• • •
But let us pause before the journey and summon the travelers from the cold storage of memory; let us first see them all in their twenties, in their new dress uniforms, the blues, the blue of the British night sky and of our day sky. The date is January 1, 1786, the setting is a New Year’s dinner hosted by a rich entrepreneur in Kazan, our first major stopover on the way east.
Here is our leader Captain Joseph Billings, conversing about the excellent organization of textile warehouses on the Thames with our generous host, who, it turns out, had been in London in the ’70s on business for Count Sheremetyeff. Here is Captain Gavril Sarychev, the second-in-command, a polite man with a big, round head and a humble smile. Here is Martin Sawyer, our secretary and interpreter. He speaks very decent Russian, and prefers to use it in a confiding semiwhisper that makes our host’s young daughter bring her pretty ear closer to his lips.
Our other two senior officers are Richard Hall, another Briton, and Christian Bering, a Russian by birth, the somber nephew of the famous explorer Vitus Bering, who wrecked and died on one of the islands we are going to visit, and whose eponymous strait we will attempt to sail through. We have surgeons, Messrs. Robeck and Allegretti—an imperturbable Briton and an acerbic Italian, and a surgeon’s mate, Lehman. We have a skipper, Bakov, and draftsman Voronin, and mechanic Edwards, and shipmasters, Batahov and Bronnikov. This company of men, “the society,” as Sawyer would call it, will employ and govern dozens of others to make the expedition’s gears turn.
And last, here is your humble servant, Mr. Velitzyn. He is exercising his French by talking to Allegretti and two more guests, both foreign nationals residing in Kazan. Looking at the roast pig and braised sturgeon and wild-mushroom pâté, and watching our Britons (together with the host and a couple of Englishmen from the Gaston Coal Company) toast the health of King George III, Mr. Velitzyn imagines that everyone at the table is, like him, experiencing a buttery feeling of progress and international unity, of the universal dawn of the Age of Reason. A feeling that the Tower of Babel is not a lost cause as long as tables can be served in this feral corner of Europe, and the diners can find a way to ask to pass a plate of pickled cucumbers or a bottle of Chianti . . . In short, a feeling of pride, yes, of pride for my country.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way again.
• • •
I separated from the company to visit my brother’s grave in Orenburg, then followed their route east for two and a half thousand miles. After a month on the road, at the end of February 1786, I rejoined them in Irkutsk, the capital of Siberia, two-thirds of the way to our final destination. Having seen nothing but small villages and nomad tents since the Urals, I perceived Irkutsk as a pinnacle of urban civilization and Governor General Jakobi as an omnipotent ruler, whose word alone could bring us aid and cooperation from every last servant of the empire, a year’s worth of provisions for 180 men, every piece of iron, sailcloth, and cordage to rig four ships, and hundreds of packhorses to carry it all beyond the Arctic Circle.
My trust in order and subordination would prove to be misguided.
Meanwhile, we met Dr. Carl Heinrich Merck, a young German physician, another protégé of Dr. Pallas. A far-flung scion of a Darmstadt family of pharmacists and physicians that would achieve utmost prominence in the years to come, Merck appeared to be in Siberia on a kind of professional coming-of-age mission, seeking experience as well as the pharmacopoeia of the East. He accepted the offer to join the expedition as a naturalist.
• • •
In May, we left for Yakutsk via the river Lena—one and a half thousand miles northeast. From there we covered another thousand and a half by land east to the township of Okhotsk, on the sea of the same name. There the enterprise split, Captain Hall and half the work crew staying behind to build ships, while the rest (about seventy men) took various routes north, to the Upper Kolyma fort, where we intended to winter while building two ships of our own. We would float along the Kolyma River to the Icy Sea come spring, and then sail east over the top of the Eurasian continent in search of the Northeast Passage. A goal that did not seem overly ambitious, at the time.
We reached the fort by September, after cresting two mountain chains, fording three big rivers and innumerable small ones, losing our way, finding it, and losing it again, along with baggage, horses, and men. What kept me going was a naïve assumption that our destination was the way destinations are supposed to be: better than the journey, a safe harbor, an oasis. But it was none of these things.
