Chapter 1
KAMCHATKA PENINSULA
RUSSIAN FAR EAST
All expeditions begin with a cup of tea.
Captain Commander Vitus Bering pours it, and from it drinks one Georg Wilhelm Steller, a theologian, naturalist, and curious man.
The captain fills the cup to the brim because he has a mission.
It was the imperator Peter the Great himself who had first encouraged Bering to find a seaway, to chart a route from Asia to the Americas, and Bering had duly set off.
In fact, he had set off twenty years ago, left the coastline and sailed north into uncharted waters, but the fog was continuous, the weather atrocious, and with his ship’s reserves of fresh water already depleted, the expedition had eventually decided to turn back.
Bering returned with a more detailed map of the Kamchatka Peninsula, but the upper corner of the atlas remained empty, and the imperator departed this world without ever finding out where the edge of the New World is drawn.
The imperator may have died, but the thought itself has not.
One must try again, try better and harder.
The Tzarina Anna has given the order, and now another two ships float in the waters at Avacha Bay: the Sviatoi Piotr and the Sviatoi Pavel, St Peter and St Paul.
Between them they carry a hundred men, a full twenty are needed to hoist their sails alone, and around them a whole harbour springs up with barracks, workshops, hurriedly erected lodgings, and everything save the ships is small, dirty and cold.
Three scientists were selected to join the Great Northern Expedition, respected learned men from the newly opened Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg.
No expense was spared in equipping the entourage.
The scientists were accompanied by six assistants, six surveyors, two draughtsmen and thirteen soldiers, an interpreter, a physician, a technician, a drummer, as well as guides, rowers and bearers.
With them, they carried a scientific library comprising hundreds of volumes, nine carts of instruments, four telescopes, five astrolabes, twenty thermometers, twenty-seven barometers, two hundred and sixteen horses and many barrels of fine Rhenish wine.
They set off from the capital to great pomp and ceremony, with eight thousand kilometres of Siberia and an unknown sea ahead of them.
By the time the professors arrive in Yeniseysk, they have already been travelling for many years, many long, arduous years, and yet they are not even halfway to their destination.
In Yakutsk a fire breaks out in their lodgings, destroying all their notes and samples.
Years of work goes up in smoke, and everyone has reached the end of their tether.
The astronomer falls out with the ethnographer; the further east they travel, the worse things get, and eventually they reach a decision.
The professors write to the Academy to ask to be relieved of their duties, and without waiting for an answer they turn their horses and head westwards again.
The captain’s naturalists have set off home, but on their travels, they encounter a researcher who appears wholly unaffected by the misery of Siberia.
This peculiar man does not care for powder and wigs, he drinks his beer and mead from the same tankard, but he is good at his work and speaks with great authority about grasses and birds that can withstand the Siberian cold.
Professor Gmelin recommends that this man replace them, and Bering yields to the inevitable.
He pens a friendly but assertive letter inviting this Georg Wilhelm Steller to be his guest at the harbour in Avacha Bay.
The theologian, naturalist, and curious man Georg Wilhelm Steller sits upright in his chair.
He is wearing his best clothes, but that isn’t saying much; four years in Siberia will eventually take its toll on anyone’s sense of style.
He has arrived on a dogsled and tries not to show how good it feels to be indoors in the dry with a cup of strong, warm tea.
The Academy of Sciences had charged Steller with documenting the flora, fauna and precious rocks of the Kamchatka Peninsula, but while he was in the east a flame ignited within him.
He has seen the steppes and the mountains, rowed across Lake Baikal, and now he wishes to travel even further and has requested permission to sail all the way to Japan.
One expedition is much like another, isn’t that right, the captain laughs, fills the scientist’s glass, and Steller raises it to his lips and glugs.
Steller gathers his equipment ready for departure, but delays and unexpected obstacles lie ahead.
Replenishing the ship’s food stocks takes longer than expected: the crew’s biscuits disappear on their way to the harbour, and the batch made to replace them never arrives either, and the Koryaks in charge of the deliveries rise up in protest – delivering something to the furthest corner of Siberia takes time, and Kolyesov, the commanding officer responsible for the shipments, does nothing to make the job any easier.
He is a man who does everything tomorrow, for today he can raise a glass, and Steller waits, curses, waits some more, and in the meantime compiles a study of the local fish.
Steller waits five months, twenty slow and sluggish weeks that he could have spent studying the novel species of Nippon, but eventually the long-awaited day arrives.
Some of the provisions are still missing, but the expedition can wait no longer, it is time to leave so that they can return before the autumn storms, and on the twenty-ninth day of May the ships lower their anchors in the bay to wait for clement weather.
On the fourth day of June there is a favourable wind, and St Peter and St Paul finally begin their journey to Alaska.
The commanding officers crack open bottles of champagne.
The cadets’ cheeks burn with an enthusiasm that Bering remembers on his own face when he set off on his previous expedition two decades earlier.
Young men’s imaginations brim with the riches of far-away lands, islands, bays and mountains that will soon be named after them, the respect and admiration in the eyes of the aristocrats’ daughters, perhaps even of the Tzarina herself upon hearing of their adventures, but Bering is reminded of the monotonous days ahead, the dwindling food reserves and squalling nights when the men will pray for the salvation of their souls in the face of what seems like certain perdition.
