Third Nature

Divining the Scientific Archive

By

Sandra Talbot

A THESIS SUPPORT PAPER SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF FINE ARTS

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART+ DESIGN

2020

©Sandra Talbot

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ABSTRACT

The dichotomy between the science and art worldviews provides a gateway through which
both artists and scientists can explore a personal and collective relationship with the world via the
platform of the archive. Scientists (like me) and artists (like me) can leverage scientific
collections—fossil compendia, field notebooks, nautical logs, herbaria sheets, genetic data and
imagery, or the myriad other objects collected or created during scientific activities and
expeditions—and archives of these collections can be viewed simultaneously as repositories of
knowledge, ways to satisfy the desire for order and control, transmitters of wonder, and mirrors of
ourselves, of the collector, and of culture and society.
For the past thirty years, I have participated in scientific expeditions to treeless, windswept
islands of Alaska’s Aleutian Island Archipelago and allied island groups. Landfall was made on a
number of those same islands during the ill-fated 1741 Second Kamchatkan Expedition. This
experience has provided me an unparalleled opportunity to place imagery emerging from archives
generated via my own lived experience straddling the 20th and 21st centuries within the context of
archived records and the lived experience of 18th century scientific explorers. My research tracks
archives of the voyage of the packet boat, St. Peter, which carried Captain Commander Bering’s
crew from Kamchatka to southeast Alaska and, after many trials, including sickness and death of
the Commander, back to Kamchatka, during 1741-1742. My own field research activities and
archives—mostly materials from botanical expeditions conducted between 1988 and 2019—span
much of that 18th century track, and I use in my art-making those archived science-made materials
to explore the impact of scientific expeditions and subsequent colonial expansion on the species
and indigenous people that occupied and continue to occupy these remote treeless islands. In an
example of ArtScience, I leverage insight emerging from art-making, science-making and my
own lived experience to formulate and test a new hypothesis to solve a mystery that has puzzled
nine generations of biologists exploring these harsh but beautiful geographies: the species identity
of an unknown animal called Steller’s sea monkey.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................................. ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ......................................................................................................... iii
LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................................. iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ....................................................................................................... vi
1

CHAPTER 1. Introduction............................................................................................1

2

CHAPTER 2: Chasing the Wind: The Second Kamchatkan Expedition ...................21
1.1 The ‘Illusion Island Archipelago’ .........................................................................21
1.2 Georg Wilhelm Steller and the Second Kamchatkan Expedition .........................25
1.2.1 Tales of the Cryptid: Divining Steller’s Sea Ape ..................................29
1.2.2 The Sea Ape, AKA the Sea Monkey .....................................................36

3

CHAPTER 3: Chirikof and Simeonof Islands: Invasion of Cattle and Daisies ...........42
2.1 Chirikof Island: AKA Land of Vicious Feral Cattle .............................................43
2.1.1 Landfall, Chirikof Island, 1 August, 1741: Bering Expedition..............44
2.1.2 Landfall, Chirikof Island, July 13-21, 2013: Botanical Studies ............46
2.2 Simeonof Island, Shumagin Island Group, Land of the Ox-eye Daisy ................49
2.2.1 Landfall, Shumagin Island Group, August 1741: Bering Expedition ....49
2.2.2 20th and 21st Century Landfall, Simeonof Island: Botanical Studies .....52

4

CHAPTER 4: Murder Point and Massacre Bay, Attu: Invasion .................................60

5

CHAPTER 5: Island Hopping: Ox-eye Daisies on Adak Island .................................66

6

CHAPTER 6: A Segue (Divining Steller’s Sea Ape, Continued) ...............................75
6.1 A New Hypothesis ................................................................................................76

CHAPTER 7: Coda: What Does a Sea Monkey Have to Do with a Field of Daisies? ...........81
WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................................83

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Susan Hiller, Homage to Joseph Beuys. Ongoing from 1969. ..................................4
Figure 2. Mark Dion, New England Cabinet of Marine Debris (Lyme Art Colony), 2019 ...... 5
Figure 3. Mark Dion, Brontosaurus, 2016 ................................................................................6
Figure 4. Tacita Dean, The Russian Ending, 2001. ..................................................................6
Figure 5. Sandra Talbot, Abandoned Projects, 2018. ...............................................................7
Figure 6. Sandra Talbot, Book of Falling Angels, 2019............................................................9
Figure 7. Sandra Talbot, Book of Falling Angels, detail, 2019. .............................................10
Figure 8. Sandra Talbot, Burnt City Grid I, and Burt City Grid II, 2019. ..............................11
Figure 9. Sandra Talbot, Burnt City Grid I and II, detail, 2019..............................................12
Figure 10. Sandra Talbot, Situs Relictus, 2019. ....................................................................13
Figure 11. Sandra Talbot, Three Towers, 2019. .....................................................................14
Figure 12. Sandra Talbot, This is Not Nature, 2018-2019. ...................................................15
Figure 13. Sandra Talbot, cristae acustica, 2019. .................................................................19
Figure 14. Tracks of the St. Peter and St. Paul ......................................................................21
Figure 15. Sandra Talbot, Wunderkammer. Steller’s Curse, 2020 .........................................31
Figure 16. Sandra Talbot, Wunderkammer. Steller’s Curse, detail ......................................32
Figure 17. Sandra Talbot, Steller’s Bestiary. The Promyshlenniki’s Legacy, 2020 ..............33
Figure 18. Sandra Talbot, Steller’s Bestiary. The Promyshlenniki’s Legacy, detail ............34
Figure 19. Sandra Talbot, Memento Domine Luter Mare, 2020. ............................................35
Figure 20. Digital image showing the tracings of St. Peter’s track. .......................................38
Figure 21. Gessner’s Simia marina, sea monkey. ..................................................................40
Figure 22. Cattle trail in bluff vegetation, southwestern Chirikof Island. ..............................47
Figure 23. Digital images of herbarium sheets of specimens. ................................................48
Figure 24. Sofron Khitorovo’s sketch and modern map of the Shumagin Island Group. ......51
Figure 25. Sandra Talbot, Invaders Invading, 2019. ............................................................53
Figure 26. Sandra Talbot, First Nature, Becoming Second Nature, Daisy, 2020. ..................54
Figure 27. Sandra Talbot, Lusus naturae 3, Plot 9, View 1, 2020 ..........................................55
Figure 28. Sandra Talbot, Lusus naturae 3, Plot 9, View 2, 2020 ..........................................56
Figure 29. Sandra Talbot, Daisy Trail, 2020. .........................................................................57

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Figure 30. Sandra Talbot, Tracks, 2020. .................................................................................57
Figure 31. River otters swimming in Simeonof Harbor. ........................................................59
Figure 32. Sandra Talbot, collecting specimens on Murder Point, Massacre Bay. ................62
Figure 33. Japanese peace memorial at the top of Engineer Hill............................................64
Figure 34. Sandra Talbot, A Deeper Peace, 2011...................................................................64
Figure 35. Sandra Talbot, The Strand at Massacre Bay. In progress. ...................................66
Figure 36. Sandra Talbot, Daisy Fields, Abandoned NSGA Site, Adak, I and II, 2020. .........68
Figure 37. Sandra Talbot, still frames from video, Dreams of Conquest, 2020 .....................69
Figure 38. Sandra Talbot, Strange Taxonomies, 2020 ............................................................72
Figure 39. Sandra Talbot, The Invasion of Adak, 2020 ..........................................................74
Figure 40. Sandra Talbot, Steller’s Sea Monkey? 2009. Two views. ....................................76
Figure 41. Sandra Talbot, Steller’s Bestiary: Simia marina, 2020. ........................................80

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to acknowledge that I live and write on the traditional and contemporary homeland
of the Dena’ina people, and work on the historical lands of the Unangan and Alutiiq people. I am
thankful for the guidance of my instructors at Emily Carr University of Art and design,
particularly my advisor, Ingrid Koenig, throughout my degree program, Mimi Gellman, who
served as my internal reviewer and provided numerous insightful comments to my thesis
supporting document. Julie Decker served as my external examiner. Joseph Cook hosted me at
the Museum of Southwestern Biology; Mike Conti documented my MFA exhibition and provided
tutoring in video editing. Kevin Sage facilitated image documentation and Yvette Gillies
facilitated scientific imagery archival. I thank the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U. S.
Geological Survey for making archived imagery of scientific expeditions to islands of western
Alaska available. I am grateful for the support of my graduate cohort and the constant support
and encouragement of my husband, Stephen S. Talbot.

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CHAPTER 1. Introduction

“Our idea of an objective world is a shared hypothesis.”
(Grayson 12).

There is, for at least some of us, a collective desire, hope, belief, or certainty that we live
in a knowable, factual and logically consistent world. I am a research scientist by vocation,
practicing western scientific methodology within my professional life for over 40 years. One of
the goals of western science1 is to build knowledge and investigate, understand, and explain the
natural world largely within this worldview, a worldview in which things that are currently
unknown can become known, a worldview underpinning scientific research methodologies, a
paradigm that is simultaneously enabling and constraining, a conceptual scaffolding, a null
hypothesis that is rarely tested2. However, philosophers and critical theorists know the world to
be subjective, contingent, and constructed (Crimp 200), a fabricated narrative (Foucault, “The
History of Sexuality” 193). We can argue whether this worldview represents the null hypothesis
within the world of art, but certainly it is a worldview to which we, as artists, are regularly
exposed. Since I have occupied the world of art (via my avocation) for as long as I’ve occupied
the world of science (via my vocation), I have straddled these two worldviews for most of my
adult life. Obviously, this has the potential to leave me conflicted at times, and to engender a
certain amount of compartmentalization in the way I feel about the acquisition, dissemination and
archival of knowledge. Of certainty, however, is that worldviews are always subjective, even
those that attempt to view the world objectively.

1

Unlike indigenous science, which does not distinguish between the sacred and the empirical (Nakashima and Roué
315), is generally more intuitive and holistic, and typically passes on knowledge orally from one generation to the
next via elders, western science is considered positivist, materialist, supposedly objective and certainly quantitative,
and is based on the transmission of academic literature (Mazzocchi 3). The entirety of my academic science training
and subsequent vocational activities have been conducted solely within the western scientific worldview (until
recently) but my pre-academic scientific learning benefitted from indigenous science approaches via the guidance by
and input from family friends.
2

Quantum physicists hypothesize multiple realities and continue to test that (for example, see Proietti et al.,
“Experimental Test of Local Observer Independence”).

2
Artist Tiffany Shafran suggests that the dichotomy in these worldviews provides a
gateway through which artists, like scientists, can explore a personal and collective relationship
with the world via the platform of the archive (19). Scientists (like me) and artists (like me) can
share the “modality of knowledge-making” (19) via the scientific collection—of fossil
compendia, herbaria sheets, genetic data, or myriad other objects “of the most diverse forms”
(Daston 2)—and archives of these collections can be viewed simultaneously as repositories of
knowledge, ways to satisfy the desire for order and control, transmitters of wonder, and mirrors of
ourselves, of the collector, and of culture and society. Science historian Lorraine Daston refers to
the archives of science as the ‘third nature’—that which endures from the ‘second nature,’ the
“scientific work of hypothesizing, testing, explaining, and predicting” (1), winnowed by scientific
empiricism from ‘first nature,’ the “teeming, tangled complexity of nature” (1). Scientific
archives contain those things that endure after the stuff of second nature “slips from science
present to science past” (1) and represent the scaffolding upon which scientific history has been
written. Within the spheres of contemporary art and cultural theory, the significance of archives,
including scientific archives, has steadily increased, and in his introduction to “The Archive,” art
historian Charles Merewether credits artists and cultural theorists with positing “some of the most
searching questions…[about] what constitutes an archive and what authority it holds in relation to
its subject” (10). Scientific archives can be re-examined, redefined and reinvented by artists; in
this way, artists can redefine and rewrite scientific history.
But who decides what goes into scientific archives, what emerges from those archives, and
when? Certainly, public institutions, such as universities, museums, government bureaucracies,
and libraries represent a large proportion of these gatekeepers of archival knowledge. I have
recently encountered a certain level of conflict associated with the archival of a two-decade
corpus of scientific documents, images, and other data repositories that I’ve generated. A specific
(but not the only) quarrel has been about the circumscription of required taxonomies of federal
data managers who seek to impose more order and control over archives than can be credited to
the research methodologies used in their genesis. This has led me to question how both deluges
of data and gaps in scientific archives can obscure meanings or methodologies, and to think about
how manifest memory can be ignored, or lost, or muddled, or altered. This conflict has spurred
the most recent investigations in my artistic practice, which have been to make manifest through
imagery my explorations of ignored, hidden or forgotten knowledge in scientific archives.

3
In some cases, this knowledge has been simply abandoned or lost: the research is
inconclusive or changes trajectory, scientists leave positions (some to become artists) and
abandon their research. Scientists can die before they can publish all their research results.
Funding can be cut off before the work is done. Research institutions can be shuttered.
Sometimes, archived knowledge is held in deep storage due to the specific classification
structures assembled by public institutions that archive collections in the public’s name, and yet
selectively preserve and interpret those very materials in a way that determines what eventually
becomes public knowledge. Opportunism and competition can lead scientists to assert ownership
over their findings; Florence Hsia recounts how the heirs of Royal Astronomer James Bradley,
considering them commodities, hoarded his observations for almost a century after his death in
1762 (34). Thus, I am interested in what is not obvious, what has not been made public, what is
held outside the scientific canon of knowledge or the specific narrative told by the institutions. I
am interested in what is omitted due to neglect, or forgetfulness, or to reinforce what Tiffany
Shafran calls a “unified hegemonic narrative” (19) that serves to strip archived objects of any of
the initial sense of wonder emanating from their creation or discovery.
My current art practice shares some commonalities with Susan Hiller’s (Figure 1), Mark
Dion’s (Figures 2 and 3) and Tacita Dean’s (Figure 4) appropriation of scientific methods of
collecting, ordering and presenting objects. These artists leverage stochasticity3 (or apparent
stochasticity) in the juxtaposition of disparate objects in their discursive platform of the archive to
examine the tension between knowing and feeling that emerges with the discovery or creation of
‘scientific’ objects. In some cases, I also recontextualize actual archival material, either
duplicated, or discarded. Like them, I am interested in the connection between the archives and
the transmission of a sense of wonder. How can the archive restore the world-as-wonder, or can
it? Can “wonder and wonders still seize us” (Daston and Park 365), much less breach the
dichotomy between art and science? Is the imperative to wonder as seen in the West truly
imperative (Buckingham 55), or does it emerge from the same hierarchical ontologies wielded in
the collection, ordering and archiving of objects by the institutions? Would flat ontologies
(DeLanda 58) remove some critical essence, by transforming the wonders buried in scientific
The word ‘stochasticity,’ which derives from the Greek word stókhos that means “pertaining to chance” (Parzen 7),
refers to the lack of predictable order or plan. The word ‘stochasticity’ is often used as a synonym of the word
‘randomness’ but the word ‘stochastic’ is typically applied to analyses, processes and/or systems and the word
‘random’ is typically applied to a variable.
3

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“Archives of Wonder[s]” (Shafran 19) into just more things among things, “Wonders Without
Wonder” (Buckingham 54)? Are we even ever able to escape from the anthropocentrism that
influences our worldviews and defines for us what we find full of wonder, wonder-ful; is there
such a thing as an objective being in the world or, for that matter, in the universe?

http://www.susanhiller.org/otherworks/homage_beuys.html

Figure 1. Susan Hiller, Homage to Joseph Beuys. Series of feltlined cabinets containing antique bottles of water collected by the
artist around the world: ongoing from 1969. 43¼ x 75¼ inches.
Figure removed due to copyright restrictions.

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Figure 2. Mark Dion, New England Cabinet of Marine Debris (Lyme Art
Colony), 2019. Cabinet; wood, glass, metal, assorted marine debris, plastic,
rope, ceramics. 103 ½ x 50 5/8 x 25 3/8 inches. Used with permission,
courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles
(file name: TBG 20353).

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Figure 3. Mark Dion, Brontosaurus, 2016. Epoxy resin, tar, wood
and various objects. 71 x 75 x 25 inches (overall); 24 x 60 x 24 inches
(pedestal). Used with permission, courtesy the artist and Tanya
Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles (file name: TBG 17015).

https://art.daimler.com/artwork/tacita-dean-the-russianending-2001/

Figure 4. Tacita Dean, The Russian Ending, 2001. Photogravure,
20 parts (9 shown here), each 21 ¼ x 31 ¼ inches. Figure removed
due to copyright restrictions.

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My recent artistic process has centered on the archive or collection (or archived
collections) as a medium for the transmission of wonder and the revelatory knowledge that
emerges from a focus on things that are hidden, and the conflation of boundaries between the
artistic and western scientific worldviews via the collection of objects that exist just outside the
border between what is known, and what is unknown, between what is seen, and what is unseen.
My science practice has provided me with access to many such archives, either through my own
scientific activities, such as laboratory or fieldwork, scientific expeditions, and wildlife
rehabilitation, or through similar activities of colleagues or historical figures. My work leverages
both 2-D (drawing, painting, digital) and 3-D (various metal and concrete casting and
assemblage) methods that typically incorporate materials cast off from scientific, industrial or
natural processes or archived materials. Six artworks illustrate my most recent practice:
•

Abandoned Projects (Figure 5) references the development of scientific research projects
that are subsequently abandoned and left to gather dust.

Figure 5. Sandra Talbot, Abandoned Projects, 2018. Charwood,
Styrofoam, concrete, glue, tape, clipboards and other found objects,
plaster and gesso. 20 x 30 inches.

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•

Book of Falling Angels (Figures 6 and 7) transforms archived x-ray images of injured wild

birds4 admitted for care into a wildlife rehabilitation center—the Bird Treatment and Learning
Center in Anchorage Alaska—where I volunteer as a clinician. The artwork, which was included
in an exhibition5 in June 2019, involved the alteration of x-ray imagery collected classically (via
radiography) or digitally, transfer of the imagery to steel plates—grounds with much greater
longevity than original films—with surfaces that were distressed using bleach, and assembly into
an accordion book using steel hardware. In addition to exploring relationships between humans
and non-humans and predator/prey relationships, the piece illumes the liminal space between life
and death.

