On the map, they name this island after their captain, but for them this place is the blue foxes’ island. These Arctic foxes will not leave them in peace. They burrow their way into the crew’s pits, then scamper away with belts, boots and tools between their teeth, they snatch seagulls roasting on the fire, and the crew turn their attention to the foxes. It is the foxes’ fault that scurvy has claimed half their number, the foxes’ fault that their ship is rotting out in the bay, the foxes’ fault that their captainis decomposing in the cold sand, and they hunt the foxes, catch them but don’t kill them, instead sending them back to their dens half flayed, with no eyes, no tails, their paws singed in the fire. Killing them is insufficient; the men want to hurt them. They need a culprit. But the foxes never learn and return night after night. Their persistence is staggering, senseless, and Steller allows an unscientific thought into his mind: perhaps the foxes are punishingthem, making the crew pay for the popularity of their skins in St Petersburg.
On the ship, Khitrov was responsible for discipline, forcing even those weakened with scurvy to work, but since Bering’s death he has stepped aside. The question of who steered the ship towards this uninhabited shore comes easily to a starving man’s lips, and Khitrov has seen the half-skinned foxes. Their captain commander was a good-hearted man, God have mercy on his soul, and alongside an affable man like him, the job of the fleet master was to crack the whip. These simple souls do not understand that he has done everything for the good of the crew. If he had not forced them from their berths, they would still be drifting on the open seas, their sails torn asunder, and their ship would have become a floating grave where, below deck, the rats would feast on their flesh.
Khitrov realises that the tide has turned when he sees Steller digging a pit into the embankment. He demands to be let in and shelter from the wind, but the naturalist just continues his work, striking his spade into the ground as though the fleetmaster standing next to him were nothing but air, an immaterial spirit, and not his superior with powers bestowed by the Tzarina herself. The crew looks on, but nobody intervenes. Khitrov is not stupid. He steps aside, and the position of commander is assumed by one Lieutenant Sven Waxell, a jovial fellow who is allowed to take the decisions simply because he will not make any decision without asking everybody else’s opinion first. Khitrov accepts his lot. If they ever return to the mainland, he will reinstate discipline, but until then he keeps himself to himself, sucks on bird bones in his pit and patiently swallows back any harsh words that come into his mind.
After Bering’s death, the foxes’ island changes. Now tasks are divided equally. Every man must do his share, and even the officers cover the middens and feed the sick. Steller suggests that he might be allowed to concentrate on his research, but Waxell simply laughs, and the naturalist settles for plucking seagulls, digging pits and disappearing off to watch the sea cows whenever he gets half a chance. This happens less frequently than he would like. There is an endless amount of work, staying alive requires constant, grinding labour, a battle to fend off hunger and misery. The cold has become a garment that they cannot shrug off, they cannot remain still, or their fingers and toes will turn red, then black and begin to smell, and they rub their stiffened limbs to keep warm. Steller bends the surgeon apprentice Konavalov’s fingers, and the man implores him to stop, he no longer cares about his fingers and toes, please, I beg you, but Steller looks away and continues. If he gets offthe island alive, he will ask the Academy for a new assignment, a new direction. He yearns for air shimmering in the heat, he longs for the desert, the equator, the tropics, anywhere the wind is warm.
After spending more than enough days tending to the sick, Steller becomes restless. Usually good-humoured, he starts snapping at his comrades, and eventually Waxell sends him away to explore the beaches, to find driftwood for their now meagre fires. The task gives Steller the opportunity to examine the animals and the terrain, to choose his direction and spend his days observing the birds and plants, and he learns how to find the sea cows, watches how they swim around the island to shelter from the wind. He was worried that they might leave, abandon the island, but they do not. They never head out to sea but actually avoid the open water, they do not dive but seem to prefer the shallows, they walk along the seabed on their short front limbs, munching on kelp, and if the wind turns, they grip the rocks along the shore and embrace the boulders so as not to be washed out to sea in the waves.
It is true that Steller generally returns from his excursions carrying less firewood than the others, but after days spent wandering the coastline he has the energy to sing again and to tell the others of his observations as they sit round the campfire. The crew has little interest in cormorants and grasses, but he is not the only one excited about the sea cows. The men are all keen to behold this great mammal, the gentle giant of Blue-FoxIsland, and Steller tells them about it like a proud parent. They consider the sea cow, their hungry eyes gaze out at the open waters, imagining what it would be like to sink their teeth into these creatures bobbing beneath the surface – a single specimen would be enough to feed every one of them – and as they speak, the sea cow’s flesh seems like manna from heaven. As they chew on seagulls and the flour left from the ship, they imagine the taste of the sea cow, and as they sleep, with a faint moan they dream of swallowing its blubber.
