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Authors: William Stolzenburg
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140 miles an hour.
Williwaws and erupting volcanoes, blinding fogs and fifty-foot seasâthese were as much a part of the Aleutian experience as the rare windows of sunshine that revealed the most ethereal of landscapes. Those few who could roll with the punching winds and shrug off the tenacious chill found seduction in an Aleutian majesty. One of those was Bob Jones.
Jones had been educated as a biologist at South Dakota State University. The cold, windswept plains of interior North America served as fair training ground for an Aleutian tour of duty. Jones welcomed the stormy moods of the Jekyll and Hyde paradise. There were beaches in the Aleutians harboring bawling herds of northern fur seals by the hundreds of thousands. There were sea cliffs crammed wing to wing with nesting murres and kittiwakes, puffins and auklets, amassing by the millions. Even in the forbidding winter swells of the Bering Sea, flocks of floating seabirds would stretch to the horizons as the bison had once blanketed the Great Plains.
One could only imagine the Aleutians at their wildest, for their heyday had long passed. However stunning the show, the wildlife multitudes that Jones had inherited were in fact the withered vestiges of an epic plunder.
B ERING
In June 1741, the Russian ship St. Peter , with a crew of seventy-six commanded by Vitus Bering, sailed from the Siberian shores of Kamchatka in exploration of the North Pacific. Nearly six weeks later, after reaching the Alaskan shores of what is now America, a mysteriously indifferent Commander Bering celebrated the discovery of his lifetime with an inexplicable impatience to head home. After a brief foray along the Alaskan coast, the St. Peter weighed anchor and headed back across the sea that would take Beringâs name, as well as his life.
Beringâs premonitions soon became prophecy. By late September, halfway home across the Aleutian chain, a third of Beringâs crew were lying in the hold, joints aching, teeth loosening, faces yellowing with the slow death of scurvy. Bering himself was bedridden with a mysterious malady all his own. With ship and crew at half-mast, the signature williwaw of the Aleutians came crashing. âWe could hear the wind rush as if out of a narrow passage,â noted the shipâs naturalist, Georg Steller in his journal, âwith such terrible whistling, raging and blustering that we were in danger of losing masts or rudder or else of seeing the vessel broken by the waves, which pounded as when cannons are fired, so that we were expecting every moment that last stroke and death. Even the old and experienced pilot Hesselberg could not recall among his fifty years at sea having passed through a storm which even resembled it.â
On the morning of September 30 a williwaw more ferocious than the last struck the St. Peter . âNo one could lie down, sit up, or stand,â wrote Steller. âNobody was able to remain at his post: we were drifting under the might of God wither the angry heavens willed to send us. Half of our crew lay sick and weak, the other half were quite crazed and maddened from the terrifying motion of the sea and ship. There was much praying, to be sure, but the curses piled up during ten years in Siberia prevented any response. Beyond the ship we could see not a fathom out into the ocean because we continuously lay buried among the cruel waves. Under such conditions no one any longer possessed either courage or counsel.â
The siege extended through October. Under barrage of wind and wave and scurvy, their food running short, minds and bodies unraveled. Corpses began going overboard with nearly daily routine.
Finally, on November 4, dead ahead of the storm-tossed ship arose a mountainous land, mistakenly imagined by the desperate crew as the shores of their homeland. âIt is impossible to describe how great and extraordinary was the joy over everybody at this sight,â Steller wrote. âThe half-dead
Williwaws and erupting volcanoes, blinding fogs and fifty-foot seasâthese were as much a part of the Aleutian experience as the rare windows of sunshine that revealed the most ethereal of landscapes. Those few who could roll with the punching winds and shrug off the tenacious chill found seduction in an Aleutian majesty. One of those was Bob Jones.
Jones had been educated as a biologist at South Dakota State University. The cold, windswept plains of interior North America served as fair training ground for an Aleutian tour of duty. Jones welcomed the stormy moods of the Jekyll and Hyde paradise. There were beaches in the Aleutians harboring bawling herds of northern fur seals by the hundreds of thousands. There were sea cliffs crammed wing to wing with nesting murres and kittiwakes, puffins and auklets, amassing by the millions. Even in the forbidding winter swells of the Bering Sea, flocks of floating seabirds would stretch to the horizons as the bison had once blanketed the Great Plains.
One could only imagine the Aleutians at their wildest, for their heyday had long passed. However stunning the show, the wildlife multitudes that Jones had inherited were in fact the withered vestiges of an epic plunder.
B ERING
In June 1741, the Russian ship St. Peter , with a crew of seventy-six commanded by Vitus Bering, sailed from the Siberian shores of Kamchatka in exploration of the North Pacific. Nearly six weeks later, after reaching the Alaskan shores of what is now America, a mysteriously indifferent Commander Bering celebrated the discovery of his lifetime with an inexplicable impatience to head home. After a brief foray along the Alaskan coast, the St. Peter weighed anchor and headed back across the sea that would take Beringâs name, as well as his life.
Beringâs premonitions soon became prophecy. By late September, halfway home across the Aleutian chain, a third of Beringâs crew were lying in the hold, joints aching, teeth loosening, faces yellowing with the slow death of scurvy. Bering himself was bedridden with a mysterious malady all his own. With ship and crew at half-mast, the signature williwaw of the Aleutians came crashing. âWe could hear the wind rush as if out of a narrow passage,â noted the shipâs naturalist, Georg Steller in his journal, âwith such terrible whistling, raging and blustering that we were in danger of losing masts or rudder or else of seeing the vessel broken by the waves, which pounded as when cannons are fired, so that we were expecting every moment that last stroke and death. Even the old and experienced pilot Hesselberg could not recall among his fifty years at sea having passed through a storm which even resembled it.â
On the morning of September 30 a williwaw more ferocious than the last struck the St. Peter . âNo one could lie down, sit up, or stand,â wrote Steller. âNobody was able to remain at his post: we were drifting under the might of God wither the angry heavens willed to send us. Half of our crew lay sick and weak, the other half were quite crazed and maddened from the terrifying motion of the sea and ship. There was much praying, to be sure, but the curses piled up during ten years in Siberia prevented any response. Beyond the ship we could see not a fathom out into the ocean because we continuously lay buried among the cruel waves. Under such conditions no one any longer possessed either courage or counsel.â
The siege extended through October. Under barrage of wind and wave and scurvy, their food running short, minds and bodies unraveled. Corpses began going overboard with nearly daily routine.
Finally, on November 4, dead ahead of the storm-tossed ship arose a mountainous land, mistakenly imagined by the desperate crew as the shores of their homeland. âIt is impossible to describe how great and extraordinary was the joy over everybody at this sight,â Steller wrote. âThe half-dead
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