Читать книгу Eastbound through Siberia - Georg Wilhelm Steller - Страница 6
ОглавлениеJonathan C. Slaght
THE EARLIEST EXPLORERS OF SIBERIA AND THE RUSSIAN Far East were the fur traders and Cossacks, hard men of rust and mud. Leaning heavily on firearms and steel, they established a chain of Russian outposts winding from Irkutsk in Siberia to Yakutsk and Kamchatka in the Russian Far East. Among them were Ivan Moskvitin, the first Russian to reach the Sea of Okhotsk (in 1639); Kurbat Ivanov, the first Russian to stumble upon the shores of Lake Baikal (in 1643); Vassili Poyarkov, the first Russian to reach the Amur River (in 1644); and Vladimir Atlasov, among the bloodiest of the Cossacks, the first to organize explorations of Kamchatka. Some of these explorers died peacefully, whereas others, like the morally ambiguous Atlasov, died violently while cementing the Russian Empire’s hold on this frontier.
Once a network of Russian fortresses and peasant villages had been established across the lands of the eastern half of the Russian Empire, another group of explorers came. Armed with journals, notepads, and specimen cases instead of weapons, these were the naturalists. Georg Steller was part of this wave, joining adventurous Russians, Danes, Germans, Poles, Scots, and Swedes hired by the Russian Empire to catalog its natural riches. The legacies of these explorers are intertwined with the history of science and exploration in Russia; their names peer back at us from the plants, birds, and mammals seen there today: Dybowski’s frog, Gmelin’s buttercup, and Pallas’s reed bunting among them. Later explorers who fine-tuned our knowledge of these vast landscapes included Nikolai Przehvalskii, Alexander von Middendorff, Carl Maksimovich, George Kennan, and Vladimir Arsenyev.
Georg Steller’s contributions to natural and social history in Russia have been, I believe, undervalued. This is due partly to the thunderclap of discovery that defined his time with Vitus Bering—the first European exploration of Alaska would overshadow anyone’s other work—but also to how his records were handled by the Russian authorities Steller answered to. At the time of his expeditions, the Russian Empire was jealous of the information Steller (and all the other scientists) put to paper, keeping it hidden from foreign powers also eager to exploit the riches of the North Pacific.
Other specifics in Steller’s journals on Siberia and the Russian Far East, particularly of life in these wild regions far from the gilded palaces of St. Petersburg, contained details the government likely preferred remain quiet. Corruption was rampant, laws were haphazardly designed, and services such as rudimentary health care were often absent. In the passages here, Steller documented a months-long epidemic that killed Russians (but did not affect the indigenous Buryats) and saw injustice in the burden of taxes levied on the neediest peasants. Comparing the poor with the rich in March 1740, he wrote that
as a general rule about Siberia, it can be noted that the people in poor and bad places are much more industrious and of a better mind-set than in rich places and those of abundance. There is no house in these parts where hemp and burlap are not spun and woven for shirts and pants; young and old are intent on saving themselves from poverty as much as possible. Whereas in Irkutsk the womenfolk—as soon as the tea and cabbage soup have been prepared—can be found lying together on the stove like sausages in a frying pan, smoking their asses so they don’t rot and fall apart from all the moving and whoring.
Although some of Steller’s documents were released soon after his death and acted as vital references for future explorers of the North Pacific, the sensitive nature of Steller’s texts meant that the breadth of his discoveries and observations remained—and to some degree still remains—unexplored. His notes were locked away; some were lost to subsequent decay or misplaced, while others sat near-indecipherable in the Latin and eighteenth-century German they were written in. Remarkably, the dissolution of the Soviet Union cracked these long-sealed vaults as well, and a number of Steller’s records have come to light in recent decades. This volume was among that valuable cache.
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Steller’s legacy in the North Pacific is subtle but deeply pervasive. Like Vladimir Arsenyev, who detailed explorations of the areas south of the Amur River in Across the Ussuri Kray (Indiana University Press, 2016), Steller seemed most comfortable describing vegetation when he wrote about nature. It is therefore unsurprising that the greatest number of taxa named after him today are plants. In Appendix D of this volume, translators Margritt Engel and Karen Willmore list two genera (Dendrostellera and Stellera) and ten species that still carry his name, from Steller’s leek to a perennial herb called Veronica stelleri, and note an additional fifteen species that, given the ever-evolving nature of scientific and common species names, were once called “Steller” but no longer are.
