Island of the Blue Foxes

by Stephen R. Bown

  They soon spied what they thought to be mountains to the north but that later revealed themselves to be clouds. Another week of fair winds and clear skies passed, and it was now early July. Green-looking vegetation swirled past the hull of the ship. They thought it might be grass and took a sounding, finding no bottom at one hundred fathoms. Chirikov reported that they “examined the vegetation and learned that it was not sea grass but a species found in thick water resembling a sea nettle which is washed ashore in large quantities.” On July 12, they saw a “shore duck in the water.” On the thirteenth, they spied a “shore duck, a gull, and two old floating trees.” On the fourteenth, their excitement was fueled by “a large number of shore ducks, gulls, a whale, porpoises, and three medium-sized pieces of driftwood that had been in the water for some time.” And then land materialized to the east, “quite mountainous,” with bottom at sixty fathoms, consisting of “gray sand and in places small rocks.” Birds now regularly flew past the ship. It was July 15, the same day that Steller was squinting north from the deck of the St. Peter several hundred miles north along the same coast and claiming to see land that was not confirmed until the following day.

  Great flocks of murres and cormorants flew overhead as the St. Paul sailed closer to land. They were confident that this “was without doubt the American coast,” because according to the map of Louis Delisle de la Croyère, they were north of “parts of America that are well known,” Spanish America. They were now near Cape Bartolome, Baker Island, west of Ketchikan, on the Alaskan panhandle. Of course, Croyère’s chart showed only the very roughly charted coast that was claimed by imperial Spain, even though Spain did not actually have any presence along that coast closer than Acapulco, three thousand miles to the south. Although it seems absurd, no one had ever spoken to the people who lived along the coast, and they had no idea that a far-distant empire lay political claim to their lands. The St. Paul slowly cruised north for several more hours, searching for a good anchorage. “The coast is irregular and mountainous: these mountains had a fine growth of timber and in places were covered with snow.” The explorers were now literally on the opposite side of the earth from where they had started in St. Petersburg.

  The next day, at four in the afternoon, Chirikov ordered a shore boat lowered, and the quartermaster, Grigori Trubitsin, led eight men closer to shore to inspect a bay to see if the St. Paul could safely enter. It is now called Windy Bay, on Coronation Island. Trubitsin rowed around and reported “large fir, spruce and pine trees on the beach, many sea lions on the rocks,” but there was no sign of human habitation, and the bay was unsuitable as an anchorage. The ship sailed out from the coast for safety during the night, and the next day it continued cruising north by northwest through increasing fog along a coast of “high snow-covered mountains extending to the northward.” Chirikov recalled that “it was my intention to make a careful survey of a part of the American coast, but my plans were ruined by the misfortune of July 18th.”

  When the fog cleared, the men stared from the deck of the ship and saw that the mountains had more snow on them than a few days earlier. They sailed the St. Paul “as close to the shore as we dared,” but, unable to find a secure place to anchor, they decided to send a longboat ashore to search a bay for a safe anchorage. Then they could make a base for closer investigation of the new land. Chirikov handed Fleet Master Avram Dementiev a copy of his instructions, which he then read several times, as well as a signed paper detailing his conduct in the strange new land. Chirikov stayed on the St. Paul, tacking back and forth about a nautical mile from shore while Dementiev took ten armed men in the longboat. The location is now called Takanis Bay, on Yakobi Island, generally northwest of the town of Sitka. Chirikov instructed them to fire a signal rocket once ashore to announce their safe arrival, to light a bonfire on the beach at night, and to offer gifts to any native peoples, such as kettles, beads, cloth, needles, and tobacco. He wanted them to report on the quality of the harbor, to sketch it, to investigate the “trees and grass,” and to “examine the rocks and the soil to see whether they contain precious minerals.” They were also to fill some of the empty water barrels. As with the St. Peter, there wasn’t enough for the return journey, and getting a fresh supply was a priority. But most important, for an ambitious imperial expedition, Chirikov instructed them to “in all things conduct yourself as a true and good servant of Her Imperial Majesty.”

  The men rowed off into the mist and out of sight of the ship. The longboat was loaded with provisions for a week in case a storm kept them from returning, but their instructions were clear: to “make every effort to carry out quickly the above instructions so that you may return to the ship the same day or at least not later than the next day.” But no rocket was fired. When darkness came, there was no bonfire on the beach. “Strong winds and tides” kept the larger ship from approaching the land. Days passed, and still there was no sign of the shore party, and “owing to the heavy fog we could not identify the landmarks.” They all had a sinking feeling that Dementiev’s men had never made it ashore, or, worse, they had been attacked and killed. At first the weather was fine, but it was then followed by several days of heavy rain, fog, and winds that carried the St. Paul away from the shore.

  On July 23, Chirikov ordered the ship to creep closer to shore at the place where he had instructed Dementiev to go. They spied rocks jutting from the ocean and lurking just below the surface as they fearfully eased the big ship closer. Chirikov fired two cannons, the boom echoing against the forest, but there was no reply. The fog lifted a little, and from the deck they spied smoke on shore in the location where they presumed Dementiev had landed. The glow of a fire on the beach rallied their spirits, and they fired seven more cannons at intervals. During the previous days, “we had seen no fire, no buildings, no boats, nor any other signs of human beings and therefore supposed that the country was uninhabited.” The size of the fire grew, but no boat appeared on the water. Chirikov lit the stern lantern as a beacon and, as the weather was calm, kept the St. Paul close to shore. By morning the fire on the shore had died down, and only a wisp of smoke spiraled upward, blending with the fog.

  Chirikov and his officers decided that the shore boat must have been damaged and was unable to row out to the ship. They prepared a written document to this effect and affixed their signatures. They would take another risk and send ashore the remaining small boat with the carpenter, the caulker, and all the tools needed to repair a boat. Boatswain Sidor Savelev volunteered to lead the second shore party, with the plan that he would return immediately with the yawl and a few of the stranded mariners. Around noon the four men set off from the ship and rowed toward shore, about nine nautical miles away, and the St. Paul followed carefully behind with a keen lookout for hidden rocks. By six in the evening, the St. Paul had retreated in the face of a heavy sea, and from the deck the men could just see the yawl approaching the shore. They waited. No signal came, and the yawl did not return to the ship. The next day, July 25, at one in the afternoon, they spied two boats emerging from the bay and coming toward the ship. Thinking it was their two boats, Chirikov sailed the St. Paul closer, but it soon became apparent that these were not Russian boats: “Their bows were sharp and the men did not row as we do but paddled.” The larger one with many men kept its distance, while a small fast one with four men sped closer. They could see that one person wore something bright red. Some of them stood up and motioned with their hands for the St. Paul to come closer, and they called out twice, “Agai, Agai,” before turning around and paddling back into the bay. Chirikov gave orders for white kerchiefs to be displayed, but the boats continued ashore and soon disappeared. They could not follow them, because “many rocks were seen both under and above water on which the surf was playing.” A heavy surf prevented them from anchoring, and they had to retreat. There were no more signals of fires or smoke.

  By now, Chirikov wrote, “we became convinced that some misfortune had happened to our men.” Dementiev and the first party
had been missing for eight days, and there had been plenty of opportunity to row out to the ship had they been able to. “The action of the natives, their fear to come close to us, made us suspect that they had either killed our men or held them.” When Waxell later heard of the tale of the St. Paul’s misfortune, he speculated just how it could have happened. “When our people came ashore,” he speculated, “the Americans will have hidden themselves, and thus the men from the boat will have had no inkling of any danger. Then they will have begun to roam about, one in search of water, another looking for berries and fruits, and the others this or that. In this manner they became scattered and, when the Americans thought the right moment had come, they will have run in between them and the boat, preventing them from getting back to it. That is how it must have been.” He wrote that Chirikov was too naive and should have hidden some of his men belowdeck when he saw the two boats approaching, thereby to lure the Americans closer, since he believed they had “perhaps even the intention of taking the ship.” Then, he speculated, Chirikov could have captured some of them and ransomed them in exchange for the Russians.*

