Now the race was on. The weather was calm and breezy, good sailing weather, but no one knew how long these conditions would last. Using the two small boats, they all began working day and night, loading the ship with everything for the voyage, stopping only when exhausted. Since they had no idea how long they might be at sea, they needed a great deal of food and water in addition to all the regular materials for running the ship, including the ballast. Men hastened to set the masts, hang the anchor, and set the rigging. After days of constant activity, the men were nearing collapse, but the ship was ready for sea. Last to be loaded on was the men’s personal baggage. On this issue, Steller fell to quarreling with the mariners. They felt there was no room for him to bring aboard all his collected specimens from Alaska, the Aleutians, and Bering Island, despite the fact that each mariner had stuffed the hold with bales of dried sea-otter skins. Steller had to be content with his notebooks and a few choice items. He had a large collection of preserved plants, of which he was permitted only the seeds, and he had painstakingly prepared the skeletons and skins of many mammals, including a young sea cow and a Steller’s sea lion, stuffed with grass. But there were no exceptions, and Steller grumbled and fumed until he reluctantly abandoned his specimens.
At four in the afternoon on August 13, 1742, the men emerged from their dwellings for the final time, feeling “much inner emotion,” according to Steller. They stood around the nearby graves, remembering. They hammered into the sand a wooden cross where Bering lay, hung their heads, and then ferried out to the ship in groups. It was only then that they truly appreciated just how crowded they would be, crammed in among the baggage and food. As they began to row over the reefs and out to sea with the tide, they looked back and saw that blue foxes had already swarmed their abandoned camp, scavenging “with the greatest glee” for scraps of meat and fat and other interesting items left behind.
THE NEW ST. PETER, riding low in the water, set sail and slowly headed south around the headland before steering west to where they surmised Kamchatka would be, hopefully not too far away. The weather was unusually “clear with passing clouds.” They set their course and prayed to avoid any early autumn storms. The ship coasted along, and the men looked one final time ashore to the island, “on which we knew every mountain and valley which with much toil we had climbed so often in search of food… and to which we had given names.” Steller, the unofficial spiritual leader and counselor, wrote of their final longing: the island was a place of struggle, misery, and death when they arrived, yet he marveled “how wonderfully we were fed, and how in spite of astounding toil we steadily gained in health and became more and more hardened and strengthened, and the more we gazed at it in parting the plainer it appeared to us, as in a mirror, God’s wonderful and loving guidance.” Soon the island was gone from view entirely, and they again faced the unknown ocean.
The wind increased the next day, and the seas became so choppy that they had to cut adrift the ship’s yawl, which was dragging against a headwind. By midnight, someone noticed that the ship seemed to be steering sluggishly, and when they looked below they beheld a sickening sight: the hold was awash in water. Water was filling the ship faster than they could bail or pump it out. Waxell called for reduced sail, and they began heaving overboard anything they didn’t immediately need, including all the cannonballs and other lead shot. Men frantically scampered about belowdeck, moving barrels and bales around, searching for the problem. Once the ship was lightened and floating higher in the water, at around three in the morning, the carpenter Starodubstov discovered the hole: an open gap between planks where the caulking had fallen out. They caulked it again and then nailed planks over the gap from the inside, and this stemmed most of the water from flooding the ship. With constant pumping, they could keep the water level steady as the ship slowly continued west.
Two days later, on August 17, they spied to the west through the fog and drizzle high snowcapped mountains, and they steered south to follow the coast to Avacha Bay, which they calculated was about thirty miles farther south. It took them eight days of struggle against contrary winds and calms, including a period when they rowed for twenty-four hours continuously, before they entered the bay on August 25. As they passed the rudimentary lighthouse at the entrance to the bay, a Kamchadal rowed out to them in a canoe. To his astonishment, he found that he was talking to survivors of the American expedition sailing in a new vessel made from the remnants of Bering’s old ship. They had all been presumed dead, he said, and according to long-standing custom, their “property which we had left behind had fallen into the hands of strangers and had mostly been carried away.” The news produced scarcely a ripple of discontent among the survivors, so accustomed were they to “misery and sorrow.” Stoic and filled with relief, they “regarded the present circumstances as in a dream.”
The new St. Peter cruised on to Petropavlovsk and arrived at two in the afternoon of August 26, 1742, thirteen days after leaving Bering Island and ten years after the expedition began. The weary men clambered ashore in bewilderment, filled with joy and delight, tinged with disbelief. “From uttermost misery and distress,” Waxell recalled, “we were plunged into veritable superabundance,” where anything could be had from storehouses full of provisions, where there was plenty of room in comfortable, dry, and warm quarters. They were surrounded by things commonplace in their past lives but that they hadn’t seen for what seemed a lifetime. Despite the elation at being home again after fifteen months, the men soon realized that they now had nothing, no money and no possessions, and no physical reminders of their prior life. They walked around stunned, wondering what to do. The “sense of contrast [was] so overwhelming that it just cannot be expressed in words,” Waxell wrote. When he was alive, Bering had made a request to the officers and men that if they returned safely, they should all go together, whether Russian Orthodox or Lutheran, and make a contribution to the chapel for a common prayer service and to place there a memorial plaque with an image of the apostles Peter and Paul and an inscription offering thanks for their escape from the deserted island. In honor of their commander, they did so. It was their final act together before going their separate ways.
