First Contact

September 4, 1741

It is astonishing to think that as recently as the eighteenth century – not the Middle Ages, not the days of Marco Polo, but in the supposedly enlightened eighteenth century – people still had only the vaguest idea of where Asia ended and America began.

In 1725, when Peter I sent the renowned explorer Vitus Bering on an expedition to faraway Kamchatka, he instructed him to “follow the land northward,” remarking that no one knows where it ends, but that “it appears that that land is part of America.” Commander Bering’s mission was to establish where Russia and America “meet.”

The First Kamchatka Expedition (1725-1731) did not manage to answer that question, but the explorers who undertook the Second Kamchatka Expedition (1732-1743) made it all the way to Alaska, to the Aleutian Islands, and brought back intriguing tales of people living in forests and on the banks of a mysterious river who were amazingly similar to Russians. They had beards, prayed to images on wooden boards, and dressed like Russians.

Various versions of these rumors of an early Russian presence in America would circulate right up to the mid-nineteenth century, and historians are still trying to figure out what inspired them. Was this fact or fantasy? Historians in the fact camp point to the boats that disappeared in the mists of the Bering Strait in the mid-seventeenth century (before it had been given that name), back when some of the Cossacks headed by Fedot Popov and Semyon Dezhnyov ventured into these waters and disappeared after being caught in storms. Could it be that, rather than perish, they became the first Russians to settle Alaska? We still don’t know.

Be that as it may, as the Second Kamchatka Expedition approached the Aleutian Islands in 1740-41, the sailors did not have the slightest idea what awaited them.

Their ship, the St. Paul, under the command of Captain Alexei Chirikov, took a relatively southern route across the North Pacific (what we now know is the shortest distance between Asia and America is farther north, at the southern edge of the Article Circle) and traced the American coastline all the way to 58 degrees north latitude. Navigator Avraam Dementyev was sent with ten men to investigate the coast. In the hope that this exploratory party would encounter members of the local population, they were given copper and iron pots, beads, and other goods to trade. Several days passed and the party did not return. After waiting a bit longer, Chirikov sent a boat with three men, plus a fourth who suddenly asked to go ashore. But this small detachment sent to find the first also never returned.

Chirikov continued to wait, but when boats filled with clearly hostile locals headed their way from the shore, the ship made haste to depart. What happened to Chirikov’s fifteen men is still a mystery. They most likely died, but who knows? Maybe they somehow wound up surviving and taking up residence in Alaska.

Bering, who was on the St. Peter, lost sight of Chirikov in the fog and continued on without him. Bering’s crew was in bad shape and had begun to die of scurvy. We know details of this troubled expedition thanks to Georg Wilhelm Steller, a German scientist and explorer who joined Bering. Steller had been born in Germany, but by the early 1740s had been living in Russia for several years, studying the nature around Lake Baikal, the Lena River basin, and other areas of Siberia. What was it like for Steller to go from the scholarly life of his university in Halle to the wilds of Kamchatka? What drove him to venture farther and farther into the unknown, where he meticulously recorded his observations all while wintering with sailors in dugouts and surviving storms, scurvy, an earthquake, and tsunami?

Among the observations Steller shared with posterity is an account from early September 1741, when the ship, its crew exhausted from a poor diet and scurvy, approached some islands off the American coast:

We had just dropped anchor when, from the cliff lying south of us, we heard a loud noise, which at first we took for the roaring of a sea lion. (We did not expect any trace of human beings on this miserable island twenty miles away from the mainland.) But soon we saw two small boats being paddled from the shore to our ship. We all awaited them with the greatest eagerness and utter amazement. [Georg Wilhelm Steller, Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741-1742, edited and with an introduction by O.W. Frost; translated by Margritt A. Engel and O.W. Frost. (Stanford University Press, 1988)

The boatmen regaled the voyagers with long speeches in an incomprehensible language. It was hard to tell whether these were words of welcome or some shamanic spell. But when the men started to make gestures that seemed to represent an invitation to come ashore and suggested that food and drink awaited them there, it felt safe to assume that the natives’ intentions were friendly.

One of the natives came paddling right up to the boat. What ensued was fairly typical of  first encounters between very different civilizations. As Steller describes it:

We welcomed him with a cup of brandy, which, imitating our example, he smartly drank up. But immediately he spat it out again, acting strangely about it, and did not seem at all amused by this supposed trick. Although I had advised against this as well as against tobacco and pipes, they supposed nevertheless that the Americans had the stomachs of our seamen and tried to make up for one annoyance with a new one. They presented him with a lighted pipe of tobacco, which he, to be sure, accepted, but, displeased, he paddled away. The smartest European would do the same if he were treated to the fly agaric [a toxic mushroom], rotten fish soup, and willow bark that the Kamchadals fancy so delicious.*

Overall, the meeting of cultures that day did not go terribly well. Eventually, the weather started to act up and the explorers felt a need to head back out to sea, away from the rocky shore. When the natives, “perhaps not out of malicious intent but pure naivete,” held onto the boat’s line and refused to let go, the Russians began firing their weapons into the air. The startled Aleuts immediately released the line.

Such was the troubled first encounter between Russian sailors and the indigenous population of Alaska at the very dawn of what would grow into “Russian America.” Neither Bering nor Steller lived to see this odd phenomenon become a reality. Weakened by scurvy, Bering died on an uninhabited island that now bears his name. Thirty of his 75 crew members also perished. Steller returned to Kamchatka and managed to complete several Siberian expeditions, some of them solo.

Steller often found himself at loggerheads with the ships’ officers at sea and with the local Russian authorities on land. This may testify to a rather difficult personality, but there are at least two cases where his clashes with the powers that be arose because he was standing up for the indigenous population, which was often treated unfairly as the Russian authorities tightened their grip over Siberia. In 1745, he was even arrested after he released from prison some Kamchadals charged with rebellion. Steller was taken to Irkutsk for trial but was released by order of the Senate before reaching that destination. At that point the scientist, weary of Russia, decided to return to Europe. He never made it home: in 1746 Steller died in Tyumen.

Although in Steller’s case, calling Europe “home” is a bit of a stretch. Given the life he chose, it is pretty clear where he felt truly “at home.”