24 men on the sick list
6thOCTOBER
Reserves of brandy running low
18thOCTOBER
32 men on the sick list
27thOCTOBER
A terrific storm. Not enough healthy men to lower the mainsails. The sailcloth parted in the gale. Hard to keep a steady course.
28thOCTOBER
TheSt Petersails past a verdant island. However, replenishing the supplies of fresh water proves impossible, as there are now only ten healthy men on board, and they too are so weak that if we lower the anchor, they will not have the strength to raise it again.
30thOCTOBER
40 men sick. Even the healthy are beginning to die of exhaustion and dehydration.
2ndNOVEMBER
Hourly updates in the logbook come to an end. Navigator Kharlam Yushin, hitherto responsible for noting down observations, writes: “I am already exhausted from scurvy, and I stand my watch only because of extreme necessity.”
By now, all the men can do is pray that the winds will push them in the right direction, that Kamchatka will appear along the horizon before the last of them succumbs to scurvy and thirst. Eventually, their prayers are answered. On the morning of the fifth day of November, the lookout sounds the alarm. Through the rain, the black strip of a distant shore comes into view, the men see snow-capped mountains, and somewhere someone finds a carefully hidden drop of brandy. They pass the dram around, and the captain momentarily awakes from his slumber, and now there is no shame in weeping for joy.
The others celebrate, but Steller is plagued by a sense of miscalculation. They are not far away, but they cannot have reached their destination either. The officers suggest going ashore at the nearest cove – it is true, this is not Avacha Bay, but nobody knows whether they will be able to travel any further. If they go ashore here, they could send the healthiest men to fetch horses from the nearest village, but Steller insists that they first make sure this really is Kamchatka. They can only lower the anchor once, and if they do so in a bad spot, they won’t be able to undo their mistake. The navigator agrees with the naturalist, but by now all the men are at the end of their tether: you curs, you vultures, you blackguards and bastards, and the captain reaches adecision. The terrible weather, the torn sails, the crew at death’s door: their final destination, this must be it.
Their crippled ship cuts slowly through the water. They do not make the shore before nightfall, and at midnight a cruel, otherworldly gale whips up across the sea. The sky is bright, but waves rise up as if in a storm, and the sea lashes the anchor cable until it snaps. The crew lowers a second anchor, but that cable snaps too, and panic begins to set in. If the waves knock them into the water, all will be lost. Then one of them thinks of the corpses. Having a body on board is a bad omen, death invites more death, and so they drag their lifeless comrades from the hold and push them overboard. The bodies, which they had spared for a noble burial, are unceremoniously dumped into the sea. Steller looks away. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death; he does not want to look but looks nonetheless and watches the sheets wrapped around the bodies unfurl, revealing their contents and floating in the waves for a moment that seems to last an eternity.
Eventually their patron saint has mercy on his stricken ship. The waves push the vessel into shallower waters, the wood splits asunder and theSt Peterlists but does not topple, takes on water but does not sink. The crew spends the night praying that their sandy anchor will hold, and when daybreak comes, the wind dies down – and they are still alive. They gather their belongings, muster on deck and gaze at the land opening out before them.
Steller paces along the shore looking for any indication of a settlement. There are no signs of ash in the piles of rocks, and they find no huts or paths. This does not necessarily mean anything, people are few and far between in Siberia, and Steller crouches down to examine the plants, but Lepekhin the Cossack taps him on the shoulder. Steller looks up, looks in the direction Lepekhin is pointing and sees a group of dark shapes galloping towards them. Are these bears? No, wolverines, and the Cossack loads his rifle, but then they recognise the animals. Sea otters. The large, stumpy mammals waddle over to them, take stock of them like tame dogs, and Steller’s heart feels heavy. The little snout against the leather of his boot – could this creature truly know humans yet fear them so little?
They row the captain commander ashore. Bering is reluctant to leave his berth, but their ship is now a miserable, waterlogged wreck, and combining their strength Steller and Lieutenant Waxell carry him onto dry land. Bering hangs limp between them, and to Steller it feels almost like dragging a cadaver, but he shakes off the thought. The captain may be unable to go ashore on his own two feet, but as he lies on the sand he asks the naturalist for a report on his morning excursion. The pale, agonising wait of a weary man, and Steller drinks his tea, blowing onto the hot liquid. The Lord alone knows whether this is Kamchatka, but the captain seems not to hear. What else could this be? We shall rest here awhile, then send for some horses.
They thrust their oars into the sand, prop the sails between them to provide protection from the wind, and light a fire. Then they roast an otter, its flesh, its liver and kidneys, and the sick men drink tea that Steller has brewed from seagrass. Dusk envelops the landscape, and far up on the hillside a landfowl squawks, caught in a predator’s jaws.
They awake to a shout. Lepekhin the Cossack adds some logs to the fire. At first, the flames are reflected in sets of mirror-like eyes, then illuminate the furtive creatures to which they belong. Arctic foxes have sneaked down from the hillside. They have crept up to the camp and gingerly tasted the sick; one man has teeth marks on his fingers, another on his cheek. It is a long night. The foxes are fearless and agile, able to dodge the stones thrown at them, but as the sun rises the crew can take aim properly. They shoot sixty in total; it’s almost too easy, the poor things don’t even realise that they should flee.