EPILOGUE:
RUSSIAN AMERICA
ON APRIL 25, 1742, just as the survivors on Bering Island were recovering from scurvy and debating plans for their escape, a new empress was crowned: Elizabeth I, cousin to Anna and daughter of Peter the Great. Although Empress Elizabeth never executed anyone during her long reign and remained an enthusiastic supporter of the sciences and arts, she came to power in a coup that cleared the court of non-Russians, specifically Germans, and her reign was open to few foreigners in positions of authority. The expedition remained officially in operation for the next year, but it had lost its luster as a celebration of Russian sophistication. On September 25, 1743, after reading the reports from Waxell and Chirikov and hearing of Bering’s death, the senate disbanded the expedition. All members were eventually recalled and their contracts terminated. The monumentally expensive and hugely ambitious Great Northern Expedition was officially over.
Although little is known about the fate of many of the mariners who sailed on the St. Peter and the St. Paul, beyond their names, occupations, and dates of death, several of the officers who had prominent roles in the expedition basked in the historical limelight. Steller and Waxell wrote memoirs that keep this extraordinary tale alive.
AFTER WAITING OUT THE winter in Petropavlovsk and recovering from scurvy, while wondering about the fate of his comrades on the St. Peter, Chirikov repaired the St. Paul and led a brief search for the St. Peter in June 1742. On June 22, he sailed close enough to Bering Island to name it St. Julien. He observed fur seals and snowcapped mountains but approached from the south and never saw or was seen by the shipwrecked comrades, who were building the new smaller St. Peter on the beach. Chirikov’s men were still in poor health and the ship was not in perfect shape, so after discovering Attu Island, the voyagers soon returned to Petropavlo
vsk. By mid-July the St. Paul sailed for Okhotsk to await further orders from St. Petersburg.
With the presumed death of Bering and the loss of the St. Peter, Chirikov was proclaimed new leader of the Second Kamchatka Expedition, so he headed inland to Yeniseisk to make his report. He continued to manage the affairs of the expedition, including working on the final map of the Russian discoveries. But his health was broken from the privations of the American voyage. He who had so often been impatient to get going on an adventure, and a little disdainful of Bering’s caution and prudence, had lost his own zeal for bold and uncertain undertakings. In 1746 Chirikov was ordered back to St. Petersburg, where he was promoted to captain-commander and placed in charge of the Naval Academy. Still suffering bouts of ill health, he died in November 1748, leaving a wife and four children.
WAXELL DID NOT REMAIN long in Petropavlovsk after the astonishing return from Bering Island in August 1742. He learned that Chirikov had returned from America the previous October with his men dying of scurvy and had sailed for Okhotsk barely a month before the return of the new St. Peter. He had a great desire to catch up with his new commander and make a report, so he quickly readied the ship, recaulked planks, and used the naval store of supplies in Petropavlovsk to make other repairs. By early September, he was at sea, but when, not long after, the ship soon proved unseaworthy with multiple leaks, he returned to spend the winter in Petropavlovsk. He sailed west to Siberia the following spring.
Waxell continued to serve in Yeniseisk for several years finalizing the expedition’s business, during which time he fought for compensation for his men. He argued that the government should give them their contracted ration supply for the time they had spent on Bering Island. Rations were part of their pay and obviously were never delivered. He sent a report to Chirikov, who forwarded it to the Admiralty Council. Waxell described the “privations and wretched conditions” of the men’s lives on Bering Island and explained the reasoning for his impertinence: “I am only doing what I owe to my subordinates,” he wrote in his six-page submission, “for those under me could complain to God and supplicate Him for vengeance upon me were I not to stand by them and reveal the pitiable state in which they then were.” He wanted the men to be paid in money for their lost ration allotment and explained in detail how the lack of rations had compelled them to “live off of all sorts of unclean beasts.” He then described them, painting a graphic picture for the urban officers of the council. “If you can perhaps endure the smell of sea otter meat, it is extremely hard and tough as soleleather and full of sinews, so that however much you chew at it, you have to swallow it in large lumps.” The sea bear “has a very strong and revolting smell.… [W]hen you have to eat them it requires a great effort.” He also described eating the entrails with “gusto” in order to survive, “yet we were never able to get enough of these revolting foodstuffs to nourish us properly,” and, besides, he continued, it was freezing cold and the men all suffered from scurvy and other hardships. He calculated a value on the “flour, groats and salt” for the time the men were marooned on the island and then offered detailed justification of the large total. In his journal, he included transcripts of his correspondence with the admiralty and was proud to report that his petition, and his description of their horrible conditions, resulted in each man being paid an additional one hundred rubles plus back pay at the rate of any promotions they might have received during the voyage for their “unheard-of sufferings and great distress.” Waxell’s petition reflected his enduring priority: while he certainly made some mistakes, he was a thoroughly honorable officer for his men.
