Island of the Blue Foxes

by Stephen R. Bown

  Steller had lingered longer than he should have. The yawl was waiting for him, and it was with apprehension that he hastily rowed back to the ship—and was surprised at being handed a cup of warm chocolate drink, in those days a rare and special treat. And perhaps there is no more odd drink for him to have had. Consider that the cocoa was originally produced somewhere in the Americas, likely farther south in Mexico, and then shipped across the Atlantic, probably to Spain, and then to Amsterdam and St. Petersburg. Finally, it was carted overland to Moscow and across Siberian Asia, loaded onto the St. Peter, and taken back across the Pacific to America, where Steller drank it after being one of the first Europeans to set foot in Alaska. The chocolate had traveled even farther than the mariners, nearly circumnavigating the world.

  Within an hour of Steller’s return, Khitrov and his party of fifteen in the shore boat also rowed back to the St. Peter. He reported the good news that he had indeed found a good safe harbor on the east side of Wingham Island, which was about a mile long and half a mile wide. “In going there between N. and E., the depth of the channel was 25, 22, 18, 10, 7, 6, 4 and 3½ fathoms where it was possible to anchor.” The bottom was “sandy and in spots clayey. The island is sheltered from many winds.” During their exploration of the smaller island, the men discovered a summer hut constructed with hewn boards. The hut contained tools and domestic implements, including a wooden basket of unusual design, a shovel, and a small copper-stained stone. Khitrov thought that perhaps the stone was used as a whetstone for copper tools. They had met no people, but the signs suggested that there had been people here shortly before the explorers’ arrival. Khitrov assumed that the people here, as the ones on Kayak Island, “on seeing us ran away or hid or that they have their habitations on the mainland and come to the island in summer to catch fish and other sea animals.” Hardly surprising conclusions, considering the tiny size of the island and the difficulty of hiding from fifteen men on such a small patch of land. But the good news to Bering was that Khitrov not only discovered but had also roughly charted the safe harbor, one of the specific requirements of his orders now accomplished.

  Bering ordered some of the men to return in the yawl for the final load of water barrels and to leave some gifts that, Waxell noted, “were to be left in the cabin for the natives.” The gifts included some cloth or leather, two iron kettles, two knives, twenty large glass beads, two iron tobacco pipes, and a large package of leaf tobacco. The idea was to leave for the local people a good impression of the bearded strangers, as a foundation for good relations on future visits. Waxell proclaimed that the smoked fish they had taken from the encampment “tasted most excellently” and was pleased with the exchange. Steller had a different, and dimmer, view once he noted the additional plundering of the camp that had occurred after he had described where it was: “If we should ever come again to these parts, the natives would certainly run away even faster or they would show themselves as hostile as they themselves had been treated, especially if it should occur to them to eat or drink the tobacco… for them to conclude that we had intended to poison them!” Either Steller was merely being contrary, or he was jaded in his views because of the ill treatment of the natives in Kamchatka. But if evidence from other early encounters between Europeans and remote peoples is a guide, the gift of iron items such as kettles and knives would have been viewed as extremely valuable and warmly remembered.

  When he was in the vicinity of the camp, Steller had a feeling that he was being watched, a vague sense of uneasiness. His suspicion was confirmed a half century later from an unexpected source. Another Russian ship under the command of Gavril Sarychev, as part of the Joseph Billings expedition in 1790, encountered a “very good-natured and intelligent” Eyak man, who told them, through an interpreter, a tale from his childhood. When he was a boy, he remembered a ship coming to Kayak Island during the summer, when his family used to visit the island after fishing and hunting on the mainland. “When the ship sent a boat ashore, we all ran away. When the ship sailed away, we returned to our hut and found in our underground storeroom glass beads, tobacco leaves, an iron kettle and something else.”

