A MEETING IN THE NIGHT--HARDSHIPS OF BUSH'S PARTY--SIBERIAN
FAMINES--FISH SAVINGS BANKS--WORK IN THE NORTHERN DISTRICT--STARVING
POLE CUTTERS--A JOURNEY TO YAMSK
Availing ourselves of the road which had been broken by the sledges
of the priest, we made more rapid progress toward Anadyrsk than I had
anticipated, and on November 22d we camped at the foot of a range of
low mountains known as the "Russki Krebet," only thirty versts south
of the settlement. With the hope of reaching our destination before
the next morning, we had intended to travel all night; but a storm
sprang up most inopportunely just before dark and prevented us from
getting over the pass. About midnight the wind abated a little, the
moon came out occasionally through rifts in the clouds, and, fearing
that we should have no better opportunity, we roused up our tired dogs
and began the ascent of the mountain. It was a wild, lonely scene.
The snow was drifting in dense clouds down the pass, half hiding from
sight the bare white peaks on either side, and blotting out all the
landscape behind us as we ascended. Now and then the misty moonbeams
would struggle faintly through the clouds of flying snow and light up
for a moment the great barren slope of the mountain above our heads;
then they would be suddenly smothered in dark vapour, the wind would
come roaring down the ravine again, and everything would vanish in
clouds and darkness. Blinded and panting for breath, we finally gained
the summit, and as we stopped for a moment to rest our tired dogs, we
were suddenly startled by the sight of a long line of dark objects
passing swiftly across the bare mountain-top only a few yards away and
plunging down into the ravine out of which we had just come. I caught
only a glimpse of them, but they seemed to be dog-sledges, and with a
great shout we started in pursuit. Dog-sledges they were, and as we
drew nearer I recognised among them the old sealskin covered _pavoska_
which I had left at Anadyrsk the previous winter, and which I knew
must be occupied by an American. With heart beating fast from
excitement I sprang from my sledge, ran up to the _pavoska_, and
demanded in English, "Who is it?" It was too dark to recognise faces,
but I knew well the voice that answered "Bush!" and never was that
voice more welcome. For more than three weeks I had not seen a
countryman nor spoken a word of English; I was lonely and disheartened
by constantly accumulating misfortunes, when suddenly at midnight on
a desolate mountain-top, in a storm, I met an old friend and comrade
whom I had almost given up as dead. It was a joyful meeting. The
natives who had gone to Anadyr Bay in search of Bush and his party had
returned in safety, bringing Bush with them, and he was on his way to
Gizhiga to carry the news of the famine and get provisions and help.
He had been stopped by the storm as we had, and when it abated a
little at midnight we had both started from opposite sides to cross
the mountain, and had thus met upon the summit.
We went back together to my deserted camp on the south side of the
mountain, blew up the embers of my still smouldering fire, spread down
our bearskins, and sat there talking until we were as white as polar
bears with the drifting snow, and day began to break in the East.
Bush brought more bad news. They had gone down to the mouth of the
Anadyr, as the priest had already informed me, in the early part of
June, and had waited there for the Company's vessels almost four
months. Their provisions had finally given out, and they had been
compelled to subsist upon the few fish that they were able to catch
from day to day, and go hungry when they could catch none. For salt
they scraped the staves of an old pork-barrel which had been left at
Macrae's camp the previous winter, and for coffee they drank burned
rice water. At last, however, salt and rice both failed, and they were
reduced to an unvarying and often scanty diet of boiled fish, without
coffee, bread, or salt. Living in the midst of a great moss swamp
fifty miles from the nearest tree, dressing in skins for the want of
anything else, suffering frequently from hunger, tormented constantly
by mosquitoes, from which they had no protection, and looking day
after day and week after week for vessels which never came, their
situation was certainly miserable. The Company's bark _Golden Gate_
had finally arrived in October, bringing twenty-five men and a small
steamer; but winter had already set in, and five days afterwards,
before they could finish discharging the vessel's cargo, she was
wrecked by ice. Her crew and nearly all her stores were saved, but by
this misfortune the number of the party was increased from twenty-five
to forty-seven, without any corresponding increase in the quantity of
provisions for their subsistence. Fortunately, however, there were
bands of Wandering Chukchis within reach, and from them Bush succeeded
in buying a considerable number of reindeer, which he caused to be
frozen and stored away for future use. After the freezing over of the
Anadyr River, Bush was left, as Macrae had been the previous winter,
without any means of getting up to the settlement, a distance of 250
miles; but he had foreseen this difficulty, and had left orders at
Anadyrsk that if he failed to return in canoes before the river
closed, dog-sledges should be sent to his assistance. Notwithstanding
the famine the dog-sledges were sent, and Bush, with two men, had
returned on them to Anadyrsk. Finding that settlement famine-stricken
and deserted, he had started without a moment's delay for Gizhiga, his
exhausted and starving dogs dying along the road.
