Theologian and natural scientist Georg Wilhelm Steller had a difficult time on Catherine the Great's ship, which was to map the route from Asia to America. According to sources, Steller was tasked with exploring nature. They suffered a shipwreck near a deserted island, but the sailors did not want to let Steller ashore.
Steller only managed to take a drawing of the strange animal before the crew had exterminated all the peaceful sea cows that were easy prey where they lived in shallow waters. The exact circumstances of the shipwreck near the deserted island remain unclear. Captain Bering had a sea, a strait, and an island named after him, while Steller gave his name to the cow.
Turpeinen follows the sea cow from its discovery in 1741 to the 1950s when a skeleton of Steller's cow was exhibited at the Helsinki Natural History Museum. Her book has had sensational success both in Finland and internationally. In 1859, Hampus Furuhjelm is governor in Alaska, with only a few years left until Russia sells the colony to the USA.
Furuhjelm has ambitions to find fur animals that have not yet been exterminated, as well as a skeleton of Steller's cow. He has an epileptic sister who spends her days cataloging collections of dead, stuffed animals. The novel is called 'The Living', not the dead, and Turpeinen directs her searchlight at the hidden, the quirky researchers, archivists, and collectors who seek knowledge and want to preserve the memory of what once existed.
That humans could exterminate what God once created was almost unthinkable in Steller's time. As the decades pass, that blasphemy transforms into a sorrow that the curious drive for progress always seems to have death in its wake. The full title and author of Turpeinen's book mentioned in the report are not specified.