Chapter IX

The New Siberian Islands--The Mammoth--Discovery of Mammoth
and Rhinoceros mummies--Fossil Rhinoceros horns--Stolbovoj
Island--Liachoff's Island--First discovery of this island--
Passage 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 quantity 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 grassy 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, surpasses 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 passage 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.

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 shores 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 ambassador 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, assured 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. MUeLLER'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 assured 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 deg. 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 superstition 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_,