Stephen R. Bown · 2017 · survival

Stephen Bown's account of the Great Northern Expedition, 1733 to 1743 - the most expensive scientific venture of its age. Three thousand people hauled shipbuilding iron across the whole width of Siberia so that two ships could sail east and find America. One of them did, and then came apart on an uncharted island full of foxes that were not afraid of anything.

1. 1
   St Petersburg

   Peter the Great commissions a Danish officer, Vitus Bering, almost from his deathbed. What follows involves three thousand people, ten years, and orders that can be countermanded at any moment from the capital.

2. 2
   Tobolsk

   East across the Urals with the academics, the surveyors, the wives and children, and the anchors and cannon and iron fittings that Siberia cannot make - hauled by horse, sled and river barge across a continent.

3. 3
   Yakutsk

   The last real town, and then the worst stretch: everything carried over the mountains to the Sea of Okhotsk on packhorses, most of which die, in a supply operation that takes years and ruins the region it passes through.

4. 4
   Okhotsk

   A port built from nothing to build ships in, and the St Peter and the St Paul come off the stocks at ninety feet - and then the supply vessel is lost, which quietly decides the fate of everyone aboard.

5. 5
   Petropavlovsk

   They round Kamchatka to the new harbour on Avacha Bay and winter there, and sail for America in June 1741, a month into the season - and within weeks fog separates the two ships permanently.

6. 6
   Kayak Island

   Mount St Elias is sighted on 17 July and a longboat goes ashore three days later. Steller is given ten hours on the American coast after a decade of travelling, and spends them collecting plants and being shouted at to hurry.

7. 7
   Bering Island

   Driven west in autumn storms with the crew dying of scurvy, the St Peter strikes a reef off an uncharted island. Blue foxes swarm the camp and eat the dead and bite the living, and Bering dies in a sandpit in December.

8. 8
   Petropavlovsk

   Forty-six survive the winter on sea cow and fox, break up the wreck and build a smaller boat from it, and sail four hundred miles home in August 1742 - carrying otter pelts that will start a Russian rush to Alaska.