A new, terrifying word enters the lexicon:extinction. The irreparable destruction of a species. What a remarkable, godless notion, and at first scientists try to avoid it at all costs. Perhaps these weird and wonderful bones belong to the ancestors of existing creatures, animals that changed as their climate and diet shaped them into new, sleeker forms. But the naturalists shake their heads. The chalk beds do not reveal a complete lineage like this, palaeontologists have been unable to find a chain of evidence from one creature to the next, and besides, what living creature could possibly be a descendant of the tyrannosaurus or the glyptodon? No, surely the earth cannot be home to such a beast.
Cuvier spends terrified nights considering the theological implications of his assertion, searching for a way to reconcile the truth of the Bible with what he can see in front of his very eyes. Eventually, he comes up with an answer. The flood depicted in Genesis – this must be the catastrophe that submerged even the tallest mountains, drowning the dinosaurs and mammoths, all the creatures that the Lord did not deem it necessary to save.
But his explanation is imperfect, for the new science ofgeology is constantly revealing lost animals separated by millions of years. The same flood cannot have swept away both the trilobite and the sabre-toothed tiger. This means that the world must have experienced multiple catastrophes, one after the other. The implications of this conclusion are immense, hard to fathom. A stable, unchanging system becomes a world in which destruction follows destruction, waters flood the land, an asteroid can darken the sky, time and time again, and where all that is left of many species is bone and dust.
The idea of extinction is both thrilling and horrifying, and visitors cannot get enough of these beasts of the past. They throng around the skeletons, hungry for more, they read everything they can about the dinosaurs and the mammoths and fill the benches of lecture halls as palaeontologists present their latest discoveries. Extinct species become almost fashionable, and eventually the sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins is given the task of bringing these lost creatures to life. His assistant is one Richard Owens, a keen young researcher who was the first to understand that the bones found within the earth form a distinct taxonomical class of their own. He coins the word “dinosaur” and divides these ferocious reptiles into three genera: the carnivorous, the herbivorous and the armoured. Hawkins and Owens examine the bones, imagine them covered with flesh and skin, and using clay and concrete Hawkins gradually restores these lost animals to their natural size.
The sculptures become a sensation long before the exhibition even opens. On New Year’s Eve 1853, Hawkins and Owens hold a dinner to which they invite all the leading palaeontologists inthe United Kingdom, journalists and the board of the Crystal Palace, and set out a dining table inside the iguanodon. The occasion is unforgettable. The guests enjoy an eight-course meal inside a dinosaur – oysters, pigeon, lamb shanks, pheasant, pastries and the finest wines – and make merry long into the night. The story of a banquet inside the body of an extinct animal quickly travels round the world.Punchcongratulates the men for the age in which they live, for “if it had been an earlier geological period, they might perhaps have occupied the Iguanodon’s inside without having any dinner there”, and theLondon Quarterly Reviewlauds the miracle that is humanity: “Saurians, Pterodactyls all! Dreamed ye ever of a race to come dwelling above your tombs and dining on your ghosts?”, and soon everybody is on tenterhooks, waiting for these beasts to be brought to life.
Hawkins and Owens do not offer the public mere statues; they create an entire world. The gardens at the Crystal Palace become an archipelago of the extinct, a place where visitors can wander through the past, experience the marvels of palaeontology and see living history with their own eyes. The Crystal Palace becomes the world’s first dinosaur theme park, a zoo whose enclosures are populated not by lions but by animals that have long since disappeared. Before this, the dinosaurs were nothing but bones and sketches, but now these large, heavy beings are finally made flesh again. A lake is dug for them, complete with three islands. Hawkins’s sculptures are not displayed in a museum or gallery but are released into the wild. Now these terrific reptiles can dig their claws into the mud, and Hawkins tries to imagine themoment at which they became trapped in the clay once and for all. The silent cry of a flying lizard carries across the islands, and visitors see the world as it was long ago.
