Island of the Blue Foxes

by Stephen R. Bown

  Steller’s keen observation took note of how quickly the value system of shipboard life was replaced by something more prosaic. Although they all knew that sea-otter pelts were valuable and would normally have been hoarded, they now tossed them aside for the foxes, considering them a burden. Items to which they had never before given particular thought and may not have even bothered to pick up had they been dropped, items certainly worth less than a sea-otter pelt, were now considered “treasures.” These included axes, knives, awls, needles, thread, shoe twine, shoes, shirts, socks, sticks, and strings. Nothing from their previous life, the life aboard the St. Peter, retained the same value.

  Some of the animosities from shipboard life continued, however, to ripple through camp. With disrupted naval discipline and far from home, grumblings toward the officers for past grievances and perceived slights and wrongs were amplified. Steller heard men occasionally “calling down God’s judgement for revenge on the authors of their misfortune.” Many in formerly high positions now glanced around apprehensively at the suffering men looking for someone to blame. Khitrov in particular was unpopular with the crew and feared for his life. For a few days near the end of November, Khitrov maintained a desire to stay on the ship through the winter, arguing with Waxell that it would be more comfortable and free from the wind. He clung to the structure of life and the authority that the navy afforded him. Perhaps he feared the misery, destitution, and squalor of the shore camp; perhaps he thought that the men, once freed from the ironbound strictures of the navy and with idle time, might turn their memories to incidents of past discipline and harsh words, to cruel jokes played upon them, to rough commands and punishments meted out. Khitrov no doubt recalled his claims and assurances to the men that they were perfectly safe and to his proclamation that he would allow his own head to be cut off if it proved that this landing was not Kamchatka. Many blamed the disaster on Khitrov and to a lesser extent the other officers. Steller recorded that “day and night,” when he passed by or lay down to rest, Khitrov heard barely concealed “reproaches and threats for past doings.” He approached Steller and his mates and “implored us for God’s sake” to accept him into their group. Steller was adamant. Their dwelling was already full, he said, and they had unanimously agreed on this. Khitrov had at one point or another during the voyage insulted all in Steller’s band, and they all believed that he “was the chief author of our misfortune.” They “refused him absolutely.” And so Khitrov crept back to sleep among the men in a large dwelling called “the Barracks,” where the sick were being transferred from the ship, ignoring the lidded glances and pretending not to hear the “wailing and lamenting” and the calls for justice.

  COMMANDER BERING WAS ROWED ashore on November 9, with four men carrying him on an improvised stretcher made with poles and coiled rope. They placed him in a hollow in a choice location of what was becoming the shore village in the dunes. The men joked about the “grave” they were digging for themselves in the sand. Steller was astonished at how much his commander’s health had deteriorated but was “amazed at his composure and strange contentment.” Once Bering was settled, Steller crouched out of the wind under the tent, and they had a private conversation. Bering wanted to know what Steller thought of their situation. Had they reached Kamchatka? Steller replied that “to me,” it did not look like Kamchatka and then quietly explained his observations on the nature of the plants and how he did not think it was far from Kamchatka, since the flora did not correspond to the plants he had seen in Alaska, either. Steller had also recently found some debris washed up on the beach that evidenced Russian workmanship. He showed Bering part of a broken fox trap, also found washed up on the beach. It was of a similar design to the traps made by the Itelmans of Kamchatka, but was fitted with a sharpened shell rather than with iron. This suggested that it had washed ashore from Alaska, where the natives did not have access to iron. Without making the claim, Steller proposed that they were probably somewhere in between the two continents. Bering looked pensive and replied, “The vessel can probably not be saved, may God at least spare our longboat.”

