Island of the Blue Foxes Read online

  It should not be surprising to note that nothing went according to the well-laid plans drawn up in St. Petersburg. The workers who were supposed to construct the boats in advance did not do so, the food supplies that were to be ready and waiting never materialized, the wagons and sledges were not constructed in a timely manner, the promised horses were not ready, and many of the workers who were pledged to assist or join the expedition were mysteriously absent. All the support that had been so graciously proclaimed, and the promised resources, proved to be a chimera. Merely keeping the ponderous expedition and its tons of unwieldy equipment moving east through Siberia without drownings or starvation was a constant dilemma. Deserters were so numerous that the turnover in manpower occasionally threatened to stall the expedition’s progress, leaving tons of supplies behind. The working and living conditions must have been truly atrocious if so many risked fleeing the expedition, since in Siberia there was nowhere to flee to, with hostile peoples, little food, few settlements, and a killing winter. Escaping the discipline and hard labor of the expedition was an uncertain prospect.

  Lieutenant Sven Waxell recalled that “we sought to prevent further losses by introducing a harsh discipline; we set up a gallows every twenty versts along the River Lena, which had an exceptionally good effect, for after that had been done we had only very few run aways.” Then in his midthirties, the Swedish Waxell had served in both the English and the Russian Navies. He was a sensible and unpretentious man who brought along his wife and boy, named Laurentz, who had been born only in 1730. Waxell and his son would play a greater role in the dramatic events of the voyage than they ever could have imagined. The main contingent of the expedition arrived in Yakutsk in June 1735 and reunited with Captain-Commander Bering.

  THE JOURNEY WAS NOT all hardship for the Berings—now that they were nobility, their rank had privileges, even in Siberia. As the leader of the massive expedition, the largest ever and most disruptive migration of people from Russia to Siberia, which was to bring the most immediate changes as well as the promise of future transformations and greater governmental presence in the region, Bering was a symbol of power and progress. He had to play his role. Anna Bering was equally devoted to promoting her family’s interests as she saw them—a rise in social status and rank and the respect, at least officially, of those of lower rank. These social ambitions were one of the main reasons Bering agreed to such a challenging and arduous position. Anna was obviously devoted to her husband to be willing to follow him to the ends of the known world and leave two of her children behind. In Siberia, primitive as were the conditions, Vitus and Anna were like a lord and lady, the pinnacle of Siberian society and living symbols of imperial authority.

  Although a select few high-ranking Siberian officials affected the trappings of western European privilege, such as the governors or vice governors of Yakutsk, Irkutsk, and Tobolsk and a handful of wealthy merchants in the fur trade, for the most part culture, as Anna and Vitus Bering would have considered it, was absent. So they brought it with them. Many of the thousands of people who were connected with the Great Northern Expedition over the years and hundreds of the packhorses were employed in making sure the Berings suffered as little as possible from Siberia’s want of creature comforts. They slept in tents as infrequently as feasible and traveled with their own entourage of servants. On the trail, Bering lived up to his rough-and-tumble reputation, and they all had to endure clouds of flies and mosquitoes while floating down rivers on barges. But when they arrived in towns and usurped the finest house for their use, the servants brought out silver table plates for daily use and reserved the fine porcelain settings of thirty-six for more ceremonial dinners. The Berings presided over events in clothing that also set them apart: Anna’s luggage contained a large collection of silk, velvet, and cotton gowns, trimmed with ermine and brocade. Bering was resplendent in starched collar, powdered wig, and satin pants. They wore linen shirts and fine polished shoes and silk stockings more appropriate to the court in St. Petersburg, and they donned stylishly crafted furs for chilly outings. Their apartments were decorated with candelabra, and lacquer storage boxes contained a selection of jewelry and other trappings of imperial sophistication and luxury—all an affirmation that they were above the local Siberian hierarchy.

  One of the most ostentatious luxuries that the pack trains hauled for the Berings was a clavichord, an instrument similar to a piano. Pity the poor beast of burden that had it strapped to its back. To Anna, however, during years of cold and dust in Siberia, it must have been a welcome distraction both to teach their children and to enliven dull evenings with the other officers’ wives and Siberian dignitaries.

