‘How great and extraordinary was the joy of everyone over this sight is indescribable,’ Steller wrote. ‘The half-dead crawled out to see it. From our hearts we thanked God for his favour. The very sick Captain-Commander was himself not a little cheered, and everyone spoke about how he intended to take care of his health and to take a rest after suffering such terrible hardships.’ Cups of brandy, which the crew had secreted before the barrel ran dry, were passed around to toast their safe arrival in Kamchatka. Only slowly did it dawn on them that it was not Kamchatka but an unknown island that they later named after Bering. Sailing for the mainland was out of the question: it was too late in the season, the crew were too ill, and the ship had taken too much of a battering. Their only choice was to stay for the winter. Luckily there was driftwood for fuel and the island teemed with game – predominantly foxes, but also sea otters and seals, all of which were so tame that killing them was an easy matter. Indeed, they were so plentiful that Steller spent the first few nights in a stone hut mortared with fox carcases.
It took ten days to unload the ship, bring the sick ashore and dig rudimentary shelters – Steller called them graves – that they covered with sticks and rags. The transition was too much for some: one man died when he was brought out of his cabin, another on the crossing and seven more as soon as they reached the shore. ‘Even before they could be buried, the dead were mutilated by foxes that sniffed at and even dared to attack the sick ... who were lying everywhere without cover under the open sky,’ Steller wrote. ‘One screamed because he was cold, another from hunger and thirst, as the mouths of many were in such a wretched state from scurvy that they could not eat anything ... [their] gums were swollen up like a sponge, brown-black and grown high over the teeth and covering them.’ In a vengeful madness the crew tortured the foxes, gouging out their eyes, cutting off their tails, roasting their paws and partially skinning them before letting them free as an example to the rest. But they kept coming and, as more and more men died, the foxes burrowed into the hospital trench. It was a hideous scene. As Steller put it, ‘everywhere we looked on nothing but depressing and terrifying sights’.
Their one advantage was the supply of fresh meat, which Steller, long before his time, recognized as an effective anti-scorbutic. He tried to persuade the men to eat it, but they didn’t like the flavour of seal meat and refused absolutely to touch the nutrient-rich blubber. Bering, who had been carried on a stretcher to Steller’s trench on 11 November – ‘we treated him, as well as the other officers who came to our “grave”, to tea’ – was particularly revolted by the suggestion: ‘he declared a very great aversion for it and wondered at my taste’. He died on 8 December 1741, two hours before dawn, and was buried alongside several more of his men. Not until the depths of winter, when desperation drove them to eat the marine animals, did the crew begin to recover. For almost half of them it was too late: three months after they landed on Bering Island, 30 of the 76 were dead.
Steller penned a double-edged obituary to his late commander. Bering, he said, was ‘by birth a Dane, by faith a righteous and godly Christian, by his conduct a well-mannered, friendly, quiet man, and for that reason always popular with the entire command, both high and low’. He was, however, ‘not born to make quick decisions and conduct swift enterprises’, and the men ‘considered his esteem to be the result of fear and lack of ability to judge’. On arriving at Bering Island, ‘He wished nothing more than our deliverance from this land and, from the bottom of his heart, his own complete deliverance from this misery. He might well not have found a better place to prepare himself for eternity than this deathbed under the open sky.’ In short, he was pleasant, weak, unfit for command and, in Steller’s opinion, deserved what he got.
The company’s recovery was hampered by living in a sub-Arctic climate. Their ‘graves’ were frequently covered by snow, from which they had to dig themselves out every morning. The same snow fell on the beach, covering it so thickly that they were unable to collect driftwood. When their initial stockpile was consumed, they went further and further afield in search of fresh sources. By December they were already walking two and a half miles a day. By March they had to trudge ten miles to the other side of the island. The same applied to the game: on landing they had been able to shoot vast amounts; by the end of winter they were making daily journeys of more than 20 miles, returning with loads of up to 100 pounds strapped on their backs. It very nearly killed them. One group was caught in a storm and took refuge in a cave, where they starved for seven days. Another was similarly caught, but in the absence of a cave simply burrowed into crevices and let the drifts cover them. When they emerged the next morning they were senseless and speechless, so stiff from cold that they could hardly move their feet. The assistant surgeon, totally blind, fumbled his way behind them. Steller feared that one man would lose his hands and feet, ‘since he had been lying in a creek the whole night and was hard as a stone and his clothes had frozen to his body, but God restored him without any injury whatsoever’. It was eight days before the assistant surgeon regained his sight.