  Chirikov kept the ship close by for two more days, slowly patrolling the coast, but now both of the St. Paul’s small boats were lost, along with fifteen men. In the afternoon of the second day, the two native boats appeared again in the bay, but they remained close to land and then returned down the bay and disappeared. A little smoke curled into the air from the shore, but it soon dissipated. Without smaller boats to go ashore or explore shallow water, the St. Paul was in serious danger. An inventory revealed that they had forty-five casks of water onboard, some only partially full because the barrels had leaked. It was “hardly enough” to return, and they now had no way of filling their empty casks. They had been in America for only a few days, but Chirikov knew they had no other choice but to sail back to Kamchatka as quickly as possible. On July 27, the entire crew was placed on short rations, and the St. Paul began to battle contrary winds and rain on the homeward voyage.

  THE ST. PETER SKIRTED the eastern side of Kodiak Island, zigzagging for days against contrary winds. As the ship drifted toward the island chain now known as the Semidi Islands, Steller spent his days observing large numbers of hair seals, fur seals, sea otters, sea lions, dolphins, and storm fishes (porpoises)—all the animals that seemed to flourish along the misty shores of the islands. Through thick rolling fog they proceeded, as phantasmal and eerie promontories rose from time to time from the mist. On August 4, they spied a mighty volcano (Mount Chiginagak) to the northwest, while the ship followed the curve of the fifteen-mile-long series of nine islands, each capped with towering peaks. Then the ship changed course and headed south to get some distance from the land that could be seen to the north and west, the Alaskan Peninsula. To the mariners, it looked like they were trapped in a bay, with land visible in every direction except south. Steller desperately wanted more time to investigate the land, and Waxell and Khitrov pressed Bering into agreeing to their plan to chart more of the coast before returning. However, a half-submerged reef was occasionally revealed as a ponderous wave retreated. All on board, even Steller, knew that it would have been treacherous sailing close to land without accurate charts. Waxell suspected the barely discernible land was a series of islands, because “we sailed two or three hours at a stretch through very calm water and with a light wind, yet at the same time making a good speed. Suddenly we would come out into large ocean waves and were scarcely able to manage the ship.” Bering no longer had any interest in exploring—he just wanted to get back to Kamchatka—but the confusing geography of islands and mainland around the western Gulf of Alaska was confounding the direct route home. Events were proving Bering right in his fear of the unknown land, and the mist and rain amplified this fear.

  On their way back south, the ship passed west of Chirikov Island again, but this time it was far off to the east, and Steller noted that “the winds, which at this time and until August 9 were mostly east or southeast and could have advanced us several hundred miles on the straight course to Kamchatka, were now utilized fruitlessly tacking up and down.” As Bering had feared, they were beset by dreaded headwinds, the seasonal westerlies. The ship’s speed slowed, and then the wind drove the ship back forty-three nautical miles to the southeast. Steller brooded about the abundance of “storm fishes” that he spied in the waters around the ship. It was believed that when they were “seen unusually often in a very quiet sea, a storm followed soon after, and that the oftener they came up and the more active they were, the more furious was the subsequent gale.” Steller counted many of them. Then, on August 10, through the fog and drizzle, he spied something that he had never seen before. It wasn’t a sea otter, a sea lion, a whale, or a porpoise. “The head was like a dog’s, with pointed, erect ears,” he wrote. “From the upper and the lower lips on both sides whiskers hung down. The eyes were large; the body was long, rather thick and round, tapering gradually towards the tail. The skin seemed thickly covered in hair, of a gray color on the back, but reddish white on the belly; in the water, however, the whole animal appeared red, like a cow.” The peculiar beast had no forefeet but rather fins. It leaped gracefully through the water, jumping and playing, following the ship for more than two hours, diving under the slowly moving vessel and appearing on the other side, back and forth perhaps thirty times. When a piece of seaweed drifted by, the creature playfully swam up and grabbed it in its mouth and surged toward the ship, close enough that Steller could have poked it with a pole, “making such motions and monkey tricks that nothing more laughable can be imagined.” After several more tricks, causing much laughter, it darted away and was seen only from a distance. Steller called it a “sea ape,” and it became a mystery to many future naturalists. Clearly, it wasn’t any of the other sea mammals that Steller had seen in Kamchatka or Alaska; he was sufficiently familiar with them that he certainly would have identified it. Much ink has been spilled debating the likely identity of the famous “Steller’s sea ape,” but the light wasn’t good, “the moon and stars were out,” and because of the fog and mist, a great deal was obscured. It was probably a full-grown bachelor fur seal or a young northern fur seal. We do know why the “sea ape” fled the ship. Steller shot at it because he wanted it for his collection, but he missed.*