Anna’s second cousin takes her to the gardens at the Crystal Palace, and she finally has the chance to see the famed statues for herself. Henry is considerate and borrows a wheelchair so she doesn’t have to exert herself, and the Palace’s very own curator gives them a private tour. Anna gives her sunniest smile and Henry pushes her along the neatly raked pathways. The winding walkways, the sparkling waters of the reservoir and the willows, pretty and pleasant, leaning over the water. Then they see the statues, the ichthyosaurs and Teleosaurus lurking in the shallow waters, the rough-hewn monsters on the islands, the Megalosaurus and the warty-backed Labyrinthodon. Hawkins has fashioned every scale and claw, chiselled lips that curve to give each of his creations a malevolent smile, and when the wind shakes the branches of the trees, their shadows shimmer above the statues, as though the dinosaurs are merely biding their time, their chests puffed out, ready to break into a gallop. But then a squirrel climbs along the Iguanodon’s tail, starts nibbling a pinecone, and the vivacity of a living creature, the movement of its little paws, makes the statue look like a statue once again. It is a curious frieze, two ages, two worlds, superimposed: the squirrels, the coots swimming lazily by, and the geese waddlingin amongst the dinosaurs; the lost and the living side by side, one on top of the other.
Anna looks at the dinosaurs, at the squirrels and titmice resting on their scales, and is strangely moved. How brutal and wild the world has been, how in flux. Groves, the curator, interrupts his presentation and smiles. That is true, he says, but no need for Madam Furuhjelm to worry, we are not at the mercy of nature like the poor dinosaurs. The best scientific minds are at work charting the laws of nature, and before long the world will open up to us like a book. Then we will be able to gauge the future and stave off catastrophes, to predict and prevent earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, to turn hostile forests and bogland into towns and beautiful, controllable systems, and the world will be like one enormous garden, a new Eden born of man’s needs and desires. Wild nature is hideous and dying, and only man can make it agreeable and living, as the great naturalist de Buffon has written. As she listens to the curator, Anna realises that this is their mission in the north too: they are to bring the colony into the realm of the laws of man, to bring culture and education and make Alaska a prim and proper place.
They leave the statues behind. Henry pushes Anna along the meandering pathways, and in the Palace’s little boutique they buy a small ceramic dinosaur as a souvenir. The jaws of the plesiosaur are decorated with rows of sharp teeth, but its eyes seem to peer at them in a way that gives the toy a quirky appearance, and Anna smiles as she thinks of the child that will soon hold it in its hands.
The sailors ring the bells, and Anna grips her husband’s hand. These are their final moments on the old continent. Soon the ropes will be untied, the ship will carry them to a recently discovered corner of the new world, and a long silence will descend between Anna and her family. Until now, she has been able to write to her mother and sister daily and has received post from them twice a day, but now this contact will be severed. She has calculated that it might take up to two months for letters to reach Novo-Arkhangelsk. Soon, their thoughts will be separated by an ocean and sixty long days, and Anna is reluctant to step aboard the ship and writes her mother one final letter, scratching her pen across the paper and trying not to let her breathing become too shallow.
The SSMagdalenabegins her voyage across the Atlantic. Crossing the ocean is an endless ordeal. Anna lies in her cabin, unable to eat or sleep, she becomes weak with nausea and hunger, and Ida Höerle is unable to console her, as she is every bit as poorly as her lady. Anna starts to fear that she might lose the child – how can it possibly survive if she can barely swallow a single morsel? Worry makes her as restless as the churning sea. Weeks of agony and misery, for Anna must not let her husband see her in such a state, but eventually the ship arrives in the archipelago of the West Indies, and the winds die down.
Now she can finally join her husband. Fear is replaced with a weary happiness: she can see Hampus again and she has not lostthe child. They dine at the captain’s table, and Anna is pleasantly surprised at the quality of life in high society: for their entourage alone, the ship’s kitchen slaughters three cows, three lambs and three dozen chickens every day, and the passengers in first class are young and bright. After luncheon, they perform plays and recite poetry, and an officer strikes up an especially warm friendship with one of the young ladies, which gives the older women plenty to talk about. Here in the tropics the air is humid, but they are brought buckets of ice with which to cool their drinks and themselves. Everything is most agreeable, though jolly expensive, and they take to throwing their dirty clothes overboard, as it is cheaper to buy new ones than to have the old ones laundered. Every evening, they gather on deck, cast their clothes into the sea and raise a merry toast to their socks.
