Steller tells the men to row silently, but his instruction is unnecessary. Only once they are out at sea do they fathom quite how enormous these creatures are. The shadows shimmering beneath the surface are thirty feet in length – what incredible, majestic beasts they are! He counts fifty backs, and the rowers become restless. It would only take one knock to the boat and they would fall into the water’s icy embrace, and the rowers refuse to go any closer, but the animals have already noticed them. First they swim further away and group together, gather their young in a great huddle, then one of them leaves the flockand swims towards the boat. The men grip their oars, helpless: should they try to flee and row back to safety? But then the creature raises its head out of the water and their fears turn to confusion at this mermaid greeting their boat with meek, myopic eyes.
Myth and reality come together in the story of the sea cow, and one cannot write about it without writing about mermaids. The connection is so profound that their order is named after mermaids; they are sirenians, Sirens. It has been suggested that the idea of sea cows as the humans of the ocean comes from their habit of observing the world from above the water: they float upright and raise their head above the surface, but unlike fish and whales they can turn their heads from side to side. When sailors saw their heads appear out of the water, they realised that the creature in front of them could be neither a fish nor a whale, nor even a seal with a long snout, and from a distance the sea cow’s head does indeed resemble a human head far more than that of any other oceanic being. Sea travellers of the day knew nothing of manatees or sea cows, but they had all heard stories of fish-tailed women who lived in the water, and with that the connection was established.
The first documented sighting of a sirenian is in an entry in Christopher Columbus’s log: he recalls that an admiral in his fleet once visited Hispaniola, where he saw three mermaids’ heads appear out of the water. Granted, Columbus’s admiral notes that the mermaids were not nearly as beautiful as legend would have us believe. It is true that the bald, round-headedmanatee does not at all resemble the seductive Sirens of lore. If one were to describe the sirenians in human terms, perhaps a balding, rather chubby old gentleman would be a more apt comparison, but despite this they are always associated with women. In the Malay language, the sea cow is known as “dugong”, lady of the sea, and in the mythologies of island peoples, there are many stories of women turning into sea cows to help guide sailors away from danger. Perhaps the reason for this is the sea cow’s breasts, which, unlike those of other aquatic mammals, are situated on their upper chest, just under their front limbs. Perhaps this was enough for these sailors, and upon seeing the cows’ teats full of milk they could forget all about their bald heads and whiskers.
In the first European contact with manatees and sea cows, the animals are described as mermaids, but soon afterwards naturalists too are able to travel to unknown shores, and the first scientific descriptions of the sirenians begin to appear in the archives. Steller knows the descriptions by those who travelled to the Americas, and Francisco Hernandez’sNova plantarum, animalium et mineralium Mexicanorum historiacontains two drawings of themanati gomara, a gentle sea mammal that grazes in the warm waters along the American coastline. Steller’s creature is many times larger than this and lives in the wrong ocean, but he recognises its order, also known by the namesTrichechus,Taurus marinusandVacca marina. A sturdy, rotund body and a tiny little head – no, there can be no doubt. Floating in front of them is a giant manatee, an unknown sea cow native to these northern waters.
The crew of theSt Peterhas seen many creatures rise up from the depths, each more curious than the last. They have seen glowing fish, transparent fish, flying fish, fish the size of a house, monsters with tentacles long enough to wrap round even the largest warships, but none of them has ever heard of a sea cow the size of a whale. Before the expedition set off, Steller interviewed people in Avacha Bay, asked them to describe all the local animals in exhaustive detail, and once they had told him about all the species they knew, they invented new ones, but this did not concern him. The Academy is interested in ethnographical research too, so he wrote down all their stories, but never before has he heard tales of the giant sea cow. How could such a magnificent creature go without mention on a shore known to man?
Now he knows with absolute certainty that they are lost, but his horror is mixed with a strange sense of elation: it means that the discovery of the sea cow is his alone.