  AFTER THE FINAL BARRELS of water were loaded, stories told, and the hot chocolate drink savored, things resumed their natural pattern. As he wasn’t immediately chastised for being a little late returning, Steller recorded that he “made my ideas known about various things”—probably in a manner that reinforced everyone’s disgust with his arrogance. When he heard they were calling the southern tip of the island Cape Elias and marking it on their chart as such, he groused that “the officers were determined to have a cape on their chart” even though he “plainly represented to them that an island cannot be called a cape.” He even took the liberty, for their edification, of pointing out that the projection of a cape must come from the land, “the same meaning being conveyed by the Russian word nos (nose), while in the present case the island would represent nothing but a detached head or a detached nose.” No one likes a pedant, and one can almost hear the sighs of exasperation and annoyance, see the turned backs, and feel the dark thoughts.

  The next morning, July 21, Bering unexpectedly came on deck, “much against his usual practice,” and without consulting anyone ordered the ship to weigh anchor and proceed north along the coast. Waxell approached Bering and tried to convince him to delay at least a few more hours for one final trip to fill the remaining twenty water barrels, but Bering refused and claimed that “because of the approach of August and our ignorance of the land, the winds, and the sea, we should be satisfied for this year with the discovery already made.” Waxell and Khitrov were not pleased with the directive, in particular sailing without a full supply of freshwater, but they chose not to demand a sea council to discuss it further and bowed to Bering’s wishes, at least in part. Rather than sailing directly home through known waters, Waxell writes that “it was our intention to follow the land as it went.” Bering had good reasons for his trepidation and a gnawing fear that with provisions for only one season and no knowledge of the winds and currents, they were in fact in a dangerous and precarious situation. It had taken them seven weeks to get across the ocean, so he had to assume it would take as long or longer to recross it. Bering had been looking for patterns in wind movements as recorded in the logs, and he came to the conclusion that for most of the summer, the prevailing winds were twice as likely to be northeasterly or easterly compared to the opposite direction. If the pattern held, he thought it might mean, as it does for other monsoon-type weather systems, that with the changing season, the winds might reverse. If so, the ship would be battling against headwinds that blew two-thirds of the time from the opposite direction, southwesterly. The winds would be against them. If this was the case, they had only about three more weeks to explore the Alaskan coast while working their way northwest.

  Later in the morning, as the ship eased out from the shelter of the islands, Steller mused philosophically that “the only reason we did not attempt to land on the mainland is a sluggish obstinacy and a dull fear of being attacked by a handful of unarmed and still more timid savages, from whom there was no reason to expect either friendship or hostility, and a cowardly homesickness which they probably thought might be excused.… [T]he time spent here in investigation bears an arithmetical ratio to the time used in fitting out: ten years the preparations for this great undertaking lasted, and ten hours were devoted to the work itself.” As the land drifted by, he could only imagine what interesting things lay undiscovered; he was not content with what they had done and was disdainful of the cowardice he imagined ruled Bering’s and the other Russian officers’ decisions. (Bering would have been even more risk averse had he known what Chirikov was dealing with around the same time farther south and east along the same coast.)

  From Kayak Island, the ship sailed west and then in a generally northwesterly direction through fog, wind, and the occasional short but rough gale. One typical entry in the ship’s log reads, “Stormy, squally, rainy.” Heav
ily forested islands, such as Hawkins, Hinchinbrook, and Montague Islands, with concealed waterways, littered the coast and bedeviled their efforts to gain a clear understanding of the geography. With more time or better weather in a more clement season, the improved visibility might have revealed the glacier-fed fjords in Prince William Sound, the Copper River delta, and numerous native villages. The seas grew more turbulent with the “continuous stormy and wet weather” the farther they sailed. But the land did not trend to the north as they had supposed, but curled to the west, requiring the ship to keep angling, to avoid the unknown dangers of the coast.

