_FROM TOBOLSK TO TOMSK._
The steamer _Beljetchenko_.--Fellow-passengers.--Card-playing.--Cost
of provisions.--Inspection of convicts’ barge.--An exile
fellow-passenger.--Obi navigation.--The Ostjaks.--Their
fisheries.--Feats of archery.--Marriage customs.
The Siberians are rich in time. Days to them are of little consequence;
hours of no moment. With them “Time is _not_ money.” “What difference,”
said a coachman at Ekaterineburg to a friend of mine for whom he
had lost his train, “what difference one way or other could an hour
make, or for that matter _two_ hours either?” Moreover, the arrival
and departure of steamers are not announced by a.m. and p.m., but
the date simply is given; and of course you are expected to be in
readiness to start at any moment of the twenty-four hours. We deemed
it unsafe, therefore, to sleep at the hotel on Monday night, the 2nd
of June, lest we should be left behind; so, getting our tarantass and
luggage on the pier, I crept inside the vehicle, and there spent the
early part of the night, till, at dawn, the steamer arrived. For a
Siberian steamer, the _Beljetchenko_, belonging to Messrs. Kourbatoff
and Ignatoff, was good, and her dimensions, compared with others upon
which I subsequently travelled, were large. She was a paddle-boat, with
fore-cabins and saloons for first-class passengers, and after-cabins
for those of the second class, whilst the deck was allotted to a
considerable number of third-class passengers and discharged soldiers
who were “homeward bound.” All told, the passengers, I should imagine,
could not have counted less than from 100 to 150. Among those of
the first class were some pleasant people, such as officers of the
army, navy, and gendarmerie, and a few school girls going home for
summer holidays from Petersburg, a distance of 3,000 miles. There
were specimens also of the ubiquitous Russian merchant, travelling on
business. Our first impressions of these travellers were unfavourable.
Some of the gentlemen were taking leave, if I mistake not, at Tobolsk,
of friends, and this event is usually accompanied in Siberia with
the drinking of a great deal of wine; so that, when one of the naval
officers came to take his place in the sleeping saloon, he was in a
condition “unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” We were spared
further inconvenience of this kind by the captain, who had received
injunctions from one of the proprietors, Mr. Ignatoff, to look after
“Mr. Missionary,” as the captain insisted upon calling me, and on which
I did not undeceive him. For the payment of three second-class fares
he gave us for sleeping the second-class ladies’ cabin--intended for
five persons--in which we were comfortable enough at night, whilst we
sat where we pleased by day. The captain was also instructed to charge
£2 instead of £4 for the carriage of our tarantass, and also to deal
leniently with our heavy excess of baggage and books. As our voyage
lasted several days, it was not a matter for surprise that time hung
heavily upon the hands of some of the passengers, but I was hardly
prepared for the amount of card-playing with which much of it was
killed. In no country that I have visited have I seen a tenth part of
the card-playing that I witnessed in Siberia. The Russian Government
exercises a monopoly in the manufacture of playing-cards, the profits
being applied to the support of the Foundling Hospital at Moscow,
and 110 tons of cards are annually carried on the Petersburg-Moscow
railway. I am told that the amount of card-playing in European Russia
also is very considerable; that there are clubs in Petersburg where
the gambling is frightful. As for our fellow-passengers, there was a
clique who played by day and quarrelled by night, and sometimes did
not leave off their games till seven in the morning. By the time the
journey was five days old, £20 had been lost by a young officer, who
told me that in the small towns of the interior, in which soldiers are
quartered, where there is little congenial society and nothing to do,
card-playing is the daily constant resource of the officers. The habit,
moreover, is not confined to men, but is indulged in, though apparently
in a less degree, by women also. On board the steamer the game was
not accompanied by excessive drinking, and, happily, several of the
passengers--especially the ladies--spoke French, and a few could read
English, so that in their society we passed an agreeable time.
The fares for travelling and the charges for provisions were low. The
three second-class tickets for the whole journey of 8 days cost only
£4, and for a dinner of 4 or 5 courses--soup, fish, meat, game, and
pastry,--only 2_s._ were charged. I remembered this tariff with a sigh
in California, where the price was double for a meal not half so
good, with wretched attendance into the bargain. It must be confessed,
however, that provisions on the river’s bank were extremely cheap--so
cheap that one almost hesitates to put it on paper. At Surgut I was
offered a pair of ducks for 2½_d._; 10 brace of _riabchiks_, a sort
of grouse about the size of a partridge, cost 1_s._; a couple of fish
called _yass_, weighing, I supposed, 1½ lb. each, were offered for
1½_d._; and 10 large fish, as a lot, for ¼_d._ each. At Juchova I was
offered for 5_d._ a couple of pike, weighing probably 20 lbs., and a
live duck for 1¼_d._; whilst at the villages in the district we passed,
which are not easily accessible, a young calf, I was told, could be
bought for 6_d._
[Illustration: THE “IRTISH,” A CONVICT BARGE ON THE OBI.]