Captain Commander Bering looks at the sky. The wind is driving the clouds together, piling them one on top of the other, and a similar grey blanket has been pulled over his senses. He tries to roll on his side, but he cannot, his body will not obey himbut is falling apart in front of his eyes. He catches a sweet smell coming from his flesh but tries to think about it as little as possible. Sleep comes easily, thank God. Through his slumber he hears the naturalist’s frantic voice, Steller talking about unprecedented animals, underwater giants, then he drifts deeper into sleep and brushes the voice away as he might an insect.
Captain Commander Vitus Bering never returns to the warm salons of the capital. He never returns to St Petersburg but takes his last breath on this rainswept shore on the morning of the eighth day of December. Even in death, he cannot escape this wretched place. Here, everything bears his name:
the Bering Strait
the Bering Sea
Bering Island.
The men dig a grave. They have to make sure it is good and deep, because the foxes are good at digging too. The ground is in the grip of frost, and the men are tired, but they dig, strike their spades into the sand and slog without a care for their aching limbs. They dig until the pit is deep enough, then gather round and hold a simple funeral. They erect a small wooden cross on top of the grave and mourn their captain and their misery.
Their captain is dead, and there is still no sign of the horses, but today they celebrate Christmas, collect what damp flour they have left and fry pancakes in seal blubber, raise their tea cups as if they were sipping an exquisite wine, give speeches exalting the captain and make a toast to the Tzarina, unaware that during the course of their journey she too has left this world behind. Steller, the cantor’s son, sings Christmas carols, and for a brief moment they are somewhere else.
On St Stephen’s Day, an exhausted trio appears on the horizon. Their scouts have not died after all, neither have they fled, but worse still, they come bearing bad news: theSt Peterhas been shipwrecked off the shores of an unknown, uninhabited island.
In the beginning, there is a single progenote, compounds gathered within a vesicle. Archaea and bacteria divide in two, again and again, and fill the waters, and there is light, and algae start to suck in the light, and oxygen seeps into the atmosphere, banishing the poisonous gases and creating a layer of protective ozone in the firmament around the earth. The air changes and there is a wave of extinctions, but the cells that remain embrace the oxygen and start to breathe.
At first, this single cell enjoys its solitude. It remains alive by dividing itself in two, until more solitary cells join together; they share responsibilities, and these lifeforms slowly begin to grow in size. The first multicellular organism is the sponge, a soft mass with no limbs, no nervous system or digestive tract, but over time the waters bring forth living creatures abundantly and begin to fill with bilaterians, beings whose bodies are formed of two symmetrical halves, and before long the world’s very first set of eyes appear on the face of the flatworm. This is only the first of the worms’ innovations. Their descendants devise a digestive tract running through the body with separate orifices for nutrients and waste. The development enables them to eat without pausing, and soon the seas are brimming with life. Molluscs appear beneath the waves, echinoderms, invertebrates and jawless fish. These creatures in turn devise the gamete, and soon afterwards the secluded depths of the primordial seas form thebackdrop to the first sex act in history. Lifeforms multiply, filling the waters of the seas, and the plants and sponges begin to seek out less crowded habitats, they creep up and out of the water, and wolf’s foot, horsetails and ferns cover the face of all the earth.
Fish living in marshland and shallow waters learn to breathe the air – a useful skill indeed, allowing them to crawl from one pond to another, to move into pools left by the retreating tide and to safety from the great armoured beasts of the sea. In shallower waters, they learn to use their fins, to walk along the seabed in alternate steps, and their limbs become muscular, their wrists and elbows stronger. Their gill covers move to their necks, and eventually they develop lungs, elbows, knees, wrists, fingers, a neck and nostrils – everything they will need for life above the surface – and with that the fish are ready to haul themselves up onto the dry land.
The fish rise up from their ponds. They learn how to drag themselves along the ground, but they never venture far from the sea, as they must still lay their eggs in the water. The shallow pools abound with tadpoles. In fact, this humble larva is the distillation of millions of years of development: first there is the protoplasm, the jelly from which this tiny, spritely aquatic lifeform wriggles forth, then the tadpole grows itself limbs, sheds its tail and swaps its gills for lungs, the water for land, feels the earth beneath its flippers and pushes. The tadpoles develop into snake-like, frog- and salamander-like creatures, and they devise the egg, a watertight, calcium shell, and lo, now they can abandon the seas altogether. They inch their way further inland, disappear into the tangle of ferns, and there the amphibians gradually turn into reptiles and replace their moist skin with scales that can withstand the heat. Animals appear uponthe earth, but there is one memory of the sea that remains with us: the hiccough, the reflex that salamander larvae used to change the manner of their breathing, to shift from lungs to gills, from gills to lungs.
