Island of the Blue Foxes

by Stephen R. Bown

  Spangberg had all but disproved the existence of Yezo, or at least showed that it was one of the Kuril Islands exaggerated beyond reality, but had not been believed. Waxell, Bering’s second in command on the St. Peter, concurred, saying that “Spangberg’s map is based on actual experience and pays no attention to the statements or guesses of others.… Spangberg will not associate himself with the view that these islands are the land Yezo.… As far as I am concerned, I am now firmly convinced that if there is a land of Yezo in these regions, it can only be these islands. Had there been any other Yezo, it certainly would have been discovered.” Croyère was strenuous in his arguments, claiming that Bering and Spangberg had not seen the islands because they were farther east than everyone supposed. He was persuasive and had the backing of the academy in St. Petersburg, and Bering had orders to consult him.

  Despite Spangberg’s expeditions and the opposition of Chirikov and Waxell, who believed the lands to be phantoms, Bering decided that the first order for the St. Peter and the St. Paul was to head south to search for these mythical lands, so that he could not be faulted for not adhering to his orders. The other officers at the meeting reluctantly affixed their signatures to the document, agreeing on the course of sailing, southeast and east rather than northeast. Chirikov later reported that they felt compelled to agree to the southern course because of the charts showing that Gama Land “was part of America because, on the general charts, land is indicated all the way from California to Juan de Gamma [sic] Land, and this indication is also on the map of Professor Delisle de la Croyere [sic].”

  The decision led to a huge and time-consuming circuit of the vast uncharted expanse of the Pacific Ocean. This proved to be a disastrous course, especially when they were already a month late in departing and lacking in provisions. Writing a decade later, Waxell fumed that Delisle and his associates at the Academy of Sciences “who drew up these plans obtained all their knowledge from visions or that being very credulous they were dupes of others.… [M]y blood still boils whenever I think of the scandalous deception of which we were the victims.”

  THE SEA COUNCIL ALSO officially confirmed the decision that had not been made known to the crews, that both ships would return to Petropavlovsk by the end of September. With the loss of the supplies the previous fall, they had no means to winter over in Alaska. Now, given that they were already late and first to set sail southeast in search of mythical islands, this was a nearly impossible task for a single sailing season.

  The remainder of May was consumed with last-minute details—making ropes, caulking the hull, testing the rigging, making pitch and sealing cracks, scrubbing and scraping, woodcrafting, hauling and stowing supplies, and repairing damaged items. They were testing and fitting out both vessels to make sure they were in perfect condition and making the final crew assignments. Steller, seemingly oblivious to the frantic final preparations for the voyage and unaware of the sheer logistical complexity of the enterprise, was busy collecting and describing an unusual new species of fish he found in Avacha Bay. In addition to fourteen cannons and balls and gunpowder for dozens of small arms, they had loaded into the ships approximately six months of provisions per sailor: 4 tons of groats, 3 tons of salted beef in barrels, 3 tons of butter in barrels, more than 1 ton of salt pork in barrels, 650 pounds of salt, 102 barrels of water (about a two-month supply), 3.5 tons of crackers, as well as 17 barrels of gunpowder, firewood, iron, spare sails, rope, tar, and more.

  On May 22, the crew rowed out to the ships with their bags of personal items and occupied their quarters. There were seventy-six men and one boy, Waxell’s fourteen-year-old son, Laurentz, aboard the St. Peter and seventy-six men aboard the St. Paul. They would be living in crowded quarters. The St. Peter was commanded by Bering, with his second in command being Lieutenant Sven Waxell, followed by Lieutenant Andreyan Hesselberg, Shipmaster Sofron Khitrov, and Second Mate Kharlam Yushin. Georg Steller was surgeon and naturalist. Aleksei Chirikov commanded the St. Paul, with two lieutenants, Chikhachev and Plautin, as well as astronomer and geographer Louis Delisle de la Croyère. Alongside the direct command structure were nineteen marines and their officers and other professional tradesmen, including the purser, an assistant surgeon, coopers, caulkers, a sailmaker, a blacksmith, four carpenters, and the general sailors. There was one artist, Friedrich Plenisner, who was one of Steller’s only companions, and three “interpreters,” Kamchatka natives compelled or persuaded to come on the voyage to help speak to any people they might encounter in the foreign lands across the ocean.

