Island of the Blue Foxes Page 18

  With the minds of the men smothered by despondency and gloom, the physical manifestations of scurvy increased. Soon, a third of them lay ill, swaying in their hammocks in the reeking hold of the ship as it pitched and plunged through the rising waves. The floor was awash with sickly fluid, and men lay prostrate in the slime, sluicing about as the ship danced and leaped to the tune of the gale. Waxell wrote that “they were attacked by scurvy so violently that most of them were unable to move either their hands or their feet, let alone use them.” The teeth of the remaining sailors were wobbly, and their gums were turning black and bloody. Although Steller had revived Bering briefly with his antiscorbutic herbs, the commander returned to his previous state of morose indifference as soon as Steller’s supplies ran low, unable or unwilling to raise himself from his bed.

  The storm became ferocious, coming now from the southwest instead of the north, Steller recorded, “with such redoubled violence as we never have experienced before or since; we could not imagine that it could be greater or that we should be able to stand it out.” Sometimes the wind was so fierce that the clouds “with incredible swiftness shot like arrows past our eyes and even met and crossed each other with equal rapidity, often from opposite directions.” Winds tore at the rigging from erratic angles, purple and black clouds made navigation impossible, and ragged froth was whipped across the deck. “Every moment we expected the destruction of our vessel,” Steller wrote, “and no one could lie down, or sit up or stand. Nobody was able to remain at his post; we were drifting under the might of God wither [sic] the angry heavens willed to send us. Half our crew lay sick and weak, the other half… were quite crazed and maddened from the terrifying motion of the ship. There was much praying to be sure, but the curses piled up during ten years in Siberia prevented any response.” Occasionally, Steller or others claimed to see land, but, unable to control the ship, this was just another source of worry and danger over which they had no control. Waxell later remembered that “I can truthfully say that I did not get many hours sleep during the five months I was away on that voyage, and never seeing known land. I was in a continual state of uneasiness, always in danger and uncertainty.”

  Squalls tore the sails into tatters. The ship was spun about uncontrollably, teetering on the precipice of a curling tongue of sea before plunging into the trough between the monstrous waves, with timbers shuddering. Near the end of September, a chill descended from the North, turning the rain to snow, hail, and freezing rain. Ice crusted on the rigging and froze the hatches, while the wind moaned during the dark, brooding days and the even longer nights. Men were either mad with terror or debilitated beyond the point of caring. Yet as the provisions ran low, their appetites increased. “God knows, we were very short,” wrote Waxell, especially when there was nothing wholesome to eat other than biscuits. The bucking and heaving of the ship made cooking impossible. Even worse, the liquor supply also dwindled and ran dry on October 16. Waxell lamented, “Nor had there been much gin left for several weeks now. As long as it had lasted, it had kept the men in fairly good fettle.” Gin or vodka was utterly useless in treating scurvy, unless they had orange juice to mix it with, but it may have had a salubrious effect of numbing the men to their horrible and seemingly hopeless predicament. “Their only wish,” Waxell wrote, “was that a speedy death might free them from their miserable plight. They told me that they would rather die than let life drag on in that wretched fashion.”

  All progress west from the Shumagins was lost during the eighteen days of storms, as the St. Peter was blown back east an astonishing 304 miles. On October 12, when the St. Paul was limping into Petropavlovsk, the St. Peter was still being blown about the wind-whipped ocean and was again more than 1,000 nautical miles east of Kamchatka and three degrees of latitude south of where the ship had been one month earlier on September 13.

  By mid-October, most of the men were sick or weak. Once at sea again the sailors had started dying on September 24, when “by the will of God died of scurvy the grenadier Andrei Tretyakov.” The next recorded death was Nikita Kharitonov on October 20, but from then on sailors routinely expired in the dim, fetid hold where their bunks were strung up. “Not only did the sick die off,” Steller reported, “but those who according to their own assertion were well, on being relieved at their posts, dropped dead from exhaustion. The small allowance of water, the lack of biscuits and brandy, the cold, dampness, nakedness, vermin, fright, and terror were not the least important causes.” Soon after Tretyakov’s death, Waxell announced that merely fifteen barrels of water remained, and three of them were damaged and had leaked. Day by day, mariners perished with agony frozen on their ghastly countenances, and the living hauled the stiff corpses above deck and hove their erstwhile companions overboard. Bering was feverish and insensible; his skin was like stained leather and his eyes unfocused as he lay in his cabin. “The most eloquent pen,” Steller wrote, “would find itself too weak to describe our misery.” The voyage was now one of “misery and death,” with little else on anyone’s mind and little hope for the future.

