Alaska (19 page)

The cossack said nothing; he did not try with false modesty to deny that he had been brave, because it had been his daring feats in the Ukraine at age fifteen which had brought him to the tsar's attention. But Peter could only guess at what acts of courage had allowed this man who knew nothing of the sea to venture down the Lena River and along the coast to the land of the Chukchis and to protect himself along the way.

Finally, as they paced together, Peter said: 'I wish I were to be the captain of that ship, with you the officer in command of troops. We would sail from the coast of Kamchatka, wherever it is, to all of America.'

During the time that Trofim spent working in the shipyard at day and learning to read at night, he discovered that most of the constructive work being achieved in St. Petersburg, and a massive amount was under way, was being done not by Russians, but by able men from other European nations. His tutor Soderlein was from Heidelberg in Germany, as were two of the medical doctors at the court. Instruction in mathematics was in the hands of brilliant men from Paris. Books were being written on a variety of subjects by professors imported from Amsterdam and London. Astronomy, in which Peter took great interest, was in the hands of fine men from Lille and Bordeaux.

And wherever practical solutions to problems were required, Trofim found Englishmen and Scotsmen, especially the latter, in charge. They drew the plans for the ships, installed the winding stairs in palaces, taught the peasants how to care for animals, and watched the money. One day as Peter and Trofim discussed the still shadowy expedition to the east, the tsar said: 'When you seek ideas, go to the French and the Germans.

But when you want action, hire yourself an Englishman or a Scotsman.'

When Zhdanko delivered letters to the Academy in Moscow he found it populated by Frenchmen and Germans, and the porter who led him about the newly furnished halls whispered: 'The tsar has hired the brightest men in Europe. They're all here.'

'Doing what?' Trofim asked as he clutched his parcel.

'Thinking.'

In the second month of this training, Zhdanko learned one other fact about his tsar: the Europeans, especially the French and Germans, might do the thinking, but Peter and a group of Russians much like him did the governing. They supplied the money and said where the army would go and what ships would be built, and it was they who ran Russia,

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make no mistake about that. And this perplexed him, for if he was to help select the sailor who was to command the vast expedition that Peter had in mind, he felt obligated to identify some Russian capable of directing a task of such magnitude.

But the more he studied the men along the waterfront and listened to reports about them, the more clearly he saw that none of the Russians was remotely capable of the task, and he was loath to tell Peter, but one day when asked how his thinking was going, he had to speak out: 'I hear of two Germans, one Swede and one Dane who might do. But the Germans with their mighty ways would be unable to control Russians like me, and the Swede fought against us three times in the Baltic wars before joining our side.'

'We sank all his ships,' Peter laughed, 'so if he wanted to continue being a sailor, he had to join us. Are you speaking of Lundberg?'

'Yes, a very good man. I'll trust him if you choose him.'

'And who was the Dane?' Peter asked.

'Captain-of-the-Second-Rank Vitus Bering. His men speak well of him.'

'I, too,' the tsar said, and the matter was discussed no further.

But when alone Peter spent careful hours reviewing what he knew about Bering: Met him that day twenty years ago when our training fleet stopped in Holland. Our admirals were so hungry for anyone with experience at sea that without examination they commissioned him sublieutenant. And they chose well, for he rose fast, Captain-of-the-Fourth Rank, the Third and Second. He fought manfully in our war against Sweden.

Eight years younger than Peter, Bering had retired with honor at the beginning of 1724, taking up residence in the stately Finnish seaport of Vyborg, where he expected to live out the remainder of his life as a gardener and watcher of naval ships as they passed up the Gulf of Finland to St. Petersburg. In the late summer of that same year, he had been summoned to Russia to meet with the tsar: 'Vitus Bering, I should never have allowed you to retire. You're needed for an exercise of the greatest importance.'

'Your Majesty, I'm forty-four years old. I tend gardens, not ships.'

'Nonsense. If I weren't needed here, I'd go on the journey myself.'

'But you're a special man, Your Majesty,' and when Bering said this, a round little fellow with pudgy cheeks, a twisted mouth and hair drooping close to his eyes, he spoke the truth, for Peter was a good fifteen inches taller and possessed of a 121

commanding presence which Bering lacked. He was a stolid, capable Dane, a bulldog type of man, who had attained a position of eminence by his rugged determination rather than because of any quality of dramatic leadership. He was what the English mariners liked to call a sea dog, and such men, when they fastened their teeth onto a project, could be devastating.

'In your own way,' Peter said, 'and in a way vital to this project, you too are special, Captain Bering.'

