Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  The year 1727 was abominable. The completion of the Fortuna occupied most of the spring and summer, leaving them a very slender margin in which to cross Kamchatka. When they reached the Kamchatkan coast they found its waters were too shallow for the ship’s draught, which necessitated the laborious and time-wasting task of landing their supplies by boat and barge. They then hauled everything into the interior – boats, fuel, food, not to mention the canvas, ropes and nails they needed to build their ships once they reached the other side. It was a harder, slower business than Bering had anticipated, and they had not gone halfway before winter overtook them. Their only option was to continue, which they did with remarkable fortitude and at the cost of several lives, until they reached their goal. The journey had taken six months. If Bering had simply sailed the Fortuna around the southern tip of Kamchatka he could have been there within 30 days or so.

  They built their new ship, the Gabriel, in remarkably short time, and on 13 July 1728 they sailed north, leaving a shore party to await their return. By 7 August they were at the Chukotsk Peninsula and, with only one barrel of water remaining, went ashore to fill their 22 empties. A day later they met their first Chukchis. Or, more accurately, the Chukchis met them: eight natives came out in kayaks, and one man swam to the Gabriel where, with the promise of gifts, and through an interpreter, he told Bering all he knew of the region. He had little to say, and most of it was discouraging: he did not know of the Kolyma River, but had heard that reindeer herders went annually to a large river in the west; where he lived there were no forests nor any rivers of note; there was no promontory to the north; and as for the east, ‘There is an island not far from the land, and if there were no fog, it could be seen. There are people on this island, and as for any more land there is only our Chukotsk land.’ He was awarded a few metal toys, carrying which he swam back to his kayak.

  The Gabriel rounded the Chukotsk Peninsula on 13 August 1728* where, at 65° 30’ N, Bering convened a sea-council to determine their future course. Chirikov’s written opinion gave an insight into both their situation and the formalities of Russian naval etiquette. ‘On this date your excellency deigned to summon us,’ his report ran. ‘I submit my humble opinion: since we have no information as to what degree of latitude in the Northern Sea along the eastern coast of Asia Europeans of known nations have been, we can not accordingly know with certainty about the separation of Asia and America ... Because of this it is necessary for us without fail, by force of the ukaz [order] given your excellency by His Imperial Majesty, to proceed along the land to those places indicated in the aforesaid of His Imperial Majesty.’

  To follow the coast, however, would have meant going west, when the expedition’s goal lay in the opposite direction. Bering therefore sailed north. His decision was understandable: if there was a promontory – or nos in Russian – that arched from the Chukotsk Peninsula to America then he would meet it. If, instead, he found ice then it was likely that no such nos existed, and neither did a land passage between Asia and America. By 16 August, at 67° 18’ N, with no sign of a nos and with less than a month before the sea froze, he dared go no further. He returned to Kamchatka, where the shore party and the crew of the Gabriel endured their fourth winter away from home.

  During the winter and the following spring, Bering investigated the coast. Once an advocate of the nos, he was now certain that it did not exist, but everything he found on his walks suggested the presence of a large body of land to the east. The driftwood was not indigenous to Kamchatka, and the movement of the ice – slow to gather if the wind was from the north, quick if it was from the east – told him that America could not be far away. There was also a tale from the Chukchi describing how ‘In the year 1715 a man had stranded there who said that his native land was far to the east and had large rivers and forests and many high trees’. Bering took the Gabriel on a brief foray towards America in 1729, but he discovered nothing. The expedition returned (this time by sea) to Okhotsk, where he mothballed the Gabriel and Fortuna, posting guards to protect them, and left for St Petersburg, where he arrived on 1 March 1730.