In Siberia, a column of lava rises up through the earth. It pushes its way through the crust, setting off a series of volcanic eruptions across the Northern hemisphere. For two million years, the earth belches up carbon and methane; the air is thick with a sulphuric fug, the waters of the seas become warmer, and all living creatures gasp for breath. The populations of the seas and the earth are decimated, but the reptiles stoically struggle on. Now they have enough space to experiment, and thus winged fowl and dinosaurs appear upon the earth, mammals too, small, furry creatures with a four-chambered heart and heightened senses. They scurry between the legs of much larger beasts, until one day it is time for the great lizards to depart the earth forever.
Now it is the mammals who are in experimental mood. The forests and savannahs are filled with new mammalians – monotremes, marsupials and placentalia, the latter being a most curious development whereby the animals gestate their young in a protective membrane inside their body, beneath their very skin. In the boughs of the trees lives the furry, long-tailed progenitor of all placentalia, barely the size of a swallow, munching on insects high up in the canopy. Soon, the placental mammals divide into two separate orders, and it is at this point that the sea cow and humankind bid each other farewell. Sirenians and primates go their separate ways, and Homo sapiens and the sea cow await their respective births on branches pointing in two different directions.
One of these orders are the Boreoeutheria, the northern true beasts, which develop into giraffes, dogs, mice, bats, humans and great whales. One might imagine that the sea cow is related to the whale, but no. Independently of each other, two different clades of mammals hit upon the same idea and return to the ocean: one a small creature, the size of a wolf, that grows into the largest mammal in history, the other a prehistoric proto-elephant whose descendants give rise to the sirenians. The ancient seas are also home to great ground sloths adapted for life in the water, but their sluggish story ends long before ours begins, while the whales and the sea cows remain.
The other clade of placental mammals is given the name Atlantogenata. This group includes the superorders of Xenarthra and Afrotheria, and it is from the latter group that the elephants and sirenians arise. One of them chooses the sea, the other the earth, and forty million years ago, the shores are graced with Prorastomus, the first known ancestor of the sirenians – a clumsy creature the size of a pig and consumed with a lingering yearning for the oceans. New, terrifying predators are creeping and galloping upon the earth, but this creature is drawn to the sea by the aquatic plants and the gently bobbing waves. Prorastomus spends increasing amounts of time in the water, crawling only seldom onto dry land. Its legs become shorter, its toes turn to fins and its narrow tail becomes wider. In the water, its joints no longer need to bear its weight, and it starts to grow and develop a form perfectly suited to life underwater.
And it is at this moment that our protagonist appears, Steller’s Sea Cow, though at this point using such a name feels a little out of place. We are still a long way away from the moment when Stellerhimself emerges from his mother’s belly, and indeed, it is another two million years until Homo sapiens appear on the stage at all, but this order of the sirenians is now alive and abundant. In years to come, fossils pushed up from the earth and the seabed will reveal a full twenty-eight genera of portly sea cows. These gentle beings float in the warm coves of ancient seas, but one of their number heads north, gradually moving into cooler latitudes, increasing the thickness of its blubber layer as it makes its way into colder waters. It develops a body that will protect it against the chill, and eventually it is closer in size to an elephant than to other sea cows. Steller’s Sea Cow becomes a giant within its own order, an exception after its kind.
In the north, snow starts to gather on the mountaintops. It snows on the rocks, so much so that the already cool summers barely have enough time to reveal the earth at all, and the snow gathers, layer upon layer, and forms ice. Then, very slowly, the ice begins to move, it rolls down the mountainsides, grinding the earth and rock as it goes. Snow continues to fall, ice continues to build up, until eventually it covers the mountains and the valleys, pushing water and mud out of its way, and all around the arrival of the glacier is heralded by decimated forests and the skeletons of dead animals, as far as the eye can see. The land turns from green to grey, then everything is covered in white, the sea fuses with the ice, the shoreline retreats far out to sea, and where once there was water now there is land. Ungulates dig their hooves into the newly revealed seabeds in bewilderment.