Back then, he was a man in his prime, but now he feels every one of his six decades; the young make merry, but Bering notes a shadow in the eyes of Khitrov, the fleet master.
He too was on the expedition twenty years ago, and he knows what lies in store for them.
Bering leaves the celebrations. He is in no mood to raise a glass; he yearns for the wind and the sea, and he climbs up on deck.
By now he can only barely make out the harbour, and behind that the summit of Avachinskaya Sopka rising up above the bay in all its tremendous grandeur.
The sight is imposing, the sunset beautiful, but he turns his back to it and resolves to spend the rest of his days in warm, comfortable rooms.
Steller is a learned naturalist, but a gentleman he is not.
The son of a lowly Nuremburg cantor, he is not invited to share the champagne, and instead immerses himself in work, noting down the seabirds and plants carried on the waves.
He spends his time examining the currents and making all manner of calculations, and when he next sees Bering, he rushes to his side and explains he has worked out that it would be best to steer the ship a few degrees to the north-west, but the captain commander simply gazes out at the slowly disappearing land as if he has not heard Steller’s words at all.
They leave the coastline, and the ship is shrouded in an impenetrable fog.
All that cuts through it is the call of a passing seabird, drizzle wets the deck and the sails, the men’s clothes cling to their bodies, damp and heavy, and nothing can keep them warm.
Seven days of a wet impermeable dim, until eventually a wind picks up from the south-east and the fog disperses.
The men climb up on deck to see the sun, but their stomachs become knotted in anguish, for opening out in front of them is the wide, empty sea.
The expedition’s two ships have drifted apart in the heavy fog.
For days they search for the St Paul, but in vain.
One of the saints is gone, taking with it half of the Great Northern Expedition’s provisions.
There is much to observe. The waves carry plants that only thrive in shallow waters.
Steller watches sea creatures and birds that never venture far from the shore.
Again, he describes his observations to the ship’s command and urges them to change course, but the officers merely raise an eyebrow and shrug their shoulders.
How can a man under sail for the first time think he knows the seas better than they do?
The captain commander takes no part in the dispute.
He has no desire to upset the officers; they have friends in St Petersburg.
Steller looks on as two officers plot the ship’s course on a map of the world and place them in the wrong ocean, locating the ship in the Atlantic instead of the Pacific, but nobody corrects their mistake.
Then an animal rises to the surface, and he remembers why he agreed to this bothersome journey in the first place.
The creature is approximately two cubits long.
Its hide is covered in red fur and its head recalls that of a dog.
It has alert, pointed ears and bulging eyes, long dangling whiskers that resemble the learned men of the Orient, but its behaviour is like that of a boisterous child.
It frolics, dives underwater then returns to the surface with a tuft of seagrass in its mouth, tosses the grass into the air and snatches it again between its teeth.
The crew gather to watch, and they clap their hands at the creature, but Steller summons the best sniper on the ship, a Cossack by the name of Toma Lepekhin, and instructs him to shoot the animal.
Lepekhin takes a shot, but the bullet misses the heart, it pierces the skin but does not take the creature’s life.
It dives back into the depths, but this time it does not return to the surface.
Steller is well acquainted with all the studies and travelogues, the catalogues of known animals stored in university libraries, but this animal he does not know.
Weeks of nothing but seagulls and guillemots, and he lets the first interesting creature they encounter slip between his fingers.
This simply won’t do, and he thinks his way through all the most bizarre shelves in all the cabinets of curiosity until, lying in his berth that evening, he finally hits upon what it is.
He had to look far back in history, but there it is, Historia Animalium, Gessner’s great bestiary, and the Danish Sea Ape, Simia marina Danica, with its snakelike tail, its four wing-like fins, knobbly head and peculiar, playful character, everything fits, and now he can sleep, his mind content.
His knowledge has not failed him; he is still able to classify the world.
In Gessner’s bestiary, the real and the imagined come together: tigers, dogs and rhinoceroses frolic alongside unicorns and satyrs.
The sea ape belongs to the latter group.
It is a creature unknown to science, a so-called animal paradoxum.
The sea ape never became as infamous as the yeti or the scintillating snake residing in Loch Ness, but Steller’s observation does not go unnoticed, and future generations still pore over his words.
It has been suggested that the creature Steller encountered, with its fins and other features, was in fact a deformed fur seal, but this is hard to believe.
Steller was well acquainted with seals, and by his own account he was able to observe the animal long enough that it would have been curious indeed had he been unable to correctly identify a species with which he was so familiar.
It has also been suggested that the sea ape was not an animal at all but a caricature of none other than Captain Commander Vitus Bering, a frustrated researcher’s mischief at the expense of his own captain, but if it were merely a joke, why did Steller not make it more explicit?
Why depict the creature’s fins and tail if it were not in fact an animal at all but a jibe at a living person?
Did Steller see an animal we know by another name?
Or did he encounter a species that fell into extinction before its body could be preserved in solvent and transported back to the academies of the world for identification?
Or did the weary naturalist simply sketch the creature in his diary for his own amusement, to beguile those who came after him? We shall never know.