The Explorers

The Explorers by Roger Pocock (1926)

Roger Pocock's The Explorers opens by framing four centuries of European history as a single sustained quest: the search for the best trade route to India and the China seas, beginning with the reign of Henry VII of England. Each major European power is shown to have built empires as a direct consequence of this search. Portugal found the Cape route and colonized African coasts. Spain mistook the West Indies for the real Indies but seized the New World from Cape Horn to the southern edge of Alaska. France occupied Canada and the Mississippi Valley, and later attempted Egypt and Palestine before digging the Suez Canal. Holland explored Hudson's Bay and built a rich empire in the East Indian Islands. Britain, by searching in every direction, opened up Russia, settled Newfoundland, founded the United States, built Canada, and secured a fortress line across the Mediterranean, ultimately holding all routes and with them her Indian empire. The narrative then turns to Russia's own search for a route to India and China, a story Pocock traces back to the court of Empress Catherine, the former Swedish nursery governess Martha Rabe, who had successively been the mistress of a Russian general, a servant to Princess Menchikoff, the lover and then wife of Peter the Great, and finally his successor as empress of all the Russias. At her court, learned men spoke of the legend of Juan de Fuca, an old Greek mariner who had claimed on the quays of Venice to have sailed north along the west coast of America and passed through a strait that eventually brought him back to the ocean, in reality the channel behind Vancouver's Island. As the legend reached Catherine, however, these straits of Anian were said to connect the Pacific directly to the Atlantic, offering Russia a continuous sea route to the Indies and potential dominion over the world. Catherine set her soothsayers to chart these straits at forty-eight degrees north latitude on the west coast of America, and had them add every rumor of a great land beyond Siberia called Aliaska, filling the North Pacific with speculation until the resulting chart was practically useless. She then assigned two naval officers, Vitus Bering the Dane and a Russian lieutenant named Tschirikoff, to find the straits. The expedition traveled overland across Russia and Siberia, sustained by hunters along the way, built two ships on the North Pacific coast called the Stv Petr and the Stv Pavl, and spent thirteen years exploring the Siberian coast before finally setting out in 1741 into unknown waters in search of the Island of Aliaska and the charted straits. The crews sickened of scurvy during the long fruitless search and men died steadily. Bering clung to faith in the official chart even as it killed his men. Tschirikoff eventually deserted him and sailing eastward came to land at the mouth of Cross Straits in Southern Alaska, where pine forests climbed to cloud-covered mountains and smoke rose from a savage camp-fire beyond a rocky shore. He sent a boat's crew ashore in search of provisions and water; they vanished behind a point and were never seen again. He sent a second boat, which also vanished, while the savages' fire blazed and distant drums muttered. After two days Tschirikoff abandoned hope and fled back to Siberia with the surviving remnant of his crew. Some three hundred miles to the north, Bering in the Stv Petr drove his mutinous crew onward. The ship ran before a southwest wind into green shallows and violet fogs that resolved at sunset into the sight of an immense mountain revealed through parting clouds above the mastheads. The sailors were terrified and Bering fell to his knees in wonder. The day fell on the Russian calendar feast of the prophet Elijah, who had been taken from the earth in a chariot of fire, and to the lost mariners the glowing mountain of ice and cloud seemed less a geographical feature than a divine vision. Bering named it Saint Elias. The subsequent wanderings through the Aleutian Archipelago, a sub-arctic wilderness of volcanic islands lost in eternal fog, brought the expedition to ruin. Scurvy and hunger reduced the crew to ghost-like figures before the voyage ended in wreck on one of the last islands, within two hundred miles of the Siberian coast. Bering himself was laid between two rocks for shelter, where drifting sand covered his legs and kept him warm in his final days and then made him a grave. The naturalist Stellar, a German who survived the winter, left the only account of the sea-cows found on the island, creatures unknown until then and since wholly extinct. The survivors spent the winter building a boat from the wreck's timbers, sailing home in the spring with a cargo of sea-otter skins that fetched a fortune on the Chinese coast, where the furs were prized for the official robes of mandarins. News of this trade drove the hunters of Siberia to mount their own expeditions to Alaska, led by survivors of Bering's crew. A colony was founded, and although the Straits of Anian were never discovered because they did not exist, the czars gained a new empire called Russian America. Alaska was eventually sold in 1867 to the United States for one million five hundred thousand pounds, and the territory continued to yield far more than that sum annually in fisheries, timber, and gold.

By Roger Pocock · First published 1926 · Genre: Historical Fiction, Adventure, Exploration Narrative · 1,777 words

First lines

A. D. 1741

From the time of Henry VII of England down to the present day, the nations of Europe have been busy with one enormous adventure, the search for the best trade route to India and the China seas. For four whole centuries this quest for a trade route has been the main current of the history of the world. Look what the nations have done in that long fight for trade.

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exploration · adventure · travel · discovery · history · biography · geography · wilderness · expedition · pioneers · survival · natural world

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