The crew try to hunt them. They load their rifles and shoot, first taking aim from the shore, then from their boats, but this proves difficult. The sea cow is protected by a hide an inch thick, and under that its muscles and vital organs rest behind a wall of dense blubber a further four inches thick. The ammunition rebounds from the sea cows’ flanks without causing any damage, and Waxell forbids the men from wasting any more bullets, but they continue to shoot regardless. Occasionally a carefully aimed bullet pierces the animal’s pebble-sized eye, and the sea turns red. A cry of joy goes up on the shore, but their elation is short-lived. The herd surrounds their fallen comrade, preventing the men from rowing their boat any closer, and all they can do is lean against the rail of their dinghy and look on as their catch sinks into the depths. But the men do not give up. They shoot again and ram their boats into the animals’ sides, they hit and beat them, gash the sea beasts’ hide with their axes, but their problem remains unchanged: the sea swallows up their catch. They know how to kill the sea cows but not how to get acarcass weighing several tonnes out of the water and onto the shore, and in the evenings they sit round the campfire drawing up plans and comparing strategies. It is easier to talk about the sea cow than about how they will make their already thin broth last another day.
The sea cows never learn to fear them. They continue grazing, paying no heed to the danger, absorbed in their underwater world, and Steller is able to row the dinghy right up next to them. On one occasion, a young male comes so close that he is able to place his hand on its back. The creature examines their boat, prods its boards with the sensitive whiskers on its snout, and Steller runs his fingers along its hide, its gnarly skin reminds him of the bark of an old oak, and it is warm. He had imagined that a creature swimming in the frigid oceans would be cold to the touch, but beneath his hand he feels the sea cow’s calm warmth and strokes it, examining the bumps on its skin, and he becomes restless. He must get closer, see its organs and bones, he must measure it. A naturalist cannot be content with simply stroking a subject. Only by penetrating the surface can he understand the true nature of the sea cow.
A young female is munching a clump of kelp between her rows of teeth, grinding the tough seaweed into a finer and finer mass and fumbling for more. The forest of kelp sways in the waves, and the female’s lips grope at its rippled surface, hunting for another strip. Suddenly, pain radiates through its flank, an incandescent light flashes through its nerves, and a warm liquidfills its mouth. Midshipman Johann Sind tugs at the rope to make sure the metal is caught fast. The men have come up with a plan. Sind has seen the way the Greenlanders hunt whales with iron spears, and they have prepared a harpoon, stretched a seal skin between two oars and practised, first on land, then at sea, harpooning seals and improving their aim until the steel tip hits its target, and the men gather together: now they will claim their first sea cow.
Sind gives a sign, and the men assembled on the shore grip the rope and begin to pull. The rope brings the sea cow into the hands of the hungry men, and they do not give in but pull, haul, until the skin is torn from their hands. The sea retreats from around the sea cow. It feels the breeze against its hide and cries out, letting out a sound that startles the rest of the herd into motion. It turns its head, calls its comrades, and Steller listens to its lament. The sound is curiously small; it could be from a child or a bird, and it is hard to conceive that such a sound could come from such a gigantic body. Steller looks on as the sea cow rises out of the sea and becomes wedged against the rocks. They have succeeded. They have hauled a sea monster from its kingdom, and the men behold their catch, raise their eyes and howl like ecstatic dogs.
The sea cow sees something approaching. It distinguishes the shadow from the water but doesn’t understand what it sees. With its tiny eyes it can make out the edge of the forest of kelp and identify those of its own kind, and usually it has no needto see any more than this. It has made do with its other senses, the whiskers around its snout that it uses to sense food and other sea cows, to suckle from its mother and to seek out the soft, thick hide of a mate, and with its hearing it perceives the boundaries of its herd, listening to the others’ clicks and moans. Now it tries to save itself using all its senses, but nothing it has ever experienced has prepared it for this. The sea cow has spent millennia doing very little besides grazing. It has grown too large to make sensible prey for any of the oceans’ many predators, it has had no need for heightened senses, for claws or teeth, but rather it has been able to think of its surroundings with a tranquil curiosity. Now a faint image of jaws and teeth flickers through its mind, but it abandoned fear so long ago that it does not know how to fight or flee. It tries to wrench itself back into the water, but the rocks along the shoreline press into its hide, the rope pulls it out of the waves, and with every yank the harpoon digs deeper into its flesh. It does not know what to do and freezes on the spot, lets out a small, miserable whimper and listens to the sound of approaching footsteps, stares at the black leather boot, pupils wide, until Sind brings down his axe, and the sea cow’s basin-sized heart twitches one last time.