4

I obtained most of the initial x-ray imagery from a colleague, Lisa Pajot, who also volunteers for the clinic; the birds
are those she cares for and who in turn partner with her giving presentations in support of the clinic’s education
program. As the main bird in the piece, a bald eagle named Petra, died several years ago, I will be giving this piece
to Lisa as a memorial to Petra. I recently purchased the book “Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st Century
Naturalist” that, to my surprise, included an image of a lithograph by Dion of several x-rays of raptors, including one
with a broken wing (Erickson, 52). Dion’s lithographs were included in an exhibition, Raptor, held in 2000, at
Mildred’s Lane, Beach Lake, Pennsylvania; an example can be seen at https://serpentinegalleries.myshopify.com/products/mark-dion-raptor. I am unsure whether I should be disappointed that my use of
the x-ray image of Lisa’s raptors (owl, eagle, magpie), and the single wild goshawk in the Book, is unoriginal (Dion’s
lithographs, unknown to me, preceded the date of my work), or proud that I independently share similar approaches
with such an accomplished artist, or accept (as has been suggested by wiser minds than mine) the existence of a
collective unconscious.
5

Birds on the Edge, International Gallery of Contemporary Art, Anchorage, Alaska, June 1-28 , 2019.

9

Figure 6. Sandra Talbot, Book of Falling Angels, 2019. Galvanized steel, digitally-altered
x-ray images, acrylic, charcoal, stainless steel, zinc hardware. 12 x 42 inches. Each ‘page’
is 8 x 12 inches.

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Figure 7. Sandra Talbot, Book of Falling Angels, 2019. Detail views.

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•

In Burnt City Grid I and Burnt City Grid II (Figures 8 and 9), I house an alien and

enigmatic landscape within a recognizable museum archival presentation to engender an
understanding of the potential of climate change-exacerbated wildfires to utterly destroy human
habitations. Burnt City Grid uses charwood created during the volcanic-like process of casting
aluminum into a wooden mold and incorporates stones collected from riverbeds in Alaska.

Figure 8. Sandra Talbot, Burnt City Grid I, and Burnt City Grid II, 2019.
Charwood, stones, aluminum in museum archival boxes. Each is 17 x 24 x
2.5 inches.

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Figure 9. Sandra Talbot Burnt City Grid I (left) and Burnt City Grid II (right), detail, 2019.
Charwood, stones, aluminum in museum archival boxes. Each is 17 x 24 x 2.5 inches.

•

Situs Relictus (Figure 10) and Three Towers (Figure 11) address the resilience of Nature

after humans have retreated, incorporating into a collection of concrete or wood-cast aluminum
‘buildings’ naturalia (stones, broken branches and leaves) recovered and archived from ‘real’
wounded ecologies, and artificialia cast off from industrial processes and laboratory experiments,
reference books, and archived charwood. The layers of concrete and leaves in Situs Relictus
references the passage of time and the cyclic nature of ecological change. The addition of mosses,
to the ‘buildings’ comprising Three Towers refer to the successional role that bryophytes play in
the revegetation of blasted landscapes.

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Figure 10. Sandra Talbot, Situs Relictus, 2019. Concrete, stones, charwood,
reference books, birch leaves, burned spruce branches. 36 x 36 inches. This art
incorporates remnants of prior sculptures destroyed during the November 2018
7.2 earthquake centered approximately 7 km northwest west of Anchorage.

14

Figure 11. Sandra Talbot, Three Towers, 2019. Wood cast aluminum, concrete,
stones, charwood, Hylocomium splendens (moss). 18 x 26 inches overall.

15

•

This is Not Nature (Figure 12) incorporates aluminum and bronze castings of

dried plant materials from a co-worker’s collection of dried fruit leftover from non-eaten
lunches (as such, this represents a collection archived by a scientist, not a scientific archive
per se). The cast pieces are arranged in a series of perhaps familiar, but not quite
recognizable artifacts meant to represent the spoils of a far-off-future scientific expedition to
discover what life on a distant past on Earth was like. Like other works, this piece functions

Figure 12. Sandra Talbot, This is Not Nature, 2018-2019. Cast aluminum, stones, acrylic blocks.
Various sizes (1 x 3.5 inches to 2.5 x 2.5 inches), without (left top) or with (right top) vitrine
cabinet; various used and alternative ‘artifacts (bottom right and left).

16
as a parody of scientific archives, mocking the tendency of scientists (in this case, archaeologists,
paleontologists and anthropologists) to erect entire cultures or ecosystems based on just a single
or few artifacts.
With each of these artworks—even the satirical pieces—I sought to evoke a sense of
wonder while placing the work within a traditional museum-archive, tableau, or scientific project
management framework.
While the archive can be considered a repository of historical knowledge and memory (the
Age of Discovery’s “Knowledge of All Particulars” of Richard Hooke 6), the archive cannot
reconstruct a complete knowledge or memory. That is, in addition to the subjective nature of
archival construction and the archives’ capture by the dominant culture, there will always be a
‘memory-crisis’ (Terdiman vii) regardless of the ‘completeness’ of an archive and an underlying
desire to ensure future knowledge in the face of finitude (Derrida). Yet unanswered, at least for
me, is whether this ‘memory-crisis’ can be leveraged within an image-making strategy to promote
a sense of wonder, both in the unusual/uncanny/inexplicable, and in the mundane. As well, the
archive cannot be considered as simply “sites of knowledge retrieval but [also] of knowledge
production” (Stoler 87); archives are not things, but “epistemological experiments” (90). In their
co-edited book “Beyond the Archive,” Gesa Kirsch and Liz Rohan trace trajectories of research
that extend ‘beyond the archive’ (1-9) as it is understood traditionally, encouraging the exposé of
nonlinear and fragmentary foundations of the archive within the context of autobiography, and
problematizing our notions of authorship, textuality and material of the archive. In “The
Historical a priori and the Archive,” Foucault refers to the power of archives to represent the past
and determine the relationship among their contents; the archive determines what we know,
regardless of the relationship between the “history that is given…[and] of things actually said”
(127). Chuck Dyke, while acknowledging that our “familiarity with the turf will help turn up the
artifacts” (105), cautions that that same familiarity is “one of the controlling contingencies…[w]e
are no doubt predisposed to extract certain artifacts and ignore others” (105). As such, my
familiarity with scientific archives may predispose me to select and reconceptualize archives that
fit within my scientific worldview. That worldview, which pays so much attention to precise
details, may also predispose me (as it has other scientists) to miss the larger impacts of more
granular work; it also predisposes me to ignore the vantage point of other, non-human individuals.

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Even more difficult than stepping out of a western scientific worldview is then stepping
out of the human worldview. Many eminent scientists, including E. O. Wilson and Charles
Darwin, attempt to (or, in Darwin’s case attempted to): Wilson via concepts introduced in
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, and, later, Biophilia, and Darwin via his comparative
evolutionary theories and tendency toward anthropomorphism. Behavioralist Samuel Barnett
criticized Darwin’s tendency to anthropomorphize animals (210), although of course care must be
taken to avoid anachronistic thinking; Darwin worked and thought in the late 19th century, a very
different world than the one inhabited by Barnett in the mid-20th century, and as a scientific
naturalist, Darwin also lived in a completely different cognitive world, which makes his
anthropomorphizing seem astonishing to modern scientist. Alternatively, Michael Ghiselin
downplayed Darwin’s anthropomorphizing, assigning Darwin’s intent as metaphorical rather than
literal. Darwin’s tendency to regard non-human species on human terms may have seemed quaint
or metaphorical, leading some to ignore it (as indigenous people’s views about our relationship to
non-human animals were long ignored), but Eileen Crist suggests that Darwin’s intent was as a
realistic appraisal of the evolutionary continuity of animal (including human animals) life (12).
We cannot know what was in Darwin’s mind, but I suspect that the ability to hold true multiple
possibilities within the mind, simultaneously (and be comfortable with the ambiguity that
engenders) is an ability of both great scientists, and great artists.
While guarding against these tendencies to view the world hierarchically from an
anthropocentric viewpoint via the western scientific worldview, I continue to be drawn toward
archives that are pertinent to my lived experience, even those archives that were constructed
centuries ago. Scientific archives are not just about the memories of “our wild, discontinuous,
ever-changing past…[but are also]…as much about future as about the past, laying up stores…for
generations to come” (Daston 3). How do I use art to draw a trace between my current scientific
life to the lives of scientists (or, perhaps, protoscientists) that sailed the same routes that I have?
My thesis research was guided first by explorations of archived scientific materials
associated with those stored or recorded by myself or by other scientists (both acquaintances and
historical) involved in scientific research on non-human species in Alaska. These have included
museum archives—including a two-week internship at the Museum of Southwestern Biology in

18
November, 20196—as well as publicly available US state and federal databases and other online
archives, records/materials not yet formally archived, including laboratory or field notebooks, and
translations of historical (18th century) journals and archived documents published in the late 19th
and early 20th century. I have been particularly interested in materials archived as part of
scientific expeditions. Among archives, I sought those that reference unexplained sightings or
events, have the potential to shift the boundaries between the known and the unknown, or that
subvert the ‘order of nature’ and that engender a sense of wonder, either through
awe/astonishment, or “logical perplexity” (Bogost 121). My methodology sought to transform
traditional scientific didacticism and ideological structure (such as hierarchical ontologies) to
expose the granular nature of meaning-making that can arise from the presentation or
juxtaposition of fragmentary material, documents imagery, or experiences. I explored imagery
gathered from the viewpoint of experimental subjects (rather than solely the viewpoint of the
scientist), or unexpected or inexplicable concurrences and marginal spaces that came to exist on
the outermost limits of scientific investigation, including archives associated with
cryptozoological sightings in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, including records of
Thunderbirds in Alaska, Sasquatch in the Pacific Northwest, and, ultimately, Georg Steller’s ‘Sea
Ape’ (Steller 82-83).
Although my artistic practice has been primarily in sculpture, I untethered myself from
solely sculptural imagery, leveraging where possible or practical actual archival material or
facsimiles. For example, my interim thesis exhibition involved printing photographic imagery
from lost-then-found scientific archives onto bleached-distressed galvanized steel plates,
construction of sealed boxes that housed the original archival material (scanning electron
microscope [SEM] radiograph films) and audio files of archived, publicly available recordings of
calls of crickets and katydid species closely related to the subjects depicted in the films (Figure
13).

6

The Mammals Curator at the Museum of Southwestern Biology, Dr. Joseph Cook, was previously Curator of
Mammals at the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, hosted the internship.

19

Figure 13. Sandra Talbot, cristae acustica, 2019. Installation, mixed media (cardstock,
bronze, clipboard, galvanized steel, acoustic files, ink, charcoal, polyacrylic. Plinth (left):
39 x 29 x 18 wide; boxes (left) 4.5 x 5.5 x 2.5 inches; steel plates (right) 12 x 12 inches
each.
In that interim exhibition, the subject matter (SEM imagery of mechanoreceptors, or
cristae acustica, associated with the tympana [hearing apparatus] of three groups of orthopteran
[in this case, crickets] species) of the lost-then-found archival materials was not immediately
apparent although I provided clues in the form of scientific nomenclature, the title of the exhibited
work (cristae acustica) and the archived acoustic files. My own ability to fairly quickly
determine the source of the imagery in these lost-then-found archives was due to my familiarity
with biological taxonomic conventions and technologies associated with imagery processes
(radiography) commonly used during the mid-to-late 1900s, yet the information I used to divine
those archived materials was and remains available to the curious among us. Transmission of the
lost archived knowledge via the imagery in cristae acustica was intentionally obscured to
encourage the viewer to seek the hidden knowledge, if desired, using contemporary technology,
such as QR codes and internet search engines.
Considering the concepts introduced here and via my ongoing artistic explorations, and
within the context of my own lived experience as a participant in scientific expeditions and the
subsequent archival materials already available to me, my graduate research has represented a

20
continued exploration of the idea that the archive is a representation of the fissure between the
desire for a rational, ordered universe and the reality that the world is subjective, contingent and
constructed. In an intersecting trajectory, I examined my own scientific explorations to delve into
the idea that wonder is a liminal condition that can be explored within the discursive platform of
the scientific archive. I explore these concepts by situating them within a specific geography that
has been the target of my own field expeditions since 1988: treeless, windswept islands of
southwestern Alaska, including Chirikof Island, the westernmost island of the Kodiak Island
Archipelago; Simeonof Island, the southernmost island of the Shumagin Island group off the
southern shoreline of the Alaska Peninsula; and various islands of the Aleutian Island
Archipelago. I have participated in scientific expeditions to each of these islands during the late
20th and now early 21st centuries, and all were noted during the ill-fated 1741 Second Kamchatkan
Expedition. This has provided me an unparalleled opportunity to place imagery emerging from
archives generated via my own lived experience straddling the 20th and 21st centuries within the
context of archived records and the lived experience of scientific explorers of the 18th century.
Here, I follow a map (Figure 14) that tracks the voyage of the packet boat, St. Peter, which
carried Captain Commander Bering’s crew from Kamchatka to southeast Alaska and, after many
trials, including sickness and death of the Commander, back to Kamchatka during 1741-1742.
My own field research activities and emerging archives—mostly materials from botanical
expeditions conducted between 1988 and 2019—straddle much of that 18th century track, and I
use in my art-making those archived science-made materials, to explore the impact of scientific
expeditions on the species, including indigenous people, occupying the Aleutian Island
Archipelago and allied island systems of Alaska.

21

Figure 14. Tracks of the St. Peter and St. Paul of the Second Kamchatkan Expedition,
from Kamchatka to southeastern Alaska, and back. This thesis addresses only the track of
the St. Peter. Image 431270MAD676 used with permission of Clipart.com

CHAPTER 2. Chasing the Wind: The Second Kamchatkan Expedition of 1733-1741
“Years ago, when I was very young, I crossed the North Pacific from Vancouver to Japan;
and one day, as our ship rounded the top of the great circle, I noticed a string of strange
bare mountains rising out of the sea along the northern horizon. They resembled heaps of
smoking slag; the sun, striking their sides, gave them a greenish cast like verdigris on
copper. I asked a fellow passenger what they were. “Illusions,” I thought he said, but
now I realize he said they were the Aleutians.” (Ford 3).

The ‘Illusion Island Archipelago’
To me, the Aleutian Islands remain as “illusory and unreal” (Ford 3) as they were to
naturalist and historian Corey Ford, even after my thirty summers of botanical fieldwork on the
Archipelago sensu stricto7, on Simeonof Island in the Shumagin Island group, on Chirikof Island
In reference herein to the Aleutian Archipelago, the term sensu stricto (Latin for ‘in the strict sense’) refers solely
to the geography of the approximately 1,900 km-long island archipelago chain in that runs from Unimak Island
immediately to the west of the Alaska Peninsula, through Attu Island, the farthest western island of the Near Island
7

22
west of the Kodiak Archipelago, and on the Pribilof Islands in Bering Sea. My field research has
been conducted largely in terrestrial systems, and terrestrial systems in the Aleutians are found on
Murray Morgan’s ‘islands of the smokey sea’—the wild oceans of the Arctic. The Bering Sea is
located to the north of the Aleutian Archipelago, and the North Pacific Ocean to the south; it is
here that the sea ‘breaks its back’ (Ford). It is also here that the lost thread of my childhood
wonder—gathered up while wandering the boreal forests surrounding Fairbanks and the
manzanita-oak scrublands comprising the foothills of California’s Sierra Mountains but stretched,
then unraveled, during my young adult years in the military and the university—was found again.
For all those years I accompanied my husband, a U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS)
botanist who specializes in Aleutian flora and vegetation ecology. From 1988 to 2008, the late
Professor of Science bryologist Dr. Wilf Schofield (University of British Columbia) represented
the third core member of our expedition team. Thus, these expeditions were more than scientific
expeditions, they were a part of a shared passion for wild places and species living there.
Most of our field seasons began and ended on Adak Island, in the middle of the Aleutian
chain (in the Andreanof Island group), because the City of Adak, now comprised of
approximately 150 individuals, was connected to Anchorage, where we live, via a regularly
scheduled Alaska Airline jet. The current city of Adak was formerly a military installation (Adak
Army Base and Adak Naval Operating Base) erected during and at the end of WWII and the
subsequent Cold War; prior to that, indigenous people of the central Aleutians (Niiĝuĝis, or
Andreanof Islanders, indigenous people who speak the Atkan dialect, or Aliguutax̂) lived in
several villages in various locations around the island. At the end of each summer, we walk along
what’s locally called City Beach near Adak in advance of the arrival of the Alaska Airline 737 jet
that will return us to our home in Anchorage. That walk is always burdened by a yearning to stay,
just a little longer; Adak is the geographical Alpha and Omega of our work. At the Omega of
each summer, I am terrified that I will lose that thread of wonder once again, should I go and not
return to the Aleutians. The Aleutian Islands are not my home, but they have become the wild in
my heart. If I could live in more than one place at once, one would be in the Aleutian
Archipelago.

group in North America, to the Commander Islands of the Russian Federation. It does not include the Shumagin
Island group or other islands along the coast of the Alaska Peninsula, or the Pribilof Islands (St. George and St. Paul)
of the Bering Sea, even though indigenous people occupying both the Shumagin Island group and the Pribilof Islands
are counted among the Unangan (Aleut) people.