With the coming of spring, life became easier. On their beach piles of driftwood emerged from the snow. Simultaneously there was an influx of sea-lions and manatees – Steller called them sea-cows – which meant they no longer had to tramp across the island for food and fuel. Scurvy grass appeared, as did cress and wild celery; and when a whale beached two miles down the coast their immediate survival was assured. But the winter’s travelling had reduced their clothes to rags. Their shoes had been destroyed so comprehensively that they now wore clogs made from sea chests and leather food bags. The thaw, too, filled their underground ‘graves’ with water, driving them into overland shelters through whose walls the wind blew unremittingly. The new huts were so exposed that, some nights, the men crept back to their trenches, regardless of the seepage. It was important to devise a means of escape as soon as possible.
Winter storms had thrown the St Peter high on the beach, damaging it beyond use – not that they could have dragged it back to the sea anyway. Its timbers, however, were still solid, and with these they began to construct a new, smaller ship that they named after the first. After the back-breaking winter treks it was a relief to have a project close to hand and to work, moreover, to a positive end. They built furnaces, cut whetstones, dismantled the ship, made new water barrels and hauled driftwood from miles around to create a launch platform. ‘There was not a one wanting to be idle, nor supposed to be, the closer and dearer to each was his hope of deliverance from this island to his homeland,’ Steller wrote. They were so encouraged by their progress that for a while one or two men voted to remain another year on Bering Island to collect sea otter pelts, but ‘they finally out of shame would not consider it’.
On 11 August, after a disappointment when the launch platform failed and the ship had to be winched back into position, the new St Peter was afloat. Measuring only 42 feet from stem to stern, it was too small to accommodate the whole party in any comfort. They came to a partial solution by dividing themselves into three watches, one of which was constantly on deck. But still the space was cramped, so, rather than jettison food or water, they threw out their pillows, blankets and mattresses. Uncomfortable, but exhilarated, they weighed anchor on 14 August. That afternoon, as Steller watched the coast of Bering Island slide past them, he could not conceal his delight. ‘We knew all the mountains and valleys, whose paths we had climbed so many times with great effort to scout for food and for other reasons ... God’s grace and mercy became manifested to all, the more brightly considering how miserably we had arrived there on November 6, had miraculously nourished ourselves on this barren land, and with amazing labour had become ever more healthy, hardened, and strengthened; and the more we gazed at the island on our farewell, the clearer appeared to us, as in a mirror, God’s wonderful and loving guidance.’
He spoke too soon: that midnight, water began to pour into the ship. The pumps were choked with wood shavings and the ho
ld was so tightly loaded it was impossible to find the leak. For a while there was pandemonium, everyone getting in each other’s way as they simultaneously lowered the sails, bailed with cooking pots and threw baggage overboard. Fortunately, the leak was just below the waterline and as the ship became lighter they were able to plug the gap. (To their relief it was a minor repair: the hull had been twisted during the first, abortive launch and, being built with nails rather than wooden dowels, some of the strakes had sprung.) This was the last of their trials: on 17 August they sighted the Kamchatkan coast. They had spent ten months of deprivation on Bering Island, unaware that the mainland was just two days away.
Contrary winds, interspersed by periods of calm, meant that it was a further ten days, including a 24-hour stint at the oars, before they reached Petropavlovsk. Their homecoming was tainted by disappointment: ‘Everyone had considered us dead or come to grief; our property left behind had fallen into other hands and mostly been carried off. Therefore, joy and sorrow often changed in a few moments, according to the nature of the news about general and special happenings.’ But these were minor irritants set against their relief at returning to civilization. Expressing a sentiment that would be echoed by many other polar survivors, Steller wrote: ‘We were all so accustomed to misery and wretched living that ... we considered the previous circumstances would always continue and thought we were dreaming.’