'And what is your project?' It was typical of Bering that from the start he allocated the project to the tsar. It was Peter's idea, whatever it was, and Bering was honored to be his agent.

Zhdanko did not hear what Peter said to Bering in reply to that question, but later he left a memorandum of some importance in which he said that Peter had spoken to Bering much as he had spoken to him, Zhdanko: 'He said he wanted to know more about Kamchatka, and where the Chukchi lands ended, and what European nations held what settlements on the west coast of America.' There was, Zhdanko felt sure, no discussion as to whether Russian territory was joined by land to North America: 'That was taken for granted by both men.'

For some weeks Zhdanko watched the fat little Dane moving about the shipyards, and then he disappeared. 'He's been called to Moscow to meet with some Academy men stationed there,' a workman told Zhdanko. 'Those fellows from France and Germany who know everything but can't tie their own cravats. He'll be in trouble if he listens to them.'

Two days before Christmas, a holiday that Zhdanko relished, Captain Bering was back in St. Petersburg and was summoned to a meeting with the tsar which Zhdanko was invited to attend. As the cossack entered the business room of the palace he blurted out: 'Sire, you've been working too hard. You don't look well.'

Ignoring the observation, Peter showed the men where to sit, and when a certain solemnity clothed the room, he said: 'Vitus Bering, I've had you promoted to Captain-of-the First-Rank because I want you to undertake the major mission of which we spoke last summer.' Bering started to expostulate that he was unworthy of such preferment, but Peter, who had been continuously ill since leaping impulsively into the icy waters of the Bay of Finland to rescue a drowning sailor and who was now apprehensive lest death cut short his grand designs, brushed aside the formality: 'Yes, you are to cross overland to the eastern limits of our empire, build yourself ships in that spot, then conduct the explorations we spoke of.'

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'Exalted Majesty, I shall consider this your expedition, sailing under your command.'

'Good,' Peter said. Til be sending with you our ablest men, and as your aide, this cossack who knows those areas, Trofim Zhdanko, who carries with him my personal approval.

He's a tested man.'

At this the tsar rose to stand with his cossack, and when fat little Bering took his position between the two giants, it was like a hill standing between two mountain peaks.

A month later, before he had an opportunity to spell out the details of the exploration, Tsar Peter, called properly the Great, was dead at the premature age of fifty-three.

The governance of Russia fell into the hands of his widow, Catherine the First, an extraordinary woman who had been born into a Lithuanian peasant family, was orphaned young, and married at age eighteen to a Swedish dragoon who deserted her after a honeymoon of eight summer days. Mistress of various well-placed men, she fell into the hands of a powerful Russian politician who introduced her to Peter, who, after she had borne him three children, married her gladly. She had been a stalwart wife, and now, with her husband dead, she desired only to execute the orders he had left unfinished. On 5 February 1725 she handed Bering the temporary commission he would hold during the expedition, Fleet Captain, and his orders.

The latter were a muddled set of three paragraphs which had been drafted by Peter himself shortly before his death, and although the instructions about crossing all of Russia and building ships were clear, what to do with those ships, once built, was most unclear. The admirals interpreted the orders to mean that Bering was to determine whether eastern Asia was joined to North America; other men like Trofim Zhdanko, who had spoken to Peter in person, believed that he had intended a reconnoiter of the coast of America, with a possibility of claiming that unoccupied land for Russia. Both interpreters agreed that Bering was to try to find European settlements in the area and to intercept European vessels for interrogation. No major explorer, and Vitus Bering was that, had ever set forth on a grand voyage with such imprecise orders from his patrons who were paying the bills. Before he died Peter had certainly known what he intended; his survivors did not.

THE DISTANCE FROM ST. PETERSBURG TO THE EAST COAST

of Kamchatka, where the ships were to be built, was an appalling five thousand nine hundred miles, or, considering

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the unavoidable detours, more than six thousand. Roads were perilous or nonexistent.

Rivers had to be used but there were no boats to do so. Workmen were to be picked up en route from remote little towns where no skilled hands were available. Large stretches of empty land which had never before been traversed by a group of travelers had to be negotiated. And what was to prove most irritating of all, there was no way whereby officials in St. Petersburg could forewarn their officials in far-distant Siberia that this gang of men was about to descend upon them with requirements that simply could not be filled locally. At the end of the second week Zhdanko reported to Bering: 'This isn't an expedition. It's madness.' And this was said during the good part of the trip.