  It was around this time that the assistant surgeon, Matthias Betge, submitted an official report that five sailors were on the sick list for scurvy and that sixteen others were “badly affected.” Soon there would be more cases of men unfit for service. Bering, who had been in his cabin for two days, was probably also suffering the early stages of the affliction. Since Waxell had been running the ship for most of the voyage, setting the watch, appointing the helmsman, and assigning sailing duties, Bering’s present indisposition had little direct impact on the ship’s operations.

  After a frustrating day tacking back and forth battling contrary headwinds, Bering called a sea council in his cabin to consider their situation. Present were Bering and the senior officers, Lieutenant Waxell, Shipmaster Sofron Khitrov, and the aging navigator, Andreyan Hesselberg, then more than seventy years of age. They first went over the minutes of their previous sea council meetings, with specific attention to the directive to return to Petropavlovsk “during the last days of September.” This now seemed dangerous “because of the violent autumn storms and continuous heavy fogs.” It was not safe to approach land because they had no charts or knowledge of hidden reefs and rocks, currents, and sandbanks; islands compounded the poor visibility. After the discussion, the officers called all the junior and petty officers into the cabin and presented their opinion that it was time to turn directly for home along the fifty-third parallel of latitude “or as near to it as the winds will permit.” The document, titled “Decision to Hasten Return,” was then signed by all present. They had been at sea sixty-nine days so far. They gave orders to prepare the ship to proceed in a more southwesterly direction. Steller noted that “as usual,” he wasn’t called in to offer an
opinion or to sign the document. But he did quietly record his opinion: “If I now draw the logical conclusion, from a comparison between the object of the sea council and their subsequent acts, it must certainly be as follows: ‘These gentlemen want to go home, and by the shortest road but in the longest way.’” On this parallel, he thought, islands would surely block the path, while a more southerly route would be a detour but have better winds.

  They spent the next week, until August 17, tacking back and forth along the fifty-third parallel due to contrary winds. There were no direct winds for sailing. The ship’s log tells the story: endless hauling up and down of the various sails, the jig, topsails, foresails, topgallant sail, mainsail, trysail, and topmast-staysail, preparing the ship to turn and claw its way in the desired direction against the wind, through weather that was “drizzly,” “wet,” “heavy,” “rainy,” “foggy,” and “thick.” During this time, yet unknown to the men on either ship, the St. Peter and the St. Paul were crossing paths several times, out of sync with each other by a mere couple of days and never in sight of each other. A “real storm” set in on the seventeenth in the afternoon, and soon it was a “gale” with “heavy swell,” which petered out the next day. The ceaseless struggle against wind and waves was slowly exhausting the men.

  On the eighteenth of August, Steller woke in his bunk to hear talk of land, and he rushed to the deck to see what was going on. Throughout the voyage, on numerous occasions, Steller thought he saw land and loudly pointed it out, harassing the officers for not sailing closer to inspect it, so perhaps it was no surprise that when he went on deck no one would mention the land to him. “However it may already have been agreed that no one should say anything about having seen land,” he groused, since none of them would confirm the sighting, which he thought was either a prank against him or because it was seen “in such a singular place, namely in the south.” He then claimed the land could be seen plainly in the morning before being hidden by fog. “That it was not far from us could also be inferred from the quantities of kelp floating from that direction.” And “the fact that the westerly wind died down suddenly” was in his mind additional proof that they were sailing between America and some island to the south. The officers had a distinct lack of interest in the “land,” and Steller was angry because he thought they were pretending to not see the land so they would not have to investigate and put it on their chart. It was “indefensible to leave it without an investigation,” he fumed.