Winfried Sebald: After Nature

of the steam engine as

the first warm-blooded animal

created by humankind.

At the break of the following day,

St. Elijah’s Day,

Steller went ashore. Ten hours

Bering, with dread already imprinted

on his brow, had granted him

for a scientific excursion.

Now a deep blueness

pervaded both water and the forests

that grew right down

to the coast. Unperturbed

animals came close to Steller, black

and red foxes, magpies too, jays and

crows went with him on his way

across the beach. In the translucent darkness

between the trees he moved

with a tread more like hovering

over a cushion of moss a foot thick.

He came close to simply proceeding

towards the mountains, into

cool wilderness, but the constructs

of science in his head,

directed towards a diminution

of disorder in our world,

ran counter to that need.

Later, in a shelter made

out of joined fir-logs, he experienced

the effect of forsaken things

in a foreign space. A circular

drinking vessel of peeled-off bark,

a whetstone dotted with copper ore,

a fish-head paddle and

a child’s rattle of fired clay

he carefully selects, and in their place

leaves behind an iron kettle, a string

of many-coloured beads,

a little strip of Bokhara silk,

half a pound of tobacco and

a Chinese clay pipe.

After half a century this mute

exchange is still remembered,

as can be seen in a report by Commander Billings,

by an inhabitant of this remote region

with a laugh that’s a rustling

turned inwards.

The advice of the officers was

to make for Avatsha, keeping the course

as close as practicable to the fifty-third parallel

after the unanimous decision

to forgo any further exploration,

a simple calculation that rested

on nothing but unknown factors.

For almost a quarter of a year

the ship was tossed hither and thither

by hurricanes of a force

none in the team could recall

ever having experienced, on the Bering Sea

where there was nothing and no one but them.

All was a greyness, without direction,

with no above or below, nature

in a process of dissolution, in a state

of pure dementia. For days, in between

lulls, the ship motionless and

ever more and more damaged,

more tattered, the rigging more threadbare,

the sailcloth eaten away by salt.

The crew, stricken with

the delirium that comes of diseases

that entered their bodies, with eyes

drowning in exhaustion,

gums swollen like sponges,

joints suffused with blood,

liver puffed up, spleen puffed up

and with ulcers festering

just under the skin, day after day in God’s name

flung overboard sailors rotted away, till at last

there was scarcely a difference between

the living and the dead.

In dying the astra in human bodies

lose their quality, kind, substance

and essence, Steller, the physician, thinks,

what is dead has ceased to be living.

What does it mean, this physica, he asks,

what this iusiurandum Hippocratis,

what does surgery mean, what is our

skill and use when life

breaks apart and the physician

has neither might nor means? There—

in the night — with the moon

in its first November quarter,

a great wall of water drives

the ship onto the rocks.

Jammed there it lies, groans

for a while amid boulders

as though in its last extremity

it might yet reach dry land,

until a heavy wave

pushes it down into the stillness

of the lagoon behind the reef.

A white sickle the strand

curves in the dark, inland

the dunes overgrown with grasses

up to a plateau of shadows

under mountains in snowlight,

phosphorescent.

Four men carried Bering, when inch by inch

water had risen right into him,

on to land on a seat of ropes tied together,

leaned him against a rock that broke the wind’s

fury and made a roof out of the sails

of the St. Peter. Wrapped in greatcoats, furs

and cloaks, his face yellow-wrinkled, his mouth

toothless, a black ruin, plagued with boils and

lice all over his body, the captain observed,

full of contentment in the face of death,

the first labours towards the erection

of winter quarters in the lairs

of foxes dug in the dunes.

Steller brings Bering a soup

concocted of blubber and nasturtium roots

which, however, turning his head aside,

Bering refuses

with a blink of his eyes.

Let them now, he says,

just leave him to sink

into the sand. The wrens

are already hopping about on him.

Blessed are the dead, Steller

remembers. On December 8th

they tie the captain on to a plank

and push him down into the hole.

It is not Thy will, Lord, to abandon

to the wild beasts the souls

of them that profess Thee.

Rather for the faithful a meal shall

be prepared from Leviathan’s heart.

Steller, looking up, sees

the greenish-grey reflex from the ocean,

the Arctic water-sky,

under the clouds. A sign of

how far they still are

from land.

On August 13th

the ship built from the wreck

sails round the island’s outermost

promontory which with gentle hills and calm

outlines descends to the sea.

Glistening in lovely greenness

like the pasture slopes of the Alps

it lies in late summer’s light,

untouched, it seems, by man.

Seen from on board,

the land moves.

Time past

grows no more real

through sufferings endured.

Incomprehensible, too, on the horizon

above the blue

vapour spread over the land,

after four days at sea

the smoke trails from Asia’s volcanoes.

To get close to this vista

they tack beneath the coast,

at one-quarter of a knot per hour

southward a good week long,

by night pull at the oars, too,

until, on the twenty-fifth of the month,

they reach the harbour of Petropavlovsk,

its plundered blockhouses and stores.

In thanksgiving for the miracle of their release

and in accordance with Bering’s wish

they make a silver frame,

beaten out of the coins, left unspent

to the last, for St. Peter’s icon.

Six years went by

before the survivors of the expedition

received the order

to return to the capital.

But Steller a few days after their landfall

in the Bay of Avatsha

had detached himself from the corps

and with the Cossack Lepekhin

had set out on foot for the peninsula’s interior.

If it please Thee that we travel,

so in his mind he said, be Thou

our strength as we go,

our comfort on the way, shade

in the heat of noon,

light in darkness,

shelter from frost and rain,

conveyance at the hour of weariness,

help in extremity, so that

under Thy guidance

safely we may attain that place

to which we are drawn;

Thine be the care, Lord,

so that the stars propitiously

conjoin above us.

During what remained of the summer

Steller collects botanical specimens,

fills little bags with dried seed,

describes, classifies, draws,

sits in his black travelling tent,

happy for the first time in his life.

Thoma Lepekhin catches salmon,