  BERING ARRIVED IN YAKUTSK in October 1734 and found a state of affairs not to his liking. Chirikov had left behind in the town most of the bulky provisions that he was supposed to have hauled to Okhotsk because the promised boats to transport all this heavy material had not been built. All the tons of equipment remained in Yakutsk. Skornyakov-Pisarev, the former noble and now exile who had been ordered to organize the construction of the riverboats and to prepare Okhotsk for the expedition, was only then departing Yakutsk for Okhotsk to begin his task. When he and Bering met, they took an immediate dislike to one another. Skornyakov-Pisarev claimed that the men he had been expecting to help with his tasks had never materialized and blithely explained away his lack of progress, placing the responsibility onto Bering to solve. But Bering had no time or resources to solve every problem personally and had counted on Skornyakov-Pisarev: How was he to transport the expedition’s equipment over the mountains without the boats? If he had to organize the construction of the boats, it would cause yet another season of delay. With thousands of people buzzing around without food or a place to stay, Bering was kept running from one problem to another, stamping out little fires of discontent and innumerable minor unexpected problems, never having time to deal with the larger executive planning of the expedition.

  One of Bering’s main tasks as outlined in his orders was to explore and chart all the rivers flowing into Lake Baikal and to follow the three major Siberian rivers, the Ob, the Yenisei, and the Lena, north to the Icy Sea and along the Arctic coast. The hope was to determine whether the Arctic coast would ever be a viable sea route for European merchants to gain access to Asian markets. English and Dutch merchant adventurers had made several attempts at the Northeast Passage route in previous centuries, all of which ended in failure or disaster. This task alone, tacked on to the Great Northern Expedition’s orders almost as an afterthought, was an undertaking nearly as complicated as the Pacific voyage, which was supposed to be the ultimate objective of the entire expedition.

  One of the first exploration parties Bering organized was led by Dmitry Ovtsin, a young lieutenant who commanded a detachment of about fifty-six men. They built their sloop, Tobol, throughout the latter half of 1733 and sailed north from Tobolsk along the Ob River in 1734, accompanied by four flat-bottomed riverboats and around eighty soldiers. The soldiers were to accompany the expedition overland by marching adjacent to the river in the event of hostility of northern peoples. Their goal was to follow the Ob Gulf north to the Arctic coast and then sail east along the coast to the Yenisei River. This incredible voyage was a feat Ovtsin miraculously managed to accomplish after several years of heroically working through the ice of the Ob Gulf, along the Arctic coast, and then traveling upstream, or south, along the Yenisei River in 1737.

  Unfortunately for Ovtsin, during the course of this expedition he encountered and was friendly with a famous Siberian exile, Prince Ivan Alekseevich Dolgoruky. The secret police arrested Ovtsin and sent news of his encounter back to St. Petersburg. Although he was praised for the exploration and charting of his assigned section of the rivers and coast, Ovtsin was court-martialed, stripped of his rank, and ordered to join Bering as a laborer on the voyage to America. Such were the arbitrary decrees that controlled fate in Empress Anna’s Russia. His demotion, in addition to being personally demoralizing, was to
cause some tension on the return voyage from America, when the chain of command became unclear.

  In 1735 Bering dispatched two contingents north from Yakutsk along the Lena River on similar missions. One group was to navigate and chart the Arctic coast all the way to the eastern point in Asia, to which Bering had sailed years earlier on his first expedition. The second group was to head west to the Yenisei River and perhaps meet up with Ovtsin’s party. Lieutenant V. M. Pronchishchev departed on this second mission at the end of June 1735. His men became iced in. They overwintered near the Arctic coast, and many died of scurvy, including him and his wife. His successor, Kharlam Laptev, did not complete the coastal survey to the Yenisei River until 1741. The other party, commanded by Lieutenant Peter Lassenius, also suffered miserably of scurvy and privation near the mouth of the Lena River. The survivors of these expeditions continued charting the coast as per their orders and eventually provided the government with a rough chart of the coast. “It is deplorable to hear of all the dangers and misery these poor people had to endure,” Waxell wrote, as many of them had “fallen to death’s sickle.” Waxell also offered his opinion of the feasibility of further exploration along the Arctic coast: “As for the crew, they will be short of provisions, the air will be injurious, and the cold will undermine their health. Nor is there any need to say that they will find none of the comforts to which Europeans are accustomed. In fact, it must be anticipated that most of them will succumb, yes, die like flies.”