The situation of affairs, then, when I met Bush on the summit of the
Russki Krebet, was briefly as follows:
Forty-four men were living at the mouth of the Anadyr River, 250 miles
from the nearest settlement, without provisions enough to last them
through the winter, and without any means whatever of getting away.
The village of Anadyrsk was deserted, and with the exception of a few
teams at Penzhina, there were no available dogs in all the Northern
District, from the Okhotsk Sea to Bering Strait. Under such
circumstances, what could be done? Bush and I discussed the question
all night beside our lonely camp-fire under the Russki Krebet, but
could come to no decision, and after sleeping three or four hours
we started for Anadyrsk. Late in the afternoon we drove into the
settlement--but it could be called a settlement no longer. The two
upper villages--"Osolkin" and "Pokorukof," which on the previous
winter had presented so thriving an appearance, were now left without
a single inhabitant, and Markova itself was occupied only by a few
starving families whose dogs had all died, and who were therefore
unable to get away. No chorus of howls announced our arrival; no
people came out to meet us; the windows of the houses were closed with
wooden shutters, and half buried in drifts; the snow was unbroken by
paths, and the whole village was silent and desolate. It looked as if
one-half of the inhabitants had died and the other half had gone
to the funeral! We stopped at a small log-house where Bush had
established his headquarters, and spent the remainder of the day in
talking over our respective experiences.
The unpleasant situation in which we found ourselves placed was due
almost entirely to the famine at Anadyrsk. The late arrival and
consequent wreck of the _Golden Gate_ was of course a great
misfortune; but it would not have been irretrievable had not the
famine deprived us of all means of transportation. The inhabitants of
Anadyrsk, as well as of all the other Russian settlements in Siberia,
are dependent for their very existence upon the fish which enter the
rivers every summer to spawn, and are caught by thousands as they make
their way up-stream toward the shallow water of the tributary brooks
in the interior of the country. As long as these migrations of
the fish are regular the natives have no difficulty in providing
themselves with an abundance of food; but once in every three or four
years, for some unexplained reason, the fish fail to come, and the
following winter brings precisely such a famine as the one which I
have described at Anadyrsk, only frequently much worse. In 1860
more than a hundred and fifty natives died of starvation in four
settlements on the coast of Penzhinsk Gulf, and the peninsula of
Kamchatka has been swept by famines again and again since the Russian
conquest, until its population has been reduced more than one-half.
Were it not for the Wandering Koraks, who come to the relief of the
starving people with their immense herds of reindeer, I firmly believe
that the _settled_ population of Siberia, including the Russians,
Chuances, Yukagirs, and Kamchadals, would become extinct in less than
fifty years. The great distance of the settlements one from another,
and the absence of any means of intercommunication in summer, make
each village entirely dependent upon its own resources, and prevent
any mutual support and assistance, until it is too late to be of any
avail. The first victims of such famines are always the dogs; and the
people being thus deprived of their only means of transportation,
cannot get away from the famine-stricken settlement, and after eating
their boots, sealskin thongs, and scraps of untanned leather, they
finally die of pure starvation. For this, however, their own careless
improvidence is primarily responsible. They might catch and dry fish
enough in one year to last them three; but instead of doing this, they
provide barely food enough to last them through one winter, and
take the chances of starvation on the next. No experience, however
severe--no suffering, however great, teaches them prudence. A man who
has barely escaped starvation one winter, will run precisely the same
risk on the next, rather than take a little extra trouble and catch a
few more fish. Even when they see that a famine is inevitable, they
take no measures to mitigate its severity or to obtain relief, until
they find themselves absolutely without a morsel to put in their
mouths.
