Read Online Rat Island by William Stolzenburg - Free Book Online Page B

crawled up to see it, and all thanked God heartily for this great mercy.”
    Celebration soon turned to panic. Before dawn, heavy surf snapped the St. Peter ’s anchor and began sweeping ship and crew toward the rocks. Sea-hardened sailors ran crying and babbling. Two corpses being held for burial on land but now arousing superstitions “were thrown without ceremony neck and heels into the sea.”
    In the moment when all braced to be dashed to their deaths upon the rocks, providence intervened. The St. Peter rose on the benevolent crest of a rogue wave, lifting the wounded ship and crew over the jaws of the reef and depositing them at sudden peace in a quiet pool before the beach. The wind calmed, a crescent moon shone above a majestic horizon of sandy dunes and snowcapped peaks. The crewmen of the St. Peter had just experienced the luckiest moment of their lives. The natives of the land before them, however, had just experienced their most unfortunate.
    The next day Steller and a small crew rowed a longboat from the wreck of the St. Peter to the beach to begin exploring what the wishful among them were praying was the Kamchatka Peninsula of Siberia. What Steller soon saw told him it was not. The crew was greeted by a company of curious sea otters, mindless of any danger. Steller’s suspicions grew with the appearance of a huge dark creature wallowing in the shallows, a mysterious animal the shape “of an overturned boat,” its snout occasionally surfacing to draw breath “with a noise like a horse’s snort.” The sea cow, as Steller came to call it, treated the boatloads of armed men as mere logs of driftwood.
    Once ashore the men were besieged by arctic foxes , snapping and barking. The crewmen kicked them, to no avail. They hacked and stabbed the little creatures with axes and knives. The fearless foxes kept coming.
    As the survivors of the Bering voyage settled into their new task of surviving on what would one day be named Bering Island, the foxes became the most intimate and incessant reminder that this strange and hostile land was someplace other than home. The foxes feared nothing in the men who now attacked them. Steller and a shipmate killed sixty in a day. And still they swarmed, bold with hunger and mindless of consequence. “When we first arrived they bit off the noses, fingers and toes of the dead while their graves were being dug,” wrote Steller. “While skinning animals it often happened we stabbed two or three foxes with our knives because they wanted to tear the meat from our hands.” Men learned to sleep with club in hand. Steller continued: “One night a sailor on his knees wanted to urinate out of the door of the hut, a fox snapped at the exposed part and, in spite of his cries, did not soon want to let go. No one could relieve himself without a stick in his hand, and they immediately ate up the excrement as eagerly as pigs.”
    Mad with vengeance, the castaways resorted to torture, gouging the foxes’ eyes, hacking off limbs and tails, and hanging pairs of foxes by their feet to watch them “bite each other to death.” For their efforts the men were thereafter haunted at their huts by tail-less foxes and foxes hobbling on three or two legs, advancing with a zombie’s resolve.
    As the plague of scurvy abated and strengths recovered under Steller’s doctorly care, the castaways turned the natives’ fearlessness to their favor. Sea otters and fur seals, lounging and napping so trustingly upon the rocks and sands, allowed the men to tiptoe down and club them. The otters became such predictable fare that the men began throwing away the half-palatable meat and collecting hides as poker chips. “The sickness had scarcely subsided when … worse epidemic appeared,” recorded Steller. “I mean the wretched gambling with cards, when through whole days and nights nothing but card-playing was to be seen in the