  BERING WAS BASED IN Yakutsk for several years, organizing the northern boat expeditions and the exploratory expeditions east to Okhotsk. It was a chance for Anna and their children to settle into a routine for a while but not a pleasant time for Bering, beset as he was by setbacks and work unrelated to his voyage of discovery. The innumerable tasks that seemed so easy when blithely scrawled out in airy chambers in the court of St. Petersburg were far more challenging to accomplish in Siberia with no infrastructure or supplies and a recalcitrant workforce. These tasks included many seemingly obscure activities such as importing hemp from Irkutsk and constructing a rope works, establishing a tar distillery, and building an ironworks. Bering had spent nearly a year planning and organizing for the river exploration part of his expedition tasks when Chirikov arrived in Yakutsk in June 1735 at the head of the main contingent of the expedition. Only then could work progress on the construction of houses, storerooms, and the riverboats they would need to get over the coastal range to Okhotsk.

  Bering’s other main task was to pioneer a new and better route to Okhotsk rather than the Yudoma Cross route that had proved so disastrous years earlier. He sent two major expeditions out to search for a new route, but both ended without success. The wall of steep mountain ranges ran in an unbroken line along Siberia’s eastern coast. There was no viable alternative to the old route, and it would take another two years and several trips to get all the supplies over the mountains. The heavier loads went by river, while the lighter loads went by the dreadful overland packhorse route. Waxell was stunned once he had made the traverse, writing that “the country between Yudoma Cross and Okhotsk is a complete wilderness.” Another member of the expedition, the young naturalist Stephen Petrovich Krasheninnikov, noted that the terrain was too steep for carts or wagons and was “as miserable and difficult as one could possibly imagine.… The banks of the rivers are filled with huge rocks and round stones; it is amazing that the horses were able to walk on them at all,” and many went lame or died. “The higher the mountains are, the muddier they become. On the summits are huge marshes, and places filled with quicksand. If a packhorse becomes mired there is no way to pull it out.”

  In an attempt to improve the route, Bering ordered the construction of warming houses every two miles along the entire trail and sent men out to construct better roads over the swampy sections. The warming houses were to be staffed and kept heated all winter so that when the cavalcades arrived, the men and horses could seek shelter. To get the supplies to Okhotsk, there would be four to five hundred men continually on the march back and forth. This time Bering did not just want to get to Okhotsk with his expedition; he wanted to stamp the region with Russia’s visible presence, to make all future expeditions that much easier. His goal was to establish an official route worthy of being marked on a map, something that people could count on, a known entity, even if it was harsh and rugged. But even with Bering’s improvements, the Yudoma Cross route remained dangerous and slow. On one occasion, Anna Bering and her children were nearly lost when their horse ran off and no one knew where they had gone.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1735, Okhotsk was scarcely ready to accept thousands of newcomers. It was a village of Russians and several hundred Tungu and Lamut natives living in skin houses. When Spangberg and his advance contingent arrived, he expected to be welcomed by a host of new dwellings and storehouses ready to receive his men and equipment, with new provisions being brought in from the surrounding countryside and people moved to the vicinity to begin cattle ranching and sheep raising. He anticipated a wharf with ships under construction. But nothing had been done. Skornyakov-Pisarev, the exile who had been ordered to this task, had accomplished little. Although he was commissioned to travel to Okhotsk in 1731, he did not arrive there until 1734. Apparently, he had sent a small number of men to Okhotsk, but they died or deserted en route. Skornyakov-Pisarev had done nothing that he was ordered to do—perhaps the orders being so extravagantly impossible for him to accomplish that he felt they could be ignored. There were no new houses, no roads, no farms, no cattle ranches, and no schools or significant trade with Kamchatka. Okhotsk remained a dusty frontier town surrounded by grasses and pebbles, and the inhabitants were shocked to see so many weary people arriving and expecting to be looked after.