  On Sunday, May 24, Bering hoisted his flag aboard the St. Peter and made a final inspection of both ships, which were to sail together, to offer aid in case of disaster. At the moment of great excitement, the wind died and the ships were becalmed, sails limp and powerless until May 29. When the winds picked up, the ships were towed into the outer harbor. Unfortunately, the winds blew erratically and from the wrong angle for several days: “During the whole twenty-four hours the winds veered back and forth between S and E.” The ships floundered and were towed about Avacha Bay until Thursday, June 4, when a mild northwester arose, plumped the sails, and powered the ships slowly through the narrows and out of the harbor. They hoisted sails and eased out of Avacha Bay in fine weather, setting off toward the uninterrupted horizon—course southeast, toward Gama Land.

  On the morning of June 9, after five days of sailing in fine weather to the southeast, the two ships had reached 49 degrees latitude and began taking soundings of water depth, as they were in the vicinity shown on the charts of the elusive Gama Land. They were on alert for anything unusual. “Straight ahead of us,” wrote Waxell,

  and at some considerable distance, we caught sight of something black on the water. It was thickly covered in an incredible mass of sea birds of all kinds. We could not conceive what it was and took a sounding, but without reaching bottom; then we altered course slightly, yet not so much as to put the black that we could see at too great a distance from us. In the end we realized that it must be a dead whale, and so sailed right close towards it. To begin with, we had been quite dismayed, thinking that it was a shoal of rocks of which we ought to be beware, for you can never feel safe when you have to navigate in waters which are completely blank.

  For the next three days, they continued to slowly track the ocean to 46 degrees latitude, finding no depth at ninety fathoms and seeing no land. On June 12, Chirikov wrote in his journal, “It became quite evident that it did not exist, since we had sailed over the region where it was supposed to be.” Steller, in the first of the recorded quarrels he was to have with the naval officers, disagreed with this assessment. He claimed to see in the wake of the ship “for the first time rather distinct signs of land to the south or southeast of us. The sea being quite calm we observed various kinds of seaweed suddenly drifting about our ship in large quantities, especially the sea oak, which do not as a rule occur very far from the coast, inasmuch as the tide carries them back towards the land.” He also claimed to have seen gulls, terns, and harlequin ducks—which he imagined were sure signs that land was near. He boldly made his opinions known to the naval officers, but having no rank in the naval hierarchy, he had little voice in the decisions on the ship. They were men of the navy, and most of them were Russians, or, in Waxell’s case, a soft-spoken Swede. Steller was German and from a very different educational and cultural background. He was used to open, though structured, argument with peers as practice for rhetoric, while the officers were accustomed to making opinions known when asked and otherwise obeying orders from superiors.

  Steller and the officers were doomed to misunderstanding and conflict and an animosity that swelled as time passed. Steller was increasingly ostracized and mocked by the seamen and retreated to his journal, where he poured his anger and resentment onto the pages. “Just at the time when it was most necessary to apply reason in order to attain the wished-for object,” he fumed, “the erratic behaviour of the naval officers began. They commenced to ridicule or
ignore every opinion offered by anybody not a seaman [Steller was one of the only men of this description aboard the St. Peter] as if with the rules of navigation, they had also acquired all other science and logic.” To Steller, the fate of the voyage depended on his scientific observations and opinions, and they were being idiots not to listen to him. This waste of his expertise occurred “at the time when a single day—so many of which were afterwards spent in vain—might have been decisive for the whole enterprise.” Of course, the ships were nowhere near land of any sort, but Steller felt wronged to have been dismissed—he was used to having his opinions taken seriously. To the mariners, he was an abrasive and puffed-up meddler who felt comfortable giving orders to naval men who had spent their lives at sea and surely knew the signs of land.