  Bering’s achievements had been noteworthy: he had led an expedition to the furthest corner of the Russian Empire, had discovered the strait between America and Asia that now bears his name, and had all but destroyed the myth of the Shalatskii Peninsula. The Imperial Academy of Sciences deliberated his findings for three years before concluding that he had not found America; therefore he had not fulfilled his instructions and would have to try again. Bering, who had proposed that very thing as soon as he returned, was back in Siberia by the spring of 1734, with an expedition that included not only his second-in-command Chirikov but a host of subsidiary officers, priests, doctors, their retainers, their families – Bering’s own wife accompanied them for a while – and their porters, plus the men and boats for a separate expedition down the Lena River, the purpose of which was to chart the Arctic coast. In total, there were some 600 people under his command.

  The wives and servants soon returned home, the river parties departed, and when Bering reached Okhotsk in the summer of 1737 his massive party had been reduced to less than 200. Rejecting the Gabriel and Fortuna, whose guards had long since fled, Bering began the construction of two new ships, the St Peter and the St Paul. The former was to be captained by himself, the latter by Chirikov, and they were both to be manned by 76 men. The building work, which had proceeded so swiftly on his first expedition, was now delayed by lack of food. Supplies were supposed to have been sent from the Siberian town of Yakutsk but, thanks to the sluggish manner in which the Russian Empire operated, they failed to arrive and Bering’s men had to spend valuable time hunting. Progress was so slow that the St Peter and St Paul were not ready until June 1740.

  The two ships, each of which displaced 80–100 tons, sailed for the east coast of Kamchatka on 4 September. Here, at a harbour he named Petropavlovsk, Bering overhauled his equipment and stores for the forthcoming trip. At the same time he sent for two scientists to join the expedition: one was a Frenchman, Louis Delisle de la Croyère, an astronomer from the Academy of Sciences, who was allotted to Chirikov; the other was a German named Georg Wilhelm Steller, naturalist and erstwhile physician to the Archbishop of Novgorod, who was placed with Bering.

  The presence of these scientists in no way suggested that the expedition was a scientific one. To be sure, they could pursue scientific goals if they liked; but they were there primarily, in Delisle’s case, to advise on the direction the ships should take; and in Steller’s to assay any gold or silver they might discover. If Bering’s first voyage had carried a gloss of scientific respectability, his second was purely one of conquest. As one of the expedition’s organizers wrote, it was ‘not only for great and immortal glory, but for the expansion of the empire and for inexhaustible wealth’. Its explicit objectives were ‘to search for new lands and islands not yet conquered, as many as possible, and to bring them under subjection [and] to search for metals and minerals’. They were to extract tribute from any tribes they encountered, and in so doing to pave the way for Russia’s ultimate annexation of the American coast as far south as Spain’s colonies in California and Mexico – ‘though I know that the Spanish will not be pleased’. In an unusual twist to the imperial ethos, they were to effect all this ‘through kindness’.

  Delisle and Steller arrived in March 1741, and on 4 May a council was held to determine their course. The surest and speediest way to America would have been to follow Bering’s route of 1728. However, they suspected (rightly) that any land so far north would be cold, inhospitable and sparsely populated. Moreover, the maps that Delisle possessed showed a large island or outcrop to the south-east. Gama Land, as it was known, had purportedly been sighted by a 15th-century navigator, Juan de Gama, on a journey from China to Mexico. As there was no reason to doubt its existence, and because it looked tantalizingly close on Delisle’s map – also because Delisle was meant to be the expert in these matters – they decided to sail in
that direction. The St Peter and St Paul left Petropavlovsk on 4 June.

  Of what happened next Steller’s journal provides the fullest record. Petulant, perpetually outraged that his advice was not followed, and indignant that the sailors treated him as an ignorant landlubber, he was by no means an objective narrator. But even if one ignores his rants and concentrates solely on the facts, this was a journey of astonishing incompetence. Bering, now in his sixties, was a tired and sick man – he may already have been suffering from scurvy – who ‘lamented that his strength for enduring such a burden was often inadequate; that the expedition was much larger and more lengthy than he had projected; and also, that at his age, he wished for nothing better than the entire expedition might be taken from him and entrusted to a young, energetic, and determined man’. He remained constantly in his cabin, leaving the St Peter in the hands of two junior officers. These men, as Steller remarked, had lived nearly ten years in Siberia with ‘the ignorant rabble’, and had long since forgotten the meaning of discipline.