Now the men forget all about their weak and aching limbs and rush into the sea, heedless of the icy waves. They climb on the back of their catch, help one another up and cheer as though they have conquered a mountain. They rejoice as they slit the beast’s side open, gouge the sea cow as though they had struck gold, and their clothes change colour. Brown and grey becomered, and the shore around them turns into an iron-smelling mud. The seagulls smell the blood and call one another to join the banquet, and there on the blood-soaked beach the men laugh and embrace one another.
They drop lumps of lard into the pot, add wood to the fire and look on as the sea cow’s blubber melts into a translucent, aromatic liquid. They pour the fat into their cups, raise a toast and drink. Hot fat fills their mouths, and a shiver runs through the whole crew. At first their expression is one of confusion, then of joy, and they drink their fill in silence, swallow, gasp and scoop up some more. If the fat is like this, what will its flesh taste like, and they grab the roasting flesh on the fire, fight over the best cuts of meat, and Waxell is forced to restore order many times. Then the moment is upon them. They sink their teeth into the flesh of the sea cow, the creature they had so longed for, and it melts in their mouths like the finest veal. It is almost overwhelming. Their starved, emaciated bodies, the sudden, unbearable bliss. Tears well in their eyes, and they savour it, swallow it so hungrily that they almost dislocate their jaws, they tear at it, cut and bite it, devour the sea cow with tears running down their cheeks, swallow its loin, its liver, its kidneys, its flank and tongue, they drink its warm, intoxicating blood, they eat so much that it hurts, but they do not complain. Weeks of nothing but thin broth and seaweed, but tonight they shall feast on a sea cow.
For the first time in weeks, Steller does not wake to a nagging hunger. He lies in his berth for a moment, enjoying thesensation. The camp around him is still sleeping off the gluttony of the night before,, and Steller listens to his steady breathing, looks at the Cossack’s face, calm from sleep, then sits up, work waits for no man, and he gets up and walks to the cove where they left the remains of the sea cow. He drives the seagulls and the lurking foxes away, and the morning light brings their handiwork into sharp relief. He had hoped to use this specimen for his research, but in their frenzy the men have hacked the creature to pieces, struck it at will, leaving it full of holes, broken its bones, severed its tendons. The cadaver is half submerged in the water. The tide has risen, and inquisitive fish dart here and there in the opened stomach, nibbling the blubber, and it is clear that this individual will be no use for research; for that purpose, he needs a specimen that he can take apart meticulously, one piece at a time.
Swallowing the seal’s flesh was a mistake, but the sea cow melts in their stomachs with ease. Its meat is perfectly suited to preservation, and they eat sea cow for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and over time their teeth re-emerge from within their gums. These men, who by rights should have died long ago, stand up and learn to walk again, gingerly at first, waddling like toddlers. They have already lost thirty-two souls, but eventually there comes a day when Waxell no longer asks to be informed of those who died during the night. The mermaids have come to their rescue.
First comes the sea cow, then the spring. The long-tailed ducks, the sandpipers and eiders head down to the water, and thehillsides are filled with the sounds of screeching and mating birds. Steller hears a wren, and for a moment he imagines he is once again in the friendly, verdant woods of his childhood home in Windsheim. Lepekhin looks at him enquiringly: does the naturalist want him to hunt down this bird? It is so small that it cannot easily be shot, but he could put up a net. Steller shakes his head. He knows this bird; there is no need to snare one.
Steller sits down on a rock and watches the sea cows’ mating rituals, their playful frolicking. The female allows the male to approach her, then prances further away, and it makes Steller think of the Koryak women. Unlike the officials and soldiers, he did not order them into his bed, but sometimes they appeared all the same, and he tried to talk to them, to write down the curious words they used. They laughed at his desire to talk, laughed at his pronunciation and whispered strange, passionate words into his ears. He thinks of Brigitta-Helena, of the way his wife succumbed to him like a beautiful, noble animal, and he watches as the female sea cow allows the male to mount her, pulls a pencil out of his pocket and writes: penisca.32 inches.
