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Updated: September 3, 2025
In vain Waxel ground his teeth with rage, signalled, and waited. "The wind seemed to issue from a flue," says Steller, "with such a whistling and roaring and rumbling that we expected to lose mast and rudder, or be crushed among the breakers. The dashings of the sea sounded like a cannon."
Steller hurried off to hunt anti-scorbutic plants, while Waxel, who had taken command, and Khitroff ordered the water-casks filled. Unfortunately the only pool they could find was connected with an arm of the sea. The water was brackish, and this afterward increased disease. A fatality seemed to hang over the wonder world where they wandered. Voices were heard in the storm, rumblings from the sea.
Peter, was a crew of seventy-seven, Lieutenant Waxel, second in command, George William Steller, the famous scientist, Bering's friend, on board. On the St. Paul, under the stanch, level-headed Russian lieutenant, Alexei Chirikoff, were seventy-six men, with La Croyére d'Isle as astronomer. Not the least complicating feature of the case was the personnel of the crews.
Whether this land was America, Gamaland, or Asia, the savants could not know. It is from the works of Gmelin, Müller, and Steller, scientists named to accompany the expedition, that the most connected accounts are obtained. The "menagerie," some one has called this collection of scientists. Many of the workmen died of their hardships at this stage of the journey.
As soon as its existence and character, and the abundance of fur animals in the same waters, were made known to the occupants of those posts by the return of the survivors of Bering's expedition, so active a chase was commenced against the amphibia of that region, that, in the course of twenty-seven years, the sea cow, described by Steller as extremely numerous in 1741, is believed to have been completely extirpated, not a single individual having been seen since the year 1768.
Many years later, another voyager met an old Indian, who told of seeing Bering's ship anchor at Kyak Island when he was a boy; but the terrified Indians had fled, only returning to find the presents in the huts, when the Russians had gone. Steller was as wild as a child out of school, and accompanied by only one Cossack went bounding over the island collecting specimens and botanizing.
It was first made known to the world by Steller, in 1741, and must have become extinct near the beginning of the nineteenth century. The rhytina belonged to the same mammalian Order as the manatee of Florida and South America, and the dugong of Australia. The largest manatee that Florida has produced, so far as we know, was thirteen feet long.
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