In a world shaped by the control of trade routes, the discovery of navigable shortcuts through the Arctic had the potential to reshape the global power balance. This goes some way toward explaining why Catherine the Great’s Arctic expedition proceeded with all the secrecy of the Manhattan Project.
Englishman Martin Sauer was recruited as a translator for the 1785 Russian-backed Billings Arctic expedition. He survived nine years in the Arctic only to find himself embroiled in a dangerous game of 18th-century espionage, as he attempted to smuggle the expedition findings out of Russia.
Sauer had to smuggle the expedition’s findings out of Russia. This updated regional map, using those findings, was published in Germany in 1806. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The expedition
Exploring, mapping, and dominating the more distant regions of the world was the second-most popular game in 18th-century Europe, after horse racing. Already seeking to make Russia more like the Western European powers, and galvanized by the launch of France’s La Perouse Expedition, Catherine the Great moved to secure Russian holdings in the North.
Russia’s own expeditions and lands were obscure even to its ruler, partly due to the curious, long-term policy of secrecy surrounding Russian exploration. Catherine had relaxed this somewhat, allowing her Prussian friend and exploration consultant, Peter Pallas, to send some extracts of Russian expedition accounts to foreign academics. A great deal was still suppressed, including accounts of “the wanton cruelties committed by the first Russians to visit [the North Pacific].”
Secretly discovering a navigable passage through the Arctic wouldn’t just give them a powerful trade advantage. There was also a race to claim land without alerting any of the other powers. Russia needed a strong hold on whatever might be up there — accurate maps, planted flags, trading sites — before the rest of Europe even knew there was land to be claimed.
She appointed an English naval officer in his mid-20s to lead the endeavor.
Catherine the Great. Photo: Tretyakov Gallery
Joseph Billings receives his instructions
Joseph Billings was a humbly born Yarmouth sailor. We don’t know much of his early life, but he probably spent much of it in and around the sea. He joined Captain Cook’s final expedition to the Aleutian Islands as a teenager and later became a non-commissioned officer.
Russia and Britain had a naval alliance, and many British officers ended up in the Russian service. Billings was low-born, but he’d been with Cook in the Arctic, and that was good enough, I suppose. Billings shipped out to Russia and received a lieutenant’s commission in 1784. No sooner had he arrived than he was organizing and in charge of the upcoming Arctic expedition.
During this period, in St. Petersburg, he met and hired Martin Sauer. Sauer was an English polyglot acquainted with Pallas. Beyond that, we know practically nothing.
Alongside Sauer and Billings were a collection of scientists and naval officers. Dr. Carl Heinrich Merck, whose family would go on to form the well-known pharmaceutical company, signed on as naturalist. Their highest-ranking Russian was Lieutenant Gavril Sarychev, navigator.
Catherine set down three aims. First, to find the Northeast Passage, if possible. Second, to report on the very profitable Alaskan fur trade. Finally, to strengthen Russian claims in the region by planting government markers hither and yon. With those three goals in mind, nearly 150 men left St. Petersburg in October 1785, heading overland through Siberia.
Cook’s third voyage visited the Aleutian Islands, among many others. Billings was on the Resolution, left, alongside William Bligh (of mutiny on the Bounty fame) and George Vancouver (of Vancouver fame). Photo: Royal Museums Greenwich
March to the sea
The first stage of the expedition was a long journey through Siberia. Along the way, they met up with an old shipmate of Billings, John Ledyard. Ledyard, a New Englander, was in the middle of an ambitious one-man expedition through Russia, over the Bering Strait, and back to Virginia. The scheme was backed by Thomas Jefferson, British naturalist Joseph Banks, and the Marquis de Lafayette. But once he met Billings, he agreed to jump ship and work on their expedition instead.
They rendezvoused in Irkutsk, Siberia, where the expedition was picking up supplies. All seemed well until the city’s governor heard from the Empress. She ordered him to arrest Ledyard at once as a French spy and to send him back to Moscow under guard.
Sauer watched Ledyard be taken from the middle of a card game, thrown into a carriage, and spirited away. Fellow Cook voyage alumni and mutual acquaintance James Burney wrote that Catherine probably should have jailed Billings and made Ledyard commander instead. As far as historians are aware, Ledyard was not a French spy.