Waxell eventually returned to St. Petersburg in 1749 and by 1756 had completed his memoirs in German. He never published them, and they became widely translated only in the twentieth century. These memoirs, along with Steller’s journal, form the primary source of narrative information on the expedition and voyage. Waxell died in 1762 with the rank of captain first class, and his three sons were placed in the nobility as a recognition of his service. His son Laurentz Waxell, the only boy volunteer on the voyage, went on to a successful career as an officer in the Russian Navy.
IN THE GREATEST OF ironies, Ovtsin, the demoted former lieutenant whom Waxell and Steller hinted might have had the inclination to lead a mutinous challenge to Waxell’s command while on Bering Island, discovered that his position had been restored by St. Petersburg prior to the sailing of the St. Peter and the St. Paul in the spring of 1741. The letter informing Bering and him of the news simply hadn’t arrived in time. Due to his many years of service, he, rather than Waxell, had actually been the senior officer once Bering died and should have been in charge on Bering Island. Things might have turned out differently had this been known. With his rank and status restored, Ovtsin after he returned resumed his naval career, serving in the Baltic as a captain first rank and later in a senior desk position before he retired. The detailed map he had made of his Siberian coastal explorations was a secret with the Russian government until it was published many years later.
SOON AFTER THE REMARKABLE return to Avacha Bay, Steller elected to remain in Kamchatka for more scientific investigations. He and Lepekhin set off right away, hiking thirty miles overland across Kamchatka to Bolsheretsk, where they were joined by Plenisner. Without funds (the Academy of Sciences had cut his pay when it believed he had disappeared), Steller spent the winter teaching and writing up his reports. He revised and cleaned up his field notes, sent reports to the academy, and wrote De Bestiis Marinis; or, The Beasts of the Sea, in which he detailed the fauna of Bering Island, including the northern fur seal, the sea otter, Steller’s sea lion, Steller’s sea cow, Steller’s eider, and the spectacled cormorant. He also opened a school in Bolsheretsk for both Russian and Kamchadal students. The following summer, he collected botanical specimens in the north, before he reluctantly made his way west, intending to return, with uncertain prospects, to St. Petersburg. He had heard that with the change in government, many of his German associates at the academy had been dismissed or departed the city in the wake of strong antiforeigner sentiment.
A deeply religious man, Steller was saddened by what he termed, in a letter to expedition botanist Gmelin, his failure to “accomplish something worthwhile” on the voyage, “owing to the lazy and pompous conduct of the officers Waxell and Khitrov.” His career was stalled, and he feared his detailed reports, painstakingly prepared on Bering Island and perfected in the following year, received no recognition at the academy. He feared they would never be properly edited or published. His dreams of world renown as a naturalist were dashed. Steller’s most prescient worry was that the most significant contribution of his voyage would not be to pioneer a route to a new land for continued scientific discovery, but to unleash a swarm of rapacious fur hunters in unregulated plunder—an exploitation that would result in the destruction of the very wonders he wished to study and preserve. Steller had natural sympathies for the various native peoples he encountered and particularly the Kamchadals, whom he felt were being unjustly abused and harassed by the Russians. In a misunderstanding, he released some prisoners who had been captured and were being detained by Russians in Bolsheretsk and was accused of fomenting rebellion. Competing accounts of his actions were sent to the Russian Senate, and he was recalled to St. Petersburg. Although he was eventually exonerated of the charges, word traveled slowly, and he was put under arrest near Tobolsk and ordered to return east across Siberia to Irkutsk for a hearing. Before he got there, another courier brought news that he was freed, and he again turned west toward St. Petersburg.
Since his return from the disastrous voyage across the North Pacific to Alaska, and probably for longer, Steller had been known for overindulgence in alcohol. On his return to Europe after news of his exoneration reached him, he stopped in Tobolsk to visit his friend Archbishop Antonij Narozhnitski. Tobolsk was a hard-drinking town, and Archbishop Antonij loved to celebrate. During a three-week binge, Steller contracted a fever and then unwisely pushed on we
st by horse sleigh. When the sleigh driver halted at an inn east of Tyumen to warm himself on a freezing night in November 1746, Steller was left outside in the sleigh, burning with fever and barely sensate. When found, he was near death and could not be revived. He was thirty-seven years old.
De Bestiis Marinis was published posthumously in 1751. Various collections of his reports were published later in 1774, but his journal of the voyage was not made publicly available until 1793. A host of birds and sea mammals bear his name, though, as he feared, some have been slaughtered to extinction.
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