In 1924, Yale student John Lars Nelson takes ship on the SS Victoria , bound for Nome. He has been hired to do a plant survey, but his real mission is to find an orchid described by Georg Wilhelm Steller, the naturalist on Vitus Bering’s 1741 expedition. On the ship, John Lars encounters a young Aleut woman, Natasha Christiansen. Once in Nome he hires a pair of down-at-the-heels bootleggers to take him to the Shumagin Islands on their schooner, the Emilia Galotti . He quickly...
