14 The New York Review
*Until recently, both the Iñupiat, who
live in Alaska, and the Yupik, who live
in Alaska and Chukotka, were often
called “Eskimo.” The Iñupiat are part
of the Inuit group, which also includes
peoples in the Arctic regions of Can-
ada and Greenland.Blood on the Ice
Sophie Pinkham
Floating Coast:
An Environmental History
of the Bering Strait
by Bathsheba Demuth.
Norton, 416 pp., $27.
“Nowhere in all America will you find
more patrician-like houses; parks and
gardens more opulent, than in New
Bedford. Whence came they?” Mel-
ville asked in Moby-Dick. He knew the
answer: “All these brave houses and
flowery gardens came from the Atlan-
tic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and
all, they were harpooned and dragged
up hither from the bottom of the sea.”
Bathsheba Demuth’s Float-
ing Coast: An Environmental
History of the Bering Strait tells
the story of how people learned
to make money from the seas—
specifically, from the waters
of Beringia, the region that in-
cludes Alaska, the northeast-
ernmost parts of Russia, and
the seas in between. At first the
money came from sea otters and
whales, but when these grew
scarce in the mid-nineteenth
century, they were replaced with
walruses sleeping in piles on the
icy edges of the shore; then at-
tention turned to caribou and
Arctic foxes, and to the gold,
tin, and oil in the earth. But as
humans hunted and mined at
an ever-accelerating pace, they
did so with little understanding
of the cyclical and finite aspects
of life on earth, or of the ways
their actions would disrupt the
larger ecosystem, especially one
as delicate as that of Beringia.
Cossack mercenaries and Rus-
sian traders made it to the far reaches of
northern Asia in the first half of the sev-
enteenth century. Following practices
already established farther south, they
took local hostages and then demanded
a ransom of loyalty oaths and annual
tribute. But on the Chukotka peninsula,
in the extreme northeast, the Chukchi
and Yupik peoples successfully fended
off the newcomers’ attempts at sub-
jugation. In the eighteenth century,
Peter the Great hired a team of explor-
ers, led by the Danish navigator Vitus
Bering, to investigate the boundary be-
tween Asia and America, and the Dane
mapped the strait that would bear his
name. In 1741 Bering’s crew returned
from Alaska—its name is derived from
an Aleut word whose literal translation
is “object to which the action of the sea
is directed”—with sea otter pelts of a
quality that soon drew traders from
several other countries. Alaska became
the northernmost area of “Russian
America,” which also included parts of
California and two Hawaiian ports.
A 1747 Russian military campaign in
Chukotka failed, the commanding offi-
cer killed in battle, and Russian settlers
abandoned the fort they had built on
the Anadyr River. After years of war,
the Russians agreed to a peace treaty
with the Chukchi exempting them
from fur tribute. Both Chukotka and
Alaska were Russian possessions only
on paper, and Americans, Britons, and
Norwegians began to hunt and trade
there in the early nineteenth century.
The sea otters were soon almost extinct
due to overhunting, and Russia lost in-
terest in its portion of America. In 1867
the United States purchased Alaska for
$7.2 million (about $125 million today).
Seward’s Folly looked clever by the end
of the century, when the Alaskan gold
rush began. And then there was the
discovery, in 1968, of petroleum off the
Alaskan coast.
Though Floating Coast is billed
as an environmental history, it could
also be described as a meditation on
a biosphere. Demuth includes lavish
descriptions of the landscape she has
been admiring since she first visited as a
teenager, but relatively little in the wayof straightforward political or economic
history. She is interested in animals—
particularly whales—and Floating
Coast is, to a great extent, history from
the vantage point of the sea; political
treaties and trade agreements, mon-
archs and presidents flash by on the pe-
r ipher y, a s i f seen f rom fa r away. T houg h
centered on the Bering Strait, the book
roams with the creatures whose history
she documents, following whaling fleets
as far as Japan and Hawaii.
One of Demuth’s central concerns is
the transfer of energy between organ-
isms: as she puts it, “to be alive is to
take a place in a chain of conversions.”
In the Arctic, solar radiation is turned
into calories mainly in the sea, since ex-
panses of light-reflecting ice and snow
have dramatically limited opportuni-
ties for photosynthesis on land. Algae
and plankton are the basis for eco-
systems that include calorie-rich fish,
whales, walruses, and seals, which are
consumed in turn by land-bound crea-
tures. For Beringians—the Chukchi,
Iñupiat, and Yupik*—these creatures
were not interchangeable sources of
profit, but the sole means of survival.
