60°10’16”N, 24°55’52”E
NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM
ELSINKI
To begin with, you have to walk past the African elephant and step in through the door at the back. Hanging on the walls are the flayed bodies of fish, frogs and birds. The room can feel ghostly, but visitors wander through the space, attentive and carefree, walking from one display case to the next, examining bones and info labels, and their attention is eventually drawn to it.
First, visitors see the horses, the bears, the seals and snakes, beast upon beast, their brittle bones carefully, imperceptibly attached to one another to form the contours of recognisable creatures familiar from books and zoos, and then they are confronted with this animal and its altogether different remains.
The other skeletons displayed in the room are white and neat; nothing about them reminds us of the bloody, messy work that unveiling the bones from within a living body requires. But this one’s surface is rough and worn, yellowed like an old newspaper abandoned in the attic; its ribs and vertebrae are adorned with a filigree of cracks and fractures, and in the places where a bone is broken, its darkened surface reveals the gleam of something lighter and porous underneath.
The bones are scarred and battered. Two sets of numbers have been marked on the ribs, one written neatly in ink and the othersketched in pencil, allowing us to discern nineteen arched pairs. The ribs have been numbered in a delicate hand, but the order of the vertebrae has been daubed on the bones in thick, brash felt tip. In addition, there is a tag attached to the atlas vertebra, a faded archive label, and to see it you have to crouch down and risk catching the attention of the museum’s security guard, but from this position it is possible to read, in robust typewritten letters, the wordsRHYTINA STELLERIand the year 1960. But the most arresting thing about this creature is not the marks left by human hand, but its size.
Stripped of its flesh, a bear is nothing but a scrawny, pitiful dog, a horse shrinks to the size of a pony, but even without its hide and blubber this animal makes the other skeletons gathered in the room look like flimsy little toys. If we continue into the next gallery, we see that its sturdy bones stand comparison even with the monumental frame of the humpback whale. Its sheer size commands our attention. Children run up to it shouting “dinosaur!”, because that is what they are most excited to see, but their parents hesitate. They have read the museum’s floor plan, and they know that the prehistoric creatures are on the third floor, not here, so they lean closer and read the words on the label to their offspring:
STELLER’S SEA COW, HYDRODAMALIS GIGAS
Imagine the Bering Sea, that great expanse of water between Siberia and Alaska, the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic Ocean. Imagine the Bering Sea in 1741.
I
[…]all these treasures of nature so artfully contrived, so wonderfully propagated, so providentially supported throughout her three kingdoms, seem intended by the Creator for the sake of man. Every thing may be made subservient to his use, if not immediately, yet mediately, not so to that of other animals. By the help of reason man tames the fiercest animals, pursues and catches the swiftest, nay he is able to reach even those which lye hid in the bottom of the sea.
Carl von Linnaeus,Oeconomy of Nature, 1749
53°3’55”N, 158°37’32”E
KAMCHATKA PENINSULA
RUSSIAN FAR EAST
1741
All expeditions begin with a cup of tea. Captain Commander Vitus Bering pours it, and from it drinks one Georg Wilhelm Steller, a theologian, naturalist, and curious man. The captain fills the cup to the brim because he has a mission. It was theimperatorPeter the Great himself who had first encouraged Bering to find a seaway, to chart a route from Asia to the Americas, and Bering had duly set off. In fact, he had set off twenty years ago, left the coastline and sailed north into uncharted waters, but the fog was continuous, the weather atrocious, and with his ship’s reserves of fresh water already depleted, the expedition had eventually decided to turn back. Bering returned with a more detailed map of the Kamchatka Peninsula, but the upper corner of the atlas remained empty, and theimperatordeparted this world without ever finding out where the edge of the New World is drawn.
Theimperatormay have died, but the thought itself has not. One must try again, try better and harder. The Tzarina Anna has given the order, and now another two ships float in the waters at Avacha Bay: theSviatoi Piotrand theSviatoi Pavel, St Peter and St Paul. Between them they carry a hundred men, a full twenty are needed to hoist their sails alone, and around them a wholeharbour springs up with barracks, workshops, hurriedly erected lodgings, and everything save the ships is small, dirty and cold.
Three scientists were selected to join the Great Northern Expedition, respected learned men from the newly opened Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg. No expense was spared in equipping the entourage. The scientists were accompanied by six assistants, six surveyors, two draughtsmen and thirteen soldiers, an interpreter, a physician, a technician, a drummer, as well as guides, rowers and bearers. With them, they carried a scientific library comprising hundreds of volumes, nine carts of instruments, four telescopes, five astrolabes, twenty thermometers, twenty-seven barometers, two hundred and sixteen horses and many barrels of fine Rhenish wine. They set off from the capital to great pomp and ceremony, with eight thousand kilometres of Siberia and an unknown sea ahead of them.
By the time the professors arrive in Yeniseysk, they have already been travelling for many years, many long, arduous years, and yet they are not even halfway to their destination. In Yakutsk a fire breaks out in their lodgings, destroying all their notes and samples. Years of work goes up in smoke, and everyone has reached the end of their tether. The astronomer falls out with the ethnographer; the further east they travel, the worse things get, and eventually they reach a decision. The professors write to the Academy to ask to be relieved of their duties, and without waiting for an answer they turn their horses and head westwards again.