23
Aside from a brief stop in Adak to search for an endangered plant species and to board the
R/V Tiglax̂8 during the year after her maiden voyage of 1987, the first Aleutian Island I ever
visited was Attu, where the Battle of Attu was fought in 1943. Attu is the westernmost island of
the North American portion of the Aleutian Archipelago9, part of the ‘Near Island Group,’ so
named because the group was the nearest to Russia. I was 32 years old, had borne my three
children, all safe that summer on my mother’s farm in southern Oregon. In 1988, the U. S. Coast
Guard still maintained a Loran Station on Attu (it was decommissioned in 2010, a victim of
technological change), and access off the island for us was to be via a U. S. Coast Guard C130
plane, seemingly of WWII vintage, that resupplied the Loran Station every 2 weeks, weather
permitting. Weather did not permit at the end of the first two weeks of that 1988 expedition. The
‘coasties’ were downcast since they didn’t get their mail and therefore much anticipated
communication from the outside world, but I remember being ecstatic that we were staying the
extra two weeks. I can still feel the wonder in my heart as I:
•

rode an ATV with my botanist husband up and down the old military roads on Massacre
Bay, collecting plants (old friends now, after all these years);

•

fell into old overgrown foxholes in beach rye-sea sandwort beach meadows;

•

watched the thousands of whirling seabirds careening over our Achilles in Nevidiskov and
Abraham bays;

•

searched for sand dollars on Sarana Beach, where the rocks are dotted with Polypodium
ferns and yellow Potentilla flowers;

•

gaped in wonder as water in waterfalls fell horizontally in the tremendous winds;

•

stood on the edge of a cliff, leaning, arms out, held in place only by that same wind;

•

spied Steller’s sea lions on Point Wrangell, the westernmost point of land on the North
American continent (it’s so far west, it’s east);

•

discovered strange plants sans chloroplasts (Corallorhiza orchids), or strange ferns
bearing strange fruits (Botrychium species).

Tiglax̂ (pronounced TEKH-lah) means 'eagle' in the Unangan (Aleut) language.The crew of the Tiglax̂ work for the
USFWS Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, and the Tiglax̂ is the main research and transportation support
vessel for biological work, management programs and village outreach and education.
8

9

The Commander (or Komandorski) Island group, located some 207 miles northwest of Attu, is part of the Russian
Federation. The Commander Island group is comprised of Bering and Medny islands and 15 smaller islets and rocks.

24

It was heady, that wonder, and in every summer after that first Aleutian field season, I
sought wonder once again. And again. It is like a drug, but one that does no bodily harm. Except,
perhaps, the yearning.
The word ‘wonder’ is a verb, and a noun; it can signify a passion, and an object. There is
wonder, and there are wonders; there are wonders of wonders. In 1642, René Descartes defined
admiration, one of the six ‘primitive passions’ (the others being love, hatred, desire, joy, sadness)
that, in various combinations comprise what we call wonder, as “a sudden surprise of the soul
when makes it tend to consider attentively those objects that seem rare and extraordinary…caused
first by an imperfection in the brain that represents the object as rare, and consequently, worthy to
be seriously considered” (39). To the medieval western mind, wonder was recognized as a
“cognitive passion, as much as knowing as of feeling. To register wonder was to register a
breached boundary, a classification subverted” (Daston and Park 14)10. The ‘Order of Nature’
(Daston and Park) constructed by Divine Will was reflected in the ‘typical’ form and function of
natural phenomenon; anything that ruptured this order—the rare, the capricious, the uncanny
‘sports,’ the monstrous objects brought back by travelers in strange and exotic lands—filled
Wunderkammers11 and evoked curiosity and the spectacle of ecstasy, and collective terror in the
medieval mind. These wonders evoked wonder.
In a world saturated with ‘wonders’ increasingly accessible in museums and natural
history collections and electronic books that explain volcanoes and meteor showers and
earthquakes and floods, and grocery store tabloids reporting alien abductions and sightings of
Bigfoot and raptors (Thunderbirds?) with 20-foot wingspans in the temperate rainforests of the
Pacific Northwest, these wonders (some considered ‘respectable’, some not) fail to disrupt the
Order of Nature. Even mysteries and wonders that science cannot explain are still considered
ultimately knowable. And yet, for me, there is a continuity between my response to the heady
wonder I experienced (and described) in my encounters with the novel diversity on Attu Island,
Corey Ford’s response to the unsettling landscapes of the ‘illusion islands,’ and the medieval
10

Peter de Bolla (49) goes further, proposing that wonder is not just about knowing and feeling, but also about the
feeling of knowing.
11

Wunderkammers, or cabinets of curiosities, were early (generally 16th to 18th century) versions of modern
collections of marvels, typically brought back from explorations of ‘strange lands’ “in which strange things replaced
strange facts” (Daston and Park 253).

25
response to wonder evoked by the strange objects and strange tales brought back from strange,
uncanny lands.

Georg Wilhelm Steller and the Second Kamchatkan Expedition of 1733-1741

Corey Ford and Murray Morgan and my husband and I are not the only western
scientists/botanists/naturalists to find wonder in the Aleutian Archipelago12. The summer of 2020
marks the 279th anniversary of the European discovery of the northwest coast of North America,
including the Aleutian Islands Archipelago, via the ill-fated Russian-sponsored Second
Kamchatkan Expedition (often called the Great Northern Expedition or the Bering Expedition,
after the expedition’s leader, Captain Commander Vitus Jonassen Bering)13. While other
expedition members, including Lieutenant Sven Waxell and Fleet Master Sofron Khitrovo, kept
daily journals, the expedition is most fully described in a journal kept by German naturalist Georg
Wilhelm Steller (1709-1746)14, who was trained in natural history15 but accompanied CaptainCommander Bering aboard the St. Peter as his physician and mineralogist. Exhibits curator Dean
Littlepage argues that the botanical, anthropological, and biological contributions included in the
journal of Steller—one of the first among in a long list of European naturalists serving
expeditions of discovery in the Pacific—were the most significant achievements of the expedition
(206); Frank A. Golder writes that Steller’s journal is “the most interesting of all the papers that

12

Indigenous scientists have probably also found wonder in their surroundings, and for centuries longer.

13

The Bering Expedition was one of the largest exploration enterprises in history, conceived by Russian Emperor
Peter I the Great [1672-1725] (but implemented by Russian Empress Anna [1693-1740], Peter’s niece, and, after
Anna’s death, Empress Elizabeth Petrovna (1709-1762, Peter’s daughter by his second wife, Catherine). The goal of
the Expedition was to find and map the eastern borders of Siberia and the western shores of North America, and (by
the way, while they were at it) find an Arctic sea passage (Littlepage 207). The final leg of that expedition, which
started in 1733 from St. Petersburg, Russia, commenced in the summer of 1741 when the sister ships St. Peter and St.
Paul left Avacha Bay on the east coast of Kamchatka and headed eastward into uncharted waters.
14

Georg Wilhelm Steller was born Georg Wilhelm Stöller to cantor Johannes Jacob Stöhler (b. 1664) of Nurnberg,
Germany, and Susanna Louysa Baumann, Würtenberg. Initially thought to have been stillborn, Steller took his first
breath after being wrapped in hot blankets for several hours (Stejneger 3-4). The name Stöhler gradually assumed the
spelling of Stöller after 1715, and George himself “under the influence of the Russian transliteration” (4) changed the
spelling to Steller.
15

Along with other 18th century naturalists, including Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and Daniel Gottleib
Messerschmidt (whose widow, Brigitte, Steller married), Steller was one of the new wave of naturalists that treated
scientific expeditions as serious scientific endeavors, not as a lark. Adopting burgeoning systems to describe and
classify all life, they were almost evangelical in their mission as species hunters and species namers (Conniff 3).

26
have come down to us. The naval officers’ logbooks contain the dry facts of the voyage, but
Steller’s journal gives the spirit of it, the ‘inside’ story, the moral forces at work” (1925; vii). For
me, Steller’s journal, which was held in the deep archives in St. Petersburg and unavailable to the
English-speaking world until the early decades of the 20th century, reflected in his passion and
sense of wonder as he described novel (for him) species, not the least of which was the
description of an unidentified marine species in the waters somewhere between Alaska’s Semidi
Islands and the Shumagin Island group. After more than two and a half centuries since his
journals describing his scientific explorations in Alaskan explorations—as limited as they were—
were archived, Steller retains an almost cult-like following among western scientists working in
Alaska.
Although many western scientists exploring the globe during the Age of Discovery were
also competent to highly skilled artists, Steller was neither16. Indeed, archived documents
demonstrate that one of Steller’s conditions for participation in the Bering Expedition (something
he wanted very much) was that he be accompanied by a competent artist (Stejneger 241); this
single instance underlines the enormous contribution of artists to scientific expeditions (McAleer
and Rigby 19), and science as a whole, in eras prior to the invention of photography in the 19th
century. Unfortunately, many if not most drawings ‘made’ by Steller17 during the Bering
Expedition were lost somewhere and sometime between their creation and their archival
following the termination of the Expedition (Stejneger 511-527). Thus, our interpretation or
identification of the unknown marine species (that is, species not described elsewhere in western
literature at the time) referenced by Steller in his writings are guesses informed by Steller’s
typically very detailed written descriptions, coupled with scientific knowledge (both western and
indigenous) gleaned in subsequent centuries. Some of these guesses are probably accurate (for
example, the fur seals, sea otters, and sea lions), and some remain uncertain (in particular, the ‘sea
monkey,’ described below). Our interpretation is further muddled by opacity introduced via

In his biography of Steller, Stejneger writes “[i]t may be asserted with the greatest confidence that Steller was
utterly incapable of making recognizable drawings of the natural object, plants and animals which he observed or
described…” (511).
16

The drawings ‘made’ by Steller were presumably drawn by Friedrich Plenisner, who was Commander Bering’s
clerk assigned to illustrate Steller’s observations.
17

27
translation errors and omissions. Until very recently18, the only surviving copy of Steller’s
journal was a manuscript copy written in German (Steller’s native language) and dated 174319 and
some portions of Steller’s writings, translated into French.
Even these imperfect copies of Steller’s journal, particularly coupled with Steller’s book
“De Bestiis Marinis” (“The Beasts of the Sea”), which was written mostly during 1742 while he
was shipwrecked on what was to become Bering Island in the Commander Islands, are source
documents of incalculable historic and scientific importance20 but, again, generally
unaccompanied by graphic imagery that would serve to help visualize Steller’s subjects. The
journal also provides a narrative of bitter nationalistic rivalry21 and conflict, overwhelming
physical and psychological adversity, and eventual deliverance from death largely by the courage
and ingenuity of Steller, Lieutenant Sven Waxell (who took over command following the death of
Bering), and their surviving shipmates. As such, Steller’s journal, which communicates tacitly, if
not explicitly, the sense of wonder he obviously felt while describing the newly discovered land,
tells a tale fitting to the beginning to the recorded history of colonial expansion in Alaska, whose
In 1990, Dr. Wieland Hintzsche of the Francke Foundation in Halle found most of Steller’s original journals, which
were long buried in the vast archives of St. Petersburg (Hintzsche 176). These journals include the period between
December of 1741 to the departure from Bering Island on the rebuilt St. Peter in 1742.
18

19

In his introduction to Steller (1988), Orcutt Frost suggested this copy was ordered by the naturalist P. S. Pallas after
he received the original journal materials from Professor Johann Eberhard Fischer in 1769 (27). The fate of Steller’s
original journal remained obscure; Steller had given the journal to Fischer on August 10, 1746, entrusting him to
transport it to St. Petersburg. Steller died about three months later, on November 14, 1746. Fischer took the journal
with him to St. Petersburg, apparently holding on to it until 1769. Sometime prior to his own death in 1771, Fischer
lent the journal to French historian Jean-Benoît Scherer, who had about half of the journal translated into French.
Thus, several copies and translations of Steller’s journal were circulated in the late 18th century. After receiving the
original journal from Fischer in 1769 and ordering its copy, Pallas published his translation in 1781 (Steller’s
description of Bering Island), and 1793 (the remainder of the journal). The original journal, in total, has not yet been
recovered, and so mistakes made by copyists or translators cannot be corrected. In 1917, Frank A. Golder located a
manuscript copy of the journal in archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences at Petrograd (Golder 1925, vii); he
writes that it may have represented a direct transcript of the original—and not the transcript ordered by Pallas—based
on substantial differences from Pallas’ translation, including certain editorial changes or corrections made by Pallas.
Orcutt Frost who, along with Margritte Engle, made their translation from the 221 half-page negative photostats (7x6
inches) of the Fraktur (old German alphabet) manuscript , which were deposited by Golder into the archives of the
Library of Congress in 1917 (Frost, in Steller 1988, 26-27).
Stefano Mattioli compared a recently located, restored original version of “De Bestiis Marinis” with the version
translated from a version by an anonymous editor, possibly Johann Georg Duvernoy (1691-1759) by Walter and
Jennie Miller (Steller 1751), demonstrating that the anonymous editor dampened the tone of the original manuscript
by removing Steller’s criticisms of Russian Navy officers (Mattioli 65-66).
20

Steller’s journal recounts the bitter rivalry between him and Fleet Master Sofron Kitrovo. Wunderkammer: Steller’s
Curse (Figures 15 and 16 herein) includes, in the left upper quadrant, Khitrovo among the beasts and birds typically
included in the Curse.
21

28
natural resources were subsequently exploited to such a degree that the impacts are still written in
the genomes of certain marine species (for example, sea otters; Beichman et al. 2631) and whose
indigenous people—the Unangan/Unangax̂ people of the Aleutian Island Archipelago—were
decimated (Laughlin 120-130), all in the name of Russian imperialistic colonialism extended by
capitalistic promyshlenniki (fur traders)22. It is ironic that the scientific discoveries of Steller23—
champion of the indigenous people of Kamchatka24 against misuse by Russians, and whose
writings often reveal a rare (for the era) respect for the wild beasts of the Aleutian Island
Archipelago—fueled the decimation of the marine resources in the years subsequent to the return
of the diminished25 crew of the diminished St. Peter, in 1742.
Steller’s character is often criticized26; among other negative adjectives sufficiently
numerous that I’ve lost track, he has been called self-serving (Black, “Russians in Alaska” 53),
arrogant, intolerant and bad tempered (Michael, in Waxell 25), but few have questioned his
capability as a scientist, even before the word ‘scientist’ came into regular usage27. Fewer still
could argue he lacked passion and a sense of wonder upon discovery of never-before-described
species. It is unfortunate that the loss or misplacement of archives and artistic records (Stejneger
511-527) of the discoveries during and subsequent to the Expedition served to obscure the
22

Promyshlenniki were Russian fur hunters and traders that decimated the marine mammals of the Aleutian Islands in
years subsequent to the return of the survivors of the Bering Expedition.
23

Although Steller had accumulated a large collection of plants, stuffed skins (even the stuffed skin of a young sea
cow), and skeletons, he was forced to abandon them on Bering Island due to space considerations on the smaller
rebuilt St. Peter. He salvaged all his manuscripts, dried seeds collected in America and on Bering Island, and a pair
of horny palates of the sea cow (Stejneger 370). However, in thanks for his leadership on Bering Island, crewmates
gave Steller dozens to hundreds of sea otter pelts on their return to Kamchatka.
Stejneger writes extensively of Steller’s solicitude for the welfare of the indigenous people of Kamchatka,
“championing them against local oppressors.” (432). In 1744, Steller wrote a letter to the Governing Senate of St.
Petersburg, charging the ranking naval officer Vasilij Andreyevitch Khmetevski of ill-treating the indigenous people
of Kamchatka (425). Khmetevski retaliated by accusing Steller of perpetuating much graver offences; that and
subsequent fabricated charges resulted in an issuance of a warrant of arrest against Steller (425), although Steller was
eventually exonerated.
24

25

Forty-six of the 76 persons aboard the St. Peter survived; most of the 30 that died suffered from scurvy.

In his introduction to Waxell’s 1756 account of the Bering Expedition, M. A. Michael states that “Steller was what
would to-day be called an ‘intellectual.’ He was very intelligent, very young, very intolerant and bad tempered, and
he held ordinary mortals, naval officers in particular, in supreme contempt. He gave his opinion, unasked, on every
situation…The ‘intense’ intellectual can be most irritating, and there is little doubt that Steller’s companions on the
St. Peter must have found him so” (Waxell 25-26).
26

27

The term ‘scientist’ was coined by theologian and science historian William Whewell in 1833 (Lightman 342).

29
understanding of that biodiversity in the Aleutian Archipelago. Here, however, I am ultimately
concerned with how via art making, bolstered by my western scientific knowledge and lived
experience via scientific expeditions to the Aleutian Islands, I have (at the very least) erected a
novel hypothesis and (at the most) solved one of the most enduring mysteries in North American
marine biodiversity, presented in Steller’s journal in the form of his encounter with what has
become known as ‘Steller’s Sea Ape’ or, alternatively, ‘Steller’s sea monkey.’ As such, I
demonstrate an instance in which the rapprochement of art and science generated new knowledge,
not by using new technologies or concepts (Heylighten and Petrović 14), but rather by delving
into scientific archives of an 18th century scientist and placing his lived experiences within the
context of my own 20th and 21st century lived experiences and the wonder they evoked.

Tales of the Cryptid: Divining Steller’s Sea Ape
In 1741, Britain still ruled the United States and the Lewis and Clark Expedition was still
60 years into the future, and the geography now known as Alaska was, to western explorers, terra
incognita, a cipher, unknown and unmapped. Bering’s expedition was able to explore only a few
islands off the southern coast of southeast Alaska and in the Shumagin Island group, before the St.
Peter was turned back toward Kamchatka by storms and scurvy. The St. Peter, one of two sister
ships (the other was the St. Paul, captained by Alexei Chirikof)28 was eventually shipwrecked on
the island which now bears the Captain Commander’s name, and upon which he and 25 other
crewmembers died, almost all of scurvy29. Steller, who accompanied the St. Peter team that made
first landfall30 (July 20, 1741) on Kayak Island off the coast of southeast Alaska (Figure 14), was
the first European naturalist to describe a number of species observed throughout the

28

This thesis supporting document follows only the track of the St. Peter, but the fate of the St. Paul Captain Alexai
Chirikof’s men, who made landfall in southeast Alaska and disappeared (see notes in Golder 1922, p. 311) remains
one of the enduring mysteries of the Bering Expedition.
29

In 1991, a Russian-Danish expedition team exhumed Bering's remains, which were located using information in
Steller’s journal. Analysis of teeth and bones suggested Bering did not die from scurvy, and further analyses coupled
with Steller’s initial report suggested Bering likely died of heart failure (Frost 2003, 2). Interestingly, forensics
reconstruction of the remains of also suggested that a portrait thought to represent Bering likely actually represented
Bering’s uncle, Vitus Pederson Bering, a Danish poet, historian, and Supreme Court Justice.
30

Landfall is defined as an instance of sighting or reaching land after a sea or air voyage (Houghton Mifflin
Company 675).