  As November progressed, the storms grew worse. The St. Peter’s rigging was ice encrusted. Snow covered everything, and waves pounded the ship, occasionally crashing over the deck and pouring into the hold. The high waves further slowed the transfer of men to the shore by making the boat trip to the ship treacherous. The men were exhausted from wading into the freezing surf, rowing back and forth between shore and the dilapidated ship. Waxell and four others were still trapped aboard working when another storm blew in on November 17. Waxell fired guns to call the longboat, but no open boat could make the journey during four days of violent storms. They had run out of water and had begun drinking mouthfuls of brackish fluid from the dregs of the barrels until it snowed and they could crawl on deck, scooping snow and melting it. While they waited, they pitched several more dead bodies overboard, so that they wouldn’t have to share the ship with them.

  In his own account, Waxell boldly describes the precautions he took to secure his own life. He covered himself up and protected himself with blankets, to shield his face from the change in air between inside and outside. During the past couple of weeks, he had “seen how many of our men had died like mice as soon as their heads had topped the hatch.” He had ensconced himself far from the hold and its noxious smells and damp dark spaces. The galley at least was lighter and warmer, and he could keep a small fire burning. He mused that he might be better off here than “burrowing in the snow ashore.” But he was mistaken, and “the bad air and filth found its way even there from the holds where so many had been lying ill for two or even three months, attending to the needs of nature where they lay.” He soon was so afflicted by “this evil, unhealthy stench” that he was unable to move his hands or feet or his jaw. He was nearly dead when they found him on November 21, insensate and slumped in the galley, unable to take two steps without being held up by someone under each arm. The last to leave the ship, Waxell fainted several times getting into the longboat and he was carried along the shore to the camp, where he was placed in the Barracks.

  Once on shore, Waxell soon became “so ravaged by scurvy that we abandoned all hope for his life.” Steller, “without a thought for former treatment,” rushed to Waxell’s aid with some fresh food and a salad that he had collected from the withered roots and grasses behind the beach. Waxell lay, unable to rise, crammed into the Barracks with the other mariners, fending off advances from the foxes, until a smaller tent was made ready for him. Steller devoted extra effort to Waxell’s care for a motive not entirely altruistic—anxiety over what should happen if Waxell died. The next in command was the near-universally despised Khitrov. Steller feared that “the universal hatred would destroy all discipline and delay or even prevent, the enterprises necessary for our deliverance.” Under Steller’s care, Waxell began a slow and painful recovery, much to the relief of many who also feared Khitrov’s actions. Part of the problem for Waxell was that his son Laurentz was not officially on the ship’s roster and so was not entitled to a ration from the ship’s stores. He and his father shared a single meager allotment of rye flour between them.

  On November 22, Bering was still prostrate and lying in the same sandpit in which he had been placed when first brought ashore more than a week earlier. He quietly spoke a command to Waxell to convene a meeting of the surviving officers and devise a plan to save the ship. A day later, the officers prepared the “Report on Saving the Ship” and presented it to Bering. The weather remained stormy and rough for days, and everyone was too weak to do anything about these orders, as it was impossible to row out to the ship, which was unmanned and tethered to the shore with every remaining anchor and the grapnel hooks. The report was signed by Waxell, Khitrov, and the remaining junior officers, Kharlam Yushin, Nikita Khotyaintsov, Boris Roselius, and Alexei Ivanov. It begins: “As you know, the ship lies out in the open sea and if a strong wind should come up from the east, southeast, west or northwest
, one anchor would not hold. On the east, north and west there are rocky reefs. If a strong wind should blow up from the south, or from between south and west, the ship would be driven out to sea.” They proposed sailing the ship onto the beach and tethering it as tightly as possible and then securing the supplies. And then in the spring, they hopefully would be able to resail the vessel. In any case, they believed that if they did nothing, the ship would surely be destroyed or lost during the winter.