Anna had hoped that the journey would give them a chance to open their hearts to each other, but Hampus spends all day in his cabin reading through the colony’s affairs. He has no time for parlour games, nor for walks on the moonlit deck, and Anna has the idea of asking him to read these reports aloud to her. That way, she can keep her husband company without disturbing his work, and at the same time she can learn about her new home, and so Hampus reads to her about Juvenaly of Alaska, a monk who was sent to convert the natives. Soon after his arrival, however, Juvenaly disappears, and sailors begin telling stories of the man who tried to make the Aleutians relinquish their old gods. The savages were unimpressed by the monk’s sermon and killed him. Then, a miracle happened. Having been bludgeoned to death, Juvenaly stands up again and proclaims the greatnessof his god and does not fall silent until the natives hack him to pieces and swallow his flesh, and this is how Juvenaly became patron saint of their new colony. Anna makes the sign of the cross, but Hampus just scoffs. The church has its own motivations to portray the natives as cruel barbarians, though the main reason that their true and righteous faith has not spread is that, instead of sending its best, most gifted clergymen, the church sends those it wishes to get rid of. He suddenly remembers his wife’s disposition – surely this story is too much for her? But Anna shakes her head: by her beloved’s side, she is ready to encounter even the infamous cannibals.
In April they reach the coast of South America. They go ashore at Cartagena, and never in her life has Anna seen a place more disagreeable than this. Dusty streets, filthy women with cigars wedged between their teeth, and fruit bats fluttering over the roofs. Their leather wings make her hands sweaty, and though the hills surrounding the city are beautiful, even they are a source of disappointment. With careful planning, these hills could be turned into profitable farmland, and the location of the city could not be better, from here fruit could be transported easily and efficiently to the great cities of America, but the locals seem uninterested in turning their natural bounty into money. It pains her to look on as the possibility of progress goes to waste.
To Anna’s relief, they soon leave Cartagena behind them and take a train to Panama. Legend has it that every mile of track cost the life of one labourer. Of the three hundred Jamaicans sent to construct the railway, only twenty-five returned to their island alive. Anna shudders. She imagines the men’s boneshidden beneath the tracks but decides to turn her thoughts to the future instead. The isthmus connecting the Americas will soon be cut in two, the continents will release their grip on each other and allow two oceans to join together, and the wrongs of history can finally be left behind. Anna leans her elbows against the windowsill and inspects the landscape. The train passes through a jungle, and the trees grow so close to the track that she could reach out a hand and pluck a fragrant flower if she so desired.My own beloved Mother, she writes,were everything not growing in such wild confusion, one could well imagine oneself driving through a most choice greenhouse.
They arrive at San Francisco. The city is a pleasant surprise, its population has grown ten-fold in as many years, and its boutiques are every bit as good as those in London and Paris. Their arrival has been long anticipated, and local officials and politicians clamour round them like hungry gnats. Hampus spends the daytime in meetings, and when he returns home in the evenings he is too tired to socialise, and the knotted feeling returns to Anna’s breast.
Inside her, a life continues to grow. Axons sprout from the brain stem, bringing nerves to the organs, the eyes, the ears and nose, and the foetus inside her begins to sense the world around it. But to Anna the changes taking place under her skin remain secret. Her waist expands, but though she presses a hand against her stomach, she still cannot feel the child inside her. She takes drops to calm her nerves, listens to the beating of her heart and the child’s absent movements and dreams of the moment when they finally reach their home.
Before long, the moment is at hand: Anna feels the Alaskan soil under her feet. She has chosen her attire carefully – a black, tastefully cut silk skirt, a cloak with fur trim, and a pink bonnet, the kind of attire that would not be out of place on the boulevards of Paris. Her stomach is now clearly visible under her skirt, and knowing whispers spread through the crowds gathered on the quayside. She will have her firstborn in this unknown town, on this strange continent, and she might well have been afraid, but she is not, for that morning she saw a whale. She was standing on deck, and the creature’s gnarled back rose up from the sea. Just then, Baranof Island appeared through the mists, and Anna saw the lighthouse crowning their new home. This is surely a good omen; she decides that it must be and fills her lungs with the damp air of the Alaskan July.
