“Beasts of the Sea”
By Iida Turpeinen; Translated by David Hackston; Little, Brown and Company, 2025; $28; 274 pages.
Georg Wilhelm Steller, the naturalist who accompanied Vitus Bering to North America in 1741, has long been a character of great interest to historians and others with an interest in Bering’s fateful voyage and its discoveries. Iida Turpeinen, of Finland, has now woven Steller’s story and that of the northern sea cow into a novel that spans generations and invites conversation about the fragility of the natural world.
Although “Beasts of the Sea” is fiction, Turpeinen is a scholar as well as a writer, and her book is thoroughly informed by historic research. She skillfully combines history with imagination to create situations and scenes that would be unknowable to historians alone and yet perfectly realistic, in line with what may really have happened. Readers who look up the names of characters will find they belong to people who actually lived.
The book falls into three parts, each connected to a different century and events related to what became known as Steller’s sea cow. Turpeinen has said in an interview that her entire interest began with encountering a Steller’s sea cow skeleton in the Helsinki Natural History Museum and wondering how it came to be there.
The first third of the book tells the story of Steller’s life as a naturalist and his experiences on Bering’s voyage. This section adds to historical knowledge with storytelling that illuminates Steller’s personality and life both aboard ship and when shipwrecked on the island (later named Bering Island) where Steller observed and studied the bulbous, placid, 30-foot-long sea cow. A side story within the main narrative describes the order — sirenians — to which sea cows, manatees, and dugong belong and their mythical relationship to mermaids. Another side story delivers a lyrical recounting of evolution itself, from the beginning of life on Earth to fish, mammals, and the rest, including eventually 28 genera of sea cows.
The author uses the present tense throughout to deliver readers into the past. “These gentle beings float in the warm coves of ancient seas, but one of their number heads north, gradually moving into cooler latitudes, increasing the thickness of its blubber layer … and eventually it is closer in size to an elephant than to other sea cows … Herds of Steller’s Sea Cows fill the Pacific shores from Japan to the California peninsula, and they spread wherever the forests of kelp reach up from the seabed towards the light.”
The warmer-water sirenians die out as the Earth’s waters cool until only a handful of species remain, but the northern sea cow prospers until “a new, terrifying predator appears on the shores. . . In the end, there is only one herd left, a single group of sea cows at the furthest tip of the archipelago known as the Aleutian Islands.”
The fat and flesh of that remnant, easily hunted as the animals grazed along the shore, kept Steller and the other shipwrecked survivors alive until they build a small boat from their wreck and made it back to Russia. Because the boat was small, Steller had to leave his collections, including sea cow bones, behind. In the following years, fur hunters regularly stopped at the island, and 27 years after its first sighting, the sea cow named for Steller was extinct.
A skeleton of the extinct Steller’s sea cow and other assorted skeletons in the Bone Hall at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in November 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Ryan Schwark via Wikimedia Commons)
The concept and history of extinction are prominent themes in “Beasts of the Sea.” In Steller’s time, life on Earth was thought to be stable, created and maintained by God, and extinction of species was not even a concept. It was not until 1796, with the work of the French zoologist Georges Cuvier, that the biological meaning of “extinction” began to come into acceptance. It was even later before human activities were implicated. Turpeinen makes explicit her concern for escalating extinctions by thanking in her acknowledgments a long list of particular species “and the other 374 living creatures that were declared extinct during the writing of this novel.”
The second third of the book travels to Sitka, Alaska, in 1859. The governor of Russian America at the time, Johan Hampus Furuhjelm (a Finn from Helsinki) meets with a Finnish professor of zoology who asks him for help obtaining a skeleton of a sea cow. This chapter presents a nuanced portrait of life in Sitka at the time, with most of the story told through the experiences of Furuhjelm’s wife and sister. In the end, the governor succeeds in obtaining a skeleton (although here the author’s research and imagination fail the reality test, as she has two Aleut hunters discover the bones on Bering Island and “row” the bones from there to Sitka.) Furuhjelm served for only five years in Alaska but managed to ship a number of specimens he collected, including the sea cow skeleton, to the university in Finland.
The last third of the book jumps to Helsinki and the story of illustrator Hilda Olson, hired to illustrate biological specimens, mostly spiders, eventually more than 400 species. (Like other characters, Olson — Finland’s first professional woman scientific illustrator — existed, although little is known of her.) She eventually is asked to draw the sea cow’s bones. (This is also true.) Then, leaping to the 1950s, we enter the life of John Gronvall, an expert restorer of museum bird eggs (also true) who takes on restoration of the sea cow skeleton, correcting some of its construction. This entire section recreates the lives of scientific artists and museum practices across time, along with presenting much more about the evolving understanding of extinction.
One great strength of “Beasts of the Sea,” aside from its tremendous, historically-based storytelling, its emphasis on extinction, and its exquisite writing, is the attention to the lives of women. Even in the first section, with its focus on Steller, readers will learn about Steller’s wife and expectations of women at that time. The lives of women in history have seldom been well-documented or fully imagined, and Turpeinen has given us an essential correction.
Today, there are 27 sea cow skeletons assembled in institutions around the world. Only three of these, including the one in Helsinki, are from single individuals, and the rest are composites. Turpeinen’s initial curiosity about one set of bones has brought us a literary feat of historical fiction along with earnest attention to humans’ role in eliminating other species from the world.
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