Reading Linnaeus’sSystema Naturae, Brigitta-Helena learns that animals can be divided into six classes: mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, insects and worms. The amphibians are her favourites, but something interrupts her train of thought andshe puts the book down. Someone has left the window ajar. It is a cold, bright day in St Petersburg, and she gets up to close the window, but her mind conjures up an image, and she stops midway. She sees her husband, Georg Wilhelm, standing on a dark shore, gazing out to sea, looking right at her, and it makes her shiver. She would rather not think about Siberia, or Georg Wilhelm, all the cold she declined to experience.
Not that she didn’t like Georg Wilhelm. He was a polite, spirited man, a good conversationalist, a sought-after dinner guest, a man who talked with her about the natural sciences, notwithstanding that she was a woman, a weaker vessel and a weaker mind, as her first husband the naturalist Daniel Gottlieb had taken pains to remind her. But Georg Wilhelm deigns to speak with anyone who is interested in grasses, birds and the nervous systems of mammals. Daniel used to say that Steller would have made an excellent doctor had he not been such an excellent naturalist: whenever he set off to fetch some medicine, he was so caught up with classifying all the plants, insects and mushrooms he discovered that he was met with a grieving family and an already cooling cadaver upon his return.
Brigitta-Helena doesn’t just listen, she converses too. She knows about plants, knows the pests that nibble at their leaves, she knows to protect her saplings with chalk and ash, and she is fascinated by molluscs too, the golden ratio spiralling from a snail’s moist body, its shell spun in a perfect Fibonacci sequence – how can such a simple creature perform sucha mathematical feat? Georg Wilhelm listens attentively, and eventually he proposes.
And thus the protégé marries his former benefactor’s widow. It is only natural. Brigitta-Helena is used to Steller’s presence in her home, so Steller can continue her husband’s work, and this younger man will certainly make a change from the learned old man who used to ask her to rub his knobbly joints and fell asleep before his head touched the pillow.
After their wedding, Georg Wilhelm is given an assignment. He is to be sent to Siberia, and Brigitta-Helena too starts to pack her belongings and bids farewell to their garden and arboretum. The white and silk mulberries blossom only in her garden, and she gives her gardener advice far too many times. Eventually Georg Wilhelm has to command her into the sled, and Brigitta-Helena curls up under the furs with tears in her eyes, but as the horses canter off Steller squeezes her hand, and suddenly she feels a faint, wild thrill.
First they travel to Moscow. Once there, they are to confirm their travel arrangements with the Sibirskii Prikaz, but the journey is long and the road in terrible condition. Brigitta-Helena catches a chill, her feet feel numb and her skin becomes so chapped that she barely recognises herself in the mirror, but Georg Wilhelm seems oblivious to the dire conditions, he just talks about birds and clouds as though they were sitting in a grand parlour and not in an uncovered sled in the middle of aforest full of wolves. Brigitta-Helena begins hallucinating about the endless cold, she wakes at night, her sheets damp and dotted with bugs, and upon arrival in Moscow she makes up her mind: she will not go a step further.
Georg Wilhelm rages and weeps, rages and weeps and prays. He had imagined their journey together, imagined them climbing the slopes of uncharted mountains, identifying hitherto unknown species and in the evenings curling up together under warm fleeces, but this was his vision alone. Brigitta-Helena’s science is the science of conservatories and greenhouses, she did not choose this journey, nor this brutal, lonely work out on the steppes. Georg Wilhelm rages and weeps but eventually acquiesces, he will not stoop to forcing his wife against her will, and so Brigitta-Helena returns to St Petersburg. Steller continues his journey alone, and in his diary writes the bitter words: “I no longer need my wife, I have the ravens (Corvus corax)”.
Waxell beckons the naturalist and the navigator and spreads out the map. They are not in Kamchatka, but neither can they be very far away, the mainland must be only a few days’ journey away. It is hard to imagine that an uncharted island could exist this close to a known settlement – after all, this is no piddling little crag either but a stretch of land ninety versts across and covered in hills – but their calculations cannot be out by much. Khotyaintsov hasseen some persistent mist to the south-west, hanging in place even when the weather is clear, and he believes this curtain of fog must be held in place by the Kamchatka peninsula and the mountains lining its coast. Waxell asks the navigator to measure the distance by the stars, to assess the ocean currents; Steller conducts calculations of his own, and the men compare their results. Fleet Master Khitrov watches the men bent over their maps. By rights they ought to ask his opinion, but they do not.