  Steller did not easily give up when he felt he was right, which was most of the time, and he continued to make his opinions known. The mariners provoked him and teased him to relieve the monotony of shipboard life. Steller became the entertainment, and sometimes he did not know it. At times mariners would pick an argument with him just to get a response. One claimed that there was no such thing as ocean currents. Another pointed to a world map and boldly proclaimed that they were in the Atlantic Ocean, off eastern Canada. A mariner told him confidently that the Maldive Islands were actually located in the Mediterranean Sea rather than the Indian Ocean. So earnest and superior was Steller, and so much did he underestimate the knowledge of Russians and mariners in general, that he believed the men were serious, and he vociferously argued with them. Perhaps his irascibility was the result of excessive drinking: among other subtle references, the log for the St. Peter from May 1741, soon after the voyage began, notes that “Ensign Lagunov took out from one of the casks on board a bucket of vodka and gave it to Adjunct Steller.”

  On June 13, the two ships pulled close together, and Waxell called over the rush of wind and waves through the “speaking trumpet” to Chirikov on the St. Paul. As agreed, Bering now commanded the two ships to abandon the search for Gama Land and to head northeast to America, having fulfilled their orders to search for the mythical Pacific islands. The two ships, each the only lifeline to the other in a vast uncharted wilderness of ocean, sailed off together to the east. But in the early morning of June 20, dirty weather blew in. In the fog, darkness, and “stormy winds” common in the region, the two ships lost sight of each other.

  They had previously agreed upon a plan for just such an event, so the two ships circled around the vicinity, searching for any sign of the other for three precious days. To no avail: impeded by contrary winds and rough weather, they could not catch sight of the other, despite sailing close by. After the allotted time, which had also been agreed upon beforehand, Bering and Chirikov sailed their ships on separately. Bering ordered the St. Peter to head south for four more days through dark, foggy weather, to 45 degrees north latitude, to test Steller’s theory that land was near. But after this additional wasted time, Bering ordered a northeast course in frustration. At least no one could say he had not fulfilled his instructions to take counsel from the members of the academy, and no one would again be inclined to give credence to Steller’s opinions, however strenuously he argued them.

  PART THREE

  AMERICA

  Tlingit boats are seen in this engraving of the Alaskan coast from the 1790s, from a sketch by John Sykes, in George Vancouver’s Voyage of Discovery.

  The first encounter between the men of the St. Peter and the Aleuts of Shumagin Island is shown in this sketch by Sven Waxell.

  Sketch of Bering Island and the strange beasts the shipwrecked mariners encountered; the Steller’s sea cow and the Steller’s sea lion, by Sofron Khitrov, similar to a drawing by Sven Waxell.

  Otaria ursina, the Ursine seal, or Steller’s sea bear, from an early edition of Georg Steller’s famous natural history treatise, Beasts of the Sea.

  This illustration from a 1753 German edition of Georg Steller’s Beasts of the Sea shows Steller, Friedrich Plenisner, and Thomas Lepekhin engaged in their famous dissection of a Steller’s sea cow, a now extinct species of manatee.

  CHAPTER 7

  BOLSHAYA ZEMLYA, THE GREAT LAND

  THE WEATHER WAS FINE, and men crowded the railings of the St. Peter when they were not working, discussing their predicament—the incredible distance they had sailed without seeing even a hint of land in any direction. By the end of June, the water barrels were half empty and the rations had been cut back just in case land was still more distant. The cook prepared the mush of the evening meal with a slightly altered recipe, so that it was thick rather than watery. For weeks the ship had surged east through fair wind and weather. “We saw nothing but sky and sea and heard only the officers exclamations and expressions of amazement over how we could have erred so fundamentally as to believe Kamchatka to be separated by a narrow channel from America.” Bering spent much of his time laid up in his cabin with an unknown energy-sapping illness, and the officers began running the ship without consulting him or informing him of their decisions. Second Officer Waxell and the sea council were effectively in charge, and Bering rarely made an appearance in the pages of his account of the journey. “Even thus early a beginning had been made to carry out another scheme,” Steller recalled, “namely not to let the Captain Commander, who constantly stayed in the cabin, know more than was considered advisable.” The St. Peter kept heading northeast, and for almost a month it was a dreary and uncertain voyage, with no imminent threats but the gnawing anxiety of the unknown. They saw nothing noteworthy and heard nothing but the swish of the ship sliding through waves and the ruffle of the wind in the sails.