  On 12 June Steller saw signs of land to the south-east. Thereupon the ships turned north. ‘Just when it would have been most crucial to keep our objective most clearly in mind,’ Steller fumed, ‘the unreasonable behaviour of our officers began. They mocked, ridiculed and cast to the winds whatever was said by anyone not a seaman, as if all rules of navigation, all science and powers of reasoning were spontaneously acquired.’ On this occasion they were right to do so. Steller had been wrong: there was no land to the south. But when the sailors thought they saw land to the north – and this time there was land – the officers ignored them and steered south. (‘They, of course, have been in God’s council chamber!’ Steller sneered.) Meanwhile, on the morning of the 20th, the ships were hit by a 24-hour storm. When it passed there was no sign of the St Paul. Assuming it had either sunk or turned back for Kamchatka, Bering’s officers arbitrarily forsook their southward course and sailed east.

  The St Paul had neither foundered nor retreated. Chirikov continued towards America, where he discovered, on 15 July, the Alexander Archipelago off the coast of Alaska. In need of water, he sent an officer ashore with ten armed men. Three days later they had not returned, so he sent another armed party, led by the bosun, to chase up the first. The bosun’s party did not return either. That night Chirikov saw campfires in the forest, and the next morning there was a pall of smoke along the shore. Assuming the men had been killed – and anyway, having lost both his boats, being unable to search for them – he sailed on 27 July for Kamchatka, arriving at Petropavlovsk on 12 October. Every man, including Chirikov, was scorbutic. Delisle, who had followed current medical wisdom by retiring to his cabin with a bottle, had alcohol poisoning as well. He expired on exposure to daylight.

  The St Peter, whose crew was no healthier than that of the St Paul, reached an island – Kayak Island – within sight of the Alaskan coast at 10.30 a.m. on 20 July. It wasn’t much of a place, a cold, pine-clad lump, visited by natives only in summer. Steller found an underground store containing bundles of smoked salmon and a number of artefacts, some of which he stole. They were later replaced by a pipe, a pound of tobacco, a kettle and a bolt of Chinese silk. The subsititution was considered fair trade by the officers, but Steller thought it an unsuitable exchange: ‘If in the future we were to return to this place, the people would flee from us just as they did this time. Or, since we had shown them hostility [by opening the underground cache], they would be hostile in return, especially if they should use the tobacco for eating or drinking, since they might not know the true use of either the tobacco or the pipe, whereas at least a few knives or axes would have aroused greater insight since their use would have been quite obvious.’ They collected other bits and pieces: a bark box, a whetstone, a canoe paddle, a fox-tail and, poignantly, ‘A hollow ball of hard-burned clay two inches in diameter, enclosing a stone that rattles when shaken, which I regard as a toy for small children’. Steller gathered plants, made as many observations as he could, and took samples of the sand and coastal rock. But Bering did not allow him onto the Alaskan mainland – which was dominated by a peak that they named Mount St Elias – nor did he give him much time on Kayak Island.

  Among the many symptoms of scurvy are depression and lethargy. According to Steller, Bering displayed them to the fullest. When they reached Kayak Island: ‘It can easily be imagined how glad we all were when we finally caught sight of land. Everyone hastened to congratulate the Captain-Commander, to whom the fame of discovery would most redound. However, he not only reacted indifferently and without particular pleasure but in our very midst shrugged his shoulders.’ Privately, he disparaged his officers: ‘Now we think we have found everything,’ he told Steller. ‘But they do not consider where we have reached land, how far we are from home, and what accidents may yet happen. Who knows whether the trade winds may not come up and prevent our return? We do not know this country. We are not supplied with provisions to keep us through the winter.’ He therefore turned back, having spent less than a day off the coast of Alaska.

