The Voyage Of The Vega Round Asia And Europe Part 27

The two main arms into which the Yenisej is divided south of Yenisejsk are too rapid for the present Yenisej steamers to ascend them, while, as has been already stated, there is no difficulty in descending these rivers from the Selenga and the Baikal Lake on the one hand, and from the Minusinsk region abounding in grain on the other. The banks here consist, in many places, of high rocky ridges covered with fine forests, with wonderfully beautiful valleys between them, covered with luxuriant vegetation.

What I have said regarding the mode of travelling up the Yenisej refers to the year 1875, in which I went up the river accompanied by two Swedish naturalists and three Norwegian seamen. It was then by no means unknown, for scientific men such as HANSTEEN (1829), CASTReN (1846), MIDDENDORFF (winter journeys in 1843 and 1844), and SCHMIDT (1866), had travelled hither and communicated their observations to the scientific world in valuable works on the nature and people of the region. But the visits of the West-European still formed rare exceptions; no West-European commercial traveller had yet wandered to those regions, and into the calculations of the friendly masters of the Yenisej river steamers no import of goods from, or export of goods to, Europe had ever entered. All at once a new period seemed to begin. If the change has not gone on so fast as many expected, life here, however, is more than it was at one time, and every year the change is more and more noticeable. It is on this account that I consider these notes from the journey of 1875 worthy of being preserved.

[Footnote 200: With this name, for want of another, I denote all the innumerable islands which lie in the Yenisej between 69 45'

and 71 N.L. ]

[Footnote 201: The _Moskwa_ was the first steamer which penetrated from the Atlantic to the town of Yenisejsk. The princ.i.p.al dates of this voyage may therefore be quoted here.

Baron Knoop, along with several Russian merchants, had chartered in 1878 a steamer, the _Louise_; but this vessel stranded on the coast of Norway. The _Zaritza_, another Norwegian steamer, was chartered instead to carry the _Louise's_ goods to their destination. But this vessel too stranded at the mouth of the Yenisej, and was abandoned by the crew, who were rescued by a small steamer, the _Moskwa_, which accompanied the _Zaritza_. In this steamer Captain Dallmann, the Bremen merchant Helwig Schmidt, and Ehlertz, an official in the Russian finance office, now travelled up the river. The _Moskwa_ had a successful voyage, arriving on the 4th September at Goltschicha, pa.s.sing Turuchansk in consequence of a number of delays only on the 24th September, reaching Podkamenaja Tunguska on the 1st October, and on the 14th of the same month its destination, a winter harbour on the Tschorna river, some miles north of Yenisejsk. (Fahrt auf dem Yenisse; von der Mundung bis Yenisejsk im Sommer 1878; Petermann's _Mittheilungen_, 1879, p 81.) ]

[Footnote 202: The particulars of the voyages of these vessels are taken from a copy which I have received of Captain Emil Nilsson's log. ]

[Footnote 203: The goods carried by me and by Wiggins to the Yenisej; in 1876, and those which Schwanenberg carried thence in 1877, were properly only samples on a somewhat large scale. I have no knowledge of the goods which the _Zaritza_ had on board when she ran aground at the mouth of the Yenisej. ]

[Footnote 204: According to Johannesen's determination. On Wrangel's map the lat.i.tude of this cape is given as 73 30'. Johannesen found the longitude to be 125 31' instead of 127. ]

[Footnote 205: According to Latkin (Petermann's _Mittheilungen_, 1879, p. 92), the Lena delta is crossed by seven main arms, the westernmost of which is called Anatartisch. It debouches into the sea at a cape 58 feet high named Ice Cape (Ledjanoi). Next come the river arm Bjelkoj, then Tumat, at whose mouth a landmark erected by Laptev in 1739 is still in existence. Then come the other three main arms, Kychistach, Trofimov, and Kischlach, and finally the very broad eastmost arm, Bychov. Probably some of the smaller river arms are to be preferred for sailing up the river to this broad arm, which is fouled by shoals. ]

[Footnote 206: A common name used in Siberia for all the native races. ]

[Footnote 207: This has been incorrectly interpreted as if they shot at the vessel. ]

[Footnote 208: A coal seam is often unfit for use near the surface, where for centuries it has been uncovered and exposed to the action of the atmosphere, while farther down it may yield very good coal.