  On November 26, Khitrov was the only senior officer still standing, but he too was now very weak, reporting in the log that he could “barely stand on my feet.” He tried to inspire some men to implement Bering’s orders to beach the ship, but he could only round up five able-bodied men with any strength to do the job. They tried to get the longboat into the surf, but the men became soaked in the freezing water and had to hobble back to the tents. With this small number of men, Khitrov knew that they probably would not even have the strength to weigh the anchor, let alone set the sails and steer the ship ashore—most likely they would have cracked against the reef, destroying the ship and killing themselves. He called off the operation and reported his failed attempt to Bering, with a written statement to protect himself in case of later repercussions. The next day, Khitrov was too sick to leave his tent, although Steller somewhat uncharitably, considering everyone was down with scurvy, suggested that Khitrov was more lazy than sick. In any event, their plans were overtaken by events. A mighty storm blew in on the twenty-eighth, snapped the anchor and all the cables, and spun the ship around. Then, incredibly, the currents and winds took the St. Peter and drove it not toward the reefs, but toward the beach, “on the spot where we had planned to lay her up,” near the small river below the camp. Steller was astonished that the storm had done the job “in a better way than perhaps might ever have been done by human effort.”

  The St. Peter now lay tilted and aground, just offshore, and it slowly settled into the loose sand of the bay to a depth of eight feet, up to the gunwales, and filled with the sea. The ship would never sail again. The wreck was only two hundred meters from the camp, a constantly visible reminder of their woeful predicament. Whenever the weather briefly calmed, men continued to ferry the remaining food stores ashore, rowing slowly back and forth in the single longboat. It was now a much easier job since they could get to the ship without rowing through the big waves and open sea. The food stores that could be saved consisted mostly of rye flour and groats that were stored in large leather sacks. Unfortunately, the sacks had been soaked by seawater in the hold of the ship. Waxell set a monthly allotment of these food items of thirty pounds of rye flour, later reduced to fifteen and finally to none; five pounds of sogged groats; and a half pound of salt. The food was equally divided among the men with no preference for rank or social standing, and it went a long way toward smoothing the tensions between the officers and the sailors. Eating the flour wasn’t much of a pleasure, though. The salty groats had to be fried in seal or sea-otter fat to be palatable. “Until we got used to it our bodies became distended like drums from flatulence.” The remaining gunpowder was also damp with saltwater and mostly ruined—a devastating and gloomy disaster greater than any that had befallen them so far. How could they continue to hunt for food all winter without gunpowder?

  When the men looked at one another, they saw writ on each other’s visages the evidence of their own deprivation and suffering. “Had a stranger somehow been able suddenly to come among us,” Waxell wrote, “some nobleman, for example, with his servants, or an officer with his men, and had seen how we were living, he would assuredly have been unable to distinguish master from man or the commander from his lowliest subordinate, for we were all in the same situation, master as man, sailor as officer, and alike in both regard to standing and work, food and clothing.”

  CHAPTER 11

  DEATH AND PLAYING CARDS

  WITH THE ST. PETER sunk crookedly into the sand of the bay, deserted and battered, everyone’s focus and attention was on their new life ashore. There was no more talk about sailing on to Avacha Bay, no talk about anything other than immediate survival. Once Waxell and the last mariners were taken ashore, the camp had grown to accommodate the entire company. It settled into the form that would remain throughout the winter—a cluster of dirty, ill-shaped domes of ragged, flapping sailcloth draped over mounds of frozen sand roughly bolstered with stiff fox corpses and driftwood, encircling a small smoldering campfire. Each cluster of dugout huts was organized into the smaller units first conceived by Steller, tending to their own immediate daily needs without central authority. Since most of the men were either prostrate with scurvy, dying, or already dead, there was little movement about the primitive village. The near-constant wind drowned out the low moaning of the sick.

  “Everywhere on shore there was nothing but pitiful and terrifying sights,” wrote Steller. “Some of the sick cried because they were so cold, others because hungry and thirsty, since the mouths of many were so miserably affected by the scurvy that they could not eat because of the great pain, as the gums were so miserably swollen like a sponge, brown-black, grown over the teeth and covering them.” Waxell wrote that “men were continually dying.” And the dead had to lie for a “considerable” time among the living, “for there was none able to drag the corpses away, nor were those who still lived capable of moving away from the dead.” Moaning and staring glassy-eyed, the living could scarcely be distinguished from the dead. “We became more and more depressed mentally,” Waxell recalled.