Steller’s detailed lists of plants—important for understanding how vegetation communities may have changed in the last three hundred years—are ample, and his descriptions of the natural world are thoughtful. For example, somewhere in eastern Yakutia (near the Ancha River, a tributary of the Allakh-Yun River), Steller encountered permafrost for the first time and, not knowing what it was but recognizing it as special, wrote the following: “I saw a curious phenomenon in the woods. A stream flowed between two mountains separated from each other by half a kilometer. On both sides the cut banks were made of ice up to two feet thick. On top of the ice were soil and muskeg and very tall larch trees. I gathered that this ice has never thawed and has been lying here since times immemorial and represents solid ground.”
Steller recorded few birds in his journals here. As an ornithologist with twenty years of experience in the Russian Far East, one of my joys in translating Across the Ussuri Kray was deciphering the birds Vladimir Arsenyev saw but could not identify. For example, Arsenyev wrote about “grebes here and there in the pools of standing water, these birds had protruding ear tufts and a collar of colorful feathers.”1 These key characteristics allowed me to confidently identify these birds as great crested grebes (Podiceps cristatus). Steller, unfortunately, gives readers less information to work with. At one point he noticed “two kinds of gulls that live on the sea: one was black-and-white spotted on the back; the other was all black, longish, and gaunt with long, narrow wings.” Heinrich Springer, an Alaskan ornithologist who helped the translators with bird identifications in this text, was justifiably perplexed. In his notes he suggested that the first bird, the “black-and-white spotted” one, might be a juvenile gull, as many young gulls are mottled in their plumage. The second bird, he proposed, was perhaps a storm petrel or maybe a black tern. But if Steller is confusing a petrel or a tern with a gull, this second mystery bird might be a wide range of things. Certain color morphs of the parasitic (Stercorarius parasiticus) or long-tailed (S. longicaudus) jaegers, for example, meet his descriptions, as does a sooty shearwater (Puffinus griseus), a short-tailed shearwater (P. tenuirostris), or a dark phase of the northern fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis). It could even be something far more exotic, like a lesser frigatebird (Fregata ariel)—a highly nomadic, lithe species documented as far north as the Tartary Strait and the Amur River mouth, but never as far north in the Sea of Okhotsk as Steller was at the time.2
Steller’s clumsiness with bird identification is somewhat ironic, given that he is perhaps best recognized today by ornithologists and birdwatchers for the three striking avian species that carry his name. There is Steller’s sea eagle (Haliaeetus pelagicus), a gorgeous raptor and close relative of North America’s bald eagle (H. leucocephalus), unmistakable with its enormous orange bill and patterned plumage of rich blacks and bright whites. The largest eagle in the world (by mass) and a salmon eater, it breeds along the Sea of Okhotsk and eastern Kamchatka coasts and was likely a common sight for Steller throughout much of his time in the region. He mentioned these eagles in his journals, but the species was not formally described to science until Peter Pallas, an accomplished naturalist in his own right who had idolized Steller as a child, published Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica and named this bird in Steller’s honor.3
Next is Steller’s eider (Polysticta stelleri)—also named by Pallas—a beautiful, enigmatic creature of the northern seas. It breeds in the high Arctic on both sides of the Bering Strait and winters off the coasts of southern Alaska, Kamchatka, the Kuril Islands, and the Commander Islands. The latter of these contain what is now called Bering Island, where Steller, Bering, and others were stranded when their ship, the St. Peter, crashed into it; this island is the site of Bering’s grave.
Last is Steller’s jay (Cyanocitta stelleri)—the first bird in Alaska to be felled by a bullet, when Steller’s assistant brought one down along the shores of Kayak Island a year after the adventures described here.4 Steller recognized this jay’s similarity in plumage to the ubiquitous North American blue jay (C. cristata) he’d seen renderings of, and he felt certain this bird was a representative of American fauna. The St. Peter was indeed moored along the continent they had sought. Steller was also the first person to describe to science the spectacled cormorant (Phalacrocorax perspicillatus)—the largest known cormorant species—and the northern fur seal (Callorhinus ursinus).
If we assemble the birds and mammals Steller described or that carry his name, we see that most are in conservation trouble today, with Steller’s jay being the only exception. 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).
