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Stellar Steller
Nov. 7th, 2009 08:54 pmAfter recently reading "Steller's Island" by Dean Littlepage, I have become fascinated by the life of Georg Steller. He is a rather neglected historical figure, but what an badass scientist! He travels halfway around the world from Europe, across Siberia and the North Pacific, to Alaska on the exploratory voyage of Vitus Bering, becoming the first scientist to visit the west coast of North America and making the first European contact with Native Alaskans. Their vessel is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, the captain and many other sailors die, almost everyone gets scurvy, and the stranded survivors are forced to spend the sub-Arctic winter in hillside borrows. And what does Steller do in this situation? He founds the science of marine mammalogy and conducts some of the most rigorous and invaluable research of his day, including the only description of the now-extinct Steller's sea cow. He also helps the other castaways build a new boat from the remains of the old one and return to Asia. He wrote the first scientific descriptions of many species, several of which now bear his name. His insights included everything from the close relationship between the peoples of Alaska and Siberia to the importance of eating fresh green food to avoid scurvy. He also had a very intense, enthusiastic, and quick-tempered personality that was probably both entertaining and infuriating to witness.
Steller died while returning to Europe. However, if you imagine he did not, I think there is a lot of potential here for alternate-history, maybe steampunky Steller fan fiction. Consider the possibilities:
1. Steller as an environmental superhero of the Pacific Northwest. Steller stays in America, teams up with the locals who have superb seafaring kayak technology, and constructs, I don't know, some sort of giant kayak pulled by Steller sea lions or something, defended by harpoons and gunpowder. Although Steller loved to shoot animals, I can imagine him discovering the advanced ecological principle of "if you kill them all, there won't be any more left." He cruises around protecting the sea otters from the fur trade and presumably saving the sea cows from extinction. And doing science, of course. This is, after all, a man who once traveled hundreds of miles out of his way by dogsled just to get paper to press his plant samples (seriously).
2. Steller discovers the theory of evolution 100 years before Darwin (yes, his whole voyage took place in the mid-1700s, before the American Revolution, and certainly before Humbolt, Darwin, Wallace, or most of the other pioneering naturalists you may have heard of). The parallels between Steller and Darwin are rather remarkable: born almost exactly a century apart, both men visited unpopulated Pacific islands and studied the fauna in detail, including flightless cormorants which have evolved only in those two locations (the one Steller observed is now extinct, so we don't really know if it was truly flightless). Steller's writings contain hints of Darwinian ideas, but if he ever followed them through to their eventual conclusions, he never wrote about it. If he had only lived as long as Darwin, modern biology might have been jump-started a lot sooner.
3. In actual historical fact, Steller described a "sea ape" he observed from the boat. Most historians think this was a fur seal that he just didn't get a good look at, although he observed thousands of fur seals yet he apparently still considered the ape to be something different. What was the deal with this sea ape? Did it have affinities to sasquatch? Maybe Steller has more adventures tracking it down.
4. Steller changes the course of history through interactions with later-arriving explorers of the North Pacific sailing for Russia, Spain, or Britain (Grigory Shelikhov, Juan Bodega y Quadra, Captain Cook, Alexander Mackenzie, George Vancouver, etc.), famous Native Americans (e.g. Chief Seattle as a child), assorted pirates or other folks whose visits to the Pacific went unrecorded (Ben Franklin? Voltaire?) or even Lewis and Clark (who finally get there when Steller is very old and the action is long over).
5. Romance. Not much is known about Steller's sexuality, although he presumably didn't care for his wife very much, as he abandoned her in Europe and was in no hurry to get back to her, even after returning to civilization. But if you're into speculating about that kind of thing, you do have a bunch of men sharing close quarters in cold weather.
I have no immediate plans to write a story about Steller, since so far I can't find I way to keep the cheesiness down to an appropriate level, but who knows, maybe these ideas will come together. Mostly I just wanted to gush, and maybe spark some else's imagination.
Steller died while returning to Europe. However, if you imagine he did not, I think there is a lot of potential here for alternate-history, maybe steampunky Steller fan fiction. Consider the possibilities:
1. Steller as an environmental superhero of the Pacific Northwest. Steller stays in America, teams up with the locals who have superb seafaring kayak technology, and constructs, I don't know, some sort of giant kayak pulled by Steller sea lions or something, defended by harpoons and gunpowder. Although Steller loved to shoot animals, I can imagine him discovering the advanced ecological principle of "if you kill them all, there won't be any more left." He cruises around protecting the sea otters from the fur trade and presumably saving the sea cows from extinction. And doing science, of course. This is, after all, a man who once traveled hundreds of miles out of his way by dogsled just to get paper to press his plant samples (seriously).
2. Steller discovers the theory of evolution 100 years before Darwin (yes, his whole voyage took place in the mid-1700s, before the American Revolution, and certainly before Humbolt, Darwin, Wallace, or most of the other pioneering naturalists you may have heard of). The parallels between Steller and Darwin are rather remarkable: born almost exactly a century apart, both men visited unpopulated Pacific islands and studied the fauna in detail, including flightless cormorants which have evolved only in those two locations (the one Steller observed is now extinct, so we don't really know if it was truly flightless). Steller's writings contain hints of Darwinian ideas, but if he ever followed them through to their eventual conclusions, he never wrote about it. If he had only lived as long as Darwin, modern biology might have been jump-started a lot sooner.
3. In actual historical fact, Steller described a "sea ape" he observed from the boat. Most historians think this was a fur seal that he just didn't get a good look at, although he observed thousands of fur seals yet he apparently still considered the ape to be something different. What was the deal with this sea ape? Did it have affinities to sasquatch? Maybe Steller has more adventures tracking it down.
4. Steller changes the course of history through interactions with later-arriving explorers of the North Pacific sailing for Russia, Spain, or Britain (Grigory Shelikhov, Juan Bodega y Quadra, Captain Cook, Alexander Mackenzie, George Vancouver, etc.), famous Native Americans (e.g. Chief Seattle as a child), assorted pirates or other folks whose visits to the Pacific went unrecorded (Ben Franklin? Voltaire?) or even Lewis and Clark (who finally get there when Steller is very old and the action is long over).
5. Romance. Not much is known about Steller's sexuality, although he presumably didn't care for his wife very much, as he abandoned her in Europe and was in no hurry to get back to her, even after returning to civilization. But if you're into speculating about that kind of thing, you do have a bunch of men sharing close quarters in cold weather.
I have no immediate plans to write a story about Steller, since so far I can't find I way to keep the cheesiness down to an appropriate level, but who knows, maybe these ideas will come together. Mostly I just wanted to gush, and maybe spark some else's imagination.