The Age of Ice: A Novel (18 page)

• • •

I went to check on Ivan Kuznetzov. What moved me? Curiosity perhaps, that genuine mixture of ruthlessness and compassion. Had he been there, I would’ve offered him to go to the Arctic as my assistant. Wouldn’t I?

But Ivan was gone. The familiar basement apartment was now occupied by a somber shoemaker, his wife, and three children.

I never saw Ivan again, but I want to think that he did leave Russia, that he’d gone to France, to survive the Revolution, the Jacobins, the Terror, the Directoire and the ascent of Napoléon. There, in Viviers, in the abandoned orangery he rented from an impoverished nobleman owner, he saw through the missing glass panel in the ceiling the first appearance
of the Great Comet of 1812 in the starry skies above France and wondered tiredly what new calamity it spelled for the shaken Europe.

Or perhaps he had gone to the British Isles. There, on the Isle of Skye, standing on the heather-covered hill close-cropped like the sheep that grazed on it, he saw the comet in its full fury, two angry streams of fire blasting off its head, and he would have meticulously measured the length of the streams over the course of several nights.

Or perhaps . . . Didn’t I later see a record of
John Smithson, an astronomer,
on the passenger list of the
Beowulf,
sailing from Bremen to Baltimore on March 15, 1790?
John Smithson is
the same as
Ivan Kuznetzov.
So perhaps he had gone to the New World, to the United States of America. There, from a belfry in New Madrid, Mississippi Territory, he saw the Great Comet, and made an entry in his diary, one of his last: “Indians believe that this comet is a manifestation of the Great Spirit, a portent of better days for their people.”

I hope it was he.

• • •

By the end of the year 1785 I was traveling east.

Water had failed me—it did not make Anna and me happy—and I was going back to ice. But not as a defeated refugee. No, as a warrior brandishing a thermometer for a sword and determined to conquer the Empire of Ice.

O
ur sojourn in the Empire of Ice lasted almost nine years. Including the years that it took us to get there and back. The vastness of my country of birth is mind-boggling, and I am sure Empress Ekaterine, born and raised, after all, in the tiny claustrophobic German principality Anhalt-Zerbst, had no clue what a humongous, cold-blooded, slumbering beast let her claim sovereignty over itself. If one travels posthaste, almost twenty-four hours a day and changing horses at every transit station, a 420-mile trip from St. Petersburg to Moscow takes at least six days. From there to Kazan (the city I went through on my way to Orenburg ten years ago) is another week. But from there on, one leaves Orenburg to the southwest and climbs over the spine of the Ural mountain range only to discover an infinity unfolding on the other side. Weeks turn into months, hundreds into thousands; the farther one goes the more his speed of travel declines, as if in a Zeno’s paradox nightmare. Truly, whatever St. Petersburg and Moscow may think about their geopolitical weight, both together plus everything before the Urals is but a small, brightly colored crest of feathers on the beast’s head, and only a few get to trudge the full length of its mammoth-bone spine, and peek in its permafrost eye as its third lid flashes the dark aperture open—only a few get to look into it and come home unaltered.

• • •

But let us pause before the journey and summon the travelers from the cold storage of memory; let us first see them all in their twenties, in their new dress uniforms, the
blues,
the blue of the British night sky and of our day sky. The date is January 1, 1786, the setting is a New Year’s dinner hosted by a rich entrepreneur in Kazan, our first major stopover on the way east.

Here is our leader Captain Joseph Billings, conversing about the excellent organization of textile warehouses on the Thames with our generous host, who, it turns out, had been in London in the ’70s on business for Count Sheremetyeff. Here is Captain Gavril Sarychev, the second-in-command, a polite man with a big, round head and a humble smile. Here is Martin Sawyer, our secretary and interpreter. He speaks very decent Russian, and prefers to use it in a confiding semiwhisper that makes our host’s young daughter bring her pretty ear closer to his lips.