Twenty-six of Bering's best men, driving twenty-five wagonloads of needed materials, set out ahead of him, and he followed shortly thereafter with six companions, including his aide Trofim Zhdanko, with whom he established the firmest and most productive relations. During the troika ride to Solikamsk, an insignificant village marking the start of the bleak lands, the two men had an opportunity to learn each other's foibles, and since this trip was going to require years, not months, it was important that this happen.

Vitus Bering, his aide discovered, was a man of sturdy principles. He respected a job well done, was willing to praise his men who performed well, and demanded the same kind of effort from himself. He was not a bookish man, which reassured Zhdanko, to whom the alphabet had been a problem, but he did place major reliance upon maps, which he studied assiduously. He was not overly religious but he did pray. He was not a glutton but he liked clean food and hearty drink. Best of all, he was a leader who respected men, and because he was perpetually aware that he was a Dane giving orders to Russians, he tried never to be arrogant, but he also let it be known that he was in command. He had, however, one weakness which disturbed the cossack, whose method of controlling his subordinates had been so different: at any critical moment Bering, like all the Russian officers in command, was expected to convene his subordinates and consult with them regarding the situation that faced them. When they had formed their recommendations they then had to submit them in writing, so that he would not have to assume the entire blame if things went wrong. What disturbed Zhdanko, Bering actually listened to the prejudices of his assistants and often acted upon them.

'I'd ask their opinions,' Zhdanko growled, 'then burn the paper they signed,' but apart from this deficiency, the big cossack respected his captain and vowed to serve him well.

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For his part, Bering saw in Zhdanko a man of resolute courage who, at that time of crisis in Yakutsk, had been willing to risk his life by murdering his superior when that man's irrational behavior threatened Russia's position in Siberia. As Tsar Peter had revealed when informing Bering about Trofim: 'The man he killed deserved it.

Zhdanko did my work for me.' Bering asked: 'Then why did you bring him to the capital in chains?' and Peter had explained: 'He needed cooling down.' Then he laughed and added: 'And I had always planned to use him later in some fine project. Yours.'

Bering recognized that this cossack had enormous strength, both physical and moral, and he found a special reason to like him, for as he said to himself: He did sail down the Lena River. He did test those northern seas. He saw further that his aide had a gargantuan appetite, a quick anger, an equally quick forgiveness, and a tendency always to choose the more difficult way of doing things if that way produced a challenge.

He decided early in their trip that he would not look to Zhdanko for advice but he would certainly rely on him for assistance in troubled times. At Solikamsk he had an opportunity to put his theories regarding the cossack to the test.

Solikamsk was one of those minute stations at which travelers halted only for greasy food for themselves and very expensive oats for their horses. It contained only sixteen rude huts and a surly innkeeper named Pavlutsky, who began to complain as soon as Bering's men and wagons descended 125

upon him: 'There's never been so many. How can I be expected . . . ?'

Bering started to explain that the new empress herself had ordered this enterprise, whereupon Pavlutsky whined: 'She may have told you but she didn't tell me,' and in this protest he was correct. The poor man, accustomed to a solitary post rider now and then heading from Vologda to Tobolsk, was overwhelmed by this unexpected influx: 'There's nothing I can be expected to do.'

'Yes there is,' Zhdanko said. 'You can sit right here and keep your mouth shut,'

and with this he lifted the innkeeper and plopped him on a stool. Threatening to break the man's head if he uttered one word, the huge cossack then began ordering his own men and Pavlutsky's to break out what food there was, all of it, for the men and such forage as could be provided for the horses. When the way station itself could produce only a portion of what was needed, he ordered his men to search the nearby huts and fetch not only food but women to cook the meal and men to feed the horses.

Within half an hour Zhdanko had mobilized nearly everyone in Solikamsk, and the hours from sunset to midnight were frenzied with the running about of the villagers as they attended to the wants of the travelers. At one in the morning, when his two casks of ale were emptied, Pavlutsky, a much humbled man, came to Bering, pleading: 'Who is to pay for all this?' and Bering pointed to Zhdanko, who placed his arm about the innkeeper's shoulder and assured him: 'The 126

tsarina. I'll give you a paper which the tsarina will honor,' and in the light of a flickering oil lamp in a cruet, he wrote out: 'Fleet Captain Vitus Bering ate 33

meals and 47 horses. Pay to supplier Ivan Pavlutsky of Solikamsk.' When he delivered this to the bewildered host, he said: 'I know she'll pay,' and he hoped this would be the case.

From Solikamsk they traveled by troika over frozen fields to the important stopping place of Tobolsk, but east of there the snows were so formidable that they had to idle away almost nine weeks, during which Zhdanko ranged the countryside to requisition additional soldiers, overriding the protests of their local commanders. Bering, on his part, ordered a monk and the commissar of a small village to join too, so that when the troop marched north out of Tobolsk they numbered sixty-seven men and forty-seven wagons.