[Illustration: AN ARCTIC FUNERAL]
A native of Anadyrsk once happened to tell me, in the course of
conversation, that he had only five days' dog-food left. "But," said
I, "what do you intend to do at the end of those five days?"--"Bokh
yevo znaiet"--God only knows!--was the characteristic response,
and the native turned carelessly away as if it were a matter of no
consequence whatever. If God only knew, he seemed to think that it
made very little difference whether anybody else knew or not. After he
had fed his dogs the last dried fish in his storehouse, it would be
time enough to look about for more; but until then he did not propose
to borrow any unnecessary trouble. This well known recklessness and
improvidence of the natives finally led the Russian Government to
establish at several of the north-eastern Siberian settlements a
peculiar institution which may be called a Fish Savings Bank, or
Starvation Insurance Office. It was organised at first by the gradual
purchase from the natives of about a hundred thousand dried fish, or
_yukala_, which constituted the capital stock of the bank. Every male
inhabitant of the settlement was then obliged by law to pay into this
bank annually one-tenth of all the fish he caught, and no excuse was
admitted for a failure. The surplus fund thus created was added every
year to the capital, so that as long as the fish continued to come
regularly, the resources of the bank were constantly accumulating.
When, however, the fish for any reason failed and a famine
was threatened, every depositor--or, more strictly speaking,
tax-payer--was allowed to borrow from the bank enough fish to supply
his immediate wants, upon condition of returning the same on the
following summer, together with the regular annual payment of ten per
cent. It is evident that an institution once thoroughly established
upon such a basis, and managed upon such principles, could never fail,
but would constantly increase its capital of dried fish until the
settlement would be perfectly secure against even the possibility
of famine. At Kolyma, a Russian post on the Arctic Ocean, where the
experiment was first tried, it proved a complete success. The bank
sustained the inhabitants of the village through severe famines during
two consecutive winters, and its capital in 1867 amounted to 300,000
dried fish, and was accumulating at the rate of 20,000 a year.
Anadyrsk, not being a Russian military post, had no bank of this kind;
but had our work been continued another year, we intended to petition
the Government for the organisation of such institutions at all the
settlements, Russian and native, along the whole route of our line.
In the meantime, however, the famine was irremediable, and on December
1, 1867, poor Bush found himself in a deserted settlement 600 versts
from Gizhiga without money, without provisions, and without means of
transportation--but with a helpless party of forty-four men, at the
mouth of the Anadyr River, dependent upon him for support. Building a
telegraph line under such circumstances was out of the question. All
that he could hope to do would be to keep his parties supplied with
provisions until the arrival of horses and men from Yakutsk should
enable him to resume work.
On November 29th, finding that I could be of no further assistance at
Anadyrsk, and that I was only helping to eat up more rapidly Bush's
scanty supply of provisions, I started with two Penzhina sledges for
Gizhiga. As I did not again visit the Northern District, and shall
have no further occasion to refer to it, I will relate briefly here
the little which I afterward learned by letter with regard to the
misfortunes and unhappy experiences of the Company's employés in that
region. The sledges that I had ordered from Gizhiga reached Penzhina
late in December, with about 3000 pounds of beans, rice, hard-bread,
and assorted stores. As soon as possible after their arrival Bush sent
half a dozen sledges and a small quantity of provisions to the party
at the mouth of the Anadyr River and in February they returned,
bringing six men. Determined to accomplish something, however
little, Bush sent these six men to a point on the Myan River, about
seventy-five versts from Anadyrsk, and set them at work on snow-shoes
cutting poles along the route of the line. Later in the winter another
expedition was sent to Anadyr Bay, and on the 4th of March it also
returned, bringing Lieutenant Macrae and seven more men. This party
experienced terrible weather on its way from the mouth of the river
to Anadyrsk, and one of its members--a man named Robinson--died in
a storm about 150 versts east of the settlement. His body was left
unburied in one of the houses which Bush had erected the previous
summer and his comrades pushed on. As soon as they reached Anadyrsk
they were sent to the Myan, and by the middle of March the two parties
together had cut and distributed along the banks of that river about
3000 poles. In April, however, their provisions began again to run
short, they were gradually reduced to the verge of starvation,
and Bush started a second time for Gizhiga with a few miserable
half-starved and exhausted dog-teams, to get more provisions. During
his absence the unfortunate parties on the Myan were left to take
care of themselves, and after consuming their last morsel of food and
eating up three horses which had previously been sent to them from
Anadyrsk, they organised themselves into a forlorn hope, and started
on snow-shoes for the settlement. It was a terrible walk for
half-starving men; and although they reached their destination in
safety, they were entirely exhausted, and when they approached the
village could hardly go a hundred yards at a time without falling.