It is probable besides that the layers of shale, which often surround the coal seams, have in this case been mistaken for the true coal. For those who are inexperienced in coal-mining to make such a mistake is the rule and not the exception. ]

[Footnote 209: In order not to write without due examination about figures which have been written about a thousand times before, I have, with the help of Petermann's map of North and Middle Asia in Stieler's Hand-Atlas, calculated the extent of the areas of the Siberian rivers, and found them to be:--

Square Geographical kilometres. square miles.

River area of the Ob (with the Tas) 3,445,000 62,560 River area of the Yenisej 2,712,000 49,250 River area of the Lena 2,395,000 43,500

Of these areas 4,966,000 square kilometres, or about 90,000 geographical square miles, lie south of 60 N.L. ]

[Footnote 210: For the northern hemisphere it is the general rule that where rivers flow through loose, earthy strata in a direction deviating considerably from that of the parallels of lat.i.tude, the right bank, when one stands facing the mouth of the river, is high, and the left low. The cause of this is the globular form of the earth and its rotation, which gives rivers flowing north a tendency towards the east, and to rivers flowing south a tendency to the west This tendency is resisted by the bank, but it is gradually eaten into and washed away by degrees, so that the river bed, in the course of thousands of years, is s.h.i.+fted in the direction indicated. ]

[Footnote 211: As specimens of the sub-fossil mollusc fauna of the _tundra_ some of the common species are delineated on the opposite page. These are:--1. _Mya arenaria_, Lin. 2/3 of natural size. 2.

_Mya truncata_, Lin. var. _Uddevallensis_, Forbes. 2/3 3. _Saxicava pholadis_, Lin. 2/3. 4. _Tellina lata_, Gmel. 2/3 5. _Cardium ciliatum_, Fabr. 2/3. 6. _Leda pernula_, Mull. var. _buccata_, Steenstr. Natural size. 7. _Nucula expansa_, Reeve. Nat. size. 8.

_Fusus Kroyeri_, Moll. 2/3. 9. _Fusus fornicatus_, Reeve. 1/2. 10.

_Fusus tornatus_, Gould. 2/3. 11. _Margarita elegantissima_, Bean.

Natural size. 12. _Pleurotoma plicifera_, Wood. Natural size. 13.

_Pleurotoma pyramidalis_, Strom. 1-1/2. 14. _Trichotropis borealis_, Brod. 1-1/2. 15. _Natica helicoides_, Johnst. Nat. size. ]

[Footnote 212: _Bihang till Vet. Akad. Handl._ Bd. iv. No. 11, p. 42. ]

[Footnote 213: Provisions and wares intended for trade with the natives are transported on the Yenisej, as on many other Siberian rivers, down the stream in colossal lighters, built of planks like logs. It does not pay to take them up the river again, on which account, after their lading has been taken out of them, they are either left on the bank to rot or broken up for the timber. ]

CHAPTER IX.

The New Siberian Islands--The Mammoth--Discovery of Mammoth and Rhinoceros mummies--Fossil Rhinoceros horns--s...o...b..voj Island--Liachoff's Island--First discovery of this island-- Pa.s.sage through the sound between this island and the mainland--Animal life there--Formation of ice in water above the freezing point--The Bear Islands--The quant.i.ty and dimensions of the ice begin to increase--Different kinds of sea-ice--Renewed attempt to leave the open channel along the coast--Lighthouse Island--Voyage along the coast to Cape Schelagskoj--Advance delayed by ice, shoals, and fog-- First meeting with the Chukches--Landing and visits to Chukch villages--Discovery of abandoned encampments--Trade with the natives rendered difficult by the want of means of exchange--Stay at Irkaipij--Onkilon graves--Information regarding the Onkilon race--Renewed contact with the Chukches --Kolyutschin Bay--American statements regarding the state of the ice north of Behring's Straits--The _Vega_ beset.

After the parting the _Lena_ shaped her course towards the land; the _Vega_ continued her voyage in a north-easterly direction towards the new Siberian Islands.

These have, from the time of their discovery, been renowned among the Russian ivory collectors for their extraordinary richness in tusks and portions of skeletons of the extinct northern species of elephant known by the name of _mammoth_.