Our other two senior officers are Richard Hall, another Briton, and Christian Bering, a Russian by birth, the somber nephew of the famous explorer Vitus Bering, who wrecked and died on one of the islands we are going to visit, and whose eponymous strait we will attempt to sail through. We have surgeons, Messrs. Robeck and Allegretti—an imperturbable Briton and an acerbic Italian, and a surgeon’s mate, Lehman. We have a skipper, Bakov, and draftsman Voronin, and mechanic Edwards, and shipmasters, Batahov and Bronnikov. This company of men, “the society,” as Sawyer would call it, will employ and govern dozens of others to make the expedition’s gears turn.

And last, here is your humble servant, Mr. Velitzyn. He is exercising his French by talking to Allegretti and two more guests, both foreign nationals residing in Kazan. Looking at the roast pig and braised sturgeon and wild-mushroom pâté, and watching our Britons (together with the host and a couple of Englishmen from the Gaston Coal Company) toast the health of King George III, Mr. Velitzyn imagines that everyone at the table is, like him, experiencing a buttery feeling of progress and international unity, of the universal dawn of the Age of Reason. A feeling that the Tower of Babel is not a lost cause as long as tables can be served in this feral corner of Europe, and the diners can find a way to ask to pass a plate of pickled cucumbers or a bottle of Chianti . . . In short, a feeling of pride, yes, of pride for my country.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way again.

• • •

I separated from the company to visit my brother’s grave in Orenburg, then followed their route east for two and a half thousand miles. After a month on the road, at the end of February 1786, I rejoined them in Irkutsk, the capital of Siberia, two-thirds of the way to our final destination. Having seen nothing but small villages and nomad tents since the Urals, I perceived Irkutsk as a pinnacle of urban civilization and Governor General Jakobi as an omnipotent ruler, whose word alone could
bring us aid and cooperation from every last servant of the empire, a year’s worth of provisions for 180 men, every piece of iron, sailcloth, and cordage to rig four ships, and hundreds of packhorses to carry it all beyond the Arctic Circle.

My trust in order and subordination would prove to be misguided.

Meanwhile, we met Dr. Carl Heinrich Merck, a young German physician, another protégé of Dr. Pallas. A far-flung scion of a Darmstadt family of pharmacists and physicians that would achieve utmost prominence in the years to come, Merck appeared to be in Siberia on a kind of professional coming-of-age mission, seeking experience as well as the pharmacopoeia of the East. He accepted the offer to join the expedition as a naturalist.

• • •

In May, we left for Yakutsk via the river Lena—one and a half thousand miles northeast. From there we covered another thousand and a half by land east to the township of Okhotsk, on the sea of the same name. There the enterprise split, Captain Hall and half the work crew staying behind to build ships, while the rest (about seventy men) took various routes north, to the Upper Kolyma fort, where we intended to winter while building two ships of our own. We would float along the Kolyma River to the Icy Sea come spring, and then sail east over the top of the Eurasian continent in search of the Northeast Passage. A goal that did not seem overly ambitious, at the time.

We reached the fort by September, after cresting two mountain chains, fording three big rivers and innumerable small ones, losing our way, finding it, and losing it again, along with baggage, horses, and men. What kept me going was a naïve assumption that our destination was the way destinations are supposed to be: better than the journey, a safe harbor, an oasis. But it was none of these things.

By then, rivers were frozen, and my thermometers, those that survived the transportation, showed ‒20 in the mornings by the Réaumur temperature scale.

The fort sat in the floodplain of the Kolyma’s tributary, the Yasachnoi River, framed by forests and marshes, lakes and sloughs that ran in all directions as far as the eye could see. It consisted of five huts inhabited by Cossacks and their families, a few yurts, a chapel, and a fenced yard, within which stood a roomy log cabin,
izba,
of the fort’s commander. Attached to the izba was a storehouse. The fort’s whole purpose for existence was asserting the empire’s rule by fleecing revenue off the natives
and selling them municipal wares—in order of importance, alcohol, salt, metal. The commander, a Cossack by the name of Feodor, came out and made a bow, but, quite memorably, his first words were, “Hats don’t come off on Kolyma, I beg you my big pardon. Too cold, your nobleships.”