At Anadyrsk they succeeded in obtaining a small quantity of
reindeer-meat, upon which they lived until the return of Lieutenant
Bush from Gizhiga with provisions, some time in May. Thus ended the
second winter's work in the Northern District. As far as practical
results were concerned, it was an almost complete failure; but it
developed in our officers and men a courage, a perseverance, and a
patient endurance of hardships which deserved, and which under more
favourable auspices would have achieved, the most brilliant success.
In the month of February, while Mr. Norton and his men were at work
on the Myan River, the thermometer indicated more than forty degrees
below zero during sixteen days out of twenty-one, sank five times to
-60° and once to -68°, or one hundred degrees below the freezing point
of water. Cutting poles on snow-shoes, in a temperature ranging
from 40° to 60° below zero is, in itself, no slight trial of men's
hardihood; but when to this are added the sufferings of hunger and the
peril of utter starvation in a perfect wilderness, it passes human
endurance, and the only wonder is that Norton and Macrae could
accomplish as much as they did.
Returning from Anadyrsk, I reached Gizhiga on the 15th of December,
after a hard and lonely journey of sixteen days. A special courier
had just arrived there from Yakutsk, bringing letters and orders from
Major Abaza.
He had succeeded, with the sanction and cooperation of the governor of
that province, in hiring for a period of three years a force of eight
hundred Yakut labourers, at a fixed rate of sixty rubles, or about
forty dollars a year for each man. He had also purchased three hundred
Yakut horses and pack-saddles, and an immense quantity of material
and provisions of various kinds for the equipment and subsistence of
horses and workmen. A portion of these men were already on their way
to Okhotsk, and the whole force would be sent thither in successive
detachments as rapidly as possible, and distributed from there along
the whole route of the line. It would be necessary, of course, to
put this large force of native labourers under skilled American
superintendence; and as we had not foremen enough in all our parties
to oversee more than five or six gangs of men, Major Abaza determined
to send a courier to Petropavlovsk for the officers who had sailed
from San Francisco in the bark _Onward_, and who he presumed had been
landed by that vessel in Kamchatka. He directed me, therefore, to make
arrangements for the transportation of these men from Petropavlovsk to
Gizhiga; to prepare immediately for the reception of fifty or sixty
Yakut labourers; to send six hundred army rations to Yamsk for the
subsistence of our American party there, and three thousand pounds of
rye flour for a party of Yakuts who would reach there in February.
To fill all these requisitions I had at my disposal about fifteen
dog-sledges, and even these had gone with provisions to Penzhina for
the relief of Lieutenant Bush. With the assistance of the Russian
governor I succeeded in getting two Cossacks to go to Petropavlovsk
after the Americans who were presumed to have been left there by the
_Onward_, and half a dozen Koraks to carry provisions to Yamsk, while
Lieutenant Arnold himself sent sledges for the six hundred rations. I
thus retained my own fifteen sledges to supply Lieutenant Sandford
and party, who were now cutting poles on the Tilghai River, north of
Penzhinsk Gulf. One day late in December, while Dodd and I were out
on the river above the settlement training a team of dogs, word was
brought to us that an American had arrived from Kamchatka, bringing
news from the long-missing bark _Onward_ and the party of men whom
she landed at Petropavlovsk. Hurrying back to the village with all
possible speed, we found Mr. Lewis, the American in question, seated
comfortably in our house drinking tea. This enterprising young
man--who, by the way, was a telegraph operator, wholly unaccustomed
to rough life--without being able to speak a word of Russian, had
traversed alone, in mid-winter, the whole wilderness of Kamchatka from
Petropavlovsk to Gizhiga. He had been forty-two days on the road, and
had travelled on dog-sledges nearly twelve hundred miles, with no
companions except a few natives and a Cossack from Tigil. He seemed
disposed to look upon this achievement very modestly, but in some
respects it was one of the most remarkable journeys ever made by one
of the Company's employés.
The _Onward_, as we had supposed, being unable to reach Gizhiga, on
account of the lateness of the season, had discharged her cargo and
landed most of her passengers at Petropavlovsk; and Mr. Lewis had been
sent by the chief of the party to report their situation to Major
Abaza, and find out what they should do.