By then, rivers were frozen, and my thermometers, those that survived the transportation, showed ‒20 in the mornings by the Réaumur temperature scale.
The fort sat in the floodplain of the Kolyma’s tributary, the Yasachnoi River, framed by forests and marshes, lakes and sloughs that ran in all directions as far as the eye could see. It consisted of five huts inhabited by Cossacks and their families, a few yurts, a chapel, and a fenced yard, within which stood a roomy log cabin, izba, of the fort’s commander. Attached to the izba was a storehouse. The fort’s whole purpose for existence was asserting the empire’s rule by fleecing revenue off the natives and selling them municipal wares—in order of importance, alcohol, salt, metal. The commander, a Cossack by the name of Feodor, came out and made a bow, but, quite memorably, his first words were, “Hats don’t come off on Kolyma, I beg you my big pardon. Too cold, your nobleships.”
The fort had not nearly enough shelter or food to accommodate a party as large as ours, and the Governor General’s personally chosen contractor had not delivered the promised foodstuffs. We faced hunger. When Captain Billings demanded answers of Cossack Feodor, the latter looked upon the former with nothing but cheeky amusement. Didn’t the foreigner know that this was the way of things in Siberia? Was he juvenile or plain stupid?
Our first week or two at the Upper Kolyma fort was a scene of desperate activity. We converted the chapel into barracks, dug earthen huts (negotiating between bog and ice), and built a shed for the expedition’s supplies and next to it a smithy, where we installed our portable forge. In those first days I scribbled end-of-the-world missives to Anna (thankfully never-sent): I loved you as a man could ever love—and you pushed me away; what will return to you, if ever, will be a vestige of love, feral and disfigured. Would that be more to your liking?
Ah, these were not the vestiges of love but the last spasms of pampered, aristocratic, eloquent self-pity before it gave up the ghost. A dulled, grim, smug even, you did it to yourself took its place, while all the worry and fears turned on the others. I feared for the survival of the party. I feared that some humiliation, an ugly breakdown, would overtake our foreign guests, thrown so abruptly to the bottom of civilization. I feared reality: a reality of the land where making little to no provisions for several dozen men belonged to the normal way of things. By comparison, I feared less for myself—only enough to stay close to people and look into the fire as much as I could. There shall be no Old Man Frost.
Within a week of our arrival, four of us were crammed into one of the earthen huts, no more than eighty square feet: Sawyer, Robeck, Merck, and I. We lined the walls with our pallets: the Britons shared a wall and Merck and I had one each to ourselves. An open hearth fashioned out of stones took the center. We sat, dizzy with the smoke, each gnawing at his dry bread. Whichever language any of us hazarded a communication in, the words bounced off at least one wall unless translated: Sawyer spoke no German, Merck and I no English, and Robeck made little to no effort even in his one and only native tongue.
Robeck was a big, inward fellow with a ruddy face and flaxen hair. He described himself as a sawbones. Merck’s dominant feature was blue: pale-blue-eyed and melancholy. His face bore a resemblance to a certain line of German princes of which our own monarchs partake, and he walked in a curious buttoned-up manner, the kind I’ve since seen in savants and misfits: his arms did not swing freely but stayed close to his flanks. Sawyer was a short lad, animated almost comica
lly; he looked younger than his twenty-five years and he acted as if he wasn’t meant to sit still, and if our cramped quarters forced stillness upon him, he would at least keep chattering. That was how we learned that he had been born to a British merchant’s family in Archangel, a Russian port town to the north of St. Petersburg. “Your humble servant can boast a confident footing in both English and Russian nations and is no stranger to the adversities of the northern climate!” Then he introduced Robeck to us: our surgeon was from Shrewsbury, Shropshire, had righted joints and tapped veins since the age of fourteen, and at eighteen cut and sewn for the Royal Navy. His latest employ was with the East India Company. “One judges a surgeon by the workmanship of his tool case. And look at our Mr. Robeck’s distinguished-quality chest! I do hope, though, none of us will ever suffer to see the inside of it.”