As we ploughed along, there was tugged at our stern a barge laden with
convicts, to which Dr. Johnson’s definition of a ship as “a prison
afloat” would with accuracy apply. The barge was a large floating
hull, called the _Irtish_, 245 feet long, and 30 feet beam, 11 feet
high from the keel to the deck, with a 4-feet water-line. It was made
expressly for the transport of convicts, of whom it was intended to
carry 800, with 22 officers. Below it was fitted with platforms for
sleeping, like those described in the jails, whilst at either end
of the craft were deck-houses eight feet high, containing a small
hospital, an apothecary’s shop, and apartments for the officers and
soldiers in charge. The space between the deck-houses was roofed
over, and the sides closed by bars and wires, painfully suggestive of
a menagerie, or reminding one of the cage-cells in the old jail at
Edinburgh. The vessel had neither masts nor engines, and bore a pretty
close resemblance to a child’s Noah’s ark. At one of our stoppages
I was trying to make a sketch of this unique craft, when the officer
came and invited me to inspect it. We therefore went on board, with
hands and pockets full of reading matter for distribution; and if the
bars were suggestive of a menagerie, so, I must add, was the mode in
which the occupants received our literary food. Not that they were
rude, but so delighted were they with the pictures, and so eager to
get the papers that contained them, that we found it hard work to
hold our own. We had afterwards an opportunity of testing the value
in money of this apparent eagerness for reading material. In former
years I had always _given_ both Scriptures and tracts. This year it
was urged, and I think rightly, that it is better, when possible, to
sell them. To offer them, however, for money to convicts seemed almost
a mockery. Nevertheless we tried it, and requested the officer to let
us know how many prisoners would like to give 2½_d._ for a copy of
the New Testament, or the Book of Psalms. To my surprise he came at a
subsequent stopping-place, bringing the money for 44 copies, and said
that one man was in such haste to get his book that he had been to him
three times to ask for it. As we proceeded on our course, and, looking
back, saw the broad keel of the barge ploughing its way after us, one
could not help feeling for its strange freight, and the many heavy
hearts that were being tugged along further and further from the dear
place called “home.” But such thoughts received little enlargement at
the halting-places, when the barge was drawn up to the bank; for the
hilarity thereon of men, women, and children was much more noisy than
that of the free people on the steamer. One might have thought that
the convicts were having a good time of it; and it had been observed
to us at Tiumen, as a noteworthy remark, that although, of the 800
prisoners on board, probably 250 would be murderers, nevertheless
20 soldiers would suffice to control them. They had a considerable
amount of freedom on the barge, though they could not go, of course,
indiscriminately to whatever part of the vessel they pleased.
At one of the halting-places we dropped a Polish exile, a doctor. He
was the same man we had seen with his little comforts in the prison
at Tobolsk. He was not on the barge, but travelled, as such prisoners
usually do, on the steamer, as a second-class passenger, in a cabin
near ours, with a gendarme who kept him, and who, we had opportunities
of observing, never allowed him to go for a moment out of his sight.
We had ingratiated ourselves into the gendarme’s favour by giving
him books, as we had given also to the soldiers, passengers, and all
on board, and we wished to chat with the prisoner; but his guard was
faithful to his duty, and would not suffer him to be spoken to. When
it was time for the prisoner to go on shore, he walked erect out of
his cabin, dressed in private clothes, wearing shaded spectacles, and
smoking a cigar. But he was landed at a miserable place on the 62nd
parallel, where, at the beginning of June, the leaves were not out, and
it had not ceased occasionally to snow; at a village where an educated
man could, I presume, find little agreeable society or congenial
occupation. His hair was already grey, and as he sat upon his little
stock of clothes, with the gendarme standing near, and watching our
ship as it glided away, we felt we had left him in a sorry place in
which to spend his declining years. We heard that he had a second time
incurred punishment, by trying to escape from Nertchinsk. But it was a
melancholy illustration of the meaning of Siberian exile.
The distance from Tobolsk to Tomsk by water is 1,600 miles, which we
accomplished in 8 days. We overtook more than one freight steamer, but
saw few other vessels, and no timber rafts. The banks were low and
flat, and houses of rare occurrence. On the second day from Tobolsk we
stopped at Samarova, where the Irtish runs into the Obi; and on the
third day we stopped at Surgut, a place of 1,200 inhabitants. Three
days later we touched at Narim, which has a population of 2,000.
We did not land sufficiently near to any of these towns to allow of a
visit, and the steamer picked up and set down few passengers. Herds
of half-wild horses were seen from time to time on the prairies. They
were not shod, were unfamiliar with the taste of oats, and had in the
summer to find their own living. In the winter they are used for the
transport of dried and frozen fish. The natives have an ingenious way
of catching fish through holes in the ice, especially in the case of
the sturgeon, which in winter congregate in muddy hollows in the bed
of the river, lying motionless in clusters for the sake of warmth.