After the arrival of Mr. Lewis nothing of special importance occurred
until March. Arnold at Yamsk, Sandford on the Tilghai, and Bush at
Anadyrsk, were trying, with the few men they had, to accomplish some
work; but, owing to deep snow-storms, intensely cold weather, and a
general lack everywhere of provisions and dogs, their efforts were
mostly fruitless. In January I made an excursion with twelve or
fifteen sledges to Sandford's camp on the Tilghai, and attempted to
move his party to another point thirty or forty versts nearer Gizhiga;
but in a severe storm on the Kuil steppe we were broken up, dispersed,
and all lost separately, and after wandering around four or five
days in clouds of drifting snow which hid even our dogs from sight,
Sandford with a portion of his party returned to the Tilghai, and I
with the remainder to Gizhiga.
Late in February the Cossack Kolmagórof arrived from Petropavlovsk,
Kamchatka, bringing three of the men who had been landed there by the
_Onward_.
In March I received by a special courier from Yakutsk another letter
and more orders from Major Abaza. The eight hundred labourers whom he
had engaged were being rapidly sent forward to Okhotsk, and more than
a hundred and fifty were already at work at that place and at Yamsk.
The equipment and transportation of the remainder still required his
personal supervision, and it would be impossible, he wrote, for him to
return that winter to Gizhiga. He could come however, as far as
the settlement of Yamsk, three hundred versts west of Gizhiga, and
requested me to meet him at that place within twelve days after the
receipt of his letter. I started at once with one American companion
named Leet, taking twelve days' dog-food and provisions.
The country between Gizhiga and Yamsk was entirely different in
character from anything which I had previously seen in Siberia. There
were no such great desolate plains as those between Gizhiga and
Anadyrsk and in the northern part of Kamchatka. On the contrary, the
whole coast of the Okhotsk Sea, for nearly six hundred miles west
of Gizhiga, was one wilderness of rugged, broken, almost impassable
mountains, intersected by deep valleys and ravines, and heavily
timbered with dense pine and larch forests. The Stanavoi range of
mountains, which sweeps up around the Okhotsk Sea from the Chinese
frontier, keeps everywhere near the coast line, and sends down between
its lateral spurs hundreds of small rivers and streams which run
through deep wooded valleys to the sea. The road, or rather the
travelled route from Gizhiga to Yamsk, crosses all these streams and
lateral spurs at right angles, keeping about midway between the great
mountain range and the sea. Most of the dividing ridges between these
streams are nothing but high, bare watersheds, which can be easily
crossed; but at one point, about a hundred and fifty versts west of
Gizhiga, the central range sends out to the seacoast, a great spur of
mountains 2500 or 3000 feet in height, which completely blocks up the
road. Along the bases of these mountains runs a deep, gloomy valley
known as the Viliga, whose upper end pierces the central Stanavoi
range and affords an outlet to the winds pent up between the steppes
and the sea. In winter when the open water of the Okhotsk Sea is
warmer than the frozen plains north of the mountains, the air over the
former rises, and a colder atmosphere rushes through the valley of the
Viliga to take its place. In summer, while the water of the sea is
still chilled with masses of unmelted ice, the great steppes behind
the mountains are covered with vegetation and warm with almost
perpetual sunshine, and the direction of the wind is consequently
reversed. This valley of the Viliga, therefore, may be regarded as
a great natural breathing-hole, through which the interior steppes
respire once a year. At no other point does the Stanavoi range afford
an opening through which the air can pass back and forth between the
steppes and the sea, and as a natural consequence this ravine is swept
by one almost uninterrupted storm. While the weather everywhere else
is calm and still, the wind blows through the Viliga in a perfect
hurricane, tearing up great clouds of snow from the mountain sides and
carrying them far out to sea. For this reason it is dreaded by all
natives who are compelled to pass that way, and is famous throughout
north-eastern Siberia as "the stormy gorge of the Viliga!"
On the fifth day after leaving Gizhiga, our small party, increased
by a Russian postilion and three or four sledges carrying the annual
Kamchatkan mail, drew near the foot of the dreaded Viliga Mountains.
Owing to deep snow our progress had not been so rapid as we had
anticipated, and we were only able to reach on the fifth night a small
_yurt_ built to shelter travellers, near the mouth of a river called
the Topólofka, thirty versts from the Viliga. Here we camped, drank
tea, and stretched ourselves out on the rough plank floor to sleep,
knowing that a hard day's work awaited us on the morrow.
[Illustration: Head covering used in stalking seals]