  Waxell was not impressed with the town. “It is an unhealthy place,” he wrote, “that offers no means of obtaining foodstuffs of any kind, except just in the spring, when large quantities of fish come into the river from the sea.” His negative assessment deepened the more time he spent there. “The place itself is quite lowlying and is often under water altogether when there is an exceptionally strong high tide.… The whole of this area is composed of nothing but small pebbles, which the sea has heaped up and which in the course of time have become overgrown with grass.” It was hardly an inspiring place to build a town. But at least the local salmon “has a particularly pleasant taste” and was especially good with wild garlic.

  Because Skornyakov-Pisarev had made no preparations, Spangberg first had to build storehouses to shelter the provisions and equipment he had brought and then build barracks for all the men so they didn’t freeze to death in the coming winter. Only after these prosaic survival tasks were complete could he begin work on the dock and shipyards, which were his main priority. Without a shipyard, he could not build the two ships that he needed for his planned voyage to Japan. But even here, Waxell cast a critical eye on Okhotsk. “There is, besides, danger in the spring that the ice may wreak destruction. To put it briefly, this is an emergency harbour and not one that you can use with any confidence.” Nevertheless, Bering kept the supplies and equipment moving slowly over the treacherous passes to give Spangberg and his carpenters and shipbuilders the supplies they needed.

  The unreadiness, and perhaps unsuitability, of Okhotsk to serve its intended purpose as a deepwater port was not the only major challenge Bering faced. Despite the years of planning and the staggering resources deployed, another one of the key problems of the first expedition had not been solved—compelling eastern Siberians to respect the authority of St. Petersburg. Imperial authorities were used to seeing their edicts and commands promptly obeyed. Merely writing out an order was as good as seeing it fulfilled. But the lesson that these authorities were only slowly learning, and that Bering had warned of, was that while technically part of the Russian Empire and under the authority of the emperor or empress, the disparate, illiterate, and hardscrabble residents of these distant lands did not jump to attention and produce wh
at was ordered of them. It was another world. If he wanted things done, Bering would have to impose his commands by force.

  The biggest problem in Okhotsk, however, was with Skornyakov-Pisarev. He was rude and disrespectful, and he set up his own competing fort a distance away. He misused his imperial authority to hire away workers for his own projects and generally impeded Bering’s and Spangberg’s activities. A haughty and hierarchal man, he took an immediate dislike to the no-nonsense Spangberg and clashed with Bering. He considered them to be of inferior social standing, not true Russians but “foreigners.” Although seventy years old, Skornyakov-Pisarev, who was “made vicious by a long and unjust banishment,… became Bering’s evil spirit.… He was violent, restless and fiery as a youngster in both speech and action, dissolute, bribable and slanderous, a lying and malicious gossip.” Bering wrote that he could have kept three secretaries busy just responding to the criticisms leveled at him from Skornyakov-Pisarev alone.

  CHAPTER 5

  QUARRELING FACTIONS

  THE BRILLIANT OBSERVATIONS AND theories of enigmatic naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller were one of the great legacies of the Great Northern Expedition. But he was a difficult and lonely man whose complex and contradictory personality ensured that he was neither loved nor respected by most of those with whom he spent his final years. On the expedition, his arrogant assertions, although frequently correct, were delivered in such a shrill tone and superior and abrasive manner that he was routinely ignored. His Russian shipmates regarded him as an overbearing and offensive foreigner who was best left alone. While Steller was insensitive to the feelings of others, he was hypersensitive to any slight, real or perceived. He could not tolerate contradictions of his opinion and lacked tact and humility. Despite having no nautical training, he boldly asserted his opinion on naval matters, was quick to point out when a mistake had been made, and always implied that everything would have been done properly if only he were in charge.