On our third day in the hut, Sawyer pulled out a ruffled book—soaked and dried it looked—and tapped on it, saying with a degree of shy veneration, “Messieurs—François Fénelon, The Adventures of Telemachus. I find it a source of inspiration. Says here, ‘Misfortune gives new luster to the glory of great men.’ ” He looked up from the book and added, “Though let us hope we don’t face any mischief attendant on an alarm of scarcity . . .”
That was my hope too.
• • •
One day in late October the weirs across the Yasachnoi trapped four dozen fat nalime—burbot. Oh how we feasted! The fish kept coming, dearth turned to glut for a week—and then back, as was the way of things in Siberia. Then flour shipments started arriving now and then from the Middle Kolyma Fort. We ate it boiled in fish oil. And between shipments we learned to venture out and scavenge what cargo or carrion had been abandoned by the wayside of our supply line. Packhorses had been falling and dying along it for miles.
The crew started building two sloops, fifty and thirty-six feet in keel. The timber had to be felled two miles away and dragged to the river. The beasts of burden did not last long, but new ones were procured from local tribes. The end-of-the-world land was apparently populated. There was livestock and habitation, trade and travel. People lived here, the natives—Yakuti tribes mostly, hunters and fishermen who belonged to the same widespread race as Inuit and Mongols, and the Russians—were transplants from lands back west. They lived here year-round. Couldn’t we? I wedged a thermometer into a crack in my wall. I lay and watched how a tail of mercury in the glass tube above my head got shorter and shorter, as if it were crawling away from me, into the ground.
Days were shrinking and with the darkness came the cold. I took to measuring temperatures several times a day, a night. The temperature next to the hearth inside our hut was +12º Réaumur; the temperature next to my wall was +3º. I prayed for wind, not for my own but for others’ sake. Wind meant warmer weather, snowfall. Quiet meant a deep freeze. November 5, 4 a.m., ‒35º Réaumur. November 13, 12 noon, ‒38.5º. 12 midnight, ‒40º. November 17, ditto. 18, ditto. Ten ounces of mercury in a stopped vial froze in three hours, brandy became thick as molasses, day became a thinner shade of night.
At ‒40º Réaumur, axes bounced off tree trunks and shattered. Something snapped and shot in the forest, as if trees exploded like firecrackers. At ‒40º, a man’s exhalation froze in front of his face and fell to the ground as snow. Everyone’s inhalation, including mine, made a tearing sound. Everyone but me complained of pain in the chest. Everyone’s eyeballs hurt but mine. At ‒40º, men stayed in confinement of their hovels. Everything stopped. I worried. A frightful fancy hatched in my mind: if the temperature fell below negative forty-five, the lowest setting on all my thermometers, something intractable and calamitous would happen. Humans and beasts would turn into porcelain. Wood into iron. Air into dust. Earthly elements would become as strange as the northern lights, which ignited daily by now. Negative forty-five will be the temperature point of transfiguration.
On November 20, I went outside in the middle of the night, thermometer in one hand and in the other, a long cedar splinter burning at the tip, to illuminate the thermometer’s scale. While the column of spirit kept sinking into its reservoir, I stood and listened to my body. What do you feel? Do you feel cold? . . . Anything?
The sky, enormous, black, and star-studded, pressed down on us, squeezing us into a thin pelt. Within it, every hovel plus the forge burned wood feverishly, hummed with voices—the crazed glow of a sick ward. A door slammed, something wooden cracked. Somebody wallowed out stringing obscenities. A discordant song flared elsewhere, morphing into a fight. A woman’s voice rose in a plaintive chant of distress there is no English word for—but there was always a Russian one, prichitanie—and a deranged male voice unloaded abuse on the woman. Only our horses were silent, packed into a dark, patient crowd next to the smithy. And high above it all, the northern lights played, self-absorbed, a supreme radiance that brought neither light nor warmth. I listened. What do you feel? I feel worried. Other than that, nothing.
I went inside: through a rickety door, a stiff bearskin, two sheets of canvas. My companions huddled around a fire. No one could sleep. Sawyer read to Robeck out of Fénelon’s tome. Merck sat with his eyes closed, indifferent to Sawyer’s English. They looked shrunken, frightened. Sawyer said, “How goes it, Mr. Velitzyn?”
