Nikita Shumagin, Eighteen Forty-One

These islands carry the name of a sailor who never made it home. In the summer of seventeen forty-one, the Danish navigator Vitus Bering, sailing for the Russian crown aboard the Saint Peter, became one of the first Europeans to reach the coast of Alaska. The voyage back was brutal.

Scurvy crept through the crew, and a sailor named Nikita Shumagin grew so sick that the others rowed him ashore here, hoping fresh ground might revive him. He died soon after and was buried near the water. The crew named the whole archipelago in his memory, the Shumagin Islands, a quiet monument to the first of many who would die of scurvy before Bering himself perished that winter.