Island of the Blue Foxes

by Stephen R. Bown

  The next day, as they readied the St. Peter for sea, seven men paddled out from the island to meet them. Two of the men steered their kayaks close to the ship, and Bering gave them gifts of an iron kettle and some needles and thread, while in turn they presented the Russians with two bark hats, one adorned with a carved ivory decoration resembling a person. All the kayaks paddled back to shore, and then the men began yelling or chanting around the big fire. Waxell suggested to Bering that he could have captured them, or at least some of them, but Bering disapproved, and Waxell “was given written instructions not to carry it out and ordered not to use force against them in any way whatever.” Steller, who wrote descriptions of everything he saw, including clothing, tools, equipment, and personal appearance, saw similarities between the Americans and the people of Kamchatka and was convinced, though they spoke different languages, that they were related. He only regretted that he had not had enough time to prove his theories with greater research. “I have no doubt that I would have been able to give perfect proof of this thesis, if I had been allowed to act according to my own judgement, but this the nostalgia of the naval men would not permit.” Any further communication or exchange between peoples was deterred by the changing weather and the shifting wind, which allowed the St. Peter to head to sea again before dark. As it happens, the eight days they spent in the Shumagin Islands may have sealed their fate. By the time they hoisted sails and set off for the West, the autumn gales were about to begin.

  * The people were probably Tlingit, inhabiting the southern coast of Alaska and inland in northwestern British Columbia and Yukon territory. In the Tlingit language, Lingit, “Agai” or “Agou” means “Come” or “Come here.” Since relations between Europeans and the Tlingit were frequently harmonious, it is generally believed that the actions of the Tlingit, which Chirikov reported, were cautious but friendly in intent, beckoning the strangers to come and see the wreckage or perhaps to trade at a nearby village. The powerful and treacherous riptides that are common along narrow inlets of the Alaskan coast had probably swamped the two small boats and drowned the men before they ever reached shore, before they could even send a flare or fire a shot, which was to be their first order of action upon reaching land.

  * While sailing the Aleutian Islands with his family in 1969, Miles Smeeton wrote in his book Misty Islands of his own encounter with a similar creature. Based on his description, it could easily have been the same creature Steller described. Two other people on the sailboat also reported seeing the strange sea mammal frolicking near their boat. They had not read Steller’s account beforehand and only afterward believed they had seen the same beast.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE SCOURGE OF THE SEA

  ON AUGUST 31, the day after Khitrov had departed to investigate the fire, the first mariner who had been brought to Nagai Island for fresh air had died, probably from scurvy, and a grave was made with a wooden cross. The man’s name was Nikita Shumagin, and they named the island after him (now the whole chain is named the Shumagin Islands, and the specific island has been renamed Nagai). On the morning of September 1, the rest of the sick men had been returned to the ship from the island, and all fifty-two water casks filled with brine were loaded and lashed, with the longboat, to the deck. The storm that had blown in unexpectedly increased in severity. It produced such terrific wind and waves that many believed that Bering or Waxell would order the anchor cable cut in an attempt to get away from land, abandoning Khitrov but perhaps dooming them all because, as Steller opined, “we surely would have drifted on the rocks and been wrecked.”

  By this time, Bering himself was barely able to leave his cabin, and twelve other crew were on the sick list with the advancing signs of scurvy. Steller, who had studied medicine but never practiced for long, shared the surgeon’s duties and noted the increasing numbers of men on the sick roster. Steller even commented on some strange lethargy in his own disposition, writing that his own constitution had “fallen under a foreign power.” This was a reference to a general weakness in the limbs. Suspecting the beginnings of a scurvy epidemic, Steller rummaged in the ship’s medical chest in search of anything to use against the ailment but noted that the chest was “mostly filled with plasters, ointments, oils, and other surgical remedies enough for four or five hundred men in case of a battle but had none whatever of the medicines most needed on sea voyages and serviceable against scurvy and asthma, our commonest cases.”