Then come the wind and the rain, a long stretch of sleet, low to the ground, and the sodden sails no longer afford them any protection. They must build a shelter – but how and with what? There are no trees growing on the hillside, but Steller has seen how the Koryaks survive on the steppes without timber, and he orders his assistants to dig a pit. They stretch sailcloth over the opening and crawl to the bottom of the pit where they can rest in the frozen sand as if in a grave of their own making, but at least they are protected from the wind and the snow, and beforelong the others follow their example. There upon the rocky beach, they create a village of small potholes and light measly fires in the pits to stave off the foxes and the cold.
From among their number, they choose the three men who are the least sick, pack their bags with two weeks’ provisions and send them on their way. Their mission is to find the nearest village and bring back horses and equipment. They send off three gaunt, exhausted men, watch as they trudge into the distance, until the sleet obscures them from view, making the panorama soft and empty once again.
No word comes back from the scouts. At first, the crew thinks this a good sign – the journey is taking time because they have found a settlement, they are gathering equipment and steeds, these things take time in Siberia, and their eyes keep returning to the horizon, looking for approaching horses, but the horizon remains empty. Days pass, but no steeds appear.
Steller rows himself out to the shipwreck. It is a lamentable sight. The arsenic has mixed with seawater, and his birds are ruined, weeks of work and nothing but wet, rotten slurry to show for it, but he tries to salvage what he can. He boils up a new solution and asks Lepekhin to shoot some of the seagulls circling over their camp, but the solution is not strong enough. His samples become overrun with maggots, and he curses. On the night of the shipwreck, he should have remembered whatwas most important: forget about fear and the bodies; he should have saved his birds and chemicals.
For a while, the crew are able to forget their hunger. They eat otters, sea lions and ribbon seals, but their luck does not last for long, and within a few weeks the animals learn to be wary of them. Now they keep their distance from the camp. The crew must travel thirty versts to find a single otter, stumbling over the rocky shores on their rickety legs, weakened from scurvy, and hunger returns like a loyal cur. Food consumes their thoughts, and Steller and Lepekhin come up with a game. If you could eat anything at all, what would it be? Steller dreams of apples and oranges, and the Cossack chortles: a grown man longing for fruit! Steller laughs along with him and concedes that he would not turn down the Cossack’s veal calf given half the chance.
Steller has carved himself a pipe from a bird’s wing bone. Tobacco makes him feel a little lighter, and Lord knows he needs some cheering up. The weather is abysmal, nothing but a dusky gloom trickling from the sky. The sand, the sky, the sea and their clothes, all the same greyish brown, and for a moment Steller wonders whether he might be suffering from colour-blindness, a symptom of his scant, deficient diet, but then the Cossack shoots an otter, and the rocks are spattered with red.
Today, Steller wakes early and leaves the camp before anyone can put him to work. He plans to evade his responsibilitiesand observe the seals. He has no desire to listen to the sick bemoaning their suffering, nor hear news of those who died during the night, but walks instead around the end of the cape and arrives at a small cove. His appearance startles the seals lying on the shore back into the waves, and he watches their cumbersome bodies turn light and agile in the water, like an element changing form above a flame. These are a previously unknown species of seal, slender, with long fins, the males twice as large as the females. He names them Bering’s seals. There are a great multitude of them on the shores here, but they are unsuitable for consumption. The men know this, for they have already tried; they shot one of them and roasted it on an open fire, but the seal’s flesh turned their stomachs. The smell at the camp was indescribable, and they decided to leave the seals in peace: better to die of hunger than to eat this.
Steller tries to estimate the number of the seals, but this proves tricky. They dart here and there in the water, crisscrossing all the while, and he counts the same female several times. As he watches the female swim, he notices something further out to sea, a cluster of large dark shadows beneath the waves, and he stands up to get a better look. Could it be driftwood? Timber would be a valuable find, the hillsides around them produce nothing but scrub and grass, and the crew has been forced to burn wood from their ship to keep warm, but then one of the logs changes direction, turns against the waves and sputters. The sound reminds him of a horse greeting its rider, and a thrill runs through him. Are these whales? Some kind of enormous seal?But the creatures are too far away, he cannot make them out, and in his enthusiasm he wades out into the sea and is startled by the unpleasant sensation of four-degree water lapping in through the top of his boots.
The assistant surgeon Betge berates him – what were you thinking, getting your feet wet in conditions like this, you’ll take ill and succumb – but Steller pays him no heed and instead jumps from one pit to the next, gathering equipment and barking out orders. He has no care for his boot leather, hardened with salt, nor for his toes now numb with the cold; he needs men and a boat, and he needs them now, quickly, before the creatures he spotted disappear out to sea or down into the depths, and he rouses them, waving and shouting, for his breast is filled with the glee that besets any naturalist upon sensing that he might just have encountered the one animal for which he will be remembered in perpetuity.