  ‘On the morning of July 21, two hours before daybreak,’ Steller wrote, ‘the Captain-Commander, contrary to his custom, got up, came on deck himself, and, without deliberating about it, gave orders to weigh anchor.’ The decision was taken so abruptly that they could not complete their watering and departed having filled only 20 of their 46 barrels. When he thought about it Steller became irritable: ‘The only reason for this is stupid obstinacy, a fear of a handful of natives, and pusillanimous homesickness.’ Later he became angry: ‘For ten years Bering had equipped himself for this great enterprise. The exploration lasted ten hours!’ Bering, however, was too far gone to care.

  The St Peter bounced back through the Aleutians – an archipelago that stretched west towards Kamchatka – and on 30 August they were in a cluster of islands, where they landed to fill their water barrels. To Steller’s dismay, the crew insisted on using the nearest brackish pool rather than a fresh spring a little further inland. When he suggested they gather some scurvy grass, an edible plant that was known to alleviate the disease, they told him to do it himself. He did so angrily, resolving ‘in the future, to look after the saving of myself alone, without the loss of one word more’. That day a man called Shumagin died. They named the islands in his honour, then left.

  The scurvy grass went some way towards restoring the crew’s health. After three days the sailors’ teeth no longer wobbled in their gums, and in little more than a week the bedridden Bering was back on his feet. On 5 September, while attempting to replace their brackish water with fresh, they met their first Americans. A canoe came out to meet them, its two occupants wearing conical hats made of bark, painted red and green, with feathers and reeds protruding as an eyeshade. They dithered nervously, singing and shouting, then held out a stick on the end of which was a dead falcon. After several attempts to snatch the bird, the officers realized it was an intermediary, intended to accept trade goods on behalf of the canoeists. Steller exchanged some trifles for one of their hats, whereupon ‘they headed for the shore without further ceremony, lighted a big fire, and shouted loudly for a time. Then, because it soon became dark, we did not see them any more.’ On 6 September the Russians landed, giving Steller the chance to observe these new people at closer quarters. They had no facial hair and pierced their noses, foreheads and lips with bones and pieces of slate. They lived generally on the Alaskan mainland, but came to the Aleutians in search of birds’ eggs, seals and beached whales. They were so similar to the Chukchi that he deduced that at some point in the past there must have been a strip of land joining Asia to America.

  Steller was also fascinated by the zoology of the region. He saw whales puffing and splashing at close quarters, and recorded a mammal unknown to science – now extinct – that he called a sea ape. The creature had a dog-shaped head, pointy ears and long whiskers that ‘made him look almost like a Chinaman’. It was about two yards long, had large eyes and a round body, red and white on the bell
y, with a long tail that tapered to a shark-like fin. It possessed neither forefeet nor flippers but showed great playfulness, raising itself from the water for minutes on end, staring all the while at the crew. For two hours it darted beneath the ship, pausing only to grab some seaweed that it carried to the Russians, ‘and did such juggling tricks that one could not have asked for anything more comical from a monkey’. He tried, but failed, to shoot a specimen.

  Their stay ended in an unsatisfactory manner. The natives became more fascinated with the foreigners than the foreigners were with them. When the Russians tried to leave, the natives pulled their boats back to shore and had to be discouraged by several volleys of musket-fire. Thus ended Russia’s first, ignominious contact with the people it aimed to subjugate through kindness.

  From that point the voyage deteriorated rapidly. Thanks to their imperfect ability to calculate longitude – it would be more than 30 years before an accurate chronometer was developed – they lost their way. The wind blew constantly from the west, their food and alcohol ran out, their water barrels began to leak, and scurvy resumed its grip. By the middle of October, with the weather worsening and with scarcely four able-bodied men to manage the ship, Bering abandoned hope of reaching Kamchatka. According to his calculations, they were somewhere near the coast of America, where they could spend the winter and hope for better conditions next summer. He could not have been more mistaken. They were, in fact, off the Kurile Islands, north of Japan. Had he continued east the ship would have been lost – as it was, the crew were already beginning to die – but fortunately his plans were thwarted by the weather. The St Peter was forced north by storms, and on 5 November they sighted land.