The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson [bill gates best books .TXT] 📗

since confirmed their findings. Other than that, though, Melville and Strickland didn’t contribute much to our overall understanding of the dodo. That this idiosyncratic creature lived where it lived and only there was not at all strange, they argued. The temporal and geographical distribution of species had nothing to do with environment or climate, and certainly not with evolution. It was the “Creator’s” way of preserving “the ever vacillating balance of Nature.” That the dodo had become extinct was, consequently, not surprising. “Death,” they wrote, “is a Law of Nature in the Species as well as in the Individual.”

In time, however, we would learn a lot more about the dodo. In 1865, the first fossil was found, and science began to take a greater interest in its unique fate, both as the odd bird it had been and as an example of humankind’s boundless and irrevocable impact on all life on this planet. Since the end of the nineteenth century, countless books have been written about the dodo. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has made it iconic; it is doubtless one of the most widely recognized extinct species today. Furthermore, the dodo has become a symbolic creature, not only as a cautionary example of the reckless cynicism of humankind, but also as a metaphor for something outdated and obsolete. A dodo is a person who is stupid and clumsy and incapable of adapting to a new era, someone who has been rejected and forgotten, become irrelevant.

“Dead as a dodo,” as the expression goes. It may be that we will eventually say “dead as an eel” instead.

THAT MAY BE PREFERABLE TO OTHER CONCEIVABLE FATES. PERHAPS the eel will instead become something like Steller’s sea cow, a quickly fading memory of something odd and unfamiliar.

Steller’s sea cow was the name of a marine sirenian first described in the middle of the eighteenth century by the German scientist Georg Wilhelm Steller. It was a gigantic mammal, a languid, slow herbivore like its closest relatives, the dugong and the manatee. It had thick, bark-like skin and an undersize head relative to its enormous body, two small arms in front, and a whalelike tail in the back.

Georg Wilhelm Steller first spotted the animal during an expedition led by the Danish-Russian explorer Vitus Bering, in what would eventually be named the Bering Sea. It was Bering’s second expedition to the mostly unexplored region, and his mission, given to him by the Russian navy, was to sail across the sea and map the west coast of North America. Steller had on his own initiative, driven by curiosity and a thirst for adventure, traveled east through Russia to join Bering. He’d studied theology, botany, and medicine at the University of Wittenberg, accompanied a caravan of wounded Russian soldiers to Saint Petersburg, and secured a position as the personal physician to the archbishop of Novgorod. He was almost thirty and just married when he set off through vast Siberia in the winter of 1737, with his sights set on the Kamchatka Peninsula, where Vitus Bering was preparing for his expedition.

On May 29, 1741, the ship Saint Peter set off from Okhotsk with a crew of seventy-seven. It would be a disastrous journey in most respects. Almost immediately, the expedition encountered difficult weather, lost contact with its sister ship, the Saint Paul, and was forced to veer south across the sound toward the North American coast. Once they reached Alaska, the crew was already in poor shape, and many were suffering from scurvy. On top of everything else, Bering and Steller didn’t get along. Bering wanted to hurry up and map as much of the coast as they could and then turn back before the arrival of the autumn storms. Steller, for his part, wanted to do what he had come there to do: study the flora and fauna.

After about two months at sea, Bering developed scurvy, and it was decided the ship would immediately turn around and return to Kamchatka. But a violent storm intercepted them, and the ship ran aground on the reefs off an island that no one knew existed. There, in the breakers off the strange land, while most of the crew were lying unconscious in the damaged ship and the corpses of the already perished were being thrown overboard, an eager Steller immediately started planning his excursions. He had animals and plants to study. And it was there, on the island that would later be named Bering Island, just east of Kamchatka, that Georg Wilhelm Steller on November 8, 1741, first spotted a large herd of the previously unknown species of sea cow resting at the water’s edge.

It was clearly a magnificent sight, and Steller described the animals that would later be named for him in detail. From the navel up, they looked like large seals, he wrote, but below the navel they were more akin to fish. Their heads were round and not at all dissimilar from the buffalo’s. Their eyes were, despite the size of the animal, no larger than a sheep’s and had no eyelids. Their ears were hidden in the folds and furrows of their thick skin. Other than the wide tail, it lacked fins, which set it apart from the whale. “These animals live like cattle in herds in the sea,” Steller wrote. “They do nothing but eat.”

Steller not only described what the exotic sea cows looked like, what they ate, how they behaved, and how they reproduced. He also described in equal detail how fat and tasty they were, and that they were so plentiful they could have fed all of Kamchatka. He wrote that they showed no fear of humans at all. They didn’t try to escape when approached, and their only response when the starving members of the expedition caught them with large iron hooks and cut meat out of them while they were still alive was to sigh quietly.

What the sea cows lacked in survival instinct, Steller declared, they made up for in touching displays