The departing governor hosts them for three days. Voevodskii has difficulty containing his excitement at returning to St Petersburg, but he does at least try to conceal his enthusiasm, and his wife welcomes Anna most warmly. Anna Vasilevna’s friendship is overwhelming. She kisses Anna as though they were long lost sisters, speaks empathetically about the difficulties that lie ahead, the servants’ laziness and the stubborn rector of the local girls’ school. She gives Anna a hat made of sea-otter fur as a gift and speaks so much that Anna cannot get a word in. Anna Vasilevna talks for three days, then the Voevodskiis set off on their journey back to the civilised world. Anna and Hampus stand on the quayside and wave until they can no longer make out the governor and his wife on deck, then they turn to face the town that is now theirs.
Before them stands Novo-Arkhangelsk, the archangels’ new abode created on this rugged shoreline barely five decades ago. The town was founded by the first governor of the Russian-American Company, Aleksandr Baranov, but to his misfortune he did not arrive in a pristine, uninhabited paradise. Baranov began construction work on the town, but the Tlingit destroyed the fortress he built. The Company was forced to pay an exorbitant ransom for those taken alive, and the Russians decided to abandon the town, but three years later Baranov returned. Now he knew what to expect. He brought a troop of soldiers with him, expelled the natives and built a new fortress, surrounding it with a moat and manning its walls with guards and cannons. Thus protected, a small village of low houses slowly built up around the stronghold, and this settlement became the capital of Russian Alaska.
Anna and Hampus have spent three days in Novo-Arkhangelsk, but it is already clear that the term “capital” makes it sound far grander than is the case. They stroll along the main street, trying not to let their disappointment show: algae creeping its way up the walls, houses leaning against one another like drunkards. Their brave northern colony is falling apart before their very eyes.
The city is rotten, but the governor’s fortress is worthy of its name. Kekoor Castle is built on a hilltop and named after that hill. There is a set of white steps leading to the summit, the yard smells of the sea and freshly painted wood, and on top of the governor’s house is a charming light that guides ships through fog and darkness to safety. An elderly Yupik guardsthe lighthouse tower. Anna and Hampus greet him politely. Luckily the house itself is equipped with modern conveniences, including a reception area on the first floor, a dancing and billiard hall, a smoking room and offices, while the ground floor is home to the bedrooms, the kitchen, the servants’ quarters and the governate’s natural history collections, stuffed birds and animals, the natives’ curious attire.
They have spent three days at Kekoor Castle, but it is one thing to stay in a house as a guest and quite another to live there and consider it one’s own, they think to themselves as they wander through its many rooms. In the ballroom they find a life-size portrait of the Tzar, furniture of exquisite St Petersburg quality, but most beautiful of all is the panorama from the windows: behind the house, the mountains, in front of it the ocean, and bobbing in the ocean the tree-covered islands. The windowpanes have been blown from fine, thin glass, allowing them to take in the view as though the panes didn’t exist at all, and to the west on a clear day they can make out the rounded summit of Mount Edgecumbe, the place that the Tlingit callL’úx, the flashing one. Anna is pleased to discover that the house has an excellent library too. One thousand two hundred books have been sent to the colony from St Petersburg, books in all the languages of the civilised world, though Baranov is claimed to have said that, given the choice, he would have brought a doctor instead of books, for in the colony there are very few who can read Latin or Greek. But nobody asked his opinion.
Kekoor Castle is more splendid than any house Anna has lived in before. If it were anywhere else, calling it a castle mightseem something of an exaggeration, but here the name is warranted. The structure towers high above the crumbling town, like something from another world, a realm of mirrors and lighting fixtures where they can afford to keep the lights on in every lamp. The governor’s wage includes limitless supplies of candles, paraffin, meat and fish. Additionally, the Company gives them a substantial discount on tea, coffee and sugar. My, what a pleasant life they have!
