With shore leave over, the impatient Bering turned the St. Peter about, and made sail for Kamchatka. The story of that return journey is a lamentable saga. Shortly after quitting Alaskan waters, a wave of much-dreaded scurvy struck the unfortunate crew — eleven men eventually died and virtually everyone else became incapacitated to some extent. Weeks later, when they were at the farthest point of the Aleutian archipelago, a violent gale struck with overwhelming force. Try as they did, the decimated crew was unable to cope with the frightful situation. Bering decided that their only salvation was to beach the ship on one of the nearby islands. The St. Peter was steered ashore, beached, and in the process wrecked. The stranded crew camped over the long, dark, and frigid winter months in conditions beyond the pale.
Their island was teeming with foxes, and their curiosity was aroused since they never had encountered humans. Initially, they circled the encampment cautiously, but with each ensuing visit they became increasingly bold and more aggressive. So close did the fearless foxes approach that the men were forced to beat them off with clubs — scores were thus killed and skinned. The pelts were bountiful enough for fur coats to be stitched for each crew member. Fox pelts were also used for caulking the makeshift cabins the group had built.
With the passing of time, illness — scurvy above all — took its toll on the men and many lives were lost. The frozen ground made proper burial impossible. The deceased, therefore, were dragged away distantly, but insufficiently far to prevent the spectacle of foxes fighting over and playing with the cadavers.
As critical as conditions were during those months, most of the crew survived principally because of the abundant animal life. Slowly over time, a small, rudimentary vessel was ingeniously constructed from the wreckage of the St. Peter. In spring, surviving crew members managed to raise sail and reach home base on Kamchatka. Among those welcoming the returnees were a handful of colleagues — the survivors of the ill-fated St. Paul.
What a curious spectacle it must have been: a bearded, bedraggled bevy of wild-looking individuals garbed from head to toe in fox furs. (Vitus Bering was not among them. At age sixty, the expedition leader had quietly died of scurvy months earlier.)
The discovery that Asia and America were unconnected ultimately proved to be an unimportant one. Nothing really came of the Northeast Passage — nor, for that matter, of the Northwest Passage — and the rich benefits Peter had envisioned accruing to Russia were illusory. And poor Bering. What he did not know was that Europeans had long before found the strait that eventually came to bear his name. In 1648, an adventurous Cossack, Semyon Dezhnev, had sailed a flimsy boat from the mouth of the Kolyma River at the eastern reaches of the Arctic Ocean south through the strait. The record of that particular exploit, however, was uncovered only in 1736, at the very time that Bering was at sea carrying out his explorations.
Northeast Passage or not, a successful offshoot of Bering’s expeditions was the greatly expanded knowledge not only of Siberia’s Pacific coast but also of its interior. But above all, through the discovery of Alaska and northern American territories, the Dane brought to Russia and Europe a clear understanding of the immense potential of the Pacific fur trade. The Asiatic and American shores teemed with fur-bearing animals, all there pretty much for the taking. At no time was this more graphically illustrated than when Bering’s bedraggled, fur-clad crew stepped ashore on Kamchatka lugging bundles of high-quality pelts — seal, sea otter, and blue fox, in particular.
By the time John Jacob Astor made his venturous move in establishing his Oregon trading post on the Columbia, enterprising Russians had long been reaping rich harvests from the craggy shores and the boundless northern forests. Northeast of Astor’s outpost, inland within the British territory of western Canada, the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company were prospering mightily in the fur trade.
Eleven years before Lewis and Clark began their effort to search out an overland passage to the Pacific, an employee of the North West Company in Canada successfully achieved precisely that. Setting out from the inner part of the continent, Alexander Mackenzie and his party of nine crossed the Rockies in 1793 and made it to the Pacific Ocean.
They did it in just over a hundred days. The nine-member party travelled in three birch bark canoes, carrying limited supplies. The expedition commissioned by Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, was staffed by a well-equipped force of forty-five trained soldiers travelling in sturdy vessels, fully equipped.
On a boulder in Bella Coola, the Canadians inscribed in vermilion and bear grease the words “Alex Mackenzie from Canada by land, 22nd July 1793.” Years later, a similar inscription was carved on a tree: “Capt William Clark December 3rd 1805 by land. U. States in 1804–1805.”
Alexander Mackenzie, a Canadian hero who showed that the impossible was possible ... and in the process indirectly helped to send off Lewis and Clark on their mission.
Chapter 4
Alexander I
By the time the twenty-three-year-old Alexander I was catapulted onto the throne in 1801, St. Petersburg’s population had grown to over three hundred thousand, overtaking that of eight-hundred-year-old Moscow. The newly enthroned emperor came from a mixed and complicated lineage of rulers: on the one hand, a number were intelligent and determined; on the other, some were unstable, even mentally deranged. Alexander’s father was the bitter and unpredictable Paul, son of the formidable and enlightened Catherine. In 1762, following the murder of Paul’s father, the sickly and slow-witted Peter III, Catherine simply assumed the throne, leaving her son standing on the sidelines of government and power for thirty-four years, harbouring resentment and hatred of his usurping mother.
When Catherine died unexpectedly in 1796, Paul gleefully took possession of his rightful inheritance and immediately proceeded to reverse his mother’s enlightened domestic and foreign policies. Bitter years of maternal neglect and frustration had further deteriorated his warped mind. Imagined danger, shadowy conspiracy, and ruthless enemies lurked everywhere — nobody was to be trusted. “In Russia,” he declared, “the only person of importance is the one with whom I speak — and then only for the duration of the conversation.” It wasn’t long before the country was on its knees before the paranoid and unpredictable emperor. It cried for deliverance, and delivered it was on the night of March 11, 1801. A group of conspirators, fortified by generous quantities of brandy, broke into Mikhailovsky Castle where Paul had secluded himself behind moats and stout walls. A tumultuous confrontation took place, followed by a scuffle during which the tsar was struck on the forehead with a gold snuffbox — a mortal blow. An anguished Alexander was informed of his father’s death (“a fit of apoplexy,” he was told) and with no small degree of reluctance, the young man assumed the throne.
The newly anointed tsar brought together his closest, like-minded friends to form an advisory group called the Committee of Friends. This select body of young men consisted of liberal, reform-minded thinkers whose primary focus was on constitutionalism and serfdom. They were well familiar with the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and, drawing from the example of the United States, a constitution was deemed desirable, one that would give a voice to the people. As for the serfs — by far the largest segment of the population, accounting for 90 percent of the country’s gross national product — they required emancipation. Serfs were not slaves, yet they were not free agents. They were permanently attached to the land, and a nobleman’s wealth was measured not in terms of the acreage he possessed but in the number of “souls” he owned. Serfs enjoyed certain rights and protection of the law, but at the same time they were entirely