This new world order creates the perfect conditions for Steller’s Sea Cow. The ocean’s once deep trenches become shallow bays that are soon home to thriving forests of kelp. At this point, many of the sea cow’s relatives fade into history, and of the twenty-eight generathere are soon only a handful left, because although the sirenians are plump, their blubber layer is all but non-existent. They require warm water and temperate bays, and thus the genera that long for warmer climes perish one after another. But Steller’s Sea Cow is unperturbed by the colder winds, undisturbed by the frozen weather and the lowering temperatures, and the species thrives. Herds of Steller’s Sea Cows fill the Pacific shores from Japan to the Californian peninsula, and they spread wherever the forests of kelp reach up from the seabed towards the light.
But the ice does not last forever. At first, the changes are small. The sea cow slumbers, turns its belly towards the sky, allowing milder winds to caress its hide. The streams running into the sea become heavier, fuller, the glaciers retreat to reveal the churned earth underneath. In the winter, the edge of the sea ice creeps back a little, but the winter is not long enough to compensate for the destruction wrought by the summer months, and soon the ice retreats more than it returns, and the earth that it reveals starts to turn green. Moss appears on the gravel, the earth brings forth grass, and with the grass come the grass-eaters, and with the grass-eaters the predators. Roots intertwine under the newly formed soil. The tundra turns into plains, bringing forth hay and wild wormwood, then come the trees, the pines, the larches, white spruce and birches, bald cypresses standing two hundred feet tall. Forests push the plains aside, and water runs into the sea, the bays become deeper, the shores steeper, making the tangles of nourishing kelp harder to reach.
In the past, the sea cow was able to roam these shores as it pleased, but now the chain of banks brimming with kelp is broken. The plants reach up towards the light, but the continents keepshrugging off water, and the kelp sinks into the deepening bays. It is replaced by species that prefer the darkness of deeper waters, but the sea cow’s body is like a buoy that always bounces back to the surface. It cannot dive more than a few feet, and the undergrowth on the seabed is soon beyond its reach. It lives on kelp that reaches up to the surface, but now the shallow waters have become deep trenches once again, and the herds become separated from one another, left stranded, scrambling for scant ever deeper scraps of seaweed.
Eventually, a new, terrifying predator appears on the shores. In the past, the sea cow has never had to worry about hunters, but wherever humans go, great species soon disappear: the cave bear, the woolly rhinoceros, the dire wolf, the ground sloth, the pouch lion and the moa. A large, bulbous animal with neither eyeteeth nor claws, the sea cow is no match for man’s dominion, and today archaeologists dig up their bones from the ashes of ancient campfires.
In the end there is only one herd left, a single group of sea cows at the furthest tip of the archipelago known as the Aleutian Islands. Rising water levels have separated these outcrops from the mainland, leaving the sea cows trapped. Here at least they are safe, for the barren, remotest tip of this chain of islands it too far from civilisation to attract man. And while its brethren slowly disappear elsewhere, the sea cows continue their lazy life by their island, grazing and multiplying, with the foxes, otters and fowls of the air to keep them company, until fate and the winds bring them into contact with humans one final time.
They will be rescued. People on the mainland will become worried and someone will ready a ship! But one after the other, the men realise that no-one can possibly rescue them on an uncharted island. The expedition’s other ship returned to Kamchatka in October. The crew of theSt Paulhad found their way to the south-eastern coast of Alaska. Captain Chirikov sent a group of his men to explore the area, but this group never returned. A search party was sent to look for them, but they too disappeared without a trace, and at this point Chirikov abandoned all attempts to go ashore. They added the coast to the map and sailed home, and their accounts did nothing to keep alive the hope that Bering and his crew might one day return. They are declared missing, then dead, and eventually their wives stop waiting for them.