Myths of animals that became people
and people that became animals ex-pressed the biological truth of the
conversion of animal flesh into human
bodies.
According to Iñupiat tradition,
whales lived in their own country,
the nunat, from which they observed
human society. Were the humans feed-
ing the poor and the old? Were they
making the proper offerings of meat
and song? Only if the whales approved
of human behavior would they ven-
ture out of their own world and offer
up their flesh. After days or weeks of
silent watching from a walrus-hide
boat, dressed in light-colored clothing
and armed with harpoons and spearsbleached white, a hunting party might
have a matter of minutes in which
to strike a whale—often a bowhead,
which is 40 percent fat by volume and
can live for two hundred years. It could
take a whole day to kill a whale after it
had been hit, as the animal’s struggles,
sometimes throwing the whaling boat
into the air, drove the harpoon deeper
into its body. Many whales survived
for decades with old harpoons buried
in their flesh. After a whale had been
pulled to land, the entire village came
to help drag it out of the water, leaving
a trail of blood on the ice, and worked
together to butcher the carcass. Almost
all of the whale was eaten or otherwise
used, the meat packed into perma-
frost pits so it would last through sum-
mer. Blubber was eaten and burned in
lamps, and bowhead jaws served as raf-
ters in houses.In 1836 the American Navy secretary
called whaling “not a mere exchange
of commodities, but the creation of
wealth, by labor, from the ocean.”
Rather than acknowledging the ex-
tractive nature of the hunt, proponents
viewed it as a generative process, a way
of making something useless—un-
disturbed wildlife—into money. This
misprision led to the near extinction
of many species of whales, as of sea
otters and walruses, and to the near-
destruction of the Beringian societ-
ies that relied on these mammals for
sustenance.The first whalers from New England
crossed the Bering Strait to hunt bow-
heads in 1848. Living in an age before
kerosene, they coveted whale blub-
ber as oil for lamps; it was also used
to grease machines, to make soap and
perfume, and as an insecticide and fer-
tilizer. Until spring steel and plastic
were developed, baleen, the keratin
bristles that whales use to filter food as
they trawl through the sea, was made
into corsets, whips, umbrellas, tongue
scrapers, divining rods, shoe-horns, and
other consumer products. American
whaling employed not only harpoons
but also bomb lances that worked like
huge rifles. Whalers used spades
to separate the blubber, which
could be a foot thick, from the
muscle and skin, and they cut off
the head, with its precious bone
and baleen. The rest of the car-
cass was thrown back into the
sea; there was no appetite for
whale meat in the United States.
Whales were soon noticeably
scarcer. Many had been killed,
and others had learned to be
warier of humans—to hide from
the sight or sound of boats, to
take refuge in deeper and more
distant waters. Drawing on their
observations of whale intelli-
gence, whalers persuaded them-
selves that the creatures had
become more cunning, and that
humans only had to refine their
methods. Some understood, as
early as the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, that whales were at risk of
extinction, and naturalists began
to plead for clemency. But in-
stead of setting limits on hunt-
ing, the global whaling industry
adopted technological innovations.
Whales had more trouble out-swimming
steamships; the corresponding increase
in catches was portrayed as a laudable
improvement in efficiency rather than
an accelerated path to extinction.
Meanwhile, new Arctic creatures
became fair game. By 1859, Ameri-
can fleets had learned to render oil
from walrus fat, which became a way
to make whaleless days profitable for
seamen who were only paid a por-
tion of the value of the animals they
killed. Like whales, walruses soon be-
came more cautious, posting sentries
and ramming boats. But by the 1870s,
crews were killing hundreds of wal-
ruses in an afternoon, shooting them
with rifles that sounded like the crack-
ing of sea ice. Only their blubber, tusks,
and perhaps some organs were taken.
The whalers hunted mainly in summer,
when female walruses were nursing,
and pups were left to starve beside the
carcasses of their mothers.
The plummeting walrus population,
following the death of so many whales,
led swiftly to the demise of many of the
Beringians who depended on these ani-
mals. Two thirds of the 1,500 people on
Sivuqaq, or St. Lawrence Island, died
of hunger or disease. In 1879, entire
villages were found dead. Contact with
foreigners had also brought smallpox,
syphilis, and alcoholism. Americans
noted these consequences of their ar-
rival with some regret, but wrote them
off as the inevitable decline of “back-
ward” people whose only hope forChukchi hunting a gray whale in the Bering Sea, Chukotka, Russia, June 2018Yuri Smityuk/Getty Images