  As the St. Peter slid northwest, Steller had time to muse on the differences between Kamchatka and Alaska. The “American continent (on this side),” he wrote, “as far as climate is concerned, is notably better than that of the extreme northeastern part of Asia.” Although the mountains were “amazingly high,” with peaks covered in perpetual snow, they were of a “much better nature and character” than the mountains of Kamchatka. Showing the curiosity and wide range of interests common to scientists during the eighteenth century, Steller speculated that the mountains in Kamchatka were “thoroughly broken up and long since deprived of their coherency, consequently too loose for the circulation of mineral gases and devoid of all inner heat, accordingly also without precious metals. On the other hand the American mountains are solid; not naked rocks covered with moss but everywhere with good black soil, and therefore not… barren, with stunted dwarf trees among the rocks, but densely covered to the highest peaks with the finest trees.” Steller was convinced of the correctness of the (now preposterous) theory that the inner heat of the Alaskan mountains produced the greater size and quantity of vegetation compared to the vegetation in the corresponding latitude of Asia. Steller had no qualms about theorizing and sharing his theories even with people who had no interest in them; in the absence of any accurate knowledge of the natural world, unsophisticated and unsystematic speculation was the starting point for scientific inquiry.

  While watching the lushly forested and mountainous coast slowly pass by, Steller was able to study and record his observations of the specimens that he had collected, or at least the ones that Bering had allowed him to bring aboard the ship. He was already familiar with many of the plants on Kayak Island because they were similar to those found in Kamchatka, including blueberries, crowberries, and cloudberries. But one of his most prized discoveries was a large raspberry-like plant that grew in profusion where he had rambled. The new species of raspberry, which is now called a salmonberry, was “not yet quite ripe.” He had carefully dug up a few plants because he felt that he should have been allowed permission to bring several living specimens aboard ship for the return journey, kept in planters on the deck, “on account of its great size, shape, and delicious taste.” But he had to content himself with dead specimens. He recorded in yet another barb at his fellow adventurers that “it is not my fault that space for such was begrudged since as a protester I myself took up too much space already.”

  Steller had also noted ten different “strange and unknown” birds. Only the magpie and the raven were familiar to him. Steller’s servant, Lepekhin, shot one bird that he was particularly excited about. It was a species that looked similar to the blue jay, which Steller remembered seeing in a book on the birds of the Carolinas that he had perused at the academy library in St. Petersburg. He had in his mind’s eye “a likeness painted in lively colors” by a naturalist whose name he couldn’t remember (the book was The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, by English naturalist Mark Catesby). The remarkably colorful bird, a cousin to the eastern blue jay but with a tuft of black on its head, was later given the name Steller’s jay, Cyanocitta stelleri, in commemoration of its first recorded observation for science. “This bird alone,” Steller wrote, “proved to me that we were really in America.”

  Steller also took time to defend his lack of discovery of minerals, one of the key and important objectives as defined by the expedition’s instructions. His superiors in St. Petersburg, he wrote hopefully, “will easily see that my failure to discover any minerals is not due to carelessness or laziness on my part. I confess freely that I observed nothing else than sand and gray rock. It is also well known that close to the beach Nature is neither able nor accustomed to produce anything outside of marcasites and pyrites.” Everyone in the Russian service was now anxious to do exactly to the letter what their instructions demanded and to defend themselves against even the slightest deviation from those instructions. Just as Bering was checking off all the points in his orders, and pursuing anything else with a decided lack of enthusiasm, Steller was making sure he could justify his actions and reasons for going on the voyage without official permission and only Bering’s word that all would be fine. They were all a little afraid of the repercussions of not being diligent or of being overly independent.

  On July 25, the “Captain Commander had a consultation with his officers, and it was agreed, while the misty weather prevailed, to sail SW by compass, which would take us towards Kamchatka; but when the weather cleared and the wind turned fair to sail N and W in order to observe the American coast.” Waxell and Khitrov’s desire to explore more of the Alaskan coast prevailed over Bering’s desire to return immediately—Bering was no longer entirely in control of the ship’s course. As soon as the weather cleared, the ship would head back closer to land and again follow the coast, a slower but more interesting route.

