Beasts of the Sea Summary: A 250-Year Tale of Extinction

Part I begins in 1741, when Georg Wilhelm Steller joins Captain Commander Vitus Bering aboard the Sviatoi Piotr. The Great Northern Expedition sails from Kamchatka to chart the ocean between Siberia and North America, and dense fog separates the ship from its companion vessel.

Land is sighted at Cape St. Elias in July 1741. Steller briefly goes ashore with the Cossack Toma Lepekhin, collecting plants and shooting unfamiliar birds. Bering, already ill, orders an immediate return to Kamchatka.

The voyage back brings autumn gales, rotting water barrels, and scurvy. On 5 November 1741, the crippled ship strikes sandbanks off an uninhabited island, and the crew drags dying men ashore.

Vitus Bering dies in the cold on 8 December 1741 and is buried in a pit in the sand. The forty-six survivors dig shallow pits covered with sailcloth, forming a subterranean camp while Arctic foxes swarm them, biting the sick and stealing tools.

In the coves, Steller observes thirty-foot animals grazing in the kelp, floating upright and suckling young from chest nipples. He identifies them as giant northern sirenians, relatives of the manatee.

The starving crew learns to harpoon the sea cows, whose fat and veal-like meat cure their scurvy. Steller bribes assistants with tobacco to help him measure and dissect a female specimen, recording its intestines and scraping the skeleton clean.

When the survivors build a small rescue boat from the wreck, Lieutenant Sven Waxell refuses to load the heavy bones. Steller abandons the skeleton under a tarpaulin on the beach, where foxes scatter it. The crew reaches Kamchatka in August 1742.

Steller travels through Siberia documenting flora and fauna, and defends Itelmens against corrupt officials in Bolsheretsk. Local authorities retaliate by reporting him as a traitor, and although Waxell’s testimony clears him, Steller dies of fever near Tyumen on 12 November 1746 at thirty-seven.

An interlude traces forty million years of sirenian evolution, from the pig-sized Prorastomus to giant kelp-grazers. After the expedition’s reports spread, fur hunters use Bering Island as a slaughterhouse and victualing station, firing blindly into herds.

With sea otters wiped out, sea urchin populations explode and consume the kelp forests the sea cows depend on. The last Steller’s sea cow is killed in 1768, twenty-seven years after its discovery.

Part II moves to 1859, when Johan Hampus Furuhjelm arrives in Novo-Arkhangelsk as governor of the Russian-American Company. His young wife Anna and his epileptic sister Constance accompany him to a rain-soaked outpost with collapsing fur profits.

Hampus appoints Constance to curate the neglected zoological collection at Kekoor Castle. Among stuffed birds and bears, she teaches herself taxonomy from Lamarck and Cassin’s catalogues and finds a measure of peace.

Professor Alexander von Nordmann in Helsinki requests a skeleton of the lost Rhytina stelleri, and Furuhjelm offers a reward. Two Aleut hunters find intact bones buried under sand and boulders on Bering Island and transport them to Sitka.

Taxidermist Martin Wolff scrubs the bones while Constance helps organize and catalogue them. She then suffers a fatal epileptic seizure, and Anna buries her in a quiet willow grove.

In 1867 Russia sells Alaska to the United States. Kekoor Castle burns to the ground, but the skeleton is shipped to Helsinki aboard Captain Krogius’s vessel.

Part III opens in 1861, when von Nordmann receives the bones while grieving his son Arthur and losing his eyesight. He hires Hilda Olson, a twenty-six-year-old artist who had drawn 454 microscopic spider illustrations for him.

Von Nordmann and anatomy professor Evert Julius Bonsdorff mount the skeleton, and, believing Steller erred about the missing finger bones, add carved wooden hand prostheses.

Hilda draws every vertebra, rib, and skull joint for a large fold-out plate in von Nordmann’s monograph.

After von Nordmann’s death, Hilda is pushed out by the male academic establishment and cannot find work as a scientific illustrator. She moves to London and designs wallpaper embedded with hidden microscopic spiders.

In the 1950s, preparator John Grönvall dismantles and restores the aging skeleton in Helsinki’s Museum of Zoology. Applying modern anatomy, he unscrews the old fittings, discards the false wooden fingers, and repositions the bones into a natural grazing curve.

Grönvall also repairs the Garvagh Footman’s Egg, a cracked Great Auk egg owned by collector Ragnar Kreuger. He had spent thirty years guarding the Aspskär Bird Sanctuary with his brothers, and he reflects on the destruction of nature.

The coda returns to the modern museum, where an assistant discovers that tapping the sea cow’s spinous processes produces musical pitches. He plays the Poco allegretto theme from Brahms’s Third Symphony on the extinct animal’s bones.

The novel closes on modern de-extinction efforts, noting that edited rock doves and Asian elephants cannot restore what is gone.

It ends with a farewell to the sea cow and a tribute to the hundreds of species declared extinct during the writing of the book.

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Characters in This Book

Beneath the Surface: What the Novel Returns To

Books Like Beasts of the Sea

The North Water by Ian McGuire: A historical novel set aboard a whaling ship in the Arctic, sharing the brutal seafaring survival and human ruthlessness of Steller’s expedition sections.

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert: A sweeping nineteenth-century novel about botanical research and scientific illustration, mirroring the novel’s attention to collectors and drawers.

Barkskins by Annie Proulx: A multi-generational epic about centuries of ecological exploitation in North America, echoing the book’s long timeline of destruction.

The Overstory by Richard Powers: A multi-strand narrative about humanity’s relationship with the natural world and ecological memory.