There is only one thing that disturbs Anna. She tries to open her bedroom window, just a fraction, but it has been been bolted shut. And while Anna Vasilevna was a sweet lady, her housekeeping left much to be desired. The house is dark and dusty, sealed up as though they had arrived in the Arctic and not a place where there is barely any winter to speak of. The only thing that might fly out of those windows is her health, and Anna asks the servants to remove the bolts. There will be a breeze in this house; everybody knows that fresh air keeps diseases at bay. The servants try to dissuade her, but Anna pays no heed to their objections; she pushes the windows wide open, and a summery sea breeze blows through the house.
She had imagined the north would be covered in nothing but desiccated lichen and stunted trees, but the garden at Kekoor Castle is lush. Herbs and berry bushes push up through the rich soil, few-flowered shooting stars and harebells too, and their scent attracts rufous hummingbirds. Anna has never seen anything like them, these tiny, translucent winged creatures. She sits in the summerhouse, eating blackberries and listening to the hum of the birds, and suddenly she feels the child move inside her.
She has a handsome home and a fine, attentive husband. On her birthday, Hampus arranges a party and gives her a gift of two canaries. They sing to her like obedient toys, and the guests are enchanted – what an expensive and special gift – and Anna is thrilled. The English royal family keep canaries in their rooms too, and after all she is related to them, albeit distantly, and she looks on as local officials flock to the cage. How did the governor manage to bring the birds all the way out here, alive, these light, bright creatures made for palm leaves and softer winds?
One of the duties of the governor’s wife is to invite the ladies of the colony to the castle. Being an excellent housekeeper and a loving wife who looks after her husband and the manor is not enough; as the governor’s wife, her duties include themission civilisatrice. She must educate the women and children of the colony, steer them towards a life of virtue and set a good example in both deed and demeanour, and to that end she finds herself sitting in the blue salon surrounded by the other wives, and she is taken aback at her guests’ attire. The women are shabbily dressed, wearing badly cut skirts in garish colours, and what’s more they do not hesitate to tell Anna how much they miss her predecessor, Anna Vasilevna. The dear lady was always so happy, her laughter knew no end, and she never forgot to send the women gifts on their name days. And they sing the praises of Margaretha Etholén too, the wife of the previous Finnish governor, what a wonderful woman she was, and they forget themselves and start speaking Russian, but Anna doesn’t speak the language well enough to take part in their conversation. She sits in her chair, dumbfounded, and realises that ofall the residents of Novo-Arkhangelsk, the governor’s wife is surely the loneliest, for in all the colony there is no-one quite her equal.
Their colony is home to two thousand four hundred souls, four hundred settlers and two thousand Indians. Five natives for every Christian – a ratio that it doesn’t do to dwell upon. In the mornings, the natives are allowed to approach the gates of the town, and the Tlingit, the Aleuts and the Yupik can sell their wares to the settlers – fish, meat and handicrafts, spoons and handles carved from the horns of mountain goats – but otherwise they have no business in the town. Only a year ago, there was a terrible incident in which the Tlingit killed two merchants. The motives for the attack were unclear, though Hampus suspects they are in fact very well known, but that they are the kind of motives that the Company is better off not knowing about. Be that as it may, in response the Company’s soldiers shot seventy Indians, and tensions have been high ever since. Now it is Hampus’s task to make sure such a thing never happens again. Everybody knows that a warring colony reaps only poor dividends.
The officials and the workers lower their heads and doff their caps as the governor passes, but when they visit the morning market afterwards, Anna notices that the natives do not bow their heads out of respect but stare at them with harsh eyes, muttering words she does not understand but in a tone that is unmistakable. Hampus does not seem to notice this insolence, but buys a raven carved from a walrus’s tusk. This is Kah-shu-gooh-yah, the first bird who created the world and its ways. Despite Anna’s protestations, Hampus invites the tribal eldersto Kekoor Castle and decides not to put the soldiers on guard to protect them. Anna does not attend the dinner but watches through the window as the chieftains process through their door. The Tlingit have axes on their belts, and their clothes are embroidered with strange, grimacing creatures, the insignia of their respective tribes, with names likeAuke,Hoonah,Chilkat,Stikine,TuxekanandSitka, or the tribes of the small lake, the lee of the north wind, the salmon cache, the bitter water, the coast town, and the edge of the branch. The curious names feel like stones turning in her mouth.