We know by the careful researches of the academicians PALLAS, VON BAER, BRANDT, VON MIDDENDORFF, FR. SCHMIDT, &c., that the mammoth was a peculiar northern species of elephant with a covering of hair, which, at least during certain seasons of the year, lived under natural conditions closely resembling those which now prevail in middle and even in northern Siberia. The widely extended gra.s.sy plains and forests of North Asia were the proper homeland of this animal, and there it must at one time have wandered about in large herds.

The same, or a closely allied species of elephant, also occurred in North America, in England, France, Switzerland, Germany, and North Russia. Indeed, even in Sweden and Finland inconsiderable mammoth remains have sometimes been found.[214] But while in Europe only some more or less inconsiderable remains of bones are commonly to be found, in Siberia we meet not only with whole skeletons, but also whole animals frozen in the earth, with solidified blood, flesh, hide, and hair. Hence we may draw the conclusion that the mammoth died out, speaking geologically, not so very long ago. This is besides confirmed by a remarkable antiquarian discovery made in France. Along with a number of roughly worked flint flakes, pieces of ivory were found, on which, among other things, a mammoth with trunk, tusks, and hair was engraved in rough but unmistakable lineaments, and in a style resembling that which distinguishes the Chukch drawings, copies of which will be found further on in this work. This drawing, whose genuineness appears to be proved, surpa.s.ses in age, perhaps a hundredfold, the oldest monuments that Egypt has to show, and forms a remarkable proof that the mammoth, the original of the drawing, lived in Western Europe contemporaneously with man. The mammoth remains are thus derived from a gigantic animal form, living in former times in nearly all the lands now civilized, and whose carcase is not yet everywhere completely decomposed. Hence the great and intense interest which attaches to all that concerns this wonderful animal.

If the interpretation of an obscure pa.s.sage in Pliny be correct, mammoth ivory has, from the most ancient times, formed a valued article of commerce, which, however, was often mistaken for the ivory of living elephants and of the walrus. But portions of the skeleton of the mammoth itself are first described in detail by WITSEN, who during his stay in Russia in 1686 collected a large number of statements regarding it, and at least in the second edition of his work gives good drawings of the under jaw of a mammoth and the cranium of a fossil species of ox, whose bones are found along with the remains of the mammoth (WITSEN, 2nd. edit. p.

746). But it appears to have escaped Witsen, who himself considered mammoth bones to be the remains of ancient elephants, and who well knew the walrus, that in a number of the accounts which he quotes, the mammoth and the walrus are clearly mixed up together, which is not so wonderful, as both are found on the coast of the Polar Sea, and both yielded ivory to the stocks of the Siberian merchants. In the same way all the statements which the French Jesuit, AVRIL, during his stay in Moscow in 1686, collected regarding the amphibious animal, _Behemoth_, occurring on the coast of the Tartarian Sea, (Polar Sea) refer not to the mammoth, as some writers, HOWORTH[215] for example, have supposed, but to the walrus.

The name mammoth, which is probably of Tartar origin, Witsen appears to wish to derive from Behemoth, spoken of in the fortieth chapter of the Book of Job. The first mammoth tusk was brought to England in 1611, by JOSIAS LOGAN. It was purchased in the region of the Petchora, and attracted great attention, as appears from Logan's remark in a letter to Hakluyt, that one would not have dreamed to find such wares in the region of the Petchora (_Purchas_, iii p.

546). As Englishmen at that time visited Moscow frequently, and for long periods, this remark appears to indicate that fossil ivory first became known in the capital of Russia some time after the conquest of Siberia.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAMMOTH SKELETON IN THE IMPERIAL MUSEUM OF THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES IN ST PETERSBURG. After a Photograph communicated by the Academician Friedrich Schmidt in St. Petersburg. ]

[Ill.u.s.tration: RESTORED FORM OF THE MAMMOTH After JUKES, _The Student's Manual of Geology_, Edinburgh, 1862. ]

I have not, indeed, been successful during the voyage of the _Vega_ in making any remarkable discovery that would throw light on the mode of life of the mammoth,[216] but as we now sail forward between sh.o.r.es probably richer in such remains than any other on the surface of the globe, and over a sea, from whose bottom our dredge brought up, along with pieces of driftwood, half-decayed portions of mammoth tusks, and as the savages with whom we came in contact, several times offered us very fine mammoth tusks or tools made of mammoth ivory, it may not perhaps be out of place here to give a brief account of some of the most important mammoth _finds_ which have been preserved for science. We can only refer to the discovery of mammoth _mummies_,[217] for the _finds_ of mammoth tusks sufficiently well preserved to be used for carving are so frequent as to defy enumeration. Middendorff reckons the number of the tusks, which yearly come into the market, as at least a hundred pairs,[218]

whence we may infer, that during the years that have elapsed since the conquest of Siberia useful tusks from more than 20,000 animals have been collected.