  As constant as the daily routine were the internal conflicts. With seventy-seven people crowded onto the ninety-by-twenty-three-foot wooden vessel, there couldn’t have been much privacy. Steller was always at the center of the quarreling, and he continued to castigate the officers as fools for not taking his advice as to what direction to sail the ship. Despite the routine disagreements and his evident disgust at being taken so lightly and having his opinions ignored or ridiculed, Steller did not view himself as a source of interpersonal problems aboard ship. Meanwhile, the Russian sailors continued to insult and mock him for his fastidiousness and his foreign and arrogant manners. Steller wrote:

  The brazen and very vulgar snubs by the officers, who coarsely and sneeringly rejected all well-founded and timely admonishings and propositions, thinking that they were still dealing with the Cossacks and poor exiles freighting provisions from Yakutsk to Okhotsk, who had simply to obey and keep still without talking back, had been the cause of closing the mouth of myself as well as of others long ago. No matter what we observed and might discuss for the benefit of the general good as well as the public interest, the answer was always ready: “You do not understand it; you are not a seaman; you have not been in God’s council chamber!”

  The officers, he fumed in his journal after some slight to his honor or after someone had failed to show him the respect he believed he deserved, were used to dealing with the ignorant mob in Siberia rather than an educated gentleman like himself. They “completely forgot themselves and, through habit, fell into the delusion of being infallible or feeling insulted when anyone mentioned anything of which they were ignorant.”

  In the first instance, in early June, it was land to the south that Steller was sure they had missed. Now in early July, it was land to the north that he was convinced lay just a little farther across the ocean. When he spied clumps of mottled seaweed lurking just beneath the ocean’s surface, he assured the officers that land was near, most likely to the north, and was angered when they laughed at him and continued on their northeast course. Steller marshaled his evidence, all based on book knowledge of plants and animals rather than direct experience. There was the large clump of “reed grass” common in Kamchatka, an infallible indication of land since it would have been scattered if the ship was far out at sea. There was the strong current that he held out as being evide
nce of a nearby coast. There were frequent “flocks of gulls, which particularly in June, always keep close to the coast where the fishes approach the land and ascend the streams from the sea in the greatest number and thus afford them the most abundant food supply.” Steller observed that the birds were usually flying north or northwest. There were “red and white stinging jellyfish,” which Steller was confident were never to be seen more than fifteen or twenty miles from shore. And there were the sea otters, or sea beavers as he called them, which he occasionally spied in the clumps of seaweeds, although no one else could ever see them. Knowing what we do now about the ship’s location in relation to Alaska, the otters almost certainly could not have been this far out at sea.

  Even though Steller assured readers of his journal that “these irrefutable indications of a near land” were delivered to the Russian officers and to the ailing Danish commander, with “reason, great respect, and patience,” and he had advised them to “lay the course toward the north in order to reach land sooner,” they sighed and ignored him. Bering himself, probably regretting his initial impulse to invite Steller on the voyage in the first place, told Steller he considered it “ridiculous” and “beneath their dignity” and “annoying” to have to listen to him and that “in many parts of the ocean the whole sea was overgrown with weeds.” Steller was flabbergasted that his well-reasoned conclusion, that it was “inevitable” that land was near, could be challenged and dismissed by the commander so offhandedly. “What could I say to that?” he wrote. Steller was wrong on this occasion, as on many others, and although he outlined his reasoning in great detail in his journal, and some of it makes logical sense, turning directly north at this point rather than continuing northeast would have led them astray on a much longer voyage to America or to the islands in the Aleutian chain.