Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas), now extinct, was a relative of the manatee and dugong so large that a recently recovered skeleton on Bering Island revealed a ribcage nearly the size of a minivan.5 Steller’s sea lion (Eumetopias jubatus), among the largest of the eared seal species, breeds on island beaches throughout the North Pacific, but their numbers have drastically declined since Steller’s day. Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) were unknown to science before Steller described them, and the pelts brought back to the Russian mainland from Bering Island became the basis of a sustained, hundred-year hunt that nearly drove this species to extinction.6
In the search for commercially valuable sea otter pelts, Steller’s sea cow and the spectacled cormorant were casualties of association: the hordes of fur hunters drawn to the North Pacific in search of Steller’s discoveries needed something to eat, and the slow-moving sea cows and reluctant-to-fly cormorants were favored targets. The sea cow—the meat from a single individual rumored to feed thirty-three men for a month—disappeared less than three decades after Steller first described it.7 The cormorant made it just more than a century, with the last individuals seen around 1850.8 While new fossil evidence suggests that these birds were a vestige of an already-dying population—relicts of an ice age that only slightly, in geological time, outlasted the wooly mammoths of Wrangel Island—it’s indisputable that Steller was an unwitting harbinger of a conservation cataclysm in this Arctic ecosystem.9 In some respects, Steller’s legacy in the North Pacific is one of death.
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In Siberia and the Russian Far East, Steller was a foreigner twice removed: the ways of the rural Russians were almost as intriguing as the customs of the indigenous Buryat, Yakut, Koryak, or Tungus. He seemingly detailed every encounter from Irkutsk to Okhotsk, a direct distance of more than 2,500 kilometers, occasionally with a touch of humor as evidenced by this exchange at a Yakut yurt he stumbled upon after becoming disoriented in the forest: “I exchanged a few Yakut words with them; the rest I communicated with hands, feet, and gestures, and they caught on that I was lost. Pointing with their fingers, they asked if I had fallen off my horse, because I had covered almost fifty kilometers on foot. However, I understood them to ask if I was looking for love and wanted to sleep with a Yakut woman. I therefore answered, ‘No.’”
The journal notes published here in English for the first time add to Steller’s legacy by building on his other recently translated works, notably Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741–1742 (Stanford University Press, 1988, translated by Margritt Engel and O. W. Frost) and Steller’s History of Kamchatka (University of Alaska Press, 2003, translated by Margritt Engel and Karen Willmore). They are a further exploration of the man’s character, temperament, and skill as a natural and social scientist. Steller described the crippling debt of peasants in the Lena River basin, the logistics of bringing provisions to Okhotsk, the ancient petroglyphs he passed on cliff faces, and how the Yakut hunt waterfowl and pay tribute to vengeful gods. An entire chapter is devoted to the capture and preparation of salmon at Okhotsk’s fishery. He documented geophagy among the Tungus—the process of eating clay soils—in this case to ease diarrhea resulting from excessive phosphorus in their salmon-rich diets.10 Such observations act as a complement to his encounters with (and descriptions of) the indigenous Kamchadals of Kamchatka in 1743 and 1744, after returning to northeast Asia from Alaska.11 From a historical perspective, these vignettes are invaluable.
Steller’s journal entries are worthy texts in their own right: these notes of hospitable peasants, entranced shamans, and descriptions of new plants and landscapes expand our knowledge of a unique time and place. But they are more than just that. His journals from 1739 and 1740 represent the calm before the storm—the steady path toward the frontier town of Okhotsk that culminated in Steller’s first meeting with Vitus Bering. His journals make casual mention of future shipmates such as Sven Waxell, who assumed command of the St. Peter’s wreck upon Bering’s death, and Safron Khitrov—an apt last name meaning “sly” or “devious” in Russian—tantalizing cameos for anyone familiar with the epic to come. These words are the first tendrils of complicated relationships now tightly intertwined in history. Few tales of exploration and survival can match the experiences these men shared on the St. Peter during the Great Northern Expedition. The texts here set the stage for this monumental event, a story of near unimaginable peril and discovery; one that crafted the course of modern history by heralding the extinction of some species, the near extinction of others, and an irreversible bridging of the Old and New Worlds.
Notes
1. V. K. Arsenyev, Across the Ussuri Kray, trans. J. Slaght (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016).
2. V. A. Nechaev and T. V. Gamova, Ptitsy Dalnego Vostoka Rossii [Birds of the Russian Far East] (Vladivostok: Dalnauka, 2009).
3. C. Ford, Where the Sea Breaks Its Back (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966); V. B. Masterov and M. S. Romanov, Tikhookeanskii orlan Haliaeetus pelagicus—ekologiya, evolyutsia, okhrana [Steller’s sea eagle Haliaeetus pelagicus: ecology, evolution, and conservation] (Moscow: KMK Scientific, 2014).
4. W. B. Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent (New York: Random House, 1994).
5. J. Daley, “Skeleton of a Massive Extinct Sea Cow Found on Siberian Island,” Smithsonian.com, November 21, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/massive-extince-sea-cow-skeleton-found-siberian-island-180967291/.
6. K. W. Kenyon, “The Sea Otter in the Eastern Pacific Ocean” (North American Fauna 68, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1969).
7. H. Marsh, T. J. O’Shea, and J. E. Reynolds, Ecology and Conservation of the Sirenia: Dugongs and Manatees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
8. L. Stejneger, Georg Wilhelm Steller, the Pioneer of Alaskan Natural History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936).
9. J. Watanabe, H. Matsuoka, and Y. Hasegawa, “Pleistocene Fossils from Japan Show That the Recently Extinct Spectacled Cormorant (Phalacrocorax perspicillatus) Was a Relict,” The Auk 135 (2018): 895, doi:10.1642/AUK-18-54.1; N. Wade, “The Woolly Mammoth’s Last Stand,” New York Times, March 2, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/science/woolly-mammoth-extinct-genetics.html.
10. I. V. Seryodkin, A. M. Panichev, and J. C. Slaght, “Geophagy by Brown Bears in the Russian Far East,” Ursus 27 (2016): 11–17.
11. G. Steller, Steller’s History of Kamchatka: Collected Information Concerning the History of Kamchatka, Its Peoples, Their Manners, Names, Lifestyles, and Various Customary Practices, trans. M. Engel and K. Willmore, Historical Translation Series 12 (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2003).
WITH THE OPENING OF THE IRON CURTAIN IN the 1990s, Russian archives once again became accessible to foreign scholars, and the veil of secrecy imposed on the members of the Second Kamchatka Expedition centuries ago was finally lifted. In 1992, Wieland Hintzsche, a natural scientist and historian from Halle, Germany, where Steller had been a student and docent in botany some 260 years earlier, went looking for Steller manuscripts in Russian archives. He found a treasure trove of letters and documents not only by Steller but also by other individuals and institutions involved in the Second Kamchatka Expedition, most of them previously unexamined and unpublished. They are now being published in a series called Quellen zur Geschichte Sibiriens und Alaskas aus russischen Archiven (Source materials concerning the history of Siberia and Alaska from Russian archives) by the Franckesche Stiftungen in Halle, Germany, in cooperation with the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, with Wieland Hintzsche serving as main editor.
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