  On October 28, the skies momentarily cleared of snow and hail, and, to their astonishment, they spied through the mist a low, flat, and sandy-beached island not more than a mile directly in front of them. “For the second time,” Steller wrote, “we had here occasion to see plainly God’s gracious help, as we should have been done for without fail if we had come into this situation a couple of hours sooner and in the dark of night, or if God, even now, had not driven the fog away. We might well conclude that, in addition to the islands seen, there must have been many others here and there along our course, which we may have sailed past at night and in foggy weather.” Steller, the pious catechist, not yet fully under the baleful influence of scurvy, alone retained his gracious acceptance of what fate placed before them and hung on to the possibility of survival. The crew rushed to turn the ship from being driven onto the rocks or beaches and steered it back into the frothy gray waves of the unknown sea. They now knew that America did not extend directly west from the Shumagin Islands, but instead curved gently southwest—the direct line home was not only not the quickest, but not even possible. Khitrov suggested that they should lower a boat and row ashore to see if any freshwater was available. Steller wrote how relieved he was when the “unfortunate proposition” of going ashore for water was overturned by the other officers, because “only ten feeble persons were left, who, though able to lend a hand, were yet in no condition to hoist the anchor again from the bottom.” In any event, another storm soon rolled in, and had they been caught trying to row ashore, they “would assuredly all together have found our graves in the waves.”

  Waxell, along with Steller, somehow kept his strength, but he was one of the few who did. The sails were mostly torn and tattered. He could seldom locate a sailor well enough to climb the ropes. Soon there was no one strong enough to hold the great wheel and steer the ship, which was “like a piece of dead wood, with none to direct it; we had to drift hither and thither at the whim of the winds and waves.” Waxell continued, “Indeed, when it came to a man’s turn at the helm, he was dragged to it by two other of the invalids who were still able to walk a little, and set down at the wheel. There he had to sit and steer as well as he could, and when he could sit no more, he had to be replaced by another in no better case than he.” Perhaps the strangest development was Steller’s transformation from a gentleman into a laborer. As the scurvy epidemic raged, when there were scarcely four men lucid and vigorous enough to sail the ship, Waxell “tearfully begged [Steller] to help and assist,” which Steller did with “bare hands” to the utmost of his “strength and means, although it was not my office and my services had always been scorned before the disaster.” He set aside his acerbic tongue and, for the first time on the voyage, conformed himself to naval hierarchy, accepting orders from the officers he had disdained for so long and doing work that he had considered beneath him, manual labor.

  Waxell’s strength also soon began to wane.
“I myself was scarcely able to move about the deck without holding on to something,” he lamented. He tried to raise the morale of the dying scorbutic men by begging them not to despair: “With God’s help,” he shouted, “we shall soon sight land again; that will save our lives, whatever the land is like, perhaps we shall there find the means to continue our voyage.” But the ship drifted, and they had no means to direct their course or control their destiny. “To put it bluntly,” Waxell wrote, “we were utterly wretched.”

