New Siberian Islands

“ We see the group of New Siberian Islands rising from it, with their mammoth ivory and cliffs of fossil wood. We then contemplate the land masses of Novaya Zemlya, Franz Josef Land, and Spitsbergen rising from the Barentsz and Kara Seas, with the marvellous tale they tell of the former condition of the region in recent geological times. Next, on the further side of the great southerly ice-stream, is the continental mass of Greenland, with its glaciation only surpassed in grandeur and extent by the Antarctic ice-cap. ”

“ The amount of credit due to a man who starts to find one thing and lights upon another has always been a contentious matter, and this expedition afforded an extreme case for such speculations. The plan was to go east-north-east, the wintering places being undetermined, though they might be Cape Chelyuskin, the New Siberian Islands, or any land that might be discovered; and a return to Europe through Bering Strait lay among the possibilities of the venture, as an endeavour was to be made to reach the coast of Siberia in boats and penetrate south down one of the large rivers of 65Northern Asia. ”

“ When Russia desires them she will doubtless extend her protection, and I observed during my voyage that several islands were occupied by Russian settlers for hay-cutