THE AMERICAN EXPEDITION (236 pp.)—Sven Waxell—Macmillan ($3).
Where lie the farthest limits of northern Asia? Peter the Great did not know, and he wanted to. So, in 1725, Czar Peter sent a Dane named Vitus Bering and 33 men to poke around in Kamchatka, and especially to find out whether a land bridge connected Asia and North America. Bering proved the continents separate by sailing through the straits between them, but Peter’s successor, the Empress Anne, was not altogether convinced.
In 1732 she dispatched a party which grew to an imposing 3,000 men, again under Bering’s command, to explore the Arctic coast and the north rim of the Pacific, to reconnoiter the western verges of the New World—and, just incidentally, to develop the whole of Siberia into a profitable community. Despite its pretentious objectives, Bering’s second expedition was one of the most extensive and successful enterprises ever carried out in the name of science for the sake of imperialism; and so the Russians, with a genius for reverse publicity, ignored or suppressed many of its fascinating details until they sank from memory like a shower of stars in the long Siberian night.
Almost 200 years later, in 1938, the Leningrad State Library acquired the MS of a full report written by an eyewitness. This week, in a good translation by M. A. Michael, The American Expedition, by Sven Waxell, one of Bering’s chief lieutenants, was published in the U.S.
Blue Faces. Waxell, born a Swede, joined the Russian navy in 1726 and the Bering expedition in 1733, bringing his wife and son along. It took the straggling army of human whatnot (adventurers, scientists, convict laborers, shipwrights, camp followers) almost five slogging years to cross the 4,000 miles of Siberia and join up in Okhotsk. There, in Arctic cold, the expedition built a large base and a small fleet. One squadron sailed south to study Japan; two ships, one of them carrying Bering with Waxell as his second in command, put out into uncharted seas to explore America from the west.
Waxell saw his first North Americans on an Aleutian island. The faces of some were painted blue, he says, and they were “screeching” at each other at the top of their lungs. The Russians sent men ashore to parley. The Aleuts held one of them captive, and tried with unmannerly glee to drag the Russian longboat on to the rocks by its painter. Waxell called for musketry, aimed high; the Aleuts fell flat on their faces from shock. All in all, the Russians were unimpressed with the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere, especially with their custom of plugging the nose with tough grass: “When they took this out, it gave off a quantity of fluid which they licked up with their tongues.”
Among the fogbanks and williwaws of the Aleutians, Bering’s flagship, the St. Peter, wandered for five months without true bearings. Food ran low. Scurvy struck. Bering and many of his crew lay helplessly rotting in their bunks. Waxell, hardly able to stand, took command. The ship was falling apart beneath him for want of able-bodied men to repair her, when at last, on Nov. 5, 1741 the St. Peter anchored off the barren Komandorskie isle (250 miles northwest of Attu) now called by Bering’s name.
Plank Burial. Waxell ordered the well to carry the sick out of the fetid hold on to the wind-ripped shore. Many of them died almost as soon as the fresh air struck their lungs; blue foxes, which swarmed over the island, ate their hands and feet before they could be buried. The living crouched in sandpits near the beach, and there—without strength to move the men who died beside them, with little food except for sea otters and seals that they were able to kill, open to all weathers, and to winds of gale force—spent the whole of an Arctic winter.
Bering himself died in December and, strapped to a plank, was shoved into the soft sand until he disappeared. Only a little more than half the crew lived to see the spring. Under Waxell’s command they broke up the old St. Peter, which had crashed ashore soon after they landed, and built themselves a hooker. By August all was ready, the survivors set sail, and two weeks later hove into Petropavlovsk with “joy and heartfelt delight.” North America must have seemed a poor bargain to the Russians. Eventually, they were to sell out their share of it—Alaska’s 586,00 square miles—for about 2¢ an acre.
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