  THE ST. PAUL HAD suffered the same misfortunes and accidents as the St. Peter. By September, no one had had a satisfying drink of water in six weeks. Their mouths were pasty, and they dreamed of cool refreshment. The winds were against them, coasts and islands appeared through the fog, and storms buffeted the ship as they raced west to Kamchatka. Since departing Takanis Bay on August 27 and cruising west along the same latitude as Avacha Bay, Chirikov had ordered a strict rationing of water. Water for all was limited to survival levels. Without any shore boats left, the ship could not land to replenish the water or obtain any fresh foods. Chirikov reported that “when it rained the crew set buckets and other vessels to catch the water from the sails; and although it was bitterish and tasted of tar, yet the men drank it gladly and said that it was good for the health and that the tar bitterness cured them of scurvy.” This “cure,” however, proved temporary. The daily meal consisted of cooked kasha, or buckwheat mush, with a mug of wine, with a bonus second daily meal every third day. As August passed and the sailing was skittish and slow, Chirikov noted with alarm how quickly the barrels were emptied. Kasha would now be served only every other day, and on the day in between the men lived on dry biscuit and rancid butter, augmented with salt meat cooked in seawater. All the salt would have burned their lips as they ate. Soon kasha was served only once per week, as there was hardly any water with which to cook it.

  “These privations began to tell,” wrote Chirikov. Soon the St. Paul was having its own battle with scurvy, around the same time, and oddly on the same route home, as the St. Peter. “Officers and men did their work under great difficulties,” and soon some became too weak to climb up on deck and lay moaning in their bunks. “I began to fear that the worst might happen,” Chirikov recalled, “and ordered that the members of the crew should have daily two cups of wine.” It was undoubtedly a pleasant diversion from the monotony of their diet, but unfortunately no panacea for scurvy. The ship limped west through storms, while the men weakened and grew despondent and fearful in the unknown seas and unknown land. They could never seem to catch sight of land, despite the abundant evidence of its proximity—birds, sea otters, and floating vegetation along with the occasion glimpse of spectral outlines in the distance to the north.

  On the foggy morning of September 9, with visibility severely impaired, Chirikov ordered the St. Paul to put out an anchor cable in twenty-four fathoms of water. They could faintly hear the pounding of surf on rocks, but the heavy fog blinded them and Chirikov did not want to go farther. A few hours later, when the fog dispersed, land was revealed a few hundred yards from the ship, a place now called Adak Island. There were high mountains shrouded in tendrils of mist, with grass-covered and treeless slopes and cliffs right to the shore in many places. The waves broke dangerously over protruding rocks a stone’s throw from the path of the St. Paul. Had Chirikov not called a halt to the ship, they would have run aground. Without shore boats, the men of the St. Paul were trapped onboard their ship, looking at the land and dreaming of the wealth of freshwater it contained, their lips burning from the salt in their food and the insatiable craving for a clean drink from the clear creek that descended through the rocks and washed into the small bay.

  The St. Paul was so close to shore that two people could be seen walking along the beach. The crew began yelling through the speaking trumpet in Russian and in the “Kamchadal language,” telling the walkers to come aboard the ship. “A little while later,” Chirikov reported, “we heard human voices calling to us, but the breaking of the surf made so much noise that we could not make out what was said.” A few hours later, they heard more shouting from the shore, and then seven men in skin kayaks paddled out toward the ship. They began a ceremonial chanting that Chirikov believed was “praying that no harm might come to them from us.” They then paddled together and conversed in a cluster, and Chirikov made his men look pleasant, bowing and waving their hands for the natives to come aboard. Most of the Russians were hidden below with their guns primed and ready in case of attack, with only a few on deck. Chirikov noted that “they made a gesture with their hands as if drawing a bow, which showed that they were afraid we might attack them.”

  Chirikov and his men increased their striving, pressing their hands to their hearts and trying to look friendly. Chirikov then tossed them a cup “as a mark of friendship.” A man examined it and then tossed it into the water, where it promptly sank. Chirikov next produced some damask cloth, which they also tossed away disdainfully. Then “I gave the order to bring up the different things we had to give as presents—small boxes, small bells, needles, Chinese tobacco, pipes—and, holding them up, I invited them to come near.” All to no avail, as the kayakers would not come closer. The Aleuts were cautious. Finally, Chirikov tried to make them understand that he needed water by displaying an empty barrel. One man paddled closer, and Chirikov gave him a pipe and some tobacco, placing it on the deck of his kayak. Soon another paddled closer as well, eager to see what his more audacious comrade had obtained. Chirikov and a few of his men distributed the small gifts, which were “received rather indifferently.” After a while, “we noticed several who raised one hand to their mouth and with the other hand made a quick motion as if cutting something near the mouth. This gave us the idea that they wanted knives,” because of the Kamchadal custom of cutting meat near the mouth while eating.