“Northern lights,” I said.
“Local Yakuti think it’s spirits warring in the air.”
Robeck addressed me amicably, “Some blindo outheieh?”
I looked to Sawyer for translation.
“Mmm . . . A sustained drunkenness?” Sawyer said.
“Zapoi?” I offered.
“Za-poi,” Robeck affirmed. “Theyougo. Whadotheysay bau Cossacks? Thamon isasot.”
Sawyer: “Which man?”
Robeck: “Our Mr. Feodor. Ablody boozington.”
“Oh, that man.” Sawyer shook his head. “Bad apple.”
I took some of my fur garb off and sat down. Merck opened his eyes, saw my thermometer. “How cold is it, Mr. Velitzyn?”
“Forty-two below zero. Cold.”
“Kholod,” Robeck repeated after me. “Cold. Kholod. Same word.”
“No,” Sawyer said, “it’s in between cold and hold. It’s the cold that holds you in its grip.”
Veritably so! I said, “What about moroz? And stoozha? And metel, viyuga, purga, buran?”
“Frost—” Sawyer began but Robeck sprang in, “That’s morose, and stogy, and—whawasit?—purgatory? Purge!”
Now the mood improved. Sawyer scratched his nose. “Let’s see: flurries, then blizzard, a bigger blizzard, and a ferociously tremendous blizzard! And what is stoozha, Mr. Velitzyn?”
“Very big kholod.” I hazarded a mixture of English and Russian, which caused further merriment. Even Merck cracked a smile.
“That’s right,” Robeck said, laughing, “a stogy cold. A morose cold!”
Thus went our first English‒Russian lesson, thank God for it. Thank God for the languages we first grasped from their back end, learning twenty words for liquor and drunkard and ten words for chamber pot before the word for mother or God; learning that there were many more Russian than English words for bitter frost but many more English than Russian words for jest, and that most of those Russian words for jest had been borrowed from English anyway. Thank God for learning all that and even for never quite knowing whether the words I’d adopted could be found in a general vocabulary of the British nation or were Robeck-Sawyer inventions—because we made our own pidgin as we went, the language of an eighty-square-foot country of an earthen hut entrenched in the deep Siberia, a language where extreme cold was called a stogy morose and was thereby rendered less frightening. Thank God for that.
• • •
And yet it was cold. December clenched us in its hold as I learned my English from Jack and Jill and the Lord’s Prayer. Then I learned from Sawyer’s books. Sawyer had come to Siberia prepared. Along with Fénelon he’d lugged in Gulliver’s Travels, Utopia, and adventures of Sir John Mandeville and of Thomas James, the la
tter a true account of a maritime ordeal in the Arctic. Sawyer was ready to meet his share of novelties—be they giants, one-legged people, or merely a perfect social order. “Thus says Fénelon,” he’d read. “ ‘Remember that the countries where the power of the sovereign is the most absolute are those where the sovereigns are the least powerful.’ Back home, Mr. Velitzyn, this book is in so high a regard, they hold contests among fourteen-year-old girls for the best French-to-English translation of selected passages. And yet you tell me you have not heard about Telemachus! Come: the son of Odysseus embarks on a journey to find his father, accompanied by Mentor, who is Athena in disguise. No? Mentor teaches Telemachus the enlightened ways to arrange and govern a human commonwealth. Still no?”
I only read Gulliver, I’d say, and compared to your tender-aged British lassies, I was a manifest ignoramus. He’d respond cheerily, Well let me educate you then . . .
And still, it was cold.
• • •
So cold and dark that the shipbuilding work slowed, and our party could do little more than pray and hold on, subsist till the winter bottomed out. So cold . . . but the truth was, if I did not have a thermometer by my side at all times, if I did not observe others, did not catalog meteorological portents, I would not have known how cold it was. I did not feel anything. I pretended. A negative thirty or forty felt the same as negative twenty. If the world reached the temperature point of transfiguration, what would become of me?
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 14
