Where the Sea Breaks Its Back by Corey Ford

Author:Corey Ford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: West Margin Press

VI. “BY THE WILL OF GOD”

Week After Week they battled headwinds that sometimes reached gale proportions, forcing them to reef canvas. The constant lurching and tossing of the ship brought added misery to the scurvy patients, and their moans could be heard above the creaking of masts and steady snarl of wind in the rigging. Many were in an advanced stage of the disease, suffering from bloody fluxes of the bowels; but Steller had been able to bring aboard only enough antiscorbutic herbs for the Captain Commander, and was powerless to aid the rest. The brackish water had already begun to turn saline in the casks, as he had warned, and the roster of healthy men dwindled rapidly.

In mid-September the log recorded another victim: “By the will of God died of scurvy the grenadier Andrei Tretyakov.” A third of the crew was down by now, confined to the reeking hold, and the teeth of the other sailors were loosening. As the supply of fresh spoonwort gave out, Bering had a relapse and again lay helpless in his bunk, unable to move hands or feet. Even Waxell was showing the first signs of the plague, brought on by constant worry and the strain of sleepless nights. “I do not know whether there is anything more dreary or unpleasant in this world than thus having to navigate in an unknown sea,” he recalled in his memoirs. “I can truthfully say that I did not get many hours’ peaceful sleep during the five months. … I was in a continual state of uneasiness, always in danger and uncertainty.”

Clouds hid the sun and the stars, and it was impossible to observe the latitude or correct their reckoning. On the afternoon of September 25, they were dismayed to see a pair of islands looming out of the fog, and a snowy volcanic peak in the distance: evidently Atka and Adak, where Chirikov had watered on his return trip, and the volcano on Great Sitkin Island. They did not know that the Aleutian chain curved southward, and had assumed they were far from any landfall. “It was most fortunate that we caught sight of the land while yet day,” Steller wrote, “for otherwise we should certainly have run onto it in the night, or else, without any means of escape, have been driven by the wind and wrecked on it.” They changed course hastily, and scudded south to a lower parallel.

Here the williwaw struck them two days later. All that morning the wind had been building in velocity, with a wild sobbing which culminated now and then in a high hysterical laugh. There was an insane quality in the sound that put their nerves on edge; it was the babbling singsong of a madman, without sense or reason. The fog had blown clear, and ragged wisps of cloud flicked overhead against a mottled brown and purple sky. The wind had been from the southeast, but suddenly at dusk it veered to the west, and they could hear a faraway rumble, the growl of a swollen river pressing against its dikes.

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