  Those who allowed themselves to be overwhelmed by this first stage of the disease experienced it thereafter as a general asthmatic condition, which made them unable to get their breath. This was soon followed by stiffness in the limbs, swelling of the feet and legs, while the face became yellow. The whole mouth, and especially the gums, bled and the teeth became loose… and having got to this state it is already all up with the patient and he might just as well remain lying where he is. Nor will he, as a rule, make any effort to save himself, but becomes so depressed that he would far rather die than live.

  Men were wracked by violent fever, unexplained rashes, stabbing pains, delusions, and constipation. They were utterly defenseless and helpless, even to fend off the nips of hungry foxes. “Truly,” Steller confirmed, “the sight was so pitiful that even the bravest might lose courage.”

  The mariners were reduced to such a miserable state that the old antagonisms and mutual contempt receded. Steller could not long remain indifferent to the suffering and labored tirelessly to minister to the sick, concocting antiscorbutic broth from herbs and roots he chipped from the frozen earth. In his eyes they soon became not his Russian tormentors, but human beings in need of his care. The barbed sarcasm disappears from his journal, and so, one imagines, might his voice have lost its imperial twang. With Bering near death, Khitrov universally disliked, and Waxell succumbing to scurvy, Steller became the unofficial leader of the shore camp. Virtually alone in being unaffected by scurvy, he found himself in a position of unexpected power over his erstwhile antagonists. Yet it seems that he took no advantage of the situation and that his character turned in a different way, toward being a comforter and doctor. Surprisingly, he also took over cooking duties. Steller was an admirably adaptable man who, for whatever reason, was able to instantly shed the cultural trappings of his former life—the privilege he enjoyed as an educated gentleman, the creature comforts bestowed by a higher rank, and the authority over a personal manservant. He took on menial chores without complaint and earned the respect of many. Steller never entirely lost his acid tongue, but now he kept it quietly relocated to his journal—and for his critique of those he felt incompetent or disrespectful.

  While Steller might have devoted extra effort to nursing Waxell back to health simply for the benefit of the expedition, others he saved out of friendship or respect. When the old and experienced mate Andreyan Hesselberg, a Dane who had served at sea for more than fifty years and was now probably more than seventy
years old, was brought low by scurvy, Steller was particularly saddened. Hesselberg had always been friendly toward Steller and had sided with him on some of the controversial decisions made on the voyage. Steller bitterly recounted the injustice that he should “suffer the misfortune now to be treated as a silly child and idiot by men scarcely half his age and one-third his skill.” When the Dane died, Steller wrote that Hesselberg “discharged his duties always in such a way that he carried to his grave the reputation of a preeminently useful man whose disregarded advice might perhaps have saved us earlier.”

  Steller became not just a physician but a minister, comforting the dying and saying words over the dead. His role in tending to the sick and dying, his tireless collecting of any antiscorbutic plants he could locate and organizing others to do the same, and his instructions to prepare broths and soups from freshly killed animals likely saved dozens of men. Yet he who usually filled his journal with details and stories is silent on his own actions in dealing with the scurvy epidemic—his decisive actions were reported by others afterward. Müller, the historian who later wrote of the expedition, relying on interviews with survivors, said that “men could not lose heart because they had Steller with them. Steller was a doctor who at the same time administered to the spirit. He cheered everyone with his lively and agreeable company.” Steller was respected as a doctor as he never had been as a naturalist. His ambition for science and recognition was slowly replaced with patience and compassion. It is also worth noting that Steller’s personality shift came along with the change of circumstances, at a time when he had real practical knowledge and skills to share, but it also corresponded to a reduction or exhaustion of the liquor supply.