Island of the Blue Foxes

Nonfiction
Tragedy, privation and death

ISLAND OF THE BLUE FOXES:
Disaster and Triumph on the World’s Greatest Scientific Expedition
By Stephen R. Bown
346 pp. Da Capo

Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M. D.

Russian Tsar Peter the Great conceived the Great Northern Expedition that place from 1733 to 1743 and consumed amazing 18 percent of the total income of the entire Russian state.  Bown writes that the decade-long expedition

spanned three continents, (and) in its geographic, cartographic and natural history accomplishments are on a par with (the combination of) James Cook’s famous voyages, the circumnavigations of Malaspina and Bougainville and Lewis and Clark’s cross-continental trek.

Expedition leader and renowned Danish mariner Vitus Bering had offered a modest proposal that Empress Anna’s final instructions raised it to “grandiose proportions.”  Bering would lead “a huge troop of nearly three thousand scientists, secretaries, students, interpreters, artists, surveyors, naval officers, mariners, soldiers, and skilled laborers.”

On the side of the naturalists, Georg Steller proved the hardest working and the most willing to stand hardship in collecting data about plants and animals. He was also the most cantankerous. As Bown writes,

he was a difficult and lonely man whose complex and contradictory personality ensured that he was neither loved nor respected by most of those with whom he spent his final years. On the expedition, his arrogant assertations, although frequently correct, were delivered in such a shrill tone and superior and abrasive manor that they were routinely ignored.

During the expedition he described for the first time Steller’s eider, the Steller’s jay, sea bear, the Steller’s sea eagle, the sea lion, the sea ape (never seen again) and the sea cow. But Bown writes that Steller’s greatest contribution was “his classic description of the northern manatee, the giant Steller’s sea cow, which was extinct by 1768. His description is the only account of this fabulous creature, whose appearance is between a whale and a seal.”   

Bown writes that “Ill fortune plagued the expedition. In June of 1741, after years spent crossing Siberia and just as shipwrights had finally built and outfitted the St.Peter and St. Paul, a supply ship carrying most of the provisions for the voyage ran aground.  When the two ships sailed to the far west coast of America, they did so with food for only one summer, not for the period of two years that was originally planned.  Disagreements between the officers began as soon as the shore receded from sight and the sister ships headed east with no clear directive. The approximately 150 men on board were destined for one of the most tragic and ghastly trials of suffering in the annals of maritime and Artic history.”

When one of the ships the St. Peter becomes stranded on a small island, the crew, ravaged by scurvy, must fight with an aggressive population of foul-smelling blue foxes for space and food on the restricted territory. The creatures befoul clothing, food, and sleeping areas. There are too many to kill. It seems as if the sailors are mostly psychologically oppressed by these members of the canid family. Once the officers decide to build a smaller ship from the original vessel, they can sail away after losing forty percent of their crew, including Vitus Bering. After ten years they finally arrive back at a port on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

Nearly every story of Arctic and Antarctic exploration is fraught with tragedy, privation and death. However, Bown’s expert account in The Island of the Blue Foxes is a particularly grisly tale. The superb naturalist Steller returns to Europe, and after a night of hard drinking is left outside overnight on a horse sleigh, burning with a high fever. In the morning he is barely sensate and soon dies at the age of thirty-seven.

Bown’s other books include the excellent The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen, the greatest polar explorer of all time. He was first to the South Pole and among the earliest to the North Pole. Who better than Bown to write about the Great Northern Expedition?

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