The discovery of a mammoth-_mummy_ is mentioned for the first time in detail in the sketch of a journey which the Russian amba.s.sador EVERT YSSBRANTS IDES, a Dutchman by birth, made in 1692 through Siberia to China. A person whom Yssbrants Ides had with him during his journey through Siberia, and who travelled every year to collect mammoth ivory, a.s.sured him that he had once found a head of this animal in a piece of frozen earth which had tumbled down. The flesh was putrefied, the neck-bone was still coloured by blood, and some distance from the head a frozen foot was found.[219] The foot was taken to Turuchansk, whence we may infer that the _find_ was made on the Yenisej. Another time the same man found a pair of tusks weighing together twelve poods or nearly 200 kilogram. Ides'

informant further stated, that while the heathen Yakuts, Tunguses, and Ostyaks, supposed that the mammoth always lived in the earth and went about in it, however hard the ground might be frozen, also that the large animal died when it came so far up that it saw or smelled the air; the old Russians living in Siberia were of opinion that the mammoth was an animal of the same kind as the elephant, though with tusks somewhat more bent and closer together; that before the Flood Siberia had been warmer than now, and elephants had then lived in numbers there; that they had been drowned in the Flood, and afterwards, when the climate became colder, had frozen in the river mud.[220]

The folk-lore of the natives regarding the mode of life of the mammoth under ground is given in still greater detail in J.B.

MuLLER'S _Leben und Gewonheiten der Ostiaken unter dem Polo arctico wohnende_, &c. Berlin, 1720 (in French in _Recueil de Voiages au Nord_, Amsterdam, 1731-38, Vol. VIII. p. 373). According to the accounts given by Muller, who lived in Siberia as a Swedish prisoner of war,[221] the tusks formed the animal's horns. With these, which were fastened above the eyes and were movable, the animal dug a way for itself through the clay and mud, but when it came to sandy soil, the sand ran together so that the mammoth stuck fast and perished.

Muller further states, that many a.s.sured him that they themselves had seen such animals on the other side of Beresovsk in large grottos in the Ural mountains (_loc. cit._ p. 382).

KLAPROTH received a similar account of the mammoth's way of life from the Chinese in the Russo-Chinese frontier and trading town Kyachta. For mammoth ivory was considered to be tusks of the giant rat _tien-shu_, which is only found in the cold regions along the coast of the Polar Sea, avoids the light, and lives in dark holes in the interior of the earth. Its flesh is said to be cooling and wholesome. Some Chinese literati considered that the discovery of these immense earth rats might even explain the origin of earthquakes.[222]

It was not until the latter half of the last century that a European scientific man had an opportunity of examining a similar _find_. In the year 1771 a complete rhinoceros, with flesh and hide, was uncovered by a landslip on the river Wilui in 64 N.L. Its head and feet are still preserved at St. Petersburg. All the other parts were allowed to be destroyed for want of means of transport and preservation.[223] What was taken away showed that this primeval rhinoceros (_Rhinoceros antiquitatis_ Blumenbach) had been covered with hair and differed from all now living species of the same family, though strongly resembling them in shape and size. Already, long before the horns of the fossil rhinoceros had attracted the attention of the natives, pieces of these horns were used for the same purposes for which the Chukches employ strips of whalebone, viz. to increase the elasticity of their bows. They were considered at the same time to exert a like beneficial influence on the arrow, tending to make it hit the mark, as, according to the hunter's superst.i.tion among ourselves in former days, some cat's claws and owl's eyes placed in the bullet mould had on the ball. The natives believed that the crania and horns of the rhinoceros found along with the remains of the mammoth belonged to gigantic birds, regarding which there were told in the tents of the Yakut, the Ostyak and the Tunguse many tales resembling that of the bird Roc in the _Thousand and One Nights_. Ermann and Middendorff even suppose that such _finds_ two thousand years ago gave occasion to Herodotus'

