breaks above this rock, and some maps even show the channel in this very location. Maybe this rock grew just recently. Although I think that in our colonial seas there are many such new rocks. If the bigger ships sailed more often, they would show to us where the passage is clear, and where it is not; but from such discoveries let God protect me!”
The RAC had only ten ships in their fleet, and the Kad’yak was the newest and best of them all. It had been built specifically for the ice trade and was worth over eighteen thousand silver rubles. Although the cargo of ice had been insured, the ship had not. The remaining ships in the fleet were mostly converted Navy ships, many of which had seen decades of use. Despite the value of the ice trade, the RAC had fallen on hard times. After the collapse of the fur trade, Moscow was spending almost as much money to support the colony as it was getting in return. Something had to be done. Within the inner circles of Moscow there was talk about revoking the Company’s charter, its license to do business. Even worse was talk about selling the colony to the Americans. None of this reached the colony, however, and if the upper echelons of the Company knew about it, they were keeping it a secret. Recognizing this fact, a letter was sent to Arkhimandritov, chastising him for failing to salvage the ship, tow it to shore, or at least anchor it to the reef where it had grounded so that it could be salvaged later. It seems likely that the writer had not spent any time in Kodiak and had no idea what wind, seas, and storms can do to a ship grounded on a rocky reef, nor how difficult it would have been to raise or move it.
Without a ship, Captain Arkhimandritov now had little to do, but his excellent navigational skills would not go to waste. He was soon reassigned to a new duty as the cartographer of the Alaskan coast. At that time, there were no reliable charts of the area, and Arkhimandritov was a natural choice for the job. At the request of the RAC and by orders of Captain Furuhjelm, now Company manager, Arkhimandritov set out to survey the shoreline of Spruce Island and Afognak Island. On June 30, 1860, he set out in three large baidarkas with four Native paddlers and an assistant. The Aleut baidarka was traditionally a single-person craft, though they could sometimes squeeze in a small child or woman lying down in the front of the boat. Two-person kayaks were rare because they were impossible to right if turned over. To perform what we now call an “Eskimo roll” in a kayak takes coordination and practice. It is not possible to achieve that level of coordination between two people when you are upside down underwater.
Three-person baidarkies, therefore, were an invention of the Russians hunters, who sat in the middle seat, supervising two Natives who did all the paddling. Such was the way Arkhimandritov traveled around Spruce Island that summer, over a period of six weeks. During that time, he took many bearings, recorded many landmarks, and kept a detailed journal. On the third day of his journey, he entered Icon Bay. Standing on a small rocky islet, he pointed his compass toward the mast of the Kad’yak, which was still protruding above the surface of the water.
“On this bearing,” he wrote, “lies the topmast of the barque Kad’yak.”
These were the last words recorded about the ship. From there, he continued his journey and eventually gave his journal and a report to the RAC. But whatever became of his work is not known. No new map was produced, or if it were, it has become lost. His notes, however, were the property of the RAC and eventually were transferred to the United States when Alaska was sold in 1867. For over a hundred years, the Kad’yak was forgotten.
The sinking of the Kad’yak was not the end of Captain Arkhimandritov’s troubles. Only a year later, he grounded another ship while leaving the port of New Arkhangelsk. Whether he attributed either sinking to the intervention of Saint Herman is unknown, but possibly to atone for his lack of devotion, in 1869 he donated an icon of Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors, to Saint Herman’s chapel on Spruce Island. The icon was later moved to the Russian Orthodox Church in Ouzinkie, and sometime in the 1980s, it disappeared. Almost immediately following the Kad’yak shipwreck, a navigational aid was placed above the rock on which it impaled itself. This became one of the first navigational markers in Alaska, and the rock later became known as Kodiak Rock on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ship charts. Although on the surface this appears to be in reference to Kodiak Island, there are so many such rocks that one wonders why this one in particular should bear that name unless it were also a reference to the Kad’yak, which met its demise at this location.
CHAPTER 4
SUBMARINES
AND
CRAB SEX
NO LONGER A SLEEPY LITTLE Russian village, Kodiak is now a bustling fishing port, home to several hundred fishing boats ranging from 20-foot skiffs to 150-foot Bering Sea crabbers. A dozen fish-processing plants dominate the waterfront, along with various businesses to support them, including welders, plumbers, and hardware stores. Not far away lie the various bars and restaurants that provide seafaring men with another kind of support, especially when they are not fishing. Kodiak’s economic heyday occurred during the king crab boom of the late 1970s to 1980. During that time, fishermen earned a year’s salary in a week or two, and most of them were bedecked with the gold jewelry that became de rigueur bling to advertise their success. The bars were teeming and wild, and money flowed through them faster than beer.
By the time I arrived in 1984, however, the king crab fishery had collapsed, most of the boats had been converted from crabbers to trawlers, and it was a much quieter place. Nonetheless, it was still a successful port, handling over 300 million pounds of seafood annually, including salmon, crab, and halibut, worth over $100 million. At one time it was the highest grossing port in the United States, but that title has since passed to Dutch Harbor (Unalaska), to which the Bering Sea fleet has relocated in their pursuit of Pollock, which now forms the basis for the largest industrial fishery in the world. If you have eaten a fish sandwich at McDonald’s, you have eaten Pollock. Most of it, though, gets made into surimi, the rubbery-textured, tasteless, fish-paste product that is the basis of artificial crab and used for sushi in Japan and everywhere else. In less than four years, a fishery for the biggest crabs in the world had been replaced by a fishery for fake ones.
APRIL 1991
In the movies, when the wild-haired mad scientist discovers the secret potion that will bring the dead back to life, cure a deadly epidemic, change granite to gold, or stop the rapidly approaching meteor from smashing into earth, he stands defiantly, hands up in the air, and shouts the most exciting words in science: “Eureka! I have found it!”
But that’s not exactly how it works.
Usually, the most exciting words in science are: “Hmmm. That’s odd.” In fact, most great discoveries are the result of not finding what you were looking for, but finding something else instead. Something totally unexpected. And it all began with my study of crabs.
I was lying on my stomach inside a two-person mini-submarine called the Delta, 600 feet underwater, on the bottom of the ocean in the Gulf of Alaska, and looking out through a 6-inch porthole. The water surrounding us was barely above freezing, and the pressure was over 300 pounds per square inch; if our little steel tank were to spring a leak, we would be instantly crushed. The muddy seafloor was illuminated by lights, but the water was turbid, and I could only see about 6 feet into the gloom. The pilot, Rich Slater, sat slightly above me on a stool with his head up in a steel bubble atop the mini-sub. From there, he couldn’t even see the bottom. My face was only about 6 inches above the seafloor, so I had a slightly better view. As we moved slowly through the gloom, I saw some Tanner crabs, which we were trying to study. Then more. Then many of them came into view, all crowded together. Now we were surrounded by hundreds of crabs.
“What the hell?” I thought out loud. “What are these crabs doing?”
Me with a king crab at the Kodiak Fisheries Research Center.
Moments later Rich stopped the sub as we almost ran into a tall stack of crabs that was higher than the submarine. I looked out portholes on both sides of the sub, and all I could see were crabs, hundreds to thousands of them, mounded up on top of each