The Ostjak cuts a hole above them, sets a spring rod, and then forms
a number of balls of clay, which he makes red hot and throws into the
river below his bait. The heat rouses the sturgeon, which rise, swim
up stream, and are caught. There are large fisheries in the gulfs of
the Obi and the Taz, where the Russians pay rent for the sandbanks to
the Samoyedes, and, having caught the fish in summer, they put them in
ponds till the approach of winter. They are then taken out and frozen,
and in this condition sent as _fresh_ fish a journey of 2,000 miles to
Petersburg.[1] A large quantity of dried fish is also forwarded from
the Obi to the great fair of Nijni Novgorod. Furs and hides likewise
are sent there from the northern part of the province, together with
rye, barley, oats, and buckwheat from the south.
[Illustration]
Nothing, however, that we saw on the banks was more interesting perhaps
than the aborigines, especially the Ostjaks, some of whom appeared
paddling in their tiny canoes, and stealthily gliding among the bushes
as the steamer approached. The Ostjaks inhabit a tract of country on
either side of the Irtish and Obi, extending as far north as Obdorsk,
on the south to Tobolsk, and nearly as far east as Narim. There is
also a territory over which they roam on the left bank of the Yenesei
below Turukhansk, though Mr. Howorth thinks that these are miscalled
Ostjaks, being really Samoyedes. Their numbers are estimated at 24,000.
They have no towns or villages, though they sometimes settle among the
Russians. We saw on the banks the frames of some of their _yourts_,
or tents, though the people were just then driven by the floods
to higher ground. In the neighbourhood of the Obi they possess no
reindeer; their wealth consists of boats, fishing-tackle, clothes,
and utensils; and a nomad Ostjak who possesses goods to the value of
£10 is deemed a rich man. In this district they have ceased to wear
their native costume; and are become more or less Russianized; but the
Ostjaks of the Yenesei still dress in the costume of their forefathers.
These people are short of stature, with dark hair and eyes, and flat
faces; in complexion and general appearance those we saw were not much
unlike some of the Siberians. They live principally by fishing and
the chase, and are very skilful in the use of the bow. In shooting
squirrels, for instance, they use a blunt arrow, and take care to hit
the animal on the head, so as not to damage the fur.[2]
[Illustration: OSTJAKS ON THE OBI, IN SUMMER YOURT.]
I had heard of these aboriginals, before leaving England, from Miss
Alba Hellman in Finland, who thus writes of some of their marriage
customs in expressive English: “The Ostjaks are carrying on the most
shameless commerce with their daughters. A girl is a valuable thing
while she is yet in her parents’ home. She then gets all possible care
and protection. But is it therefore that she may be a good daughter,
wife, or mother? By no means for that cause: an Ostjak father has the
same object in his daughter’s feeding as he has in feeding his animals.
Well fed, she will not long stay at home without the father getting
good payment for her. The price of an ordinary wife was at the river
Irtish (on the Obi the price is higher), first, from £20 to £30 in
money; next, a horse, a cow, and an ox; then from 7 to 10 pieces of
clothing; and lastly, a pood of meal, a few hops, and a measure of
brandy for the wedding feast. And when a man cannot afford to pay all
these things, he often steals the girl. So says Professor Castrén.”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The fish of the Obi are generally pike, perch, bleak, and a kind of
red mullet, and are of less importance than the migratory fish from the
sea. These are chiefly the sturgeon, the _nelma_, and _muksum_, several
kinds of salmon, and the herring. In the first weeks of June, when the
ice breaks up, they commence their ascent of the river, avoiding the
rapid parts, the quick swimmers soon getting ahead of the rest: 30
miles below Obdorsk they form shoals, and have all passed in a week,
by which time, 150 miles higher, the quickest salmon arrive. The nelma
comes two days later, but the sturgeon not till five days afterwards.
Erman reckons this annual migration of fish to be at the lowest
computation 26,000,000.
[2] Their bows are 6 feet long, with a diameter of an inch and a
quarter in the middle, and are made of a slip of birch joined by
fish-glue to a piece of hard pine-wood. The arrows are 4 feet long, the
head consisting of either a ball for shooting small fur animals, or an
iron spear-like head for killing larger game. The bows are exceedingly
powerful, and the archers wear on the left forearm a strong bent plate
of horn to deaden the blow of the string. We heard of feats of archery
accomplished by them which far outdo the traditional deed of William
Tell. Our captain told a lady on board that on one occasion he saw
an Ostjak mark an arrow in the middle with a piece of charcoal and
discharge it in the air, whilst a second man, before it reached the
ground, shot at the descending shaft and struck it on the mark.