Waxell summons the men together, all forty-six who have survived the voyage, the sickness and the winter. What next? They are alive, they have the easier, lighter days of summer ahead of them, but after the summer comes the autumn, and after autumn, winter. They are the only people on this island, and had a search party been sent to look for them, the mission would have been abandoned long ago. Still, the edge of the mainland cannot be far away. Only a week earlier a piece of driftwood washed ashore, the sea had brought them a white-painted window frame. There must be a settlement somewhere nearby, but their ship is in pieces and they have no wood to mend the damage. One cannot cross the ocean in a dinghy, but they could dismantle the decaying wreck on the sandbank and use the timbers to build a new ship. Two of theSt Peter’s three carpenters are already rotting in their graves, but in his grace the Lord has spared the third. The crew can either remain on the island, feast on sea cow and protect themselves from the elements until the last man perishes of the cold or old age, or they can build a new ship and cross the sea, and at least attempt to return home.
Thus begins a slow and arduous operation. They row out to the wreck, remove planks from the old ship and pile them on the shore, and the carpenter slowly begins to put them together into a new vessel. As work progresses, a faint inkling of the future starts to creep into their minds, and they begin to look at the foxes and otters with fresh eyes. The helmsman rows a pack of cards back from the wreck, and the men begin to play, to win and lose. During the day they dismantle the old ship and assemble the new one, but as the light fades they take out the playing cards, and animal pelts pass from one man to the next. The following day, they hunt more animals in order to pay their new debts. Summer has arrived, and hunting the foxes and otters is easy. The animals have offspring now, and the female protecting her brood is an easy target. They quickly strip them of their pelts and leave the carcasses to the mercy of the seabirds. Otter meat is no match for that of the sea cow; the only specimens that find their way onto the men’s campfire are those expecting young or those that have just whelped, as their flesh is soft and fatty. In the space of two weeks, the men skin nine hundred otters, leaving an endless banquet for the gulls and crabs on the shore.
Some of the men enjoy the taste of the whelps’ meat, and Steller observes the behaviour of the females who have lost their young. They weep like small children, and their sorrow dehydrates them so much that their fur loses its lustre until there is no longer any reason to hunt them. The otter is a mostcaring mother, she plays and frolics with her young such that Steller cannot help but smile, and in the moments when life on the island becomes too much for him, he seeks them out and watches them as they float in the water. As he follows their antics, an amusing thought occurs to him. The otter is as playful as a dog; he could tame a litter, a young otter accustomed to humans from birth would make a loyal companion indeed. He could get a house and build a small pond for his otters, but as he gazes at their skinned bodies abandoned on the shore and draws in the stink of their dying, rotting flesh, he is forced to remind himself of the order of the world, and he shakes off the thought. This is how God intended the matter. He created the world and its creatures under man’s dominion, animals best perform their role by benefitting mankind.
Steller does not take part in the games. He has no interest in the cards and their unchanging odds, nor in whose pile of pelts is taller on any given evening. His days have been calm and unhurried, he has spent his time gawking at sea cows, birds and otters like a simpleton, but now the skeleton of their new ship is beginning to take shape in the wash, and he reproaches himself, for his work is yet unfinished. He must classify the birds, the grasses, minerals and mammals, there is still so much to do, and when he is asked to help build the ship, he initially refuses but is put to work against his will. Will this drudgery never end? Why can’t he be left in peace to continue his work? He dreams of being able to walk the length and breadth of the island irrespective of his duties and the time of day, able to observe everyblade of grass, every bird’s egg, to draw up an exhaustive report and fold the island into his satchel like a glove, and whenever the ship builders berate him for how slowly he works, delight flickers in his breast – every setback means more time spent on the island.
Steller asks Johann Sind to gather a group of men and bring him a sea cow. Sind agrees, catching sea cows is a fine distraction, and before long a handsome female is lying on the rocks by the shore. Its offspring follows them to the shallow waters, calling for its mother in shrill bleats, but Steller shakes off all feelings of discomfort. The only way he can bring this creature back to the Academy is by peeling off its skin. A naturalist does not work with ill-defined thoughts and emotions; he needs a sharp knife and a firm, precise incision, an unflinching look into the moist innards.