30
expedition—including during the nearly nine months while shipwrecked on Bering Island—and
meticulously described, via the written word, in his journals. Many of these species now bear his
name, and these are shown occupying the two ‘shelves’ in the mixed media painting
Wunderkammer: Steller’s Curse (Figure 15). These include the Steller’s sea lion (Eumetopias
jubatus), Steller’s jay (Cyanocitta stelleri), Steller’s eider (Polysticta stelleri), Steller’s sea eagle
(Haliaeetus pelagicus), the Steller’s spectacled cormorant (Phalacrocorax perspicillatus) and
Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas)31. Two of these species (the sea cow and the cormorant)
are extinct, both decimated by Russian promyshlenniki within a few decades of their ‘discovery’
and description by Steller. Three of the species (sea lion, eider and eagle) are in serious decline,
each likely or certainly impacted by anthropogenic stressors32, and only one—the Steller’s jay—
has escaped what Chris Carrel and Lance Morgan called “Steller’s Curse”33 (Wunderkammer:
Steller’s Curse; Figures 15, 16).

31

Scientists refer to species using the Linnaean binomial taxonomic names, genus and species (for example,
Polystica stelleri), which are standardized by various councils within groups (for example, the American
Ornithological Union), with the intent to facilitate communication. Common names are often not standardized, even
within localities and certainly not across cultures. For example, as a girl growing up in Fairbanks, I referred to a
particular plant species (Achillea borealis) as yarrow, whereas a friend who grew up in Anchorage referred to the
same plant as ‘stinkweed.’ Linnaeus’s binomial taxonomic scheme was being devised during the middle of the 18th
century, a decade or so after Steller participated in the Bering Expedition.
32

Anthropogenic stressors are those caused by human actions.

In a 2000 article in the Seattle Times, Chris Carrel and Lance Morgan pointed out that Steller’s ‘single-handed’
saving of the Bering Expedition “set into motion a torrent of exploitation that would overshadow [his] scientific
accomplishments and drive his most notable discoveries to extinction in mere decades” (1). According to Carrel and
Morgan, Steller’s life seemed cursed by bad luck in the form of the misfortunes of exploration, the lonely way he
died, and his almost-forgotten legacy, and that legacy lives on in the animals named for him: the extinct Steller’s sea
cow and the Steller’s spectacled cormorant (now called Pallas’ spectacled cormorant, formally described by Pallas
from Steller’s descriptions), and the endangered Steller’s eider, Steller sea lion, and Steller’s sea eagle. Only the
raucous Steller’s jay seems to have escaped Steller’s Curse. As well, a large number of other species Steller
discovered and described are also declining, including the sea otter and the northern fur seal (Arndt, 1). In a rebuttal,
Orcutt Frost (2000, 1) called the article by Carrel and Morgan ‘misleading’ (1) for multiple (valid) reasons: Steller
was accomplished although he died young, he did not ‘single-handedly’ (Carrel and Morgan 1) save the Bering
expedition, and he did not write “textbook descriptions” (Carrel and Morgan 1). Nevertheless, many of my
colleagues still refer to the phenomenon as Steller’s Curse.
While not included in the suite of species typically included in Steller Curse, the sea otter is also marked by
its near-extinction that resulted in the fur trade that began within a year of Steller’s return to Kamchatka and lasted
until the early 20th century (Reidman and Estes). While population numbers of sea otters have slowly recovered,
overall the number is still well below the species’ ancestral size and the species’ current distribution is a fraction of
its pre-18th century range and the Aleutian sea otters survived only due to translocations in the 1960s and 1970s
(Jameson et al. 100).
33

31
Like the medieval cabinets of curiosity, the mixed media Wunderkammer: Steller’s Curse
juxtaposes (on two ‘shelves’) rare (and novel, for Steller) and seemingly disparate species of
birds and marine mammals, which hold in common their membership in Steller’s Curse,
within the background of more common invertebrate plant species observed by Steller during
the Expedition, including (as interpreted from the archived journal) moon jellies (Aurelia
aurita), scurvy grass (Cochlearia groenlandica), bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana) and
rockweed (Fucus gardneri). The species listed under the Curse are rendered ghostly in
charcoal and gesso, in black and white, on Masonite; only the Steller’s Jay is obviously
colored, signifying its relative health (the three jays represent the three large groups
comprising the species complex, which includes jays that occupy habitats from coastal
Alaska through Costa Rica; Figure 16). The species are connected via a network relationship
depicted by straight lines and arcs. The frames used to hold up Steller’s Curse are discarded
damaged clamps used in genetic laboratories to make polyacrylamide gels used as a matrix to
collect classical genetic fragment data.

Figure 15. Sandra Talbot, Wunderkammer: Steller’s Curse, 2020. Charcoal, gesso,
conte pencil and acrylic. 33 x 66 x 2 inches (photo credit, Mike Conti).

32

Figure 16. Sandra Talbot, Wunderkammer: Steller’s Curse, 2020. Detail of
painting while in progress.

The imagery in Steller’s Bestiary: The Promyshlenniki’s Legacy (Figures 17 and 18, see
footnotes 22 and 33) illustrates the devastation of the sea otter (Enhydra lutris)—first described
by Steller34—following the return of the Expedition and the subsequent actions of the
promyshlenniki along the Aleutian chain, who overharvested both sea otters and the northern fur
seal. In The Promyshlenniki’s Legacy, I illustrate the impact of sea otter harvest by transferring
and processing digital imagery extracted from archived 19th century photographs of sea otter skins
taken as harvest in locales around Unalaska Island and elsewhere along the north Pacific coast of
North America. Obviously, there are no photographs of sea otter harvest during the decades
following the end of the Bering Expedition, but in his book “Empire of Extinction,” associate

34

It is important to understand that most if not all of the non-human vertebrate species shown in Wunderkammer:
Steller’s Curse, including the sea cow, as well as the sea otter, illustrated in Steller’s Bestiary: The Promyshlenniki’s
Legacy, were known to indigenous people within each species’ distributional range, and Steller’s ‘discovery’ and
subsequent description of them refers to their novelty to Europeans at the time.

33

Figure 17. Sandra Talbot, Steller’s Bestiary: The Promyshlenniki’s Legacy, 2020.
Gesso, acrylic and digital imagery on Masonite, museum case. 32 inches x 32
inches x 2 inches (photo credit: Mike Conti).

professor Ryan Tucker Jones (University of Oregon) collated archived harvest data of hunting
expeditions conducted between 1742 to 1800 (247), and I leveraged those data in this piece.
The ‘digital skins’ were then used to represent harvest from 1745 to 1747, the
years encompassing the first harvest in the North American portion of the Aleutian
Archipelago. Seven hundred and forty-three sea otters were harvested from around

34

Figure 18. Sandra Talbot, Steller’s Bestiary: The Promyshlenniki’s Legacy,
2020. Gesso, acrylic and digital imagery on Masonite (detail while in progress).

islands of the Near Island group (Attu, Agattu and the Semichi islands) during those years, and
harvest increased each year thereafter as the promyshlenniki moved eastward from the Near
islands as sea otters disappeared locally. I used Ryan’s harvest data from 1745 to 1747 to handnumber the transferred digital skins in Steller’s Bestiary: The Promyshlenniki’s Legacy, starting
from 743 and scripting backward to the first sea otter situated in the upper left-hand corner. By
incorporating 21st century processing techniques and materials on 19th century imagery to
illustrate 18th century resource extraction, The Promyshlenniki’s Legacy speaks to the longue
durée35 of interspecies exploitation in the Aleutian Archipelago and elsewhere in the north Pacific
coast of North America. Memento Domine Luter Mare (Figure 19) extends that into the 21st
century.
35

The longue durée was used in the French Annales School of historical writing as an expression to describe an
approach to historical research that prioritized the depiction of slowly evolving histories; the longue durée is used
frequently to examine settler colonialism—typically land colonialism, not resource extraction—that has resulted in
the devastation and destruction of indigenous peoples (see Barker). In this case, I apply the term within the context
of the devastation and destruction of indigenous non-human species.

35

Figure 19. Sandra Talbot, Memento Domine Luter Mare, 2020. Digital imagery
UV printed on glass, 21.6 x 28.6 x 0.5 inches. From archived imagery taken of sea
otter skulls collected by federal scientists from beaches along the Alaskan coast
during the 20th and 21st centuries, being prepared for archival into the Museum of
the North. Original imagery: Sandra Talbot, U. S. Geological Survey, public
domain: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/sea-otter-skulls-being-preparedarchival

However, it is Steller’s cryptid ‘Sea Ape,’ observed from the deck of the St.
Peter while it tacked in the ocean west of the Semidi and east of the Shumagin islands,
that has come to reflect the lingering sense of the uncanny that hovered over the
expedition from the very beginning, and represents one of the most enduring mysteries
hidden in the ocean depths. This encounter has stirred the imagination of more than
nine generations of North American biologists since his description, first published by
Pallas in 1793, was translated into English by Golder in 1925. Commentary about the
identity of the unknown marine species has featured repeatedly in books and articles

36
written by biologists, including cryptobiologists36 (see Nickell and references therein).
The subject has been analyzed in meticulous detail in the biography of Steller written
by the well-known specialist in marine species, the late Leonhard Stejneger (after
whom the elusive Stejneger’s whale is named). Despite these many attempts to
determine the identity of this enigmatic animal, however, no satisfactory identification
has emerged. Through the combination of my own lived experience in the Aleutian
and Shumagin islands, archived documentation by colleagues recording sightings of
seabirds and other species in the North Pacific, and a rare eureka moment of my own
while making art, I formulate another hypothesis that I argue has greater support than
previously promoted hypotheses. But unveiling that hypothesis will require substantial
background information.

The Sea Ape, AKA the Sea Monkey
Among all the species described by Steller, the ‘Sea Ape’ or ‘sea monkey’ (as it is often
called) is the only animal that has not been corroborated by physical evidence, or other witnesses,
and is described in Steller’s journal from a single sighting on August 10, 1741, in the open ocean
southwest of the Semidi and southeast of the Shumagin islands (see the map of the expedition,
Figure 20, and figure legend). Thus, it falls squarely within the auspices of cryptobiology37.
Steller’s account of the ‘sea ape’ or ‘sea monkey,’ which has for decades filled me (along with
numerous other biologists working in the Aleutian Archipelago) with a sense of the uncanny that
produces the type of curiosity that triggers further excavation of archives, follows:
“On August 1038 we saw a very unusual and unknown sea animal, on which I am
going to give a brief account since I observed it for two whole hours.—It was
about two Russian ells in length; the head was like a dog’s, with pointed, erect
ears. From the upper and the lower lips on both sides whiskers hung down. The
36

Cryptobiologists study animals whose existence is unsubstantiated, such as the Yeti and Loch Ness monster. Many
scientists consider cryptobiologists to be pseudoscientists.
Steller’s journal has at least two initial translations of the sighting; the information presented herein is from the
version in the initial MS used by Pallas, as reported by Golder (1925), although I’ve also pulled information from
historian Orcutt Frost’s interpretations (Steller 1988).
37

38

Stejneger argues that the sighting occurred late in the evening, around 9 p.m., so lighting conditions were not ideal.

37
eyes were large; the body was long, rather thick and round, tapering gradually
towards the tail. The skin seemed thickly covered with hair, of a gray color on the
back, but reddish white on the belly; in the water, however, the whole animal
appeared red, like a cow. The tail was divided into two fins, of which the upper, as
in the case of roosters, was twice as large as the lower. Nothing struck me as
more surprising than the fact that neither forefeet nor, in their stead, fins were to
be seen. In default of a more detailed description, one can do no better than
compare the shape of this animal with the picture which Gesner received from a
friend and which he has published under the name of Simia marina danica in his
book on animals. At any rate, our sea animal deserved this name because of its
resemblance to Gesner’s sea monkey as well as on account of its wonderful
actions, jumps, and gracefulness. For over two hours it swam around our ship,
looking, as with admiration, first at the one and then at the other of us. At times it
came so near to the ship that it could have been touched with a pole, but as soon
as anybody stirred it moved away a little farther. It could raise itself one-third of
its length out of the water exactly like a man, and sometimes it remained in this
position for several minutes. After it had observed us for about an hour, it shot
like an arrow under our vessel and came up on the other side; shortly after, it
dived again and reappeared in the old place; and in this way it dived perhaps
thirty times. There drifted by a seaweed39, club shaped and hollow at one end like
a bottle and gradually tapering a the other, towards which, as soon as it was
sighted, the animal darted, seized it in its mouth, and swam with it to the ship,
making such motions and monkey tricks that nothing more laughable can be
imagined. After many funny jumps and motions it finally darted off to sea and did
not appear again. It was seen later, however, several times at different places of
the sea.” (Steller, from Golder 1925, 64-65).

Daston and Park write that “wonders…need only be well imagined to give pleasure…we
must only be able to see in the mind’s eye the juggling automata of the romance, the two-headed
goat of the broadside, or the Martian of the tabloids…” (366). We can see in Steller’s enigmatic
creature described in the pages of his archived journal, the ‘regular irregularity’, the thing out of
place, the thing that perhaps doesn’t belong, but do we all see the same thing? The list of species

39

This seaweed was likely the mostly subtidal bull-kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana), a brown algae distributed from the
eastern Aleutian Islands to San Luis Obispo County, California (O’Clair and Lindstom 58). Bull kelp has a long
history of use by indigenous people of Alaska and father south; the Tlingit of southeastern Alaska used the species as
a cure for a headache, and dried strips as fishing lines. O’Clair and Lindstrom write of the Tlingits of Sitka: “[t]he
thin end of the stripe would be cut and inserted into one ear, while the pneumatocyst was placed on a hot rock. The
steam that formed in the air bladder would then enter the ear and, allegedly, cure the headache” (58). This seaweed
species is included in Wunderkammer: Steller’s Curse (Figures 15 and 16) and Steller’s Bestiary: Simia marina
(Figure 41).

38

Figure 20. Digital image showing the tracings of St. Peter’s track from July 8 to September
11, 1741, from Stejneger (302). Location 10 is where the sighting of the unknown animal
(Steller’s Sea Ape). The red line is the original estimated track calculated by Waxell and
Khitrovo and presented in the logbook of the St. Peter (see Golder 1922, 50-227); the black
track is a recalibration of the original estimate by the U. S. Hydrographic Office Chart. Image
in the public domain.

39
hypotheses provided below suggests not; even Steller’s reference to Gesner’s (Konrad von
Gessner’s) Simia marina, is difficult for me to accept. The reference seems to be an error;
examination of either of Gessner’s wondrous strange sea monkey images (Figure 21)
demonstrates they bear little resemblance to Steller’s description. Stejneger speculates that
Steller’s comparison of the unknown creature to Gessner’s Simia marina was “prompted more by
its manners and motions than any particular description or picture by Gesner” (280). In his
footnotes to Steller (1988), Frost suggests that Steller, who received the image of Gessner’s sea
monkey from Denmark (hence Steller’s reference to Gessner’s sea monkey as Simia marina
Danica) seven years prior to writing his journal (199); presumably Frost considers the comparison
a mistake of memory. Steller’s comparison of his unknown creature to Gesner’s image of his sea
monkey may represent an 18th century instance of Terdiman’s memory myth, or “memory as a
problem” (vii), the memory-crisis—the sense of confusion that emerges during turbulent times,
the crisis of representation—of the 19th century.
The late cryptobiologist Roy Mackal wrote “there is no known animal, in the sea or, for
that matter, on land, that corresponds to Steller’s description” (5). Nickell nevertheless urged
researchers to look for a ‘real creature,’ presumably a mammal, and presumably a seal. The most
common explanation, the shared hypothesis for the Steller’s Sea Ape, formulated to explain the
sighting is that the Steller’s sea monkey was a young northern fur seal—young, because the size
and coloring of adult northern fur seals are too different from Steller’s description—for which the
forelimbs are set far enough behind on the torso that they may have been obscured below the
waterline (Stejneger 281). The hind flippers may have comprised the animal’s hind flippers.
Stejneger suggested that Steller’s description of the tail as “divided in two parts” (280) could
logically be explained if Steller mistook the two closely set hind legs with their flippers for a tail
fin, particularly in the poor light of the evening of 10 August 1741. Stejneger wrote:
“Steller…failed to make out the fore legs…because of their position farther
back than in any related animal with which he was then familiar…when
moving at high speed through the water the fur-seal keeps the fore flippers
pressed very close to the body so that they are practically invisible. When it
raises its body straight up out of the water to satisfy its curiosity [spyhopping], the forelegs are not exposed and it is only when the animal makes
a turn or swims slowly that they are even noticeable; furthermore, the
oncoming darkness probably prevented very distinct observations of the
parts under water.” (281).

40

Figure 21. Gessner’s Simia marina, sea monkey. In Conrad
Gessner’s Historia Animalium, published in 1558. Image from
the so-called Gessner Albums, archived in the Special
Collections Department of the University of Amsterdam.
Image in the public domain.

