[Illustration: Seals in a Rookery on Bering Island.]
The terrible danger now was not from starvation, but mutiny, murder, or massacre among the branded criminals of the discontented crew. Waxel, as he recovered, was afraid of tempting revolt with orders, and convened the crew by vote to determine all that should be done. Officers and men—there was no distinction. By March of 1742 the ground had cleared of snow. Waxel called a meeting to suggest breaking up the packet vessel to build a smaller craft. A vote {58} was asked. The resolution was called, written out, and signed by every survivor, but afterward, when officers and men set themselves to the well-nigh impossible task of untackling the ship without implements of iron, revolt appeared among the workers. Again Waxel avoided mutiny. A meeting was called, another vote taken, the recalcitrants shamed down. The crew lacked more than tools. There was no ship's carpenter. Finally a Cossack, who was afterward raised to the nobility for his work, consented to act as director of the building, and on the 6th of May a vessel forty feet long, thirteen beam, and six deep, was on the stocks. All June, the noise of the planking went on till the mast raised its yard-arms, and an eight-oared single-master, such as the old Vikings of the North Sea used, was well under way.
The difficulties of such shipbuilding can hardly be realized. There was no wood but the wood of the old ship, no rigging but the old hemp, no tar but such as could be melted out of the old hemp in earth pits; and very few axes. The upper part was calked with tallow of the sea-cow, the under with tar from the old hull. The men also constructed a second small boat or canoe.
On the 10th of August, with such cheers as the island never heard before or since, the single-master was launched from the skids and named the St. Peter. Cannon balls and cartridges were thrown in bottom as ballast. Luckily, eight hundred pounds of {59} meal had been reserved for the return voyage, and Steller had salted down steaks of whale meat and sea-cow. On the evening of August 16, after solemn prayer and devotions, with one last look to the lonely crosses on the hillside where lay the dead, the castaways went on board. A sharp breeze was blowing from the north. Hoisting sail, they glided out to sea. The old jolly-boat bobbled behind in tow. Late at night, when the wind fell, the eager mariners bent to the oar. By noon next day they had rounded the southeast corner of the island. Two days afterward, rough weather set the old jolly-boat bumping her nose so violently on the heels of the St. Peter, that the cable had to be cut and the small boat set adrift. That night the poor tallow-calked planks leaked so badly, pumps and buckets were worked at fever heat, and all the ballast was thrown overboard. Sometime during the 25th, there shone above the silver rim where sea and sky met, the opal dome of far mountains, Kamchatka!
The bearded men could control themselves no longer. Shout on shout made the welkin ring. Tears streamed down the rough, unwashed faces. The Cossacks wept like children. Men vied with each other to seize the oars and row like mad. The tide-rip bounding—lifting—falling—racing over seas for the shores of Kamchatka never ran so mad and swift a course as the crazy craft there bouncing forward over the waves. And when they saw the home harbor {60} of Petropaulovsk, Avacha Bay, on August 27, exultation knew no bounds. The men fired off guns, beat oars on the deck rail, shouted—shouted—shouted till the mountains echoed and every living soul of Avacha dashed to the waterside scarcely believing the evidence of his eyes—that the castaways of Bering's ship had returned. Then one may well believe that the monks set the chapel bells ringing and the cannon roared a welcome from Avacha Bay.
Chirikoff had in May sailed in search of Bering, passing close to the island where the castaways were prisoners of the sea, but he did not see the Commander Islands; and all hope had been given up for any word of the St. Peter. Waxel wintered that year at Avacha Bay, crossing the mainland in the spring of 1743. In September of the same year, an imperial decree put an end to the Northern Expedition, and Waxel set out across Siberia to take the crew back to St. Petersburg. Poor Steller died on the way from exposure.
So ended the greatest naval exploration known to the world. Beside it, other expeditions to explore America pale to insignificance. La Salle and La Vérendrye ascended the St. Lawrence, crossed inland plains, rafted down the mighty tide of the great inland rivers; but La Salle stopped at the mouth of the Mississippi, and La Vérendrye was checked by the barrier of the Rockies. Lewis and Clark accomplished yet more. After ascending the Missouri and crossing the plains, they traversed the Rockies; but they were {61} stopped at the Pacific. When Bering had crossed the rivers and mountains of the two continents—first Europe, then Asia—and reached the Pacific, his expedition had only begun. Little remains to Russia of what he accomplished but the group of rocky islets where he perished. But judged by the difficulties which he overcame; by the duties desperately impossible, done plainly and doggedly, by death heroic in defeat—Bering's expedition to northwestern America is without a peer in the annals of the New World discovery.[4]
[1] I adopt the views of Dr. Stejneger, of the National Museum, Washington, on this point, as he has personally gone over every foot of the ground.
[2] Dr. George Davidson, President of the Geographical Society of the Pacific, has written an irrefutable pamphlet on why Kyak Island and Sitka Sound must be accepted as the landfalls of Bering and Chirikoff.