  When Steller asked Waxell for “a detail of several men for the purpose of collecting such quantity of antiscorbutic herbs as would be enough for all,” he was roughly turned down and ordered to collect them himself if he felt that it was important. Waxell was irritated by Steller’s manner and approach and now believed anything he said to be little more than the whining of a foreign academic, an arrogant man who looked down on the others and who pronounced his evident superiority with every suggestion he uttered. Steller was evidently maddening to be around. To listen to his claims (many of which were obviously without merit to anyone used to life at sea) was to lose face and admit Steller’s superiority. Now, even when Steller had sensible advice, he was brushed away, as one would an irritating insect. When Steller writes that he was “coarsely” contradicted by Waxell and other officers, as he was when he again raised the issue of the briny water, the response was likely something along the lines of “Shut up and get out of our way. We’re doing useful work here.”

  When Steller realized bleakly that relations had deteriorated to the point that his opinion and “this important work, which affected the health and lives of all, was not considered worth the labor of a few sailors, I repented of my good intentions and resolved that in the future I would only look after the preservation of my own self without wasting another word.” Steller and Plenisner had spent their time on Nagai Island collecting, and eating, as many fresh plants as they could—gentian, spoonwort, lingonberries, crowberries, “and other cresslike plants.” He later learned that the officers, “from fear of death,” had belatedly listened to his alarm about the briny water and had sent two barrels ashore to be filled with spring water “for their own consumption,” but in the haste to get the sick on board the ship before the advancing storm, they were left behind on the beach.

  With barrels of briny water and only a small personal supply of medicinal fresh plants, which Steller began prescribing to Bering and the twelve other sick mariners, the united crew of the St. Peter was ready to resume its journey home. Meanwhile, Bering and the other mariners who had been taking Steller’s prescription of fresh plants began to show signs of improvement. Bering was back on deck, and many of the sailors were taken off the sick list, their teeth firm and their energy returned. “My ministrations, under divine grace, very clearly caught their attention,” he wrote. If only they had listened earlier and collected more of these plants and fed all the mariners.

  ONE OF THE MOST vivid and grim descriptions of the ravages of scurvy can be found in A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1740–1744 by George Anson of the British Royal Navy in the same year the St. Peter and the St. Paul sailed from Asia to Alaska. Famed for plundering the Spanish treasure galleon, and a fabulously rich national hero, Anson’s joy was not celebrated by most of the mariners who disembarked with him from England. Most of them had died; only around two hundred of the original two thousand mariners, and only one of five ships, the mighty sixty-gun Centurion, returned from circumnavigating the world. The others perished miserably, mostly from scurvy. Only a handful died from other causes.

  Although the ships had actually been crammed with extra men for the voyage in anticipation of a high death rate, they were soon undermanned by sick men with the usual shipboard illnesses of dysentery or typhus. But scurvy quickly became the greatest problem. Just when the storms raged and the ships were in peril, when the men needed their strength the most, they grew morose, their limbs leaden and their thoughts clouded. A third of the sailors lay moaning in their hammocks, too enfeebled to come up on deck and save
themselves. Old war wounds began to open and bleed again, once-broken bones again separated, gums became swollen and brown, aching and oozing blood, while teeth became wobbly and fell out. “Some lost their Senses, some had their sinews contracted in such a Manner as to draw their limbs close to their Thyghs, and some rotted away.”

  There were no men well enough to clean the lower decks, so the putrid slime of body fluids sloshed back and forth as the ships rolled with the monstrous waves. The men began to die, whimpering and crying in agony as the mysterious malady took hold. Their stiff and rigid corpses pitched to the floor. One of Anson’s ships threw “two-thirds of their complement, and of those that remained alive scarcely any were capable of doing duty, except the officers and their servants.” When they did finally reach shore, with a skeleton crew of men barely able to stand, they found “almost all the vegetables esteemed for the cure of scorbutic disorders.… These vegetables with the fish and the flesh we found here, were most salutary for recovering our sick, and of no mean service to us who were well, in destroying the lurking seeds of scurvy and in restoring us to our wonted strength.”