However, the ears of a northern fur seal are not erect; they point backwards. Others,
primarily cryptozoologists, hypothesize/speculate/guess it was one of the following: 1) a
congenitally malformed fur seal (Coleman and Huyghe 64-65); 2) a vagrant Hawaiian monk seal

41
(Monachus schauinslandi; the size is correct, but the Hawaiian monk seal has no external pinnae
and are rarely seen outside of the Hawaiian Islands); 3) a juvenile specimen of Bernard
Huelvelmans’ longneck seal40, itself a cryptid without physical proof of existence (Eberhart 519);
or 4) an unknown Arctic variety of the leopard seal (Hydrurga leptonyx) although leopard seals
have no externa pinna (Mackal 205).
Years ago, I read a comment in a cryptozoology blog (which has long since vanished, and
I have been unable to relocate the cache) that also proposed the Steller’s sea monkey was an
extinct sea mink, which is the only reference to the sea monkey being a mustelid (aside from
proposing and dismissing the sea otter). Several authors, including Mackal (30), suggest the most
parsimonious explanation of the event is that Steller saw a species of marine mammal that has
subsequently gone extinct41. Given the fate of the Steller’s sea cow, thought to have gone extinct
by 1760 due to unsustainable harvest by the promyshlenniki, this idea is not far-fetched.
Nevertheless, Aleut and Koyuk legends include descriptions of animals that clearly describe the
sea cow, which was driven to extinction within 20 years of Steller’s description, but no such
convenient anthropogenic causes can be linked to the extinction of the ‘sea monkey’ and I failed
to uncover42 any obvious descriptions in Unangan and Koyuk legends or imagery fully consistent
with Steller’s description of the sea monkey. One recent hypothesis that is a substantial departure
from the others is that by referencing the similarity of the unknown creature to the ‘Danish’ Sea
Ape (when Gessner did not specify his Simia marina as a Danish sea monkey; but see Steller’s
description of the unknown creature on pages 36-37), Steller was poking fun of Captain

In his 1968 book “In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents,” the French zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans attempted to place
sightings of unknown sea ‘serpents’ into nine categories, with one being long-necked serpent, which morphed over
time in the cryptozoological literature into a longneck seal.
40

41

In an entry in his book Misty Islands, Miles Smeeton records an observation of an unidentified sea creature—
“neither sea lion, seal, nor sea otter” (110)—that he and his crew encountered while sailing near Atka in the Aleutians
Islands in 1969. The creature was “about the size of a sheep and had long pepper-and-salt hair like a cairn terrier, of
a reddish-yellow colour…it made a slow, undulating dive and disappeared beneath the ship…the length of its hair
[was] about four to five inches long…[and was] floating round the body like a weed growing on a half-submerged
rock…the head was more like the head of a dog than of a seal, with the eyes close together, not set on the side of the
head like a seal’s…it had a face like a Tibetan terrier, with drooping Chinese whiskers” (109). Many months later,
after he had read Steller’s account as put forth in Corey Ford’s book Where the Sea Breaks its Back, Smeeton
remembered the observation and thought that they had seen the same creature.
42

It must be noted that uncovering no evidence of a sea monkey motifs in Unangan and Koyuk legends or art is not
the same as uncovering evidence of no sea monkey motifs in Unangan and Koyuk legends or art. They may exist and
I did not uncover them.

42
Commander Bering who was the only Dane on board the St. Peter (Thaler). However, as pointed
out by Nickell and obvious to anyone reading Steller’s journal, and despite the leakage of his
passion for scientific exploration between the pages of his journal, Steller did not seem to be the
‘poking fun of’ type of scientist. Steller failed to show a hint of satire in his writings; he was a
sober, scrupulous scientist, among the early naturalists seemingly the least whimsical. Based on
my own lived experiences in the Aleutian and Shumagin Islands, coupled with visual clues
emerging from art-making, I consider it more likely that Steller observed a species of mammal
that is still extant, but although somewhat but not quite familiar in its newness and unexpected
place, it was rendered unrecognizable, preternatural, exceeding the boundaries of the
classificatory system adopted by Steller. In all the newness of America, did Steller suffer a
memory-crisis (Terdiman vii)? But presenting that hypothesis must wait until we go back to a
beginning, to the St. Peter’s landfalls on Chirikof Island and an island in the Shumagin Island
group during August of 1741, and with my own participation in 20th and 21st century scientific
expeditions to these invaded islands and the islands of the Aleutian Archipelago. Explorations of
those landfalls provides sufficient evidence of the biases in worldviews that can interfere with
scientific observations and therefore, their archival.

CHAPTER 3. Chirikof and Simeonof Islands: Invasion of Cattle and Daisies
The introduction of alien species can alter biotic and abiotic processes on islands if they become
invasive (Towns et al. 56, Loope and Mueller-Dombois 257). The remote islands in Alaska have
been the target of accidental and intentional introductions (Jones and Byrd 226, Ebbert and Byrd
102) beginning about 280 years ago, after the culmination of the ill-fated Bering Expedition43.

43

The first intentional introduction of terrestrial mammals occurred in the late 1740s on islands of the Aleutian
Archipelago and involved the release by Russian fur trappers, the promyshlenniki, of Arctic foxes (Vulpes lagopus)
and red foxes (V. vulpes) on several islands of the Aleutian Island Archipelago as part of fox farming and ranching
industries. Eventually, fox trappers released rodents, such as ground squirrels (Spermophilus parryii), on various
Aleutian islands to provide food for the foxes. Non-indigenous humans occupying Aleutian islands subsequent to the
first European contact brought with them livestock, including cattle, sheep, horses, goats, reindeer, and bison and,
following WWII, caribou (Ebbert and Byrd 102). Accidental introductions also occurred, with the earliest recorded
introduction of a terrestrial mammal occurring prior to 1780 with the wreck of a Japanese vessel (Brooks 50) and the
subsequent introduction of the invasive Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) to Rat Island (now Hawadax).

43
The history and biotic impacts of introductions of terrestrial mammalian species onto
Alaskan islands, and their eradication, are best known from management actions taken to remove
foxes and rats from islands of the Aleutian Archipelago. Outside but close to the Aleutian Island
Archipelago, biotic communities on the Bering Expedition’s ‘landfall’ islands of Chirikof Island,
the westernmost island of the Kodiak Island Archipelago, and Simeonof Island, the southernmost
island of the Shumagin Island group at the base of the Alaska Peninsula, were also negatively
impacted by introductions of terrestrial mammals—in these cases, domestic cattle (Bos taurus)
introduced to the islands in the late 19th century (Reedy 1).

Chirikof Island: AKA Land of Vicious Feral Cattle
Chirikof Island (55°49’30”N, 155°37’19”W), the westernmost island in the Kodiak
Archipelago, is a small (13,000 ha), isolated, treeless island located approximately 80 miles
southwest of Kodiak Island in southcentral Alaska. The seas around the island are treacherous—
resulting in a number of shipwrecks—but nevertheless, the island has been intermittently
inhabited by humans44, most recently by cattle ranchers who ‘managed’ cattle introduced at the
end of the 19th century. Currently, the only mammalian inhabitants of the island are introduced
Arctic foxes (Vulpes lagopus)—perhaps eradicated (West et al. 135; but see journal excerpt on
page 49 herein) —feral cattle (West et al. 135), and ground squirrels (Spermophilus parryii,
which may have been introduced by the Alutiiq or Unangan people, Cook et al. 1401). The cattle
remain the subject of a controversy between the land managers and a small group of Kodiak cattle
ranchers (D’Oro). Chirikof Island is considered by some to be ‘cursed’ or ‘haunted’ and the
viciousness of the feral cattle have contributed to that belief45.
44

Chirikof Island was first inhabited by Unangan and Alutiiq people from the Kodiak Archipelago, Kodiak Island,
and the Aleutian Islands (at least from 5000 to 2300 years before present) (Saltonstall and Steffian 1-121, Workman
67), thereafter until the late 19th century in a subsistence village apparently populated by Alutiiq, Tlingit, Russian and
western European people (Clark and Black, 2-13), and subsequently by fox traders and cattle ranchers (Fields 1-10,
Clark 65), until just after 1980, when the island became part of the USFWS Alaska Maritime National Wildlife
Refuge.
45

The cattle, introduced in the late 1800s and variously augmented since, went feral and vicious beginning around the
turn of the 20th century; an article in the Journal of the Bizarre calls the cattle “living ghosts of failed business
enterprises” (“Haunted Alaska”, January 09, 2018). In that article, under the heading of “The Mad Cows of Chirikof
Island,” the author recounts the story, archived (and available for a not-so-nominal fee) in The Montana Standard
(January 30, 1938, p. 51), of an “ambitious West Virginia girl,” Kay Barker, who visited Chirikof Island in the 1930s.
The article quotes the journalist Lloyd Weir: “Mesha [an Aleut companion] and I had gone to the island to take
pictures. We soon spotted a small herd but they ran as we approached. However, we found that they had gone for

44
Landfall, Chirikof Island, 1 August 1741: Bering Expedition

The St. Peter made landfall on Chirikof Island on 1 August 1741 and anchored there the
next day46. Archived records highlighted the different foci of the crew of the St. Peter. Steller’s
journal records the island in reference largely to natural history observations—wild species
observed and specimens taken, the observed vegetation of the island—and his desire to explore
the island. Steller wrote:
“We found ourselves on the morning of August 247 only about three versts48
distant from a rather large and wooded49 island… Towards noon, a sea lion
appeared near the ship and swam continuously round it for more than half an
hour… Towards evening I caught with the hook two unknown fishes of the same
genus as the so-called Scorpii marini (Cottus)50. I made at once a description of
them and preserved them in spirits, but they, with other rare collections, were

the ‘army’, which advanced in charge of a big white bull…they got near and circled around us. Suddenly, as though
through a signal of a big white bull, they charged…we ran to the shore where we had a boat waiting.” According to
the anonymous author of “Haunted Alaska,” the feral cattle were sufficiently enraged that they “plunged into the
water and began swimming in pursuit” (Weir, qtd in “Haunted Alaska”).
In 2014, we once again visited Chirikof Island on a few day trips, on the way to Simeonof Island. During that trip,
we were likewise chased by a herd of feral cattle, something that didn’t happen during our extended expedition in
2013. However, unlike the experience of Ms. Barker and her companion, the cattle did not drive us into the ocean;
still, it was a nerve-racking experience.
46

Naval officers of the Bering Expedition named the island Tumannij Ostrov (Waxell 108), which means Foggy
Island, reflecting the island’s typically mild, damp, and foggy weather (Workman 37). The island was quickly
renamed by Captain Commander Bering (Golder 1922, 111-112 ), who called the island Archdeacon Stephen’s Island
(as it was sighted on August 2, 1741 [Julian Calendar], Archdeacon Stephen’s Day), then later renamed Chirikof in
1794 by explorer George Vancouver (Vancouver 87), to acknowledge Captain Alexei Chirikof’s participation in the
Second Kamchatkan Expedition (but who never saw the island).
Dates in Steller’s journal are based on the Julian (Old Style) rather than the Gregorian (New Style) calendar. The
morning of 2 August 1741, recorded here, would have been 11 days later based on the Gregorian calendar (13 August
1741, although since the Bering Expedition did not take the International Date Line into account, it would have been
14 August 1741, by our current reckoning. According to Frost (in Steller, 1988, 36), Steller used civil time (midnight
to midnight) and the log book of the St. Peter recorded astronomical time (from noon to noon).
47

48

A verst is a Russian measure of length, approximately 0.66 miles (1.1 km)

49

Stejneger (285) suggests this is a mistake, and I agree. The island cannot be said to be wooded; it is treeless, but
there are fairly tall willow (Salix) shrubs on the island. The northern side of the island terminates in low hills.
50

Stejneger (276) suggests the two sculpins were likely Hemilepidotus (Telesius) and Megalocottus playtcephalus
(Pallas), for which taxonomic descriptions were not published until about 70 years had passed. Steller’s descriptions
played a role in the diagnoses of these species.

45
lost during the disastrous stranding of the vessel in November.” Georg Steller,
in Golder (1925, 63).
However, entries in the logbook of the St. Peter (made by Fleet Master Sofron Khitrovo,
Steller’s bête noir) referred to weather, compass bearings, size of the island, and depth of the sea
floor where anchored, and takes no notice of the wildlife:
“Light wind, fog, wet. Sighted land SE by E, but owning to darkness and mist,
it was difficult to determine whether it was an island or a part of the mainland.
Tacked to starboard, furled the sails, and dropped the small bower anchor in
18 fathoms. Tide was running from N to S…Decided it was an island,
extending from E to W. It was about ¾ of a German mile in size and 1 mile
from us. The W point of the island bore S½ E, the E point ESE; near it is a
reef about ¾ mile long.” Golder (1922, 111).

Thus, the naturalist and the sailor on the same expedition are each observing within the
context of their own hierarchical ontology, obviously “predisposed to extract certain
[observations] and ignore others” (Dyke 105); this occurred over and over when comparing the
few accounts of the Bering Expedition, including the report of the expedition by Lieutenant Sven
Waxell relative to Steller’s journal. In contemporary time, a crewmember of the Tiglax̂
mentioned that, given the tendency of the island to shipwreck51 vessels, it is fortunate that Steller
was unable to take a small boat to the island, as he proposed to Commander Bering. I replied that
if he had, and arrived safely there, he might have botanized, and perhaps encountered indigenous
people who lived there.

Hence, we all see Chirikof Island through different eyes.

51

In 1898, Friedrich Trump, Donald Trump's grandfather, survived a shipwreck on Chirikof Island. According to
New York Times journalist Jason Horowitz, Trump and others purchased a schooner and while attempting to sail it
toward the Yukon River, ran it aground on Chirikof Island. They were rescued over a month later by a passing steam
barkentine, having lived off of the schooner's provisions the entire whole time (Horowitz). It is difficult to refrain
from speculating how differently the year 2020 would have been if that steam barkentine had not passed by the
grounded schooner.

46
Landfall, Chirikof Island, July 13-21, 2013: Botanical Studies

Following are excerpts from my 2013 field journal. While our report of the Chirikof
botanical work52 is fairly ‘sciency,’ my journals are less so and include findings that did not make
it into the report. As well, the archived materials, in this case, photographs, did not make it into
the report.

July 13, 2013. Arrived via Tiglax̂ on Chirikof; Tiglax̂ crew helped set up camp.
July 14, 2013. Scouted beach, collected specimens. See datasheets and voucher
specimens. Overcast. Found human skull (lichen growing on it)53 on refuse hill
behind camp. Marked with sticks. Called in via radio.
July 15, 2013 Mini-tempest on radio about skull. Meadow vegetation work. See datasheets
and voucher specimens. Foggy.
July 17, 2013. Tempest about skull died down, probably ancient/indigenous, no guidance,
left alone without disturbing.
This island is a mess. The vegetation is weird, not the normal communities. There are
strange fields of purple lupine and yarrow, huge bushes. Cattle trails crisscross
everywhere, even on the steep sides of the bluffs where the cattle trails make huge
52

In a botanical expedition to Chirikof Island in 2013, I participated in a botanical reconnaissance of the
southwestern portion of the island. Over 250 field collections, including vouchers from 17 vegetation plots, were
made, and those collections were made into herbarium sheets and archived in herbaria (see digital imagery in Figure
23). Combining these collections with records of specimens collected during a 2-day trip in 1999, we document
about 350 native species (about 210 vascular plants) and at least 16 non-native vascular plants, of which, at least 5
can be considered invasive on Chirikof Island. Invasive graminoids (perennial ryegrass, annual bluegrass and
Kentucky bluegrass) were likely introduced through cattle feed, but also via footwear or gear. Most of the broadleaf
non-natives (common sheep sorrel, common plantain, common chickweed, common dandelion and thymeleaf
speedwell are found throughout Alaska. The hairy catsear is invasive, and as it is common to meadows and
paddocks, it was likely introduced during cattle operations. Birdseye pearlwort is also invasive; in Canada, it has
grown to monoculture mats and has displaced native vegetation. We noted shifts in the vegetation community
composition relative to other islands of similar size but without cattle. There was severe erosion by cattle grazing,
with large increases of yarrow and horsetail. We observed dominant swarths Nootka lupine, which is unpalatable to
cattle and thus present in greater than expected frequency. As well, there was greater than expected cover of Bering’s
tufted hairgrass (Deschampsia beringensis), which increases in overgrazed habitats.
53

I took four photographs of this skull and they are currently in my archived materials. Due to the sensitivity of this
finding, these archived materials will likely be placed in deep storage.

47
switchbacks [see Figure 22]. I imagine cows all in a row, nose to butt, marching up and
down the switchbacks, chomping vegetation, like weird old bovine Pacmen. Chomp,
chomp.
Ugh. I can’t get that image of bovine packmen out of my mind.
I admit, however, those trails make it a lot easier to hike up and down the mountain bluff
vegetation. See datasheets and specimens. Foggy all day.

Figure 22. Cattle trail in bluff vegetation, southwestern Chirikof Island, 17 July 2013
Sandra Talbot, U. S. Geological Survey, public domain:
https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/cattle-trail-through-meadow-chirikof-island-alaska

July 18, 2013. Beach vegetation work, see datasheets and specimens. Saw Arctic
fox, who yelped at us. We followed her down the beach and found where she had
hidden her pups, in a pile of driftwood. She stood on a rock and yelped at us. I
went up on the bluff above her to watch for the pups, who came out eventually. I

48
taunted her (“I’m gonna get your babies!”). I started moving down the bluff
toward the driftwood pile, and she started after me, almost like she understood
my words. Good mom.
Not supposed to be foxes on the island anymore; need to tell Steve Ebbert.
Foggy all day. No wonder the sailors on the St. Peter called this Foggy Island.
Found skulls of cows on the beach on the way back from the fox fiasco. Maybe
they should call this Skull Island.
July 19, 2013. Worked wetlands; see datasheets and specimens. Found
Cypripedium, collected! [see Figure 23]54. Foggy all day.

Figure 23. Digital images of herbarium sheets of specimens collected on Chirikof
Island in 1999 and 2013. Left: Hypochoeris radicata L., coll. 7 September 1999 by S. S.
Talbot, archived at the Alaska Museum of the North Herbarium (ALA). Middle:
Cypripedium guttatum (Lady’s Slipper), coll. 19 July 2019 by S. S. Talbot and S. L.
Talbot, archived at the Monte L. Museum Herbarium (BRY). Right: Lolium perenne,
coll. 7 September 1999 by S. S. Talbot, archived at the Alaska Museum of the North
Herbarium (ALA). Of these species, only the Cypripedium is a native species. Images in
the public domain.

54

Specimens of this lady-slipper orchid are shown in Figure 23 (middle specimen). The other two specimens in these
archived herbarium sheets are invasive species.