The fort had not nearly enough shelter or food to accommodate a party as large as ours, and the Governor General’s personally chosen contractor had not delivered the promised foodstuffs. We faced hunger. When Captain Billings demanded answers of Cossack Feodor, the latter looked upon the former with nothing but cheeky amusement. Didn’t the foreigner know that this was
the way of things in Siberia
? Was he juvenile or plain stupid?

Our first week or two at the Upper Kolyma fort was a scene of desperate activity. We converted the chapel into barracks, dug earthen huts (negotiating between bog and ice), and built a shed for the expedition’s supplies and next to it a smithy, where we installed our portable forge. In those first days I scribbled end-of-the-world missives to Anna (thankfully never-sent):
I loved you as a man could ever love—and you pushed me away; what will return to you, if ever, will be a vestige of love, feral and disfigured. Would that be more to your liking?

Ah, these were not the vestiges of love but the last spasms of pampered, aristocratic, eloquent self-pity before it gave up the ghost. A dulled, grim, smug even,
you did it to yourself
took its place, while all the worry and fears turned on the others. I feared for the survival of the party. I feared that some humiliation, an ugly breakdown, would overtake our foreign guests, thrown so abruptly to the bottom of civilization. I feared reality: a reality of the land where making little to no provisions for several dozen men belonged to the normal
way of things
. By comparison, I feared less for myself—only enough to stay close to people and look into the fire as much as I could.
There shall be no Old Man Frost
.

Within a week of our arrival, four of us were crammed into one of the earthen huts, no more than eighty square feet: Sawyer, Robeck, Merck, and I. We lined the walls with our pallets: the Britons shared a wall and Merck and I had one each to ourselves. An open hearth fashioned out of stones took the center. We sat, dizzy with the smoke, each gnawing at his dry bread. Whichever language any of us hazarded a communication in, the words bounced off at least one wall unless translated: Sawyer spoke no German, Merck and I no English, and Robeck made little to no effort even in his one and only native tongue.

Robeck was a big, inward fellow with a ruddy face and flaxen hair. He described himself as a
sawbones.
Merck’s dominant feature was blue: pale-blue-eyed and melancholy. His face bore a resemblance to a certain line of German princes of which our own monarchs partake, and he walked in a curious buttoned-up manner, the kind I’ve since seen in savants and misfits: his arms did not swing freely but stayed close to his flanks. Sawyer was a short lad, animated almost comically; he looked younger than his twenty-five years and he acted as if he wasn’t meant to sit still, and if our cramped quarters forced stillness upon him, he would at least keep chattering. That was how we learned that he had been born to a British merchant’s family in Archangel, a Russian port town to the north of St. Petersburg. “Your humble servant can boast a confident footing in both English and Russian nations and is no stranger to the adversities of the northern climate!” Then he introduced Robeck to us: our surgeon was from Shrewsbury, Shropshire, had righted joints and tapped veins since the age of fourteen, and at eighteen cut and sewn for the Royal Navy. His latest employ was with the East India Company. “One judges a surgeon by the workmanship of his tool case. And look at our Mr. Robeck’s distinguished-quality chest! I do hope, though, none of us will ever suffer to see the inside of it.”

On our third day in the hut, Sawyer pulled out a ruffled book—soaked and dried it looked—and tapped on it, saying with a degree of shy veneration, “Messieurs—François Fénelon,
The Adventures of Telemachus.
I find it a source of inspiration. Says here, ‘Misfortune gives new luster to the glory of great men.’ ” He looked up from the book and added, “Though let us hope we don’t face any mischief attendant on an alarm of scarcity . . .”