When they left this relatively comfortable town they had been on the road exactly one hundred days and had covered the respectable distance of nearly fourteen hundred miles in the dead of winter, but now the well-tended post roads began to vanish and they had to travel down rivers, across barren wastes and in the shadows of forbidding hills. The treasured troika with its warm furs gave way to carts, and then to horseback, and finally to booted feet trudging through snowdrifts.

In the early summer of 1725 they covered only two hundred and twenty miles Tobolsk, Surgut, Narimbut finally they came upon a river system which allowed them to raft speedily. One day they reached the brooding frontier fortress of Marakovska Post, where Bering said prayers to the notable missionary Metropolitan Philophei, who had only a few years before converted the people in these parts from heathenism to Christianity.

'It is a noble work,' the Dane said to his aide, 'to bring human souls into the knowledge of Jesus Christ,' but Zhdanko had other problems: 'How are we going to get our men and all this baggage over the mountains to the Yenisei River?'

By the most diligent effort they accomplished this, and for a few weeks thereafter had easy going, for ahead lay a chain of rivers down which they could boat to the little town of Ilimsk on that greater river whose distant upper reaches Zhdanko had once explored, the Lena. But now another crushing winter was upon them and they had to abandon any further attempts to forge eastward. In miserable huts and with barely adequate food they survived the dismal winter of 1725-26, adding to their roster thirty blacksmiths and carpenters. They were now ninety-seven in all, and if they ever reached the Pacific with at least some of the building materi—

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als they were carrying, an unlikely possibility, they would be prepared to build ships. Not one of them, except Bering of course, had ever even seen a real ship, let alone built one, Zhdanko having sailed in improvisations, but as a carpenter named Ilya said when impressed into service: 'If a man can build a boat for the Lena, he can built a ship for whatever that ocean out there is called.'

Vitus Bering was a man rarely distressed by conditions he could not control, and now, locked into this miserable, snowbound prison, he showed Zhdanko and his officers what a stubborn man he could be. Prevented from moving north or east, he said: 'Let's see what's south,' and when he inquired, he was told that in the important town of Irkutsk, more than three hundred miles away, the present voivode was a man who had formerly served in Yakutsk, the town to which they were heading, and the one in which Zhdanko had murdered the commander. When Bering inquired of his aide: 'What kind of man was this Izmailov?' Trofim replied enthusiastically: 'I know him well! One of the best!' and with no other information, the two men set forth on this arduous journey to acquire whatever additional facts about Siberia the voivode might have.

It was a fruitless trip south, for as soon as Zhdanko met the voivode he realized that this man was not the Izmailov he had known. Indeed, the present governor had never stuck his nose into the lands east of Irkutsk and would be of no help for the impending travels into those areas. But the governor was an energetic fellow who wanted to be helpful: 'I was sent here three years ago from St. Petersburg, Grigory Voronov, at your service,' and when he learned that Zhdanko had once explored as far east as the Siberian village of Okhotsk, he interrogated him strenuously about conditions on the eastern marches of his command. But he was equally interested in what discoveries Bering might make: 'I envy you the chance to sail in those arctic seas.'

When the three men had talked for about an hour, Voronov summoned a servant: 'Inform Miss Marina that the gentlemen would appreciate tea and a tray of sweets,' and shortly into the room came a big-boned, handsome girl of sixteen, with flashing eyes, broad shoulders and a way of moving which proclaimed: 'I'm in charge now.'

'Who are these men, Father?'

'Explorers for the tsarina.' Then, turning to Bering, he said: 'Concerning the fur trade, I have good news and bad. Down at Kyakhta on the Mongolian border, Chinese merchants are buying our furs at phenomenal prices. On your travels, pick up all you can.'

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'Is it safe to visit the border?' Bering asked, for he had been told that Russian-Chinese relations were strained, and it was Marina who responded in a voice trembling with excitement: 'I've been twice. Such strange men! One part Russian, one part Mongolian, best part Chinese. And the excitement of the marketplace!'

The voivode's bad news concerned the overland route leading to Yakutsk: 'Agents tell me it's still the worst journey in Siberia. Only the bravest attempt it.'

'I made it three times,' Zhdanko said quietly, adding quickly with a smile: 'That's a damned cold trip, I can tell you.”

'I'd love to make a trip like that,' Marina cried, and when the visitors left to prepare for their journey north, Bering said: 'That young lady seems willing to go anywhere.'