  When Chirikov gave the man a knife, he was overjoyed, and when he produced an empty barrel and motioned toward the nearby stream, they understood quickly but chose to paddle over and back with bladders rather than an unwieldy barrel. “One of them held up a bladder and indicated that he wished to have a knife in payment. This was given to him. But instead of handing over the bladder, he passed it to the second man, who also demanded a knife. When he got it, he passed the bladder to the third man, who equally insisted on a knife.” The trading game went on for a while, exchanging certain roots and grasses for sea biscuits, some form of strange mineral wrapped in seaweed and some arrows, and a bark hat for a “dull axe, which they received gladly.” They handed back a copper kettle as being useless for unknown reasons and then paddled ashore. Later in the afternoon, fourteen men paddled close and also made the cutting motion with their hands that indicated knives. By now Chirikov was not amused, and the water they could obtain this way was insufficient to help them. “This act,” he sniffed, “as well as some other things they did, proves that their conscience is not highly developed.”

  Erratic winds began to blow, and, “trusting to God’s help, we attempted to get away from where we stood before it was too late.” While the ship drifted dangerously close to the reef, and Chirikov feared even more submerged rocks, he ordered the anchor cable cut at the “hawse hole,” and he put on full sail to try to free themselves from the rocky bay. “It was a narrow escape, for a strong wind blew off the mountains and from all directions.” The men heaved a sigh of relief after they cleared the reef-riddled bay and made open ocean again. They still had insufficient water, but now at least the wind was in their favor and they headed west. As the days passed, Chirikov wrote his opinion that they were paralleling the American continent, as land appeared intermittently to the north through the fog as they sailed. They kept a detailed ship’s log daily despite the hardships, noting such things as “All during the day we saw sea cabbage and floating grass, the kind that grows near the shore; the color of the water was green, unlike the color of sea water.”

  On September 20, Chirikov lay in his bunk, unable to move from scurvy, �
�expecting death at any moment.” Despite being unable to move, he worked out calculations for the ship’s course from the logbooks. He passed the instructions to his mate Ivan Yelagin, who steered the ship. “Thanks to God my mind did not leave me,” Chirikov wrote. Soon, dozens of men were unable to leave their bunks. The first man died on September 26, and quickly thereafter a total of six, including three officers, Constable Joseph Kachikov, Lieutenant Chikhachev, and Lieutenant Plautin, “were snatched away.” On October 8, the distant forested peaks of Kamchatka came into view, and a day later they entered Avacha Bay and fired five guns as a signal for help. Soon smaller boats came to help them. They had two barrels of brackish and salty water remaining. Professor Croyère, who had been sick for weeks, begged to come ashore, but when he was brought up into the light on the deck and breathed fresh air, he suddenly died. The others had to be helped from the hold of the ship and nursed back to health ashore. By the time they reached home, a total of twenty-one men had died out of the original ship’s complement of seventy-six: fifteen were abandoned to an unknown fate in Alaska, and six succumbed to scurvy in the final two weeks of the voyage.

  Chirikov began writing a detailed report of the voyage, including all the meticulously documented instances when the officers agreed on any deviation from their official orders. He also collected the many items of natural history and culture they had obtained during the voyage. He explained his actions when the storm separated the two ships early in the voyage, how they had lost the men and shore boats, how the low water made a more detailed investigation of Bolshaya Zemlya impossible, how the storms deterred their progress, and how scurvy nearly destroyed them. Chirikov also apologized for not returning with one or more live Americans, as “we could not persuade them to come, and to force them against their will without special instructions was dangerous.… It is not likely they will come aboard willingly, and I do not suppose Her Imperial Majesty would have us use force. For that purpose a larger crew is necessary.” One wonders what fate might have befallen any Tlingit or Aleut who had been daring enough to board the ship. In previous centuries, English, Spanish, French, and Dutch kidnapping of natives from the Americas had been common on the Atlantic and Caribbean coasts.