  DURING THE AGE OF SAIL, scurvy was indirectly responsible for more deaths at sea than storms, combat, shipwreck, and all other diseases combined and was in fact the cause of shipwrecks when men who were too ill and weakened to haul the ropes or climb the rigging allowed a ship to be driven on the rocks or to founder and be swamped in mighty waves. From those of Jacques Cartier, Vasco da Gama, and Francis Drake to Ferdinand Magellan, James Cook, and Louis-Antoine, comte de Bougainville, scurvy appeared on nearly every lengthy voyage of discovery during the Age of Sail. It was the scourge of the seas. The problem was that no one knew exactly what caused the dreaded disease. One of Anson’s lieutenants, Philip Saumarez, expressed his own weary summation of the disease. Scurvy, he wrote, “expresses itself in such dreadful symptoms as are scarce credible.… Nor can all the physicians, with their materia medica, find a remedy for it. But I could plainly observe that there is a certain je ne sais quoi in the frame of the human system that cannot be renewed… without the assistance of certain earthly particles, or in plain English, that the land is man’s proper element, and vegetables and fruit his only physic.”

  Using the humoral theory as a foundation, physicians from numerous countries studied the disease and tried to formulate their own specific theories to explain scurvy. Dozens of tracts were written on scurvy, claiming such disparate causes of the disease as foul vapors, dampness, an excess of black bile, laziness, copper poisoning, heredity, or blocked perspiration. Cures that would bring the humors back into balance included purging with saltwater, bloodletting, putting hydrochloric acid in drinking water, smearing mercury paste on open sores, drinking dealcoholized beer, and other ineffectual but politically palatable or economically feasible solutions. On some ships, physical beatings of afflicted mariners were promoted, on the assumption that the condition was really just laziness disguised, that the scorbutic mariners were merely shirkers. The cure could occasionally be as deadly as the disease.

  It was Scottish physician James Lind, aboard the ship HMS Salisbury in 1747, who conducted what is considered to be the first controlled trial in medical history. He selected twelve scorbutic sailors with symptoms “as similar as I could have them.… They all in general had putrid gums, the spots and lassitude, with weakness of their knees.” He hung their hammocks in pairs in a separate enclosure in the dank and dark forecastle of the ship and “provided one diet common to all,” except that he treated them with different accepted scurvy remedies, such as “elixir of vitriol”; vinegar; cider; seawater, “half a pint every day, and sometimes more or less as it operated, by way of a general physic”; and a thrice-daily “electuary” paste “the bigness of a nutmeg” that consisted of garlic, mustard seed, dried radish root, balsam, or Peru and gum myrrh, washed down with barley water. The final lucky pair was fed two oranges and one lemon daily, which they “ate greedily,” for six days, when the supply of the southern fruits was depleted. Not surprisingly, the sailors fed oranges and lemons, the only ones who were fed anything fresh, recovered quickly and returned to duty. But Lind was baffled by his discovery. These fruits were scarce and difficult to obtain in northern countries, and in his attempts to concentrate the citrus liquid through boiling it into something more easily transported and stored, Lind destroyed the active ingredient and delayed the implementation of a true scurvy cure for decades. It was the preservation techniques then used for all foods on sea voyages—drying and salting—that were the real causes of scurvy.

  Of course, we now know that it is lack of fresh food containing vitamin C that is the primary cause of scurvy, a deficiency disease where the body’s connective tissue degenerates: from bone to cartilage to blood vessels, the body essentially coming apart. A reliable portable cure for the disease, other than acquiring fresh fruits and vegetables, was not discovered until forty years later. It wasn’t until the dawn of the Napoleonic Wars in the 1790s that physician Sir Gilbert Blane convinced the Royal Navy to introduce a daily dose of lime juice to all British mariners mixed with their rum.