49
July 20, 2013. Day broke with blue sky. Woke up to the sound of cows lowing. A herd
came right through our camp, a big bull. A bit scary, got the shotgun, but they
ignored us. Glad they didn’t step on our tent. Glad we didn’t have to shoot them.
Vegetation work on bluffs again, see datasheets and specimens.
July 21, 2013. Packing up camp.
July 22, 2013. Picked up by Tiglax̂; Strong winds, shore landing over a mile away.
Andy helped to tote field gear and breakdown camp. Very rough seas.

Simeonof Island, Shumagin Island Group: Land of the Ox-eye Daisy

Landfall, Shumagin Island Group, 29 August 1741: Bering Expedition
The mountainous Shumagin Island group stretches some 100 km across and includes eight
main islands—Unga, Popof, Korovin, Nagai, Chernabura, Big and Little Koniuji, and Simeonof
Island—plus other small islands. The first written record of the Shumagin island group was in the
logbook of the St. Peter, when it made landfall there on 29 August 1741 and went ashore to Nagai
Island (Figure 24) the following day; landfall was made on Simeonof Island but like landfall on
Chirikof Island, the crew of the St. Peter never set foot on Simeonof Island. The St. Peter
weighed anchor near Nagai Island (Figure 24) mainly to replenish the decreasing stocks of fresh
water; Steller, of course, wanted to go ashore and collect antiscorbutic plants to help cure the
burgeoning frequency of scurvy aboard the vessel (Stejneger 292).
Archived records of the Bering Expedition’s Nagai Island landfall once again highlighted
the difference in focus among the crew members, albeit this time according the need to obtain
water. Once again, the expedition naturalist and the sailor make records of the same events but
that are from completely different viewpoints; the following discusses the collection of water to
replenish the St. Peter’s dwindling stores. Segueing from concerns about water to personal insults
to natural history, Steller wrote:
“No sooner had I landed than I made efforts at once to locate a watering place
and found several springs which had good and wholesome water. In the
meantime the sailors had chosen the first and nearest stagnant puddle and
already started operations. I found fault with this water because it was stagnant

50
and alkaline…and must be brackish55. I therefore proposed that the springs
found by me should be used for taking water…The answer was: Why, what is the
matter with this water? The water is good, fill up with it?” As I was already
accustomed to such treatment I paid no attention and began to reconnoiter the
land…I met a black fox…[r]ed foxes, yevrashkas, or small marmots…the track of
an entirely unknown animal…[that] resembled the track of a wolf but by their
expanse and great size of the claws indicated that a different and larger animals,
or a very big species of wolf, must live here. All sorts of water birds were seen,
such as swans, two kinds of urili (Pelecani)…” Georg Steller, in Golder (1925,
77-80).

Lieutenant Sven Waxell wrote:
“On our map we called these islands the Schumagin Islands, that being the name
of the first of our men to die, whom we buried there56…The mate, Andreas
Hesselberg, was at once sent to one of the largest islands57to fetch water; he
returned, speedily bringing two samples of water which we did not find
particularly good, for they had a faint flavor of salt water. However, we had no
time to lose so we thought that such water was always better than nothing, for we
could at any rate use it for cooking…We at once made arrangements to have as
much water as possible brought on board with the help of the longboat, and we
worked on that all through the night. Our ship was not lying at all safely…we
wished to replenish our supplies of water in all haste, so that we might sail out
back into the open sea” (Waxell 108-109).

55

Steller was (rightly) concerned that the salty and brackish water would increase in saltiness as it evaporated,
rendering it less and less drinkable, and it would hasten the onset of scurvy, which was already showing up in
crewmembers (Golder 1925, 77).
Sailor Nikita Shumagin was the first crewmember who died of scurvy, and Steller’s journal states that the island
was named after him. The name is now given to the entire island group, and Steller’s Shumagin island is now called
Nagai (Golder 1925, 87 and in footnote 196 therein).
56

57

Nagai Island

51

Figure 24. Top: Sofron Khitrovo’s sketch58 of the map of the
Shumagin Island group. Archived imagery from the logbook of the
St. Peter, at the end of the 5 September 1741 entry. Bottom, A map
of the Shumagin Island group (section from the U. S. Coast and
Geodetic Chart, no. 8802, scale 1:1050,000. (Golder 1925, 76).
Image in the public domain.
58

There is a certain irony that, during this century when scientists benefitted from also being skilled artists, it was
Khitrovo, Steller’s nemesis, who was the skilled draftsman, while Steller was not.

52
20th and 21st Century Landfall, Simeonof Island: Botanical Studies

Simeonof Island, the southernmost island of the Shumagin Island group, is irregular in
shape and approximately 10 km long and wide59. As on Chirikof Island, cattle were introduced
on Simeonof Island sometime during the late 19th century, and once again the cattle were allowed
to exceed the carrying capacity of the island, resulting in the deterioration of certain vegetation
communities and likely the decline of nesting seabirds. A vegetation survey conducted in 1981
documented accelerated erosion in coastal, sandy habitats, and the cattle were removed between
1983 and 1985.
I participated in scientific expeditions in 1996 and again in 2014 to monitor the trajectory
of vegetation recovery. By 1996, the sandy beach communities appeared to have begun the
process of recovery (Daniëls et al. 135). However, also by 1996, the distribution of several of
nine introduced plant species noted during the initial 1981 field effort—in particular, velvetgrass
(Holcus lanatus), broadleaf plantain ( Plantago major), sheep sorrel (Rumex acetocella) and oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare)—had begun to spread beyond the immediate environs of the
rapidly decaying ranch house, where they are ubiquitous. These species are introduced directly
by humans or coincidently with cattle and other livestock though feedstocks, and that can persist
years after the removal of livestock (Bennett et al. 1086). As well, in 1996, seedlings of Sitka
spruce (Picea sitchensis), unobserved in 1981 but documented in 1996, presumably the result of
sexual reproduction between two mature introduced spruce trees planted in the ranch house yard
(Daniëls et al. 136), were observed. By July and August 2014, over three decades since the
removal of cattle, we found that some of introduced species (we now counted 13 species)
persisted, and some, including the ox-eye daisy, thrive and are now expanding; they have crossed
that liminal space between introduced and invasive (Invaders Invading; Figure 25).

The island is composed of two separate main portions (called, informally, and unsurprisingly, the ‘north’ and
‘south’ islands) connected by a sandy isthmus at the head of Simeonof Harbor (see Figure 24). Unlike most of the
mountains of the Shumagin Island group, whose steep slopes arise abruptly from the sea, the mountains of Simeonof
Island arise from extensive lowlands dotted by numerous ponds and wetlands.
59

53

Figure 25. Sandra Talbot, Invaders Invading, 2020. Digital imagery UV printed on glass.
15.6 x 21.6 x 0.5 inches. From archived imagery taken from the inside of a tent during the
2014 expedition to Simeonof Island. Original imagery: Sandra Talbot, U. S. Geological
Survey, public domain: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/shadow-eye-daisies-tent-wallsimeonof-island-alaska

The ox-eye is a noxious, invasive weed native to Eurasia but invasive in North America that
has recently expanded in many areas of western Canada (Clements et al. 343) and Alaska. It was
likely introduced to Simeonof Island in hay seed or intentionally planted in a garden by the ranch
house, but the daisy was likely kept from spreading prior to their removal by foraging and
trampling behavior of cattle. Ox-eye daisy species has formed dense local aggregations
expanding from a small area estimated to be 2–3 acres of more dispersed aggregation in 1981 to
over 6 acres of dense aggregations in 2014 (as measured by the GPS, Global Positioning System)
in the vicinity of the old ranch house (First Nature, Becoming Second Nature, Daisy; Figure 26)
and encroaching upon the recently recovered sandy isthmus.

54

Figure 26. Sandra Talbot, First Nature, Becoming Second Nature, Daisy, 2020.
Digital imagery from archived record of ox-eye daisy plots (here, Plot 9) on
Simeonof Island, July 2014. Original imagery, Sandra Talbot, U. S. Geological
Survey, public domain: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/ox-eye-daisy-plotsimeonof-island-alaska

A wondrous find during the 2014 expedition was the presence in our plots of multiple
daisies with deformed discs; these were documented via photography as they were processed for
genetic studies (The Pleasure of Natural Sports: Lusus naturae 3, Plot 9 series, Figures 27 and
28).
Lusus naturae literally means ‘a sport of nature’ but often also refers to a ‘freak of nature.’
Author Margaret Atwood implied the latter in her short story “Lusus Naturae,” which tells the tale
of a girl who turned monstrous at the age of six whose family rejects her because what they
considered her freakish appearance. Daston and Park point out that, in contrast to the scholastic
maxim that ‘Nature does nothing in vain,’ the wonders of cabinets of curiosities, or
Wunderkammers, “glorified in superfluity, careless of function and the extravagant in expenditure

55
of labor and materials. It was precisely this pointless variety and studied uselessness that linked
pure luxury and afunctional ornamentation to play…lusus naturae, like the luxury object,
multiplied form without function” (277). The biologist, however, typically sees nothing of luxury

Figure 27. Sandra Talbot, The Pleasure of Natural Sports: Lusus naturae 3, Plot 9, View 1,
2020. Digital imagery UV printed on glass. 15.6 x 21.6 x 0.5 inches. From archived record of
deformed ox-eye daisies collected on Simeonof Island, July 2014. Original imagery, Sandra
Talbot, U. S. Geological Survey, public domain:
https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/deformed-ox-eye-daisy

56

Figure 28. Sandra Talbot, The Pleasure of Natural Sports: Lusus naturae 3, Plot 9, View
2, 2020. Digital imagery UV printed on glass. 15.6 x 21.6 inches. From archived record
of deformed ox-eye daisies collected on Simeonof Island, July 2014. Original imagery,
Sandra Talbot, U. S. Geological Survey, public domain:
https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/deformed-leucanthemum-vulgare-ox-eye-daisy

in lusus naturae, but rather curiosity (what is that?) and perhaps, depending on the situation, a
frisson of fear (is it due to contaminants?), two characteristics attributed by some to facilitate the
sense of wonder. The digital imagery shown in Figure 27 and 28 (The Pleasure of Natural Sports:
Lusus naturae 3, Plot 9) was captured during the 2014 scientific expedition to Simeonof Island,
while sorting through the disk and ray flowers of ox-eye daisies for archival associated with
future genetic studies.
A second wondrous find was the colonization and spread of the ox-eye daisy along old
cattle trails (Daisy Trail; Figure 29), which we suspect is being facilitated by river otters using old
cattle trails. We observed river otters traversing the island via these old cattle trails on numerous

57

Figure 29. Sandra Talbot, Daisy Trail.
2020. Digital image. From archived
imagery taken during the 2014 Simeonof
Island botanical expedition. The daisies
have apparently been spread down old cattle
trails by river otters. Original imagery,
Sandra Talbot, U. S. Geological Survey,
public domain:
https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/oxeye-daisies-along-old-cattle-trail-simeonofisland-alaska
.

Figure 30. Sandra Talbot, Tracks.
2020. Digital image. From archived
imagery taken during the 2014 Simeonof
Island botanical expedition. The deep
tracks are made by river otters traversing
evaporated pond beds. Original imagery,
Sandra Talbot, U. S. Geological Survey,
public domain:
https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/rive
r-otter-tracks-simeonof-island-alaska

58
occasions during the 2014 field effort. Tracks (Figure 30) shows tracks of river otters traversing a
dried out lake bed60; it has not escaped my attention that the tracks that Steller saw on Nagai in
1741 (see page 50) may also have been tracks left by river otters.61. It may seem strange that river
otters, typically thought of as terrestrial (after all, another common name is ‘land otter’), can be
found on Simeonof Island, which is located about 80 kilometers from mainland Alaska.
However, river otters have been on Simeonof Island for at least two decades and likely longer.
How did they get there?
I learned the answer to that during the 1996 expedition to Simeonof Island, I hiked alone
along the ocean’s edge around a cape on Simeonof Island and to my astonishment, almost ran into
a romp62 of river otters. They were as astonished as I was (they were probably surprised to see
humans on Simeonof Island); otters bolted everywhere, racing every which way up then down the
bluff, falling over each other in their attempt to escape. It was hilarious; it seemed like there were
otters everywhere, but in fact there were no more than five in the romp. Again to my
astonishment, they all plunged into the ocean swimming with sinuous grace for about 20 meters
out then turning, water streaming off their vibrissae (sometimes called whiskers) so it looked like
they were boasting a liquid mustache, and raising themselves upright, holding about a third of
their upper body out of the water, staring at me. Spy-hopping. I could not see their forelimbs
(Figure 31).

I had no idea that river otters swam in the ocean. To me, this was a wondrous thing.

60

July and August of 2014 were exceedingly hot on Simeonof Island; we saw a stretch of about 2 weeks during
which no rain fell (virtually unheard-of in this locality). The shallow ponds south of our camp dried up and we found
these otter tracks along with tracks of various birds crisscrossing the mud.
61

No wolves are documented in the literature from the Shumagin Islands (see MacDonald and Cook 160). The late
USFWS Biologist Ed Bailey, who worked extensively in the Shumagin Island group, told Orcutt Frost (Steller 1988,
201-202, footnote 24) that he thought the footprint that Steller saw on Nagai Island was probably a river otter or a
bear cub. One record of a river otter has been attributed to Nagai (MacDonald and Cook 200), but I observed
numerous river otters on Simeonof Island during fieldwork there in 1996 and 2014.
62

A group of otters is called a bevy, lodge, family or a romp. Given their behavior, I chose to use the word 'romp.'

59

Figure 31. River otters swimming in Simeonof Harbor, 2008. Note the spyhopping behavior of the farther otter, shown here. Digital photograph taken on
1 August 2008, by Bob Webster and archived on http://xpda.com/minnow08/,
shown here with permission.

60

CHAPTER 4. Murder Point and Massacre Bay on Attu: Invasion
It’s called Massacre Bay.
It’s one of four bays thus named in the world. One is in New Zealand63 (recently renamed
named Golden Bay), one is near A’asu64, in American Samoa. One is in Washington State65. All
were named after violent acts involving both immigrant (imperial colonialists) and/or indigenous
people that occurred during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. But the Massacre Bay I visited in
1988, then again in 2004, then again in 2009—‘my’ Massacre Bay—is located off the
southeastern shore of Attu Island, in the Near Island group of the Aleutian Island Archipelago.
The Bering Expedition never made landfall on Attu Island, but Attu Island was among the first
North American Aleutian islands to suffer from the consequences of the Bering Expedition.
When I first visited ‘my’ Massacre Bay as part of the 1988 botanical expedition, I
assumed the bay was named after the carnage of the 1943 eighteen-day WWII Battle of Attu, the

63

In 1642, Dutch explorer Abel Tasman anchored in what became Massacre Bay on the northern point of New
Zealand, and his ship was rammed by Ngāti Tūmatakōkira and four Dutch seamen were killed by Māori; Tasman
named the bay Murderer’s Bay (Mitchell and Mitchell). The bay was later renamed Massacre Bay, apparently by
French Explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville. Massacre Bay was officially changed to Golden Bay/Mohua, in 2014.
64

In 1787, twelve European crewmembers in the French explorer Jean-Fracois de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse’s
scientific expedition, landed on the near the village of A’asu, on Tutuila Island, Samoa, to take on water, and were
killed for unknown provocation in the channel and beach near the village; 39 Samoans died in that incident. The bay
was named Massacre Bay European historians. The incident, called the A’asu Massacre, is known only from the
archived journals of La Pérouse, which were sent to Boundary Bay (Dunmore 537). A memorial near A’asu lists the
names of the Europeans killed; there is no memorial to the Samoans.
65

The name Massacre Bay, located at the head of West Sound, Orcas Island, in San Juan County in Washington
State, first appeared in the British Admiralty Chart 2689, Richards, 1858-1859. It was named by these explorers who
found extensive evidences of battles between indigenous people (Meany 161); in 1858, a raiding band of northern
tribe members decimated a Lummi village there. These events are also reflected in the names of other geographies,
including Victim Island and Skull Island.

61
Forgotten War, one of the deadliest battles in the Pacific Theatre and the only battle during WWII
held on North American soil66,67.
My assumptions about the source of the place name turned out to be incorrect (I failed to
glean knowledge from the past): the Battle of Attu was merely a 20th century’s reflection of the
brutality of imperial colonialism of the 18th century. The name Massacre Bay arises from specific
violent acts by crews of Russian promyshlenniki toward the Unangax̂ people who lived on Attu
Island in the autumn of 1745, a mere three years into the aftermath of the Bering Expedition’s
culmination. Met and rebuffed by a group of 100 armed Unangax̂ living on (relatively nearby)
Agattu Island, the promyshlenniki retreated to the less populated island of Attu and captured an
elderly woman and young boy, keeping the boy as a translator. A few weeks later, a party of
Russians attacked another Attuan settlement on what was eventually to become known as Murder
Point68 on Massacre Bay, killing 15 men and stealing women and changing the world of the
Unangan people forever.
Murder Point, on Massacre Bay, was peaceful and a source of wonder when I took part in
the botanical expeditions there during 1988, and again in 2004 (Figure 32)—crabs skittered up
and down the strand, like the shorebirds tracking tides, shells and sand dollars and molted crab
shells littered the beach, cormorants perched on rotted remains of piers—even as remnants of the
WWII carnage and subsequent military presence were evident on the nearby beaches and uplands.
Rusted rifle cartridges washed up on the beach, impressions of Quonset huts erected to house

66

Five hundred and forty-nine American soldiers, who were aided by Canadian reconnaissance and fighter-bomber
support, died in that battle, along with over 2,300 Japanese Northern Army soldiers (the ‘proto- or potential invaders’
in this temporal/spatial context) who were variously killed by American soldiers, or, to avoid capture, by their own
countrymen, or who committed suicide. One landing site of that battle was the beach on Massacre Bay.
Disembarking on Murder Point, on Massacre Bay, in the middle of wind and fog and horizontal rain characterizing
‘the birthplace of the winds,’ the young American soldiers, recently trained in the hot dry deserts of California must
have been shocked. Certainly, they were unprepared for conditions on Attu; the battle was grueling, the landscape
rugged, and over 1200 American soldiers suffered from severe cold injuries and exposure (Cloe, 293). As the battle
raged on, rations dwindled, and hunger ensued; resupply planes were often unable to locate the soldiers in the fog.
Corporal Dashielle Hammett, the author of “The Maltese Falcon”, served on Adak Island in the Andreonof Island
Group in the Aleutian Island Archipelago during WWII, wrote about the war in the Aleutians: “Modern armies had
never fought before on any field that was like the Aleutians…We could borrow no knowledge from the past. We
would have to learn as we went along, how to live and fight and win in this new land, the least-known part of our
America” (Hammett and Colodney, 9).
67

68

The Russians originally called the point ‘Krasnoy Mys,’ translated as ‘Red Cape’ (Sarichev map 26).