The captain’s naturalists have set off home, but on their travels, they encounter a researcher who appears wholly unaffected by the misery of Siberia. This peculiar man does not care for powder and wigs, he drinks his beer and mead from the same tankard, but he is good at his work and speaks with great authority about grasses and birds that can withstand the Siberian cold. Professor Gmelin recommends that this man replace them, and Bering yields to the inevitable. He pens a friendly but assertive letter inviting this Georg Wilhelm Steller to be his guest at the harbour in Avacha Bay.
The theologian, naturalist, and curious man Georg Wilhelm Steller sits upright in his chair. He is wearing his best clothes, but that isn’t saying much; four years in Siberia will eventually take its toll on anyone’s sense of style. He has arrived on a dogsled and tries not to show how good it feels to be indoors in the dry with a cup of strong, warm tea. The Academy of Sciences had charged Steller with documenting the flora, fauna and precious rocks of the Kamchatka Peninsula, but while he was in the east a flame ignited within him. He has seen the steppes and the mountains, rowed across Lake Baikal, and now he wishes to travel even further and has requested permission to sail all the way to Japan. One expedition is much like another, isn’t that right, the captain laughs, fills the scientist’s glass, and Steller raises it to his lips and glugs.
Steller gathers his equipment ready for departure, but delays and unexpected obstacles lie ahead. Replenishing the ship’s foodstocks takes longer than expected: the crew’s biscuits disappear on their way to the harbour, and the batch made to replace them never arrives either, and the Koryaks in charge of the deliveries rise up in protest – delivering something to the furthest corner of Siberia takes time, and Kolyesov, the commanding officer responsible for the shipments, does nothing to make the job any easier. He is a man who does everything tomorrow, for today he can raise a glass, and Steller waits, curses, waits some more, and in the meantime compiles a study of the local fish.
Steller waits five months, twenty slow and sluggish weeks that he could have spent studying the novel species of Nippon, but eventually the long-awaited day arrives. Some of the provisions are still missing, but the expedition can wait no longer, it is time to leave so that they can return before the autumn storms, and on the twenty-ninth day of May the ships lower their anchors in the bay to wait for clement weather. On the fourth day of June there is a favourable wind, andSt PeterandSt Paulfinally begin their journey to Alaska.
The commanding officers crack open bottles of champagne. The cadets’ cheeks burn with an enthusiasm that Bering remembers on his own face when he set off on his previous expedition two decades earlier. Young men’s imaginations brim with the riches of far-away lands, islands, bays and mountains that will soon be named after them, the respect and admiration in the eyes of the aristocrats’ daughters, perhaps even of the Tzarina herself upon hearing of their adventures, but Bering is remindedof the monotonous days ahead, the dwindling food reserves and squalling nights when the men will pray for the salvation of their souls in the face of what seems like certain perdition. Back then, he was a man in his prime, but now he feels every one of his six decades; the young make merry, but Bering notes a shadow in the eyes of Khitrov, the fleet master. He too was on the expedition twenty years ago, and he knows what lies in store for them.
Bering leaves the celebrations. He is in no mood to raise a glass; he yearns for the wind and the sea, and he climbs up on deck. By now he can only barely make out the harbour, and behind that the summit of Avachinskaya Sopka rising up above the bay in all its tremendous grandeur. The sight is imposing, the sunset beautiful, but he turns his back to it and resolves to spend the rest of his days in warm, comfortable rooms.
Steller is a learned naturalist, but a gentleman he is not. The son of a lowly Nuremburg cantor, he is not invited to share the champagne, and instead immerses himself in work, noting down the seabirds and plants carried on the waves. He spends his time examining the currents and making all manner of calculations, and when he next sees Bering, he rushes to his side and explains he has worked out that it would be best to steer the ship a few degrees to the north-west, but the captain commander simply gazes out at the slowly disappearing land as if he has not heard Steller’s words at all.
They leave the coastline, and the ship is shrouded in an impenetrable fog. All that cuts through it is the call of a passing seabird, drizzle wets the deck and the sails, the men’s clothes cling to their bodies, damp and heavy, and nothing can keep them warm. Seven days of a wet impermeable dim, until eventually a wind picks up from the south-east and the fog disperses. The men climb up on deck to see the sun, but their stomachs become knotted in anguish, for opening out in front of them is the wide, empty sea. The expedition’s two ships have drifted apart in the heavy fog. For days they search for theSt Paul, but in vain. One of the saints is gone, taking with it half of the Great Northern Expedition’s provisions.
There is much to observe. The waves carry plants that only thrive in shallow waters. Steller watches sea creatures and birds that never venture far from the shore. Again, he describes his observations to the ship’s command and urges them to change course, but the officers merely raise an eyebrow and shrug their shoulders. How can a man under sail for the first time think he knows the seas better than they do? The captain commander takes no part in the dispute. He has no desire to upset the officers; they have friends in St Petersburg.
