Creature record / 1741
10 August 1741. Vitus Bering's ship, the St. Peter, was heading west across the Gulf of Alaska. Naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller looked over the side. Something was looking back. It had a head like a dog's, with pointed, erect ears. Whiskers hung from its lips. Its eyes were large, its body covered in grey and reddish hair, its tail divided into two fins. For about two hours it stayed with the ship. It rose upright like a man, shot beneath the hull and played with a drifting piece of seaweed. Steller had no name for it. He compared it to an old drawing and called it a sea ape.
In the summer of 1741, Vitus Bering's ship had reached the Alaskan coast. The St. Peter was part of the Second Kamchatka Expedition, also called the Great Northern Expedition. Now it was heading back west. Aboard was Georg Wilhelm Steller, the expedition's naturalist, a 32-year-old botanist from Bavaria.