was the easy part of the journey. The first, slower-moving contingent had left St. Petersburg on February 21, led by Captain Spangberg. His job was to shepherd the sled loads of unwieldy and heavy materials that would be needed for the ships. Captain Chirikov followed in April with a force of more than five hundred, including all the officers’ wives and children, riding horses and hauling creaking wagons, and they soon, by coercion or conscription, joined nearly five hundred more soldiers and eventually as many as two thousand laborers as they progressed through Siberia. Lieutenant Waxell called them “deported persons who were to work on board our vessels on the rivers.” Bering himself followed soon after, on April 29, with Anna and his two youngest children, aged two and one. Their two older children, aged ten and twelve, were left in the care of family friends and relatives to ensure their education—the frontier was no place for them during these critical years. They would be adults before the family would be reunited, so it was a farewell for many years, even if all went well. The final group to depart St. Petersburg was the scientific contingent, who belatedly rushed east in August with their mobile miniacademy.
While Spangberg merely passed through with his group, taking seventy-four workers and using riverboats to transport about seven thousand pounds of raw iron in fifteen hundred leather saddlebags, the others planned on overwintering. The main parties of the expedition regrouped in Tobolsk
in January 1734 after a mostly uneventful journey. Although they were expected, there was no way a town of around thirteen thousand people could possibly prepare for the arrival of this many in winter. It was a season of fierce grumbling. Not only did Bering commandeer most of the best houses for his entourage when he arrived, but he also had orders to hire, or take against their will if they did not want to go, many hundreds of the local population when the expedition departed in the spring.
At the end of February, he and a small contingent set off overland on a winter trek southeast to Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal, to acquire trade goods of mostly Chinese origin, such as green tea, silk, and porcelain, to be used as gifts as the expedition fanned out across Siberia in the coming years. Bering and a few dozen people then pushed on to Yakutsk, arriving in October 1734—only a year and a half after departing St. Petersburg.
Captain Chirikov had the more difficult and unpleasant job of bringing the main body of the expedition east once the ice melted. It was not until mid-May that Chirikov had readied the approximately two thousand people of the main contingent of the expedition. They departed Tobolsk, no doubt to the relief of the locals, on riverboats following the route of the First Kamchatka Expedition. They planned to cruise down the Irtysh River to the Ob and ascend it, hauling the boats over the usual portage to the Yenisei, and then float down the Yenisei River, to the Ilim and Tunguska Rivers, and finally to the Lena. Each river system, as before, presented new challenges and obstacles and needed a new style of boat or cart and the unloading and loading of tons of equipment, hauling it over brutal portages during freezing storms or sweltering through maddening clouds of biting insects. And always, there was the feeding and management of thousands of horses and people of all ages, as they worked their way to the town of Yakutsk, with a population not much larger than the combined expedition.
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