account of the Arimaspi and the gold-guarding dragons (_Herodotus_, Book IV. chap. 27). Certain it is that during the middle ages such "grip-claws" were preserved, as of great value, in the treasuries and art collections of that time, and that they gave rise to many a romantic story in the folk-lore both of the West and East. Even in this century Hedenstrom, the otherwise sagacious traveller on the Siberian Polar Sea, believed that the fossil rhinoceros' horns were actual, "grip-claws." For he mentions in his oft-quoted work, that he had seen such a claw 20 verschoks (0.9 metre) in length, and when he visited St. Petersburg in 1830, the scientific men there did not succeed in convincing him that his ideas on this subject were incorrect.[224]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SIBERIAN RHINOCEROS HORN. Preserved in the Museum at St. Petersburg. ]

A new _find_ of a mammoth _mummy_ was made in 1787, when the natives informed the Russian travellers SARYTSCHEV and MERK, that about 100 versts below the village Alasejsk, situated on the river Alasej running into the Polar Sea, a gigantic animal had been washed out of the sand beds of the beach in an upright posture, undamaged, with hide and hair. The _find_, however, does not appear to have been thoroughly examined.[225]

In 1799 a Tunguse found on the Tamut Peninsula, which juts out into the sea immediately south-east of the river-arm by which the _Lena_, steamed up the river, another frozen-in mammoth. He waited patiently five years for the ground thawing so much as that the precious tusks should be uncovered. The softer parts of the animal accordingly were partly torn in pieces and destroyed by beasts of prey and dogs, when the place was closely examined in 1806 by ADAMS the Academician.

Only the head and two of the feet were then almost undamaged. The skeleton, part of the hide, a large quant.i.ty of long hair and woolly hair a foot and a half long were taken away. How fresh the carcase was may be seen from the fact that parts of the eye could still be clearly distinguished. Similar remains had been found two years before, a little further beyond the mouth of the Lena, but they were neither examined nor removed.[226]

A new _find_ was made in 1839, when a complete mammoth was uncovered by a landslip on the sh.o.r.e of a large lake to the west of the mouth of the Yenisej, seventy versts from the Polar Sea. It was originally almost entire, so that even the trunk appears to have been preserved, to judge by the statement of the natives that a black tongue as long as a month-old reindeer calf was hanging out of the mouth; but it had, when it was removed in 1842, by the care of the merchant TROFIMOV, been already much destroyed.[227]

Next after Trofimov's mammoth come the mammoth-_finds_ of Middendorff and Schmidt. The former was made in 1843 on the bank of the river Tajmur, under 75 N.L.; the latter in 1866 or the Gyda _tundra_, west of the mouth of the Yenisej in 70 13'

N.L. The soft parts of these _finds_ were not so well preserved as those just mentioned. But the _finds_ at all events had a greater importance for science, from the localities having been thoroughly examined by competent scientific men. Middendorff arrived at the result that the animal found by him had floated from more southerly regions to the place where it was found. Schmidt on the other hand found that the stratum which contained the mammoth rested on a bed of marine clay, containing sh.e.l.ls of high northern species of crustacea which still live in the Polar Sea, and that it was covered with strata of sand alternating with beds, from a quarter to half a foot thick, of decayed remains of plants, which completely correspond with the turf beds which are still formed in the lakes of the _tundra_. Even the very beds of earth and clay in which the bones, pieces of hide, and hair of the mammoth _mummy_ were enclosed, contained pieces of larch, branches and leaves of the dwarf birch (_Betulct nana_), and of two northern species of willow (_Salie glauca_, and _herbacea_).[228] It appears from this that the climate of Siberia at the time when these mammoth-carcases were imbedded, was very nearly the same as the present, and as the stream in whose neighbourhood the find was made is a comparatively inconsiderable _tundra_ river, lying wholly to the north of the limit of trees, there is no probability that the carcase drifted with the spring ice from the wooded region of Siberia towards the north. Schmidt, therefore, supposes that the Siberian elephant, if it did not always live in the northernmost parts of Asia, occasionally wandered thither, in the same way that the reindeer now betakes itself to the coast of the Polar Sea. VON BRANDT, VON SCHMALHAUSEN, and others, had besides already shown that the remains of food which were found in the hollows of the teeth of the Wilui rhinoceros consisted of portions of leaves and needles of species of trees which still grow in Siberia.[229]