Where the Sea Breaks Its Back: The Epic Story of a Pioneer Naturalist and the Discovery of Alaska by Corey Ford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Tagged as “Russian lit” because it’s the story of an 18th-century Russian maritime nightmare voyage. The movie poster tagline should be something like: “Just when they thought it couldn’t get worse, it did.”
In the mid-1700s, Russia was very interested indeed in what was on the other side of the northern Pacific – Bolshaya Zemlya, the “Big Land.” If they could find out what was there, how to safely get to it, and what they could plunder once they were there, there might be lots of money to be made. So two wooden sailing ships, the St. Peter and the St. Paul, set off from the Kamchatka peninsula, captained by the dour, doughty Dane Vitus Bering (as in the Bering Sea and Strait), to find out. Among them was Georg Wilhelm Steller, a German naturalist and medic, a haughty, arrogant, impatient man, whose interest lay in identifying and bringing back specimens of plants and animals from a place no European had ever been. The ships lose each other within days of embarking. There are storms (including the demonic-sounding williwaws), dead calms, and squabbles among crew and officers which Bering proves to be too ill and depressed to manage. Steller’s journals clearly convey that he loathed everyone and the feeling was pretty mutual. After weeks at sea, the St. Peter manages to hit the Alaskan coast, but because of delays in preparation and the trip over and the imminent autumn changes in the winds, Bering says they have to turn around immediately and return home. An expedition ten years in the making, and Steller is grudgingly permitted ten HOURS to gather his specimens. They don’t take in enough drinking water. Food is running low and is terrible. Half the crew comes down with the horrors of scurvy – luckily Steller has gathered plants he knows protect against scurvy, and nurses them along. Half of them die anyway. The ship is wrecked. They spend 8 wintry months on a barren island, harassed by fearless foxes who start feeding on dying men. Then there’s an earthquake, for pity’s sake. They rebuild a much smaller ship, set off again into more storms. Steller’s specimens are all tossed out of the floundering ship – including the sole known specimen of the sea cow that became extinct shortly thereafter. The remnants of the crew hobble into port. Steller survives, wandering rootlessly through eastern Russia, living rough, collecting plants, and drinking himself to death at the age of 37. But western North America is still home to Steller’s Jays, glossy, bossy, black-blue birds with lashing crests who will steal all the crackers from your campsite, and yell at you until you give them more. And they are why I wanted to read this book.
But one thing the St. Peter expedition had achieved was to confirm the enormous abundance of fur-bearing animals, especially the sea otters, whose waterproof pelts were maniacally sought for the fur market. In a coda called “The Plunderers,” Ford summarizes the ensuing “fur rush” of Russian hunters. They surge into the north Pacific and the Aleutian islands, stuffing their holds with thousands upon thousands of pelts of otters, seals, and foxes. The indigenous people are, of course, not pleased, and there’s plenty of human-on-human violence too. Word reached down into California, where sailors could row out into herds of sea otters and just club them with their oars. By 1830, the Alaskan otters were nearly gone, and Baron von Wrangell banned hunting them. 30-odd years later, the US bought Alaska, and the Americans took up the slaughter (about the same time they were busily killing off the buffalo). By 1925, the otters were declared extinct. But in 1931, the soon-to-be head of the Alaskan Game Commission was secretly escorted by an Aleut chief to a quiet spot to show him… a lone sea otter. They were on their way back.
A terrific, wonderfully-written sea drama, with plenty of suffering, tenacity, misery, and danger, and a poignant, almost-kind-of encouraging ending.
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