  On one occasion, the visibility from the ship was so poor that they were essentially sailing blind; they could see no land in any direction, yet a sounding found them in shallow water with choppy waves. “We tried everything possible,” Waxell wrote, “to escape from there, but in whatever direction we sailed, we found only shallow water. I had no idea what was the best thing to do. I decided to sail due south. For a time the depth remained the same, but fortunately we eventually came out into deep water.” When the mist cleared on the morning of July 26, they spied “high land” perhaps twenty or thirty miles distant to the north of the ship. It was probably Kodiak Island or nearby Sitkalidak Island. But the storm soon returned, and the St. Peter pushed through the swirling soup of “drizzle” and fog and on the twenty-ninth “hove to on account of the gale.” On July 30, the turbulent weather began to clear, and by the thirty-first the wind changed and they changed course to the north to come closer again to the mainland. Fog periodically rolled across the water.

  Shortly after midnight on August 2, through a clearing sky and a sliver of moon, eyes peered from the deck toward a “large wooded” island that had loomed like an eldritch apparition out of the encompassing fog. Bering called it Archdeacon Stephen’s Island, after the saint’s name day, but Waxell and Khitrov called it “Tumannji Ostrov,” or Fog Island. In 1794 Captain George Vancouver called it Chirikov Island, after the commander of the St. Paul, even though Chirikov never saw the island. It is about one hundred miles southwest of Kodiak Island. As the weather had become “unusually pleasant and warm, sunny and absolutely calm,” and a sea lion swam lazily around the ship, peering up at them, Steller begged to go ashore a final time, as he could see freshwater lakes, streams, and rolling grassy hills. He was refused because Bering thought the landing might prove treacherous on account of reefs or shoals. Steller and Bering “got into a slight altercation on the subject.” Bering then called a sea council in the cabin, with the main purpose of agreeing that the officers would never “upbraid” Steller or accuse him of not wanting to do his duty “most zealously, to the best of my ability, and at every opportunity.” It was yet another example of Steller’s fear of official reprimand from the academy or the senate for not doing his duty to explore and assess the natural bounty of the new lands. Once this face-saving information was duly recorded and everyone promised to uphold his assiduous pursuit of duty, Steller agreed “to let it go at that.”

  The St. Peter weighed anchor and continued in a northwesterly direction, while Steller contented himsel
f with casting his fishing line from the railing of the ship and catching two new species of sculpins that were lurking in the coastal waters. They had not solved their water problem, however, and there was no way they could sail all the way west to Kamchatka without stopping somewhere. While Bering worried about contrary winds, Steller just waited for his chance to go ashore. According to their calculations, Kamchatka was still around fifteen hundred nautical miles to the west.

  * Situated on the Alaska-Yukon border, Mount St. Elias is one of the highest mountains in both the United States and Canada at 18,008 feet (5,489 meters). Today the massive mountain is part of Kluane National Park in Canada and Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve in the United States. Sometimes called Shaa Tlein, or the “Big Mountain,” by the Yakutat Tlingit, it is less romantically known as Boundary Peak 186. Some historians maintain that the mountain was not named by Bering and his officers but that its name was appended later in the eighteenth century and named after the far less impressive Cape St. Elias on Kayak Island.

  CHAPTER 8

  CURIOUS ENCOUNTERS

  IN THE EARLY MORNING of June 20, in the mid-North Pacific Ocean south of the Alaskan Peninsula and Chirikov Island, the men of the St. Paul saw the St. Peter on the horizon to the north. The visibility was poor, and two hours later the St. Peter had disappeared from sight, leaving them alone. Chirikov ordered the St. Paul to continue on the regular course with a lowered mainsail. But the next day, they were still alone on the sea, and Chirikov “gave the order to steer as near as possible” to the spot where they had last seen the St. Peter, in accordance with his prearranged orders. The winds were contrary, and it was hard work keeping the St. Paul in the proper area. On the morning of June 23, Chirikov convened the officers in his cabin, and they agreed to continue the voyage alone, hoping to meet up with their sister ship later. The St. Paul pressed on through the gusty sea in a general northeasterly direction.