Steller’s Island A rock of many names

By Michael Engelhard PATRICK ENDRES

66 ALASKAMAGAZINE.COM FEBRUARY 2018 Kayak Island seen from the southwest, the seaward side, with Cape St. Elias and Pinnacle Rock.

rom the cockpit of a small plane—the And thereby hangs another epic tale. best means to get there from Cordova, At the age of 32, the military surgeon and Fweather permitting—Kayak Island looks like botanist Georg Wilhelm Steller—born a 17-mile-long breaching whale. Dark spruce Stöhler, in Franconia, revived after having cloaks its rocky spine. Driftwood like match- been declared dead—had joined a Tsarist sticks clogs the cetacean wake in the bays. If voyage in search of a continent in the role of the bony head, Cape St. Elias, suggests a scientist and physician. Commanded by the humpback’s, Pinnacle Rock to the south is the Danish cartographer on his fn of a titanic orca circling it. fagship St. Peter, the expedition left the tiny Indeed, in the cosmology of Yakutat Tlingit Kamchatka port Petropavlovsk on June 4, who plied these rough waters in dugout 1741. Steller had explored 7,000 miles of canoes, Kayak Island is a whale Raven tried to on foot and by dogsled the two years kill. Adjacent Wingham Island is his kayak, before, driven by the “insatiable desire to visit the mainland’s Okalee Spit, his harpoon line. foreign lands and to investigate their condi- All these turned to stone, except Raven. tions and curiosities.” Little did he know that Ignorant of the myth, Russians dubbed the he would become the frst European natural- wrong island “Kayak,” for its shape, a case of ist to set foot in Northwest America, where mistaken identity. Some people nowadays he’d encounter creatures unknown to science, call it “Steller’s Island.” and one that today is extinct.

FEBRUARY 2018 67 thick fog south of the storm-lashed Aleutian chain, in, though reluctantly, fearing perhaps that Steller would get In Bering lost contact with Aleksei Chirikov’s St. Paul on lost or carried away, botanizing. June 20, never to be reunited. After a few days of searching, Landfall was made in a small cove by the mouth of a freshet, Bering resumed sailing east, hoping to fnd land soon. His and one must assume the German was the frst man to jump sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued German adjunct spotted mainland from the yawl. While the crew reflled casks, down the beach Alaska, though vaguely, through clouds, more than three weeks Steller and his Cossack servant and hunter Toma Lepekhin later. “It was not so distinct that a picture could be made of it,” found a hollowed-out log for cooking with heated rocks, next to Steller wrote in his journal, which wasn’t published until a fre drill. Ten they ducked into the woods. 47 years after his death. Te Insatiable like his contempo- following day, July 16, the weather rary, Linnaeus, Steller identifed cleared and all beheld a snow- 140 plant species during his capped, majestic volcano: stint on the island. Tose 18,000-foot Mt. St. Elias. already familiar to him Tree days later St. Peter included upland cranberry, dropped anchor in a bay west of whortleberry, and likely Cape St. Elias. Ever the stickler, crowberry, which he called Steller contested the naming, as a “scurvy berry”—its vitamin C cape was a mainland feature, not helps to prevent that disease. an island’s. Bering just wanted to Sitka spruce was new to him, as stay long enough to take on fresh was salmonberry, an “elsewhere water. Worried about hostile unknown species of raspberry.” inhabitants, he wouldn’t endanger A faint trail through timber the crew for “some herbs,” trying festooned with moss hinted at to keep Steller from going ashore. seasonal camps of the Unagal- “We have come only to take akmiut, a branch of Pacifc American water to Asia,” the from Steller’s De bestiis marinis (The Beasts of the Sea), Eskimos. Trees had been peeled scientist complained. Bering gave published in 1751 in St. Petersburg. for shelter material or cut down TOP: COURTESY CHARLESGAUSE.NET; WIKIMEDIA COMMONS BOTTOM:

68 ALASKAMAGAZINE.COM FEBRUARY 2018 “In the Gulf,” a painting by Alaska artist Charles Gause, envisions Bering’s St. Peter approaching Kayak Island.

wintering crew. Advised by Steller, preyed on by foxes, the survivors ate antiscorbutic herbs while building a boat from the stove-in hull, which they sailed to the mainland. Teir ordeal had lasted 10 months. Steller died four years later in western Siberia en route to Irkutsk, felled by pneumonia while riding in a sled. But even in death, this adventurer did not fnd rest. Robbers dug up the corpse, leaving it naked on the ground. After reburial, the river Tura fooded his grave. In a letter to a fellow naturalist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Steller had summarized his feelings about the expedition, which encapsulate his philoso- phy: “I would not exchange the experience of nature I had on this miserable journey for any amount of money.” Collecting frantically before night fell, Steller asked his Cossack to shoot some bird specimens. with stone axes. In a clearing, Steller and Lepekhin stumbled till teeming with life, the waters surging around Kayak upon an underground cache. It held bark containers with SIsland are now managed as a state marine park. Te smoked sockeye. Arrows, painted black. Plant fbers to be beach where Steller landed was designated a national historic woven into fshnets. Dried rolls of inner spruce bark, famine landmark, as was a lighthouse built in 1916, snugged against food. On his return, Steller saw smoke tendrils curl from a the foot of monolithic Cape St. Elias. Te island has been distant campfre. uninhabited since the beacon became automated in 1974. Back at the beach, Bering ordered him aboard within three Present-day visitors bunk in a building that forms part of hours, or else he’d be left marooned. the complex. Collecting frantically before night fell, Steller asked his Naming is claiming, and Qe’yiłteh changed hands again after Cossack to shoot some bird specimens. Te midnight blue, Steller’s sojourn. Captain , who beached a longboat crested corvid Lepekhin then bagged reminded Steller of “a there in 1778, buried a bottle with a note and two silver pieces likeness painted in lively colors and described in the newest given to him by King George III’s chaplain Richard Kaye—so the account of the birds of the Carolinas” he’d seen: the eastern stone whale became “Kaye’s Island.” One year later, Spaniards American blue jay. Its western cousin, the feathered gem in the christened it “Isla del Carmen” after the saint on whose feast scientist’s hands, this splinter of sky whose peskiness and day they found it. curiosity resembled his own, proved he really had reached the No portrait of Steller survives. But his name does, hitched to threshold of the very same continent. After 10 years of prepara- a sea lion, a broad-billed sea-eagle (think Baldy on steroids), a tion, 10 hours on the island had made the endeavor worthwhile. harlequin eider, the sea cow, the gumboot chiton, and the Hardship and death lay ahead. Weaving past Kodiak and telltale jay. It endures in a species of kelp, in starry bell-heather, Attu, St. Peter foundered on a dagger-shaped scrap of land, one a glacier, a natural arch, a school that boosts courage and of the near Kamchatka. Tere, Steller drew independence (go Jays!), and less formally, in this stern and and dissected the “Manati” sea cow with walrus skin and a rockbound coast. porpoise tail that would come to bear his name. With the infux of Russian fur hunters this kelp grazer disappeared within three Michael Engelhard is the author of the essay collection American decades of its frst scientifc description from life—it was Wild: Explorations from the Grand Canyon to the Arctic Circle, and placid, twice as long as a Beetle; 10 tons of excellent eating. of Ice Bear: Te Cultural History of an Arctic Icon. He lives in

TOP: COURTESY CHARLESGAUSE.NET; WIKIMEDIA COMMONS BOTTOM: Exposure and malnutrition killed Bering and about half the Fairbanks and works as a wilderness guide in the Arctic.

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