Witnessing Russian expeditions and sea otter slaughter: Inter-imperial rivalry and the formation of Western European consciousness of "extinction" and "conservation"
(Originally posted elsewhere on 7 December 2022.)
While there’s a lot of dramatic stuff here (Arctic foxes trailing the Russian crew for starving stragglers; the participation of such a high-profile naturalist as Steller; and the sheer scale of otter massacres), I’m intrigued by other parts of this piece which I hadn’t yet had time to excerpt.
Here, Ryan Tucker Jones is not just telling a history of the encounter with and localized decimation of otters, but is also exploring two other things:
A history of nationalist identity and inter-imperial rivalry/prejudice, on the one hand, and history of environmental thought/consciousness, on the other.
How? He’s playing with inter-imperial rivalries and a history of the cultural representation of Russia among Western European ideologues/literary types. Early in this piece, Jones describes how the slaughter of otters by the Russian crews was well-known to Western European audiences who took an interest in the natural/geographical knowledge of the boreal/Arctic/North Pacific being produced. Apparently, Western European audiences responded with something like an Orientalism-esque vilification of Russian people—or at least the Russian state. Jones shows that French and British observers framed Russians as barbarians for such otter-hunts.
Moreover, Jones then proposes that Western European contemplation of such pronounced and obvious cases of local extinction (entire otter populations swept away at certain islands/archipelagos) that naturalist/administrators began to more forcefully produce ideas of “conservation” and a distinct idea of what an “extinction” was.
Anyway, the excerpt here is moreso about the Russian encounters with the otters themselves. (Maybe in the future, we’ll add a second post to account for that other material.)
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Excerpt:
In 1741, the Russian ship St. Peter, part of Vitus Bering’s expedition of discovery, shipwrecked on one of the islands while returning from the first European exploration of Alaska. Bering’s scurvy-wracked men spent a miserable winter, killing marine mammals for food and warding off the fearless arctic foxes (Alopex lagopus) [...]. Georg Wilhelm Steller, the expedition’s naturalist, devoted much of his time to a study of the island’s fauna, later published to great interest in Europe. Few Europeans had ever experienced the numbers and variety of marine mammals that the men encountered on these islands. “If I were required to state how many [fur seals] I saw on Bering Island,” Steller wrote, “I should truthfully say that I could not guess - they were countless, they covered the whole shore.” [...]
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When the remnants of the expedition arrived in Kamchatka in the summer of 1742, their tales of the abundant sea otters, fur seals, and sea cows sent Russian fur traders (promyshlenniki) from Siberia to hunt in the newly discovered waters. [...] Initially, the promyshlenniki found the animals to be as unbelievably numerous as Steller had reported them to be. The first hunters killed as many as fifty sea otters per day, several gigantic sea cows (used for food and leather) per season, and thousands of the arctic foxes [...].
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Beginning with Steller’s two-year visit, hunting had been carried out at an unsustainable rate. The sea otter population entered a serious crash seven years after Steller’s shipwreck - in 1749 and 1750 - when at least four crews hunted in the Commanders. In what must have been a vast and ceaseless slaughter, hunters killed at least 1,380 sea otters (roughly a quarter of the entire estimated population) in these two years alone. By 1754 the population had probably dropped below eight hundred animals spread across the two islands - a decline of 85 percent over twelve years - numbers low enough that hunters would have had trouble locating the animals at all. In 1757, hunters suddenly began bypassing the Commanders for the Aleutian Islands [...]. Nearly forty years later, Commander Islands’ sea otters still had not recovered from the onslaught of 1749 - 1750. [...]
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The Russian fur trade in the Pacific differed from the New World European terrestrial fur trades in another way. The Russians, besides trading for furs with the Aleuts, also demanded from them a yearly tribute of furs (called yasak), as they had with all conquered Siberian peoples. The fur traders forced compliance by taking some members of the community hostage and promising their safety only upon delivery of furs. As more and more Aleut communities fell under promyshlennik domination in the course of the eighteenth century, yasak collection naturally increased. At the same time that the supply of sea otters was in steep decline, tribute demands increased. [...]
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By then, all involved in the trade expected sea otters to disappear rapidly; they no longer expected sea otters to behave like sables. Irkutsk governor Ivan Iakobii reported to Catherine II in 1787 that “we know from many examples that the hunting has decreased substantially each year. There is absolutely no doubt, when one realizes that millions of animals have been taken [in the North Pacific]. One can therefore suppose that in a few years the animals will be completely depleted [...].” By the time the Russian American Company (RAC) was granted a monopoly on the trade in 1799, it too was forced to begin looking immediately for new hunting grounds in southeastern Alaska. [...]
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Text above by: Ryan Tucker Jones, “A ‘Havock Made among Them’: Animals, Empire, and Extinction in the Russian North Pacific, 1741-1810,” Environmental History, vol. 16 (October 2011), no. 4 (October 2011). DOI at: doi dot org slash 10.1093/ENVHIS/EMR091.