It was another eight months before they reached Okhotsk and the same time again before they returned to St Petersburg. Their journey had been successful, after a fashion: they had forged a link between Russia and America, and had returned with information about the new continent’s flora, fauna and human population. They had also secured several hundred sea otter pelts that fetched a high price in St Petersburg and more than offset the cost of the goods they had lost while away. (Most of them were given to Steller in recognition of the part he had played in their survival on Bering Island.) But the price had been high and, thanks to Russia’s fanatical secrecy about its eastern enterprises, the world knew little of what they had done. Not until the 20th century did Soviet archives divulge, reluctantly, the full extent of Peter the Great’s programme. By then Bering’s discoveries were old hat. Within 40 years of his death, the coast of Alaska and Bering Strait had been charted by Captain James Cook of Britain’s Royal Navy.
MEASURING THE WORLD
Charles-Marie de la Condamine (1735–45)
Scientists had never really believed that the world was flat. In fact, at the dawn of the 18th century they agreed unanimously that it was round. But there was roundness and there was roundness. Some said the globe was a perfect sphere. Others maintained it was uneven. The English scientist Isaac Newton was of the opinion that it bulged slightly at the equator. Jacques Cassini, France’s astronomer royal, held that it was a prolate spheroid, elongated at the poles and, if anything, pinched at the waist. But when Cassini sent a man to the South American colony of French Guiana to measure the equator’s gravity with a pendulum, it was discovered that the gravitational pull was weaker there than in France, thus suggesting that the world did, indeed, bulge in the middle. Newton’s supporters were delighted. Cassini, however, refused to accept the findings, denouncing his emissary as ‘a hypocrite, a traitor ... a sanctimonious, sneaking fabricator’. Thus one of the Enlightenment’s many scientific squabbles bubbled into life.
In itself it was a petty controversy, centred less on facts than on patriotism and injured professional pride. But it did have an underlying seriousness, for the earth’s curvature was important both to Europe’s mapmakers and to its navigators. While it was impossible as yet to calculate longitude with any precision, latitude could be determined easily from the stars. However, without knowing how long a degree of latitude was, no chart could be guaranteed accurate. In 1670 the French scientist Jean Picard had triangulated a meridian of the arc between Corbeil and Amiens, to produce a length of 69.1 miles. An Englishman had responded with a measurement of 66.91 miles. Britain’s Royal Navy, meanwhile, had made its own calculations according to ancient Mesopotamian mathematics and the clock: the Seaman’s Practice decreed that a degree of latitude consisted of 60 minutes, subdivided into 60 seconds, each minute representing one nautical mile – which, to complicate matters further, was slightly longer than its land-based equivalent.
In December 1734 the French Academy of Sciences decided to settle the question of the earth’s shape. Two expeditions would be despatched: one, under Pierre Louis de Maupertius, would go to Lapland; another, under Charles-Marie de la Condamine, would go to South America. Both parties would measure a degree of latitude and then compare their findings. If an Arctic degree was shorter than an equatorial one, then Newton’s theories were right and those of Cassini wrong. Alternatively, the globe might be spherical and the length of a degree could be standardized. Of the two expeditions the equatorial one was by far the most interesting: whereas Maupertius would be travelling through a dark and unprofitable region, Condamine’s journey led to the secretive heart of Spain’s overseas empire.
Condamine left France on 16 May 1735, bound for the port of Cartagena, in modern Colombia, carrying a royal passport that gave him unfettered access to Spain’s vast American colonies and ordered every administrator and functionary to assist him in his project. He was accompanied by a sturdy array of scientists: Pierre Bouguer, astronomer; Louis Godin and his cousin Jean Godin des Odonais, mathematicians; Joseph de Jussieu, botanist; Jean Senièrgues, physician; M. Hugot, watchmaker and technician; M. de Morainville, draughtsman; M. Mabillon, traveller; Captain Verguin of the French navy; and M. Couplet, the nephew of an important Academy member. Lest the Frenchmen stray too far, they were to be joined at Cartagena by two captains from the Spanish navy: Jorge Juan y Santacilla and Antonio de Ulloa. From Cartagena, as Condamine explained to the French academicians, ‘We shall make our way by the best means at hand to the province of Quito in the Viceroyalty of Peru. There we shall begin our work.’
Condamine was the man to undertake that work. Outwardly a pampered aristocrat whose natural habitat was the court of Louis XV, he was well travelled, a skilled geodesist and mathematician, and at the age of 34 he retained, as his childhood friend Voltaire put it, ‘une curiosité ardente’. In the words of one writer, ‘He was an ensemble of all the forces of that strange age in which religion, debauchery, intellect, fashion, and brutality seethed and bubbled together in such an extraordinary pot pourri’. Not every member of the expedition agreed with Condamine’s appointment. Pierre Bouguer wrote that: ‘M. Louis Godin had more pretension than anyone else to be placed at the head of our company ... For my own part, I had, at first, no intention of having anything to do with the enterprise.’ Then again, Bouguer was resentful because he himself was not the Academy’s first choice: ‘When several of the mathematicians or astronomers on whom reliance was placed found themselves in a situation ... to be unable to give efficacy to their zeal,’ he wrote sniffily, ‘this determined me to conquer the repugnance which the weak state of my health had always given me to sea voyages.’
Condamine showed his worth almost as soon as they reached South America in November 1735. As their Spanish escorts explained, there were two ways to reach Quito from Cartagena: one was to make a detour via Panama, where they could catch a ship to the Ecuadorian coast; the other was to travel 400 miles up the Magdalena River, ascend the Andes by mule, and then follow the mountains for 500 miles. To a man, the party opted for the Panama route: it would be quicker and easier on both themselves and their instruments. But at Panama they found colonial life moved at a different pace from their own. Spanish-American society was sluggish, and revolved around class distinction. The important posts were occupied by people from Spain. The indigenous Spaniards, the creóles, could not obtain rank and, although wealthy, resented their forced enfeeblement. The creóles despised newly arrived colonists, however hard they worked. And then there was the non-Spanish population – mixed blood, Indian and black – who were expected to wor
k but were given no incentive to do so. The class system was reinforced by sumptuary rules dictating what clothes each social group was allowed to wear. As an aristocrat Condamine was acquainted with the niceties of court life; but those of Spanish-America left him flummoxed. As far as he could ascertain, the creóles spent most of the day lying in hammocks, smoking heavily. They smoked, moreover, in a manner that he had never encountered: ‘They roll the tobacco into slender rolls and they put the lighted part of the roll into their mouths and there continue it a long time without its being quenched, or the fire incommoding them.’
Needless to say, the ship on which they had expected to sail had been delayed and would not leave until February. They occupied themselves by collecting botanical specimens, charting the coast, purchasing tents for their inland voyage and, in the case of Bouguer, replicating every observation independently of his leader. Condamine, who had been given two years to make his observations, wrote a letter to Paris: the survey might take longer than the Academy had anticipated.
The expedition moved slowly down the coast, landing at Bahía de Manta, in Ecuador, where the majority of the party went inland to the town of Guayaquil, where more comfortable accommodation could be found. Condamine, however, remained on the beach to begin his work. To his surprise and horror, Bouguer chose to stay with him. The shore was a desert, littered with the bones of whales and sea-lions, from which Condamine concluded he would have dry, clear conditions for observing the heavens. Unfortunately, the sky was obscured by mist, and only briefly on 26 March did they catch a glimpse of the moon (in the last stages of an eclipse) which enabled them to fix their position. Bouguer protested that they were wasting their time. Thereupon Condamine dragged him 70 miles north to the equator, where they spent another fortnight studying the heavens.
Off the Map Page 20
