When in 1736 Steller did indeed
receive the longed-for appointment
to join the Bering expedition,
this enterprise, launched ten years previously,
consisting of an army of carpenters,
blacksmiths, grooms, mariners,
clerks, commissioned officers,
scientists and assistants,
and of not only building materials, tools, instruments,
an arsenal of weapons and many hundreds
of books, but also endless
forage trains for the team’s provision,
crockery and clothing and crates
of claret for the higher-ranking
Academy emissaries, to be dragged onwards,
no different from a glacier pushing
great heavy masses of scree in its passage,
arrived at Yakutsk on the one hundred and
twenty-ninth degree of longitude, east.
Steller mastered the five thousand miles
in the course of the three and a half years
which Vitus Bering still needed
to convey everything, down to the last nail,
with his little Siberian packhorses
over the Yablonovy Range to
the Sea of Okhotsk. In the process
he accustomed himself to endure
deprivation and loneliness for
the sake of the baker’s daughter,
whom, in the hope that
perhaps even in far-off places
one might feel at home and on the grounds
of her seemingly unconditional
promise to travel gladly with him
to any parts wheresoever, he’d made his wife,
but who in the end, naturally, had not been willing
to make that journey halfway round the globe
together with him. In place of her, Steller
now had two young ravens,
which in the evenings dictated
ominous sayings to him.
When he wrote these down
he felt some comfort, although he knew
that even with these he would not
arrest the slow corrosion
that had entered his soul.