Billings carried on, and the expedition arrived in the Kolyma region. They were already within the Arctic Circle and planned to sail from there via the Bering Strait to the Pacific. Purpose-built ships Pallas and Yasashna, under Billings and Sarychev respectively, sailed in June 1787. By the end of the month, repeatedly pushed back by sea ice, they abandoned the attempt.
They sailed off into the Sea of Okhotsk, above. Photo: Shutterstock
Amid Arctic isles
The expedition pushed on overland to Okhotsk, a Far Eastern Siberian port, and built another two ships. The larger of the two was called the Glory of Russia, and the smaller was Good Intent. The road to the bottom of the ocean, like hell, is paved with good intentions.
Poor Good Intent didn’t even make it out of Okhotsk harbor. As Sauer relates it, the ship’s commander, Captain Hall, was of the firm opinion that the ship should not attempt to leave the harbor under present conditions. Billings then arrived to discuss the matter and determined to let the pilot — an official of the port whose role is to guide ships out to sea — decide. Hall made his case for staying, Billings for going, and the pilot sided with Billings. The ship was promptly wrecked, drowning one man.
One gets the impression, from Sauer’s account, that Billings’ leadership style left something to be desired. They carried on, though, moving Good Intent‘s crew over to Glory of Russia. The bulk of the party sailed off, island-hopping to the shores of the Bering Strait. Billings made another attempt at the Northeast Passage, and again was stymied by ice.
Perhaps sick of ships, given his luck with them, Billings decamped on the Chukotsk Peninsula with seven men and set off on foot. This was not a popular decision, and when officers presented their doubts about the plan to abandon exploration of America in favor of mapping the Russian coast, Billings replied with “petulant and illiberal retorts.”
The profiles of various Arctic islands, from Martin Sauer’s account.
Back to St. Petersburg
Sauer and the rest stayed with Sarychev while Billings marched through northern Chukotka. While definitely not the Northeast Passage, Billings did manage to explore a hitherto unknown region. They seem to have had a miserable time.
The party finally reached the other side of the peninsula after “undergoing everything that is bad,” as member John Main told Sauer. After disembarking, they set off into Chukotka, passing through the villages of the indigenous Chukchi people. Billings’ party, short on supplies, turned up in one village and demanded fuel, water, and hospitality. They were offended when these people asked for something in return. This sort of energy seems to have been how they approached the Chukchi the whole time, and it goes some way toward explaining how the party fared.
In short, they crossed the region in constant privation, freezing, starving, complaining of petty thefts by their guides, and narrowly avoiding the outbreak of violence.
Meanwhile, Sarychev and the crew went back to map the coast of St. Lawrence Island. Wintering in the Aleutians, they met up with Captain Hall, who used the remains of Good Intent to build a new vessel, the Black Eagle. Besides mapping, they spent much of their time that winter contracting scurvy and dying. In the spring, Glory of Russia, battered by ice and storms, was scuttled, and everyone piled into Black Eagle for the journey back to Yakutsk. There, they met up with Billings and finally returned to St Petersburg.
An account of extinction
Though their geographical discoveries were limited, the expedition did manage to bring back troubling, important accounts of a devastated region.
For hundreds of years, the fur trade was a massive part of the Russian economy. In fact, the Russian state, via independent fur traders and trading companies, demanded tribute in the form of furs from their Siberian (and now Alaskan) subjects. Starting in the mid-18th century, the sea otter was a key source of fur. Russian hunters and traders set up in Siberia, Alaska, and the Aleutian Islands and began extracting furs at a furious pace.
So the members of the Billings expedition were fairly horrified when they realized that after only a few decades, sea otter populations had dropped dramatically. “From the value of the skin having caused such devastation among them,” Sauer wrote, “fifteen years hence, there will hardly exist any more of this species.”
Naturalist Merck, who collected over 200 specimens across 120 species, 20 of them new to science, also noted the drastic decline of the sea otter. Even the naval men, Billings and Sarychev, noted the obvious loss.
In fact, by the 1820s, they were nearly extinct. The Russian government imposed restrictions, and their population started to recover. But when the United States bought Alaska in 1867, the trade resumed. By the early 20th century, there were only a few thousand sea otters left. Finally, several countries took action to stop the trade, and the sea otter, while still endangered, has partially recovered.