So back to Ilimsk, Vitus Bering and his company trudged, more than three hundred miles of tortuous terrain, and there they waited on the banks of the still-frozen Lena River, but when spring finally thawed the valleys and streams, they rafted nine hundred miles to the eastern stronghold of Yakutsk, where Trofim showed Bering with great excitement that portion of the mighty Lena he had twice navigated, and when the Danish sea captain saw that massive body of water so close, in a sense, to the Arctic Ocean, he gained a new respect for his energetic aide. 'I long to sail that river,' Bering said with deep emotion, 'but my orders are to the east,' and Zhdanko said with almost equal feeling: 'But if our journey prospers, may we not see the Lena from the other end?' and Bering replied: 'I would like to see those hundred mouths you spoke of

IT REQUIRED THE ENTIRE SUMMER OF 1726 AND INTO THE

fall to move the eight hundred miles from Yakutsk to Okhotsk, that bleak and lonely harbor on the huge sea of that name, for now the full meaning of the fearful word Siberia

became clear. Vast wastelands without a sign of habitation stretched to the horizon.

Hills and mountains intervened, with turbulent streams to ford. Wolves followed any body of men, waiting for an accident that would provide them with a defenseless target.

Untimely snows swept out of the north, alternating with blasts of unexpected heat from the south. No man could plan a day's journey and expect to complete it on schedule, and to look ahead for a week or a month was folly. When, on the lonely uplands of this forlorn area, one did meet a traveler coming from the opposite direction, he was apt to be one of two kinds: a man who spoke no known 129

language and from whom no information could be got, or a cutthroat who had escaped from some terrible prison compound not visible from the trail. This was the Siberia which terrified wrongdoers or antiroyalists in western Russia, for a sentence to these unrelieved monotonies usually meant death. And in these years the very worst part of the entire stretch was the region which Fleet Captain Bering now had to negotiate, and at the end of autumn, when not even half his goods had reached the eastern depot, it began to look as if he would never become a true fleet captain because he seemed destined never to have a fleet.

The trips back and forth between the two towns that year were so awesome that when porters bearing heavy loads staggered into Okhotsk, they sometimes fell in a heap, for they were totally exhausted. Bering had to make the arduous journey on horseback, since wagons and sleds could not cross the mountains and muddy flats and even cargo sleds became snowbound. At first Zhdanko remained at the western end guarding the supplies, and then, in a burst of energy, he made two round-trip journeys.

When, worn to thinness, he dragged in the last of the timbers he supposed that he would be awarded with a rest, for he believed that he could not complete another journey, but just as the snows of early winter began, Bering learned that one small party of his men was still stranded in the badlands, and without his having to ask his constable to go rescue them, Zhdanko volunteered: 'I'll fetch them,' and with a few men like himself he went back over those snow-covered trails to bring in the vital supplies, and it was providential that he did, because it was this group of sleds that carried many of the tools the shipbuilders would need.

Bering and his men were more than five thousand miles from St. Petersburg, counting their detours and doubling back, and they were beginning their third winter on the road, but it was only now that their worst difficulties began, for without proper materials or experience, they were supposed to build two ships. And it was decided that this could be most expeditiously done not here in settled Okhotsk but far across the sea on the still-primitive peninsula of Kamchatka.

That dubious decision having been made, they now had to face the next step, a perplexing one: any hastily built temporary ship sailing from Okhotsk would land on the western shore of the peninsula, but departure for the exploration would have to be made from the eastern.

So, on which shore should the ships be built? When, as was his custom, Bering consulted with his subordinates, two clear opinions quickly emerged. All who were European or European-trained rec—

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ommended that he land on the western shore, cross over the high mountains of the peninsula, and build on the eastern: 'For then you will have clear sailing to your target.' But the Russians especially Trofim Zhdanko, who knew northern waters argued that the only sensible thing would be to build the ships on the western shore, the near one, and then use them to sail around the southern tip of Kamchatka and head north to the serious business.

Zhdanko's recommendation made maximum sense for it would enable Bering to avoid that man-killing haul of building equipment across the backbone of Kamchatka where mountains soared to fifteen thousand feet but it had one serious weakness: no one at that time knew how far south the peninsula ran, and if Bering followed his aide's advice, he might spend a fruitless year trying to breast the southern cape, wherever it was.

Actually, it was about one hundred and forty miles from where the ships could be built, and it could have been breasted in five or six easy sailing days, but no map of that period was based on hard evidence, and those who guessed placed the cape hundreds of miles to the south.