Long and long ago, before you or I were born, in the year 1799 in fact,
a man by the name of Ossip Schumachoff threw away a golden opportunity.
Having undertaken an expedition up to the Arctic Ocean in search of
ivory, he started from home with his wife on a reindeer sledge, and was
so far successful in his undertaking that he discovered on the banks of
the river Lena a certain block of ice that would have set all the
naturalists in the world in commotion if he had but known it. This
block of ice was of untold value, for it contained the body of an
enormous tusked animal in a perfect state of preservation.
Owing to the impenetrable masses of ice surrounding the mammoth, Ossip
did not at that time succeed in reaching it; but returning to the same
spot some two years later, he found that the ice had so far melted that
a portion of the huge creature was exposed to the air.
And yet Chief Ossip was no nearer to his prize than he had been at
first. It is true the Ice King smilingly placed it in his grasp, but a
mightier power, Superstition, stepping in with her rod of iron, bade him
touch it if he dared.
All the old men of his tribe shook their heads discouragingly. All the
old women told direful tales of what had happened long years before, how
a certain Tungusian chief, having seen just such a monster as this, had
immediately fallen ill and died, with all his family.
And as good luck--or bad--would have it, Ossip Schumachoff too began to
feel ill, so he slowly went back to his home again to dream by day and
night for three years more of that magnificent pair of tusks going to
waste up there in the North.
At last he could stand it no longer. Making another expedition to the
Lena, he found the monster now entirely melted out of the ice, and
slipped down upon a sand-bank; but this time he sawed off the
magnificent pair of tusks, and sold them for fifty good Russian rubles.
It was not until two years later, in 1806, that the naturalist and
traveller Adams heard of the affair in Jakutsk. In June of the same year
he travelled thither to rescue what was still to be saved. Schumachoff
accompanied him, together with ten Tunguses.
They found the animal on the right bank of the Lena, near the Arctic
Ocean, on a small peninsula called Tamud, but it was by this time in a
bad condition. Polar bears, wolves, and foxes had eaten the flesh, and
the people of that desolate region had fed their dogs upon it, although
of the skeleton itself only one fore-foot was missing.
You may think how the eyes of the naturalist sparkled when they fell
upon this colossal ruin. A mammoth, you know, is what is called the
elephant of the ages before the Flood. It has long, long ago disappeared
from the living world, so long, indeed, that it would be hard telling,
perhaps, just how many thousands of years the mammoth of which I have
been writing had lain hidden away in his icy bed.
Judging by this most perfect specimen ever discovered by man, the
mammoth had the greatest likeness to the elephants of the present day,
especially to those of India.
The naturalist was able to discover that his specimen was a male. Its
head weighed four hundred pounds. It had a long black mane, the hair
measuring at least a foot and a half, and its whole body was covered
with a thick coating of reddish wool five inches in length. The tail and
the trunk were gone, but the eyes were still preserved; so also was the
brain. Professor Adams had no difficulty in stripping off three-quarters
of the skin, though this was found to be so heavy that when he attempted
to take it away it required fully ten men to carry it.
The hairs which the polar bears and other beasts of prey had trodden
into the damp ground were collected, and amounted to some thirty pounds.
Specimens of these were afterward shown in almost all the museums of
Europe.
The lucky naturalist, having no fear of death like poor old Ossip, had
everything carefully packed together and carried up the Lena, then
across the country for more than four thousand miles, to the distant
city of St. Petersburg, where the skin and skeleton form to-day the most
valuable specimen of its famous museum. He also brought home some of the
flesh, which, in spite of its age, was still fresh enough to be eaten,
and the St. Petersburg Academicians and other gentlemen tasted this
remarkable roast. The Academy gave the naturalist eight thousand rubles
for his travelling expenses, besides a professorship in Moscow.
And this is the story of the great mammoth discovery that caused so much
excitement in all the scientific circles of Europe. But how this ancient
elephant strayed in the first place into so uncongenial a climate as
that within the arctic circle, or what he could have found to eat when
there, remains, I think, a mystery to the present day.
There are many theories advanced, but who can tell which one of them all
is right?
We read that the tribes who live in the northern parts of Siberia, upon
the thawing of the ice in summer, are constantly finding some immense
skull, with its strongly bowed tusks in a perfect state of preservation,
or some other skeleton remains (of the same animal apparently), with the
red flesh still clinging to them.
And indeed these discoveries seem to have been long a source of revenue
to the poor wandering people of the north. As early as 1707 a certain
gentleman named Isbeaud Ides, who made a journey to China as ambassador
to that distant country, declared that the Tunguse carried on a
considerable business with the tusks discovered from time to time in the
melting ice.
He further says that the animal known to us as the mammoth was called
mammont by the wild tribes of Siberia, and that they believed it to be
living still somewhere deep down in the ground, burrowing in the mud in
the neighborhood of the river. According to their theory, if in the
course of its dark wandering the animal by any possibility struck upon
the sand, it immediately sank therein and died. So, too, it was
inevitably lost when it came into the air of the upper world upon a bank
of the river, because it could bear neither air nor light.
But this was only a theory of ignorant people--one to make the wise men
of the earth smile in scorn--and still the question remains unanswered,
I think, how it is that the bones and remains of a tropical animal are
found in such numbers throughout the region of ice and snow.