“The bones are scarred and battered…Attached to the atlas vertebra [on] a faded label, it is possible to read, in robust typewritten letters, the words RHYTINA STELLERI…But the most arresting thing about this creature is not the marks left by human hand, but its size.” Iida Turpeinen, Beasts of the Sea

Everyone knows about the dodo. This bird had the misfortune to be tasty, fat and flightless, and to live on a remote Indian Ocean island by which point in their long-distance voyages, passing sailors were desperate for fresh food and water. Steller’s Sea Cow is less well known, but its story equally tragic. 

These gentle giants reached ten metres long and five tonnes in weight, about the size of a female African elephant. They spent their lives in carefree seclusion browsing the prolific kelp of the remote Commander Islands, tucked in an unvisited corner of the Bering Sea. It was their bad luck to be happened upon in 1742 by the hapless Captain Vitus Bering, after whom the islands and the sea are named.

Five months earlier, Bering set sail from Kamchatka, Russia’s eastern extremity, to seek land to the east. According to the naturalist on board, Georg Steller, whose detailed descriptions represent one of the only eyewitness accounts of the Sea Cow, Bering was a listless and incompetent leader. No sooner had they discovered Alaska than he wanted to leave, passing up opportunities to document the land, its people and nature. He also spurned vital chances to resupply with plants that might have kept the scurvy that gripped his crew at bay, and even worse, clean fresh water. 

Bering’s crew was sick and short-handed by the time, on the return voyage, their boat was caught in a violent November storm. After days of abject terror, they were driven ashore onto an undiscovered island, at which point luck ran out for Steller’s Sea Cow, and for Bering. He and many of his crew would perish here during a brutal winter, but Steller and others survived, built a new boat from the remains of the old, and sailed back to Kamchatka in August the following year. 

Steller recorded everything he could about the creatures that lived on the island, describing annoyances such as the “droves of blue foxes…that carried away my maps, book and ink…and worried me while I was writing”. He watched “the habits and ways of [the sea cows] daily for ten months from the door of my hut”. They always live in herds, he said, protecting the young in the middle. “They came so close to the shore I sometimes stroked their backs”. Family groups lived together, “male with one grown female and their tender offspring”. “[They] eat incessantly, and because they are so greedy, they keep their heads always underwater…When they raise their heads, as they do every four or five minutes, they blow out the air and a little water with such a snort as a horse makes…When their stomachs are full, some of them go to sleep, flat on their backs.”