62

Figure 32. Sandra Talbot, collecting specimens on Murder Point, Massacre Bay, Attu,
Alaska, in 2004 (photograph by Stephen Talbot, shown here with permission).

soldiers were evident in the bluejoint grass69 meadows. We regularly stumbled and fell in
foxholes hidden in beach ryegrass70 beach meadows. Weathered wood planks and twisted rusty
metal sheets were scattered everywhere; brick chimney sentinels guarded the remains of
structures collapsed in years past. As already narrated in Chapter 2 (Chasing the Wind), Attu and
the artifacts archived in the island’s earth and strand rekindled the lost sense of wonder in me.
Once, on Engineer’s Hill, I found a set of dog tags left, in a way I shrink from divining, by
a soldier who battled on Attu during the war. I took photographs—since disappeared into some
unmarked and still inaccessible digital mausoleum—and turned them over to the Coast Guard
commander in charge of the Loran Station that year. I never learned whether the tags were
returned to the soldier’s family. The tags, made of aluminum, were remarkably shiny; perhaps
some family member—a son or daughter, a grandchild—had returned them to Engineer Hill

69

Calamagrostis canadensis or Calamagrostis nootkatensis

70

Leymus mollis

63
sometime during the 75-year aftermath of the war. Perhaps by finding them, I disturbed their
peace.
In 1987, a Japanese war memorial commemorating the over 2000 Japanese soldiers who
died on Attu was erected on Engineer Hill; the inscription on the memorial reads:
“In memory of all those who sacrificed their lives in the islands and seas of the
North Pacific during World War II and in dedication to world peace.”
The memorial, which is made of titanium and looks like an exploding mortar (Figure 33)
was damaged in a storm in 2003, although restored in 2003. In 2011, I made my own memorial
(A Deeper Peace; Figure 34), which was intended to look a little more peaceful than the
representation of an exploding mortar. I’m not sure which of the memorials is more fitting. There
is no memorial to the Attuans who died in 1745 at the hands of Russian fur traders, or the
Unangans that were forced to leave their homes, put into camps or residence schools, who have
sickened, or have died, in all the years since 174571.

71

The effects of contact and Russian colonialism (1745-1867) and events of the American Era (1867-1942) and
beyond were devastating to the Unangan people; senior history lecturer Ryan Tucker Jones’ “Empire of Extinction”
is one of several tomes that provides an overview of the interrelated impacts of colonialism. Prior to contact, the
population Unangan people is estimated to have been approximately 25,000. Within a few years of Russian
colonialism, the Unangan population from Attu to the Fox Island group in the eastern Aleutian chain declined greatly
due to disease and hardship of forced labor for the Russians. Unangans from many islands were moved between
islands and resettled, including the Commander Islands, where Bering died, and to the Pribilof Islands. Christianity
in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church was introduced, and local indigenous culture greatly modified.
Conditions did not greatly improve following the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867, and children were taken
from their homes and put into resident schools where their culture and language was further eroded. The 1910 U. S.
Census counted only 1,083 Aleuts (Bureau of the Census, 574). During WWII, Unangans from Attu were interred as
prisoners of war on Hokkaido, and, as a result, the United States government evacuated hundreds of Unangans to
southeast Alaska, where many died due to infectious diseases and many others were mistreated or neglected.
Military presence remained in the Aleutian Islands following WWII through the Cold War, and this resulted in the
increase in population size of Unangans, who live mostly in the city of Sand Point in the Shumagin Island group,
Unalaska and Dutch Harbor, in the Fox Island group in the eastern Aleutian Island chain, Atka, in the Andreanof
Island group, the Pribilof Islands (St. George and St. Paul), all in the United States, and in the Commander Islands
(Bering, Copper) in Russia. The 2000 U. S. Census identified just under 12,000 people as Unangans, and
approximately 17,000 identified as having partial Unangan ancestry (Ogunwole 11). Perhaps 150 people in the
United States speak dialects of the language of the Aleutian Island indigenous people (Berge 578). In 1988, the Aleut
Restitution Act of Congress attempted to compensate survivors of the southeastern Alaskan internment, and in 2017,
the US. Government formally apologized to the Unangan people for their treatment in the internment camps.

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Figure 33. Japanese peace memorial at the top of Engineer Hill,
where the Battle of Attu ended on May 29th, 1943 (photo credit: L.
Hupp/USFWS). Image is in the public domain:
https://medium.com/@AlaskaUSFWS/refuge-and-remembrancec8e2e96bec6c

Figure 34. Sandra Talbot, A Deeper Peace,
2011. 20 x 12 x 5 inches. Wood cast aluminum,
stones, rusted iron salvaged from Attu Island,
copper, walnut (photo credit, Mike Conti).

65
It was during the botanical expedition of 2009 that I felt a change, an inchoate niggling, a
persistently fleeting sense of haunting sadness. The sense of wonder I felt during prior years had
undergone a shift. As before, we trekked for miles along the steadily disappearing tracts, scaled
hanging garden cliffs, searched for wondrous new species to add to our archives, but that trip was
not quite as joyous as before, but rather heavy, dragging, oddly yearning. The bird calls seemed
somewhat muted; the glorious wildflowers seemed a little less glorious. Something was coming; I
could feel it. We could feel it. Our field companion of 15 years, bryologist Dr. Wilf Schofield
(UBC), had died eight months earlier and we felt, deeply, his absence. The Loran Station, the last
remnants of Navy Town on Massacre Bay, was closing, a victim of technological change in the
form of GPS; the 20 or so humans (young coasties manning the station, most of which hated the
tour and were glad to see the station shutter) would leave the following year. After 2010, no
humans would make their homes on Attu Island, ending a continuous 5000-year history of
inhabitation. But that wasn’t the source of our disquiet; the island could not talk to those humans
anyway, although sometimes I imagined it talked to me through the plants I learned to know and
love. But the change coming was bigger, if not less irreversible; the climate was changing, even
here on this wild, remote island, and that was changing the ecosystem of Attu forever.
In remembrance of that 2009 memory, I started working on a relief sculpture, The Strand
on Massacre Bay (Figure 35). The Strand currently incorporates and immortalizes artifacts
(rusted rifle cartridges, shells collected on the strand, planks of wood charred in the Japanese
style) filed in the earth and strand on Massacre Bay, extracted (collected) during my botanical
expeditions to Attu and other Aleutian Islands and archived in my personal corpus of sculpture
materials for over a decade. Making The Strand also used molted crab epidermises as molds for
casting. With this piece, I hoped to immobilize time, to arrest the disquiet that began during that
2009 expedition, to freeze the wonder that I have felt during all prior field excursions to Attu, and
that I feel during my typically annual expeditions to various islands in the Aleutian Island
Archipelago.
I have as yet been unable to finish the sculpture, as the COVID-19 pandemic locked down
my sculpture studio, and the half-finished piece remains inaccessible. It is frozen, its completion
will have to wait until the pandemic has swept through.

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Figure 35. Sandra Talbot, The Strand at Massacre Bay, in progress. Cast aluminum,
rusted rifle cartridges, artifacts found on the strand, charwood.

CHAPTER 5. Island Hopping: Adak. Ox-eye Daisies on Adak Island, August 2018
My field expeditions in August, 2018, included a two-day trip to Kasatochi Island to
conduct post-eruption revegetation research, and a small amount of invasive species research on
Adak Island72. One legacy of the U. S. military, which shuttered its installation on Adak in 2004,
and indeed on many Aleutian islands, is the presence and persistence of a number of introduced
plant species, some of which have become invasive. These include perennial beauty (Bellis
perennis), which dots the yards throughout Adak proper and is marching down the gravel roads in
a way reminiscent of the ox-eye daisy trails on Simeonof Island. Not surprisingly, another of
those invasive species spreading on Adak Island is the ox-eye daisy. Fields of daisies, similar to
what we saw on Simeonof Island, surround the abandoned Naval Security Group Activity
(NSGA) site near Clam Lagoon (Daisy Fields, Figure 36). The more the abandoned military
structures rust, the wider the expanse of daisy fields there. By human hands, whether by accident,

72

The St. Peter apparently made landfall, on 24 September 1741 (without going ashore) on Adak and Atka islands, in
what became known as the Andreanof Island group. Steller’s journal states: “the weather was gloomy almost the
whole day. Towards evening to our great dismay we saw land ahead of us in latitude 51°, and many islands seemed
to lie only three or four miles from us.” (Golder 1925, 112). By the time the St. Peter made landfall in the Andreanof
Island group, there were at least 13 sailors on the sick list, ill with scurvy (Golder 1922, 164-167).

67
or by design, the daisy fields have seeded, and by natural means, expanded, in the shadow of an
abandoned military complex; like Agnes Denes’ 1982 Wheatfield, planted (although for
completely different purposes) on a landfill in the shadow of the Twin Towers, the daisy field
occupies that fragile liminal space between reckless human endeavor and the earth’s serene
resilience. Above the soil, the daisy fields are beautiful, just like they are on Simeonof Island, but
I know that beneath the soil they are advancing via a network of thick rhizomes that choke and
oust native species. Unfortunately, they are likely to continue displacing native species; they are
biological invaders; effective intervention is unlikely. But, when I see the daisies swaying in the
wind (Dreams of Conquest, Figure 37), my mind slots them simultaneously into Lovelock’s
Daisyworld 73 and the religious training of my childhood:

Consider the daisies of the field…they toil not, neither do they sow74.

73

In 1983, James Lovelock and Andrew Watson created Daisyworld (Watson and Lovelock), a computer simulation
that ‘seeds’ two varieties of daisy—those with black petals, and those with white petals—to mimic certain elements
of the Earth-Sun system and to test Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis (Lovelock) which hypothesizes that the Earth is a
self-regulating system. The virtual white daisies reflect light, while the black daisies absorb light. Daisyworld tracks
the two populations and the surface temperature of the simulated world with an ever-increasing strength of the sun’s
rays. The simulation showed that the surface temperature of the world remained in equilibrium—due to different
frequencies of each type, depending on local and global simulated conditions—across various temperatures (that is,
until the temperatures exceeded each daisy type’s physiological tolerances). The initial simulations, which were
upheld following testing that modeled more biodiverse and complex virtual worlds (Wood et al.), suggested that the
biosphere responds (up to a point) with resilience to perturbations, supporting Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis.
“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin” (The Authorized King James
Bible, Matt. 6:28).
74

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Figure 36. Sandra Talbot, Daisy Fields, Abandoned NSGA Site, Adak, I
(top) and II (bottom), 2020. Digital imagery UV printed on glass. 15.6 x
21.6 x 0.5 inches each.

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Figure 37. Sandra Talbot, still frames from video Dreams of Conquest, 2020.
7:47 minutes. Video is archived at https://vimeo.com/442803496

In the video Dreams of Conquest, the silent waving of the above-ground daisy corpuses is
presaged by the silent, slow motion oscillation of light fixtures that are apparently blowing in
slight breezes that gust through a room in one of the abandoned NSGA site buildings. The video
imagery of the daisies—an invasive species that expanded following the retraction of military
control of Adak Island—was taken at a locale just outside the doorway of that building built by

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what others might call an invasive species. The purpose of that specific building is unknown, but
certainly no smoking was allowed (Figure 37, top).
Author, naturalist, scientist, philosopher and conservationist Aldo Leopold’s “land
aesthetic” (Callicott 105) emerged from his consideration that detailed information about a
particular locale within a broader ecological and evolutionary history of a region75. Leopold
strongly opposed the introduction of non-native species on those grounds, which led him to adopt
the view that introduced species are aesthetically unpleasing (they did not belong to a particular
ecosystem and were therefore visually and ecologically jarring). Leopold’s land aesthetic
(initially called the ‘land ethic’) was an extension of proto-ecological thought into aesthetic
judgement that greatly impacted landscape architecture of the late 19th century forward. In 1882,
Charles Sprague Sargent, Harvard botanist and Director of the Arnold Arboretum, clashed with
the landscape architect Fredrick Law Olmsted over the aesthetic value of using exotics to
rehabilitate the shores of the Muddy River in Massachusetts (Zaizevsky); Sargent opposed the
practice, Olmsted prevaricated76, waxing rapturous about, for example, ivy (Olmsted 419).
Because of their tendency to homogenize biotas, which contributes to what ecologist and
evolutionary biologist Daniel Simberloff calls “a pervasive biocultural homogenization fostered
by urbanization and globalization” (33), biologists now tend to view invasive species with
antipathy, through a dark and negative filter, but without necessarily acknowledging aesthetic
considerations. Some researchers, nevertheless, consider this antipathy to be riddled with
xenophobia. For example, historian Philip Pauly, referencing the Progressive Era77, writes that
“attitudes towards foreign pests merged with ethnic prejudices: the gypsy moth and the oriental
chestnut blight both took on and contributed to characteristics ascribed to their presumed human
compatriots” (54). He goes on to state that “it should be clear that attitudes about foreign and
Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac,” which introduces his ideas about his land ethic, is a seminal
transformative text within the field of conservation.
75

Sargent wrote “[i]t is not easy to explain why certain plants look distinctly in place in certain situations and why
other plants look as distinctly out of place…inevitably produc[ing] disharmonious results” (266). In an editorial
response in the pages of the journal Garden and Forest, Olmsted conceded that using nonindigenous species in his
gardens “inevitably far-fetched trees with little discrimination had led to deplorable results” (418) but would still
consider the use of certain exotics in certain places to give “a touch of grace, delicacy and fineness…not supplied by
our native trees” (419).
76

77

The Progressive Era was a period of widespread social activism and political reform across the United States that
spanned from the 1890s to the 1920s, with the goals of addressing issues emerging from immigration, urbanization,
industrialization, and political corruption.

71
native organisms were intimately linked, through both everyday experiences and analogies of
policy, to views on ‘alien’ and ‘native’ humans” (70). Notwithstanding these myriad, eraspanning viewpoints, non-native species that become invasive when introduced to a geography
arrive there through active or passive human agency, and indeed, there is an argument that
humans can or should be considered invasive species (Zielinski). As such, whether we view
invasive species through an aesthetic or ecological or evolutionary lens, we still judge them from
within our anthropocentric world view, perpetuating hierarchical view of non-native species that
displace others: invasive species are terrible, we yank them out by their roots, never mind we
share certain characteristics with invasive non-human species.
Decades ago, in another Graduate Student World, I took a course in evolution from
paleoecologist and artist R. Dale Guthrie, author of the book “The Nature of Paleolithic Art.” I
took issue with some of what Guthrie said in that course (e.g. once he stated that only animals
with good memories get ulcers, which is difficult to determine empirically, but see Sapolsky 213),
suspicious of his discipline’s tendency to connect a few artifact/dots to create edges of an entire
culture when those dots could have as easily traced alternative edges. That tendency bothered my
hypothetical-deductive scientific sensibilities. I am still not sure how much of what he proposed
in that course was intended to spark a conversation; if much of it was (and I expect it was; he is
not only a brilliant paleoecologist, he was a brilliant pedagogue), he succeeded. Nevertheless, the
tendency to look at a few artifacts and recreate entire cultures, while easy to parody (This Is Not
Nature, Figure 12; Strange Taxonomies, Figure 38), seems very dangerous to me.
Nevertheless, one of Guthrie’s statements has stayed with me for decades: he (obviously
of European ancestry) called European man “The Colonizer Morph.” The Invader. The history of
the Aleutian Islands supports that statement, whether we look at ox-eye daisies, or Norway rats,
or ourselves. The definition of a biological invasion, and indeed, an invasive species, is freighted
with imprecision, due in no large part to lack of clarity in Charles Elton’s seminal book in
invasion ecology, “The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants.” Elton did not propose a
definition of invasiveness, and as a result, the term ‘invasive’ is conflated with at least the
following terms: alien, non-indigenous, introduced, imported, non-native, colonizer, immigrant,
naturalized (Colautti and MacIsaac 135-141). Ecologist Loïc Valerey, of the Département
d’Ecologie et de Gestion de la Biodiversité Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, along with his

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Figure 38. Sandra Talbot, Strange Taxonomies, 2020. Wood cast
aluminum, mummified cast citrus bronze, stones, Styrofoam, insect pins,
vitrine case with velvet base. 22 x 12 x 5 inches.

73
coauthors, adopt an ontological approach to the notion of biological invasions that would facilitate
a return to basic principles when formulating a more precise definition of biological invasions.
Within the context of their model, which incorporates, broadly, geographic and impact criteria,
they define a biological invasion as follows (quoted for precision’s sake):
“A biological invasion consists of a species’ acquiring a competitive advantage
following the disappearance of natural obstacles to its proliferation, which
allows it to spread rapidly and to conquer novel areas within recipient
ecosystems in which it becomes a dominant population” (Valerey et al. 1349).
With a few changes, that definition can quite easily be applied to the invasion of the
Aleutians islands, and Unangan culture, by the promyshlenniki in the mid 1700s. Certainly, the
ox-eye daisies on Simeonof and Adak islands are spreading; they have become invasive. In the
end, though, I cannot hate them, anymore than can I hate ourselves. That is not a solution to the
problem of invasiveness, it’s just an observation that hate should not play a role when we look at
other species, invasive or not, any more than when we look at ourselves.
Nevertheless, after I used my iPhone to collect video imagery from a set of daisies to get a
daisy’s eye view (Dreams of Conquest, Figure 37), I collected some to use as specimens for
incorporation into my art-making (The Invasion of Adak, Figure 39).

I admit, I ripped them out by the roots.

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Figure 39. Sandra Talbot, The Invasion of Adak, 2020. Bleach and rust-distressed galvanized
metal, steel cabinet hinges, digital imagery, acrylic, pressed herbarium specimens. The images on
the upper left and lower right shows single plate among 32 total images included in the ‘book’
which was comprised of 40 total ‘pages.’ Each plate: 8 x 12 inches.

Pages of the Invasion of Adak (Figure 39) use processes described in Book of Falling
Angels (Figures 6 and 7) in addition to the further distressing of the galvanized steel plates using
hydrogen peroxide, white vinegar and salt, with rusting hastened using rusted iron gears collected
on Adak Island to ground the imagery in its geographic origin. The work incorporates imagery of
collapsing structures and furnishings and fading signage found on the abandoned NSGA site on
Clam Lagoon, Adak, pressed herbarium specimens collected from the site and archived, and
remnants of letters from colleagues. Transferring the digital imagery onto distressed and rusted

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galvanized steel and incorporating dried, archived herbarium specimens imbues the sense of
decomposition of military structures on Adak Island following the withdrawal of military support,
including financial support, reflecting the abandoned and disintegrating human environment that
is nevertheless still impacted by invading species deposited there through human agency, whether
intentional or accidental.

CHAPTER 6. A Segue (Divining Steller’s Sea Ape, Continued)

In late August 2009, at the end of our field season, and returning to Adak from sailing on
the Tiglax̂ from Attu, Buldir, Kiska, and Kasatochi, we took our usual end-of-season walk on City
Beach on Adak Island while awaiting the arrival of the jet that would take us back to Anchorage.
I bent down to pick up a piece of driftwood, noting its sinuous shape, which reminded me of some
sort of sea mammal. I stuffed the driftwood in my backpack and forgot about it until that autumn,
when I decided to work with the piece of driftwood to make a birthday present for my mother. A
frustrated marine biologist, my mother loved seals, whales and dolphins; I hoped to carve the
driftwood into a sculpture of seal. However, as my hands worked with the piece of driftwood,
another creature emerged from the wood. The face seemed to look more like a dog’s face than a
seal’s face (Figure 40). The ears emerging from the wood were large and pointed, although laid
back. The shape of the driftwood required the forelimbs to emerge much farther down than a
seal’s might, and the limbs had to wrap around rthe body, retaining the streamlined form. While
carving, my mind wandered to Steller’s descriptions of the sea monkey, but as the creature in the
wood emerged, it began to look more and more like a river otter.

And I knew that river otters swam in the ocean, at least in the Shumagin Islands.

As I looked at the carving in my hand, I was holding in my mind, simultaneously, the
account of Steller’s Sea Ape and the memory of the 1996 ocean- river otters swimming and spyhopping in the ocean off the shores of Simeonof Island, near where Steller saw his ‘sea monkey.’
In the kind of slotting of evidence and a flash that happens much more rarely in science than
supposed, I knew in my heart what Steller saw. This was a wonder emerging from both a

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cognitive passion and a boundary breached by artmaking, “as much about knowing as of feeling”
(Daston and Park 14).

Figure 40. Sandra Talbot, Steller’s Sea Monkey? 2009. Two views. 11 x 5 x 1.5 inches. Carved
driftwood, glass, cherry, brass.

But I needed evidence.

A New Hypothesis
I concede that the identity of the “sea ape” is unknown at present and barring time travel,
will remain unknown for all time. However, that does not preclude the formulation of hypotheses
and testing of those hypotheses. Again, the most common explanation for the sighting is that it
was a young northern fur seal, for which the forelimbs are set far enough behind on the torso that
they may have been obscured below the waterline, even given Steller’s report of spy-hopping, a
known behavior of whales and known in Northern fur seals (Stejneger 280). All these comments
are reasonable, given the imperfect situation surrounding the observation, but next Stejneger
writes:
“…it must not be overlooked that Steller, at the time he made his
observation, had never seen a fur-seal, dead or alive…he made his

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acquaintance with this animal [fur seals] on the rookeries of Bering
Island…” (281).
It is Stejneger’s latter quote, along with the fact that fur seal ears cannot be considered
‘erect,’ that fails to convince me, and the former is strictly due to a misreading of the archived
translations of Steller’s journal, which reports observations of “large numbers of hair seals, sea
otters, fur seals, sea lions (Phoca ursina78 and leonina), dolphins, and storm fishes” (Golder 1925,
63) during the days prior to the observation of the ‘sea monkey.’ It is unclear why Stejneger’s
1936 biography of Steller fails to include the sightings of the fur seals as presented in Golder
(1925, 63), since Stejneger is listed as the translator and partial annotator of Golder’s account.
Stejneger does dismiss the possibility that the ‘sea monkey’ was a sea otter, stating that Steller
had seen many sea otters prior to sighting the ‘sea monkey’ (Golder 1925, 65, footnote 142) and
was therefore familiar with them. Obviously, the same argument, based on Steller’s journal, can
be made for the fur seal, and I make it here.
No illustration of the ‘sea monkey’ has yet been uncovered. According to his journal,
Steller, and/or his companion Thoma (the various translations of the manuscript differ who the
gun-wielder was), attempted to shoot the animal, but missed. It is notable that the logbook of the
St. Peter did not recount the sea ape encounter; neither was it reported in Waxell’s 1756 account
of that portion of the expedition (Waxell 108); clearly, the sighting was of interest to Steller but
not to the crew also documenting the Expedition. However, the encounter was not mentioned in
Steller's 1742 governmental report, nor did Steller include description of the creature in “De
Bestiis Marinis,” although he did reference the observation and stated that he “insert[ed] a sketch
of a sea ape” (11), which was apparently lost along with other illustrations from the Steller’s
materials when they were transported along with the original journal to St. Petersburg (Stejneger
511-526).
Based on the evidence against the northern fur seal and prior arguments presented in other
chapters for other possible explanations, and in support of my intuitive leap based on art-making,
I’m convinced that Steller’s Sea Ape was a river otter. Supporting evidence for this hypothesis

78

The currently accepted name for the northern fur seal is Callorhinus ursinus.

78
comes in the form of distributional79, morphological80, behavioral81 and oceanic82 data. The
congruence of these pieces of scientific evidence supports the hypothesis that Steller’s Sea Ape
(AKA Steller’s sea monkey) was an ocean-swimming river otter (Steller’s Bestiary: Simia
marina, Figure 41), a hypothesis that derived from art-making; less support is given to alternative
hypotheses. Western scientific evidence cannot be provided to support or reject the hypothesis
that the Steller’s sea monkey was a previously—and currently—undescribed creature (that
mythago83), never documented before, and never documented since; such instances are outside
the scope of the scientific method. Yet, none of the prior explanations erected by biologists,
including cryptobiologists, even considered the river otter as a target for investigation. Thus, in
this instance, art-making conducted against a background of scientific facts and lived experience
79

River otters have been observed on at least two islands in the Shumagin Island group [Nagai Island (MacDonald
and Cook 200); Simeonof Island, as recounted herein], are known to inhabit Kodiak Island (MacDonald and Cook
200), and have been observed in the ocean between Kodiak and the Shumagin islands (Dragoo 11). Steller saw
tracks of an unknown animal that was more likely a river otter than a wolf or a bear. Archived US federal records
presenting results of a seabird, fish and marine mammal oceanographic transect near the Semidi Islands, located
between Kodiak Island and the Shumagin Island Group, reported a river otter swimming in the open ocean between
Chirikof Island and Chowiet Island, in 2001 (Dragoo 12), close to where the ‘sea monkey’ was sighted in 1741.
80

Figure 31 shows how the large vibrissae of river otters droop down, rather like a Fu Manchu beard, when the otters
are wet, consistent with Steller’s description. The size of river otters in Alaska (40-60 inches) is consistent with the
size estimate of two Russian ells (or arshin; one arshin is approximately English 2.3 feet). Pelage of river otters in
Alaska are variously reddish brown to black on the dorsal side and lighter on the ventral side, and the forelimbs are
set far enough behind on their torso, so that they could have been obscured below the waterline, and the ‘shark-like’
or ‘rooster-like’ tail of the creature may have been a visual conflation of the animal's hind feet and long tail.
Photographic images of wet river otters often show how their more rounded ears appear to be pointed, depending
upon the angle of observation (for example, see Figure 31).
81

Steller wrote that the unknown sea creature rose its front end out of the water to observe the ship; that is, it
displayed ‘spy-hopping’—a synchronized swimming movement executed by marine or euryhalic species (a species
able to tolerate a wide range of salinity) that allows the animal to rise up high in the water and look over their
immediate surroundings—and engaged in an amusing juggling behavior with what Stejneger interpreted to be the
bladder of bull kelp. River otters, particularly the immature, are well-known for their sense of play (Larivière and
Walton 5). Figure 31 documents spy-hopping by river otters swimming in Simeonof Lagoon.
82

Oceanographers Phyllis Stabeno and Albert Hermann compared currents generated via an eddy-resolving model
compared with current meters and satellite-tracked drifting buoys from Shelikof Strait, Alaska, where rapid oceanic
currents flow through the Shelikof Strait on the northern side of Kodiak Island. Their results (1159) show that buoys
follow currents leading directly toward where the St. Peter was on 10 August 1741. This suggests that a river otter
living on coastal areas of Kodiak Island could be swept out to sea via strong ocean currents and travel to the vicinity
of Steller’s sighting of the ‘sea monkey.’ Gene flow studies of Kodiak and Simeonof river otters may be able to
determine whether there is a signal of asymmetrical gene flow that corresponds with the direction ocean current flow
in the region; those studies are ongoing.
The word ‘mythago’ was apparently coined by Richard Holdstock, who used the word as the title of his book
“Mythago Wood.” It appears to be a conflation of the words ‘myth’ and ‘imago’ (an unconscious, idealized mental
image of something, or someone, that influences a person’s behavior). So, a mythago is the image of an idealized
form of a mythical creature, such as Heuvelmans’ longnecked-serpent-seal.
83

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was generative, facilitating the re-examination, redefinition and reinvention of mysterious
scientific archives (or at least a scientific mystery hidden in the archives), if not scientific history.
It is perhaps a small thing, adding this trivial speck of information—this tiny diminishing
of biodiversity when we seek to increase it—to the canon of scientific knowledge. Against the
backdrop of climate change and ongoing or predicted ills, including pandemics, societal collapse,
hunger and privation, political upheavals, peaceful protests and opportunistic riots, it seems
indeed a very small thing. But solving a 280 year-old scientific mystery via art-making followed
by science-making is not a trivial thing; it lends credence to the hopeful idea that art and science,
those twin pinnacles of human achievement, those two seemingly opposite Dionysian and
Apollonian impulses driving humankind, can approach mysteries with consilience, a unity of
knowledge that hopefully does not subsume art under science (Wilson, “Consilience” 235) or vice
versa. That is, this is a small instance of ArtScience, a consilience that is not what I call Art in the
Service of Science, or Science in the Service of Art (see Heylighten and Petrović 2-3), but rather a
new way of understanding nature and more specifically ourselves via a “synthesis of artistic and
scientific modes of exploration and expression” (Root-Bernstein et al. 192). Deviating from
examples of ArtScience provided by Heylighten and Petrović (14), this instance relied not on the
rapprochement of new science and art technologies, but rather artmaking using centuries old
methods of making art, old-fashioned scientific observation and reinterpretation of centuries-old
archives. Steller’s Bestiary: Simia marina (Figure 41) adds the river otter to the list of species
observed by Steller during the Bering Expedition, remarkably describing rare behavioral and
distributional data of that species which were only documented in western scientific literature
several centuries hence.

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Figure 41. Sandra Talbot, Steller’s Bestiary: Simia marina, 2020. Charcoal, gesso,
acrylic. 30 x 48 inches x 2 inches (photo credit, Mike Conti).

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CHAPTER 7. Coda: What Does a Sea Monkey Have to Do with a Field of Daisies?

“There is a strange power in the joining of unlike things.”
(Beacham et al.)

All unknowing, Steller probably encountered traces of the ‘sea monkey’ while ashore on
Nagai Island in July 1741, in the form of “the track of an entirely unknown animal…[that]
resembled the track of a wolf but by their expanse and great size of the claws indicated that a
different and larger animal…” (Steller, in Golder 1925, 80). Given that my hypothesis of the
species identity of the ‘sea monkey’ is true and reflects objective reality (or, perhaps, a “real
object” (Harman, 9)), we can say that the relatives of Steller’s sea monkey, perhaps even its direct
descendants, are alive and well on Simeonof Island, eating, sleeping, breeding, swimming in the
ocean, gamboling down the old cattle trails, spreading invasive daisies across the island
wilderness.
At least they were as recently as 2014.
And what of those who want the mysteries to stay mysteries, those who don’t want to
know that that sea monkey, that cryptid, that sometimes mythago, is really just a mundane
terrestrial mustelid84 swimming in an unexpected place, those who would rather believe there is
something else out there, something mysterious, but something that can never be solved? Perhaps
The river (or ‘land’) otter was known to the Unangan people; in her paper “Animal World of the Aleuts,”
anthropologist Lydia Black wrote “The Aleuts distinguished the amphibians by species, overriding the postulated
distinction between land and sea ‘warm-blooded animals.’ They included in the class of amphibians the land otter and
the beaver” (130). Contemporary western science uses the term ‘amphibian’ differently: within that scientific culture
the term is used to describe a certain taxonomic class of vertebrates that includes the frogs and toads, newts and
salamanders, and cecaelians, and would refer to beavers and land otters (and other species) as ‘amphibious’ and not
as an ‘amphibian.’ Black attributes the term ‘amphibian’ to Father Ionna Veniaminov (1840) whose data
“suggest[ed] that the [Aleut] class of animals was… subdivided conceptually into land animals and ‘amphibians’; my
data suggest that such sub classes were "unnamed categories” (Black 128). Amphibians (in the western science sense)
occur on mainland Alaska, but there are no amphibians in the Shumagin or Aleutian islands and likely they would not
have been known to the Unangan or Alutiiq people. I suspect that the noun ‘amphibian’ as attributed by Veniaminov
really meant the adjective ‘amphibious’ (simplistically, able to function or live on both land and in water) and this
single example points out the importance of defining terms used differentially across cultures, time and space, to
facilitate communication.
84

82
they can be satisfied that there are plenty of other wondrous mysteries left in the world. After all,
delving into mysteries is one of the things art and science have in common.
Scientists and artists both make sense of the phenomena that surround us by looking
behind and beyond appearances to create novel representations of objects, generate novel
concepts, and sometimes, as suggested by Heylighten and Petrović (5) develop novel languages.
These processes help us to critically examine our accepted assumptions and explanations and
search for deeper insight though an ongoing process of experimentation, exploration, trial-anderror, assembly and comparison of disparate objects and materials, and “by using make-believe”
(5) while still and always interacting with physical materials or processes. The latter
methodology distinguishes both artists and scientists from philosophers, who search for
understanding largely or solely via thought processes (5). Artists and scientists rely on feedback
mechanisms to ‘correct’ ideas that initially fail or are inefficient, although the feedback
mechanisms often differ. Heylighten and Petrović suggest that the methodologies of artistic and
scientific creativity rely on stigmergy, a self-organizing coordination between actions that was
originally described in social insects (for example, termites) in which certain actions depend on
feedback associated with prior actions (Theraulaz and Bonabeau 97).
But what (and why) is it that artists and scientists create? Do scientists create in order to
search for truth, and artists create in order to find beauty (both terms that are, admittedly,
subjective), or do they both ultimately create while searching for understanding? Both science
and art, wielded independently or together, can inform our personal life, or create universal
models (or both), directly or indirectly by uncovering unexpected or unsuspected relationships.
What are the underlying patterns that give a target subject structure and meaning, and what/where
are their interrelations with other target subjects?
The comparison of Steller’s archived descriptions of the 18th century Bering Expedition
and my own 20th and 21st century scientific archives from quasi-parallel expeditions unravel the
underlying motifs of resource extraction, colonial expansion, invasion and ecological
deterioration that recur in different instances, times and places in the islands of the Aleutian
Archipelago and allied island groups. This unravelling took decades after Steller’s archived
writings first piqued my curiosity via the wonder they generated. My concentration on archives
from certain islands—those characterized by modern-day biological invasions—perhaps biases
the presentation of this unravelling and of these motifs. Still, these motifs (invasion, colonialism,

83
imperial expansion, habitat degradation and wounded ecologies, exploitation of indigenous
human and non-human people on one hand, exploration and accompanying wonder and sense of
the uncanny, human and non-human species diversity and resilience on the other) are repeated
elsewhere, and often. The ‘reveal’ of the river otter as Steller’s sea monkey is of itself not a
discipline-disrupting concept; the universe will not tilt because we know what Steller saw.
However, it relied on artmaking that strung together disparate archived experiences—the parallel
experiences of 18th, 20th and 21st century scientists experiencing the same landscapes at disparate
times and ways, stochasticity and serendipity in the observation of unusual species distributions,
the connection between a mundane terrestrial mustelid’s behavior and its relationship to
invasiveness, and the interpretation of archives within the context of a hypothesis that stemmed
from artistic intuition—rather than the careful sifting of granular scientific facts that followed. As
such, the ‘reveal’ required stigmergy and stands as a powerful example of how we, as artists, can
leverage the products and processes of iterative exploration and experimentation and wondering
and wonderment—including the collection and archiving and reimagining of scientific objects
and experiences, the nuances of intuitive artmaking, and the patient weaving together myriad
threads of seemingly disparate interrelationships that are often sufficiently subtle that they remain
otherwise buried deep in the sands of scientific specificity—to generate new knowledge that leads
to a better understanding of the processes that have shaped our world.

There is, indeed, a strange power in the joining of unlike things.

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