Before you feel superior to 18th-century fur traders for their short-sightedness in nearly hunting these guys to extinction, recall that we are currently oil-spilling them to extinction. Photo: United States Forestry Service
‘The wanton cruelties’
The fur trade was no less devastating to the region’s indigenous people. The Billings expedition, so unsuccessful in other ways, acted as whistleblowers for the widespread abuses of Aleut people at the hands of Russian fur traders.
On Kodiak Island, Billings’ expedition investigated rumored brutalities. A Russian merchant named Grigorii Shelikhov had established a trading post there and was currently petitioning the government for a monopoly on the Alaskan fur trade. What Billings’ men discovered was nothing short of horrifying.
Six years earlier, Shelikhov’s men had massacred some 500 Koniaga people. The Russian traders habitually held indigenous women and girls captive in order to force the men to work as slaves. In only a few years, the region’s native population had significantly decreased.
While officially civil, there was clear tension between the expedition and the company men. Billings even sent his Russian secretary, Vassiley Diakonoff, back to Irkutsk in chains, after Billings came to suspect him of disclosing “some secrets of the expedition” to Shelikhov. Sauer declines to comment further on this, leaving it somewhat mysterious.
The expedition members were not, to be clear, anti-colonialist. Billings and the men were very much in favor of Russian colonization. But they favored naval and state control, and saw the mistreatment of the natives, like the declining sea otter, as evidence of how private companies were mismanaging the region. The expedition’s report strongly condemned Shelikhov’s management, and he did not get his monopoly.
A visual document of their journey comes to us from Luсa Voronin, a Russian artist and engraver who accompanied the expedition. Voronin was interested in ethnographic illustrations, producing many portraits of indigenous people and settlements.
Suspicion in St. Petersburg
Those reports on the fur trade were internal only. As the Billings Arctic expedition stumbled back to St. Petersburg, their thoughts turned to the world at large. How much of what they’d seen and experienced would be sanctioned for publication, and who would get to put a name to it? Surveying the sick, bedraggled survivors, Billings became suspicious of one man in particular: his translator and secretary, Martin Sauer.
Sauer had caught a lingering fever in Siberia and had petitioned to be allowed to return to England to recover in a milder climate. But Billings was suspicious, not in the least because Sauer was currently in possession of a great deal of correspondence, records, and data, including Billings’ own diary. Billings wrote to his superiors that Sauer was planning to publish their secret documents, “before Her Imperial Majesty would like.”
A navigable trade route through the Arctic would give the nations that controlled it a massive economic and political advantage. Every bit of progress was valuable. Billings and his Russian sponsors wouldn’t have been the first to succumb to a degree of jealous paranoia. A few decades later, Arctic explorer Thomas Simpson died in a mysterious exchange of gunfire, which his brother (and 20th-century explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson) suspected had to do with Simpson’s missing notebook of geographical findings.
Then there are the reports on the fur trade, and the abuses which Catherine the Great had already made moves to quiet. Billings’ Admiralty and Russian government superiors agreed and granted permission to search the still-sick Sauer’s room.
St. Petersburg in 1794. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Sauer’s subterfuge
Billings went to Sauer’s room and ransacked it, searching for his papers. He found a few scattered notes, but none of the original documents. When he confronted Sauer, still lying in bed with fever, Sauer claimed to have burned them all.
Frustrated, Billings departed, and Sauer, given medical leave from the Russian service, quickly made his way to England. Russian government documents show that by this point, they believed Sauer had faked his illness entirely. If he did, he never admitted it. He definitely lied about burning the documents, though.
No one outside of Russia had heard news of the Billings expedition since 1790, when word of it had leaked out — possibly thanks to Ledyard, Billings’ old shipmate, who had eventually been deported to Poland. German press accounts complain of the “secretive darkness” surrounding the enterprise. So when Sauer published his complete account, in English, the exploration-curious public flocked to read it.
Their reactions help show why, exactly, the Russian government didn’t want an account like this published. British reviewers disparaged Russian Imperial rule in the North Pacific, condemning the mismanagement of both conquered subjects and colonial fur wealth.
As a literary travelogue, which Sauer had aspired to create, it was less well received. He abandoned his ambitions for further exploration and became a stockbroker. Billings courted the daughter of his naturalist patron, Peter Pallas, unsuccessfully. Pallas didn’t approve of a common Yarmouth sailor as a son-in-law. Maybe if he’d discovered the Northeast Passage instead of giving up.