  Steller, ahead of his time, had his own ideas about scurvy based on his discussions with the native peoples of Kamchatka and his observation that they did not get it throughout the long winter, though some of the Russians seemed to be prone to it. As far as he could tell, the Kamchadals did not do anything in particular to prevent scurvy, so he concluded that it must be related to their diet, the one thing that differentiated them from the Russians. Steller took this hypothesis and tied it to the consumption of fresh plants, sometimes bitter or unpleasant ones that would not normally be part of a diet if flavor were the only consideration. The Russians, interlopers in the region, mostly ate travel rations augmented sporadically with wild game. Scurvy was a condition that would not have been as common in the Russian Navy as it was in the British, Spanish, and French Navies, whose services had a much longer history of lengthy sea voyages and spent more time at sea, crossing oceans. By contrast, the Russian Navy was mostly stationed in the Baltic or Black Sea and was never quite as far from port where fresher foods would have been available. In any case, the precautions Steller took in the fall of 1741 and his inquisitive mind and ability to experiment were the only things working in favor of the mariners aboard the St. Peter.

  NEAR THE END OF SEPTEMBER, after sailing generally west through rainy, overcast weather for two weeks, the St. Peter was still hundreds of miles from Avacha Bay, only 40 percent of the way home. Steller’s journal entries contain reports of the occasional sea otter or clump of drifting seaweed, owls or gulls and their direction of flight. A sighting of whales on one day foreshadowed a brief storm on the next, while porpoises following the ship foreordained another short storm. In general, though, the westerlies prevailed, rushing them toward their destination. But with the sun and stars mostly hidden because of the perpetual cloud, they were cruising west generally blind, hoping that the direct route they had chosen through these unknown waters would also be the safest and fastest path and would not be blocked by hidden reefs or fogbound islands. “Thus,” Waxell reported, “for two or three weeks we never had sight of the sun, and at night we were unable to see the stars,” which made navigation impossible. “We had to sail along without knowing what was what and that in an unknown ocean, like blind people who do not know whether they are going too quickly or too slowly.” There was a general anxiety among the entire crew. Not knowing their location or the location of land or deadly obstacles, with possible disaster lurking behind every cloud bank or veil of mist, the stress was building, and sleep was anxiety ridden and unrefreshing. “We did not know what obstacles might lie ahead of us,” Waxell wrote, “and so had to count with the possibility that any moment something might come to finish us off.” They were sailing by dead reckoning, and so, without knowing it, they were slowly drifting south as they progressed west.

  September 21, at last, was a clear and calm day. The swells eased, and the wind
was a refreshing northwesterly. Men came on the deck and basked in the sun and hoped for the future. But by afternoon the wind began to shift, first to the southwest, and then, increasing in velocity, it became erratic. It was the beginning of more than two weeks of vicious storms, storms that blew them fifty miles south and east while working to a crescendo in early October. The log tells the story: “stormy,” “wind comes in gusts,” “waves running high,” “squally and rainy,” “flashes of lightning,” “heavy storm,” “strong gale blowing,” “heavy sea running,” “terrific storm and great waves,” “heavy squalls and high seas,” “squalls, rain, snow,” “thick clouds,” “altogether exhausted from scurvy.” Steller wrote that “every now and then we could hear the wind rush as if out of a narrow passage, with such terrible whistling, raging, and blustering that we were every minute in danger of losing masts or rudder or else of seeing the vessel itself damaged by the force of the waves, which pounded it as when cannons are fired, so that we were expecting every moment the last stroke and death.”

  As the storm increased in severity beyond the wildest imaginings of the crew, a storm more violent than any could ever recall during their combined decades at sea, the tainted water supply turned brackish and undrinkable. The steady diet of salt beef, hardtack, groats, and peas began to take a toll on the mariners’ health. Steller had already used up his meager supply of scurvy grass and sour dock in the first week after leaving the Shumagin Islands. The ship contained nothing else to alleviate the spread of scurvy. Morale was low, and a dark lassitude hung over the ship. Steller wrote that “the unwholesome water lessened the number of healthy men from day to day and very many were heard to complain of hitherto unwonted disorders.” Sailors began to express doubt that they would ever reach home this season and began to mutter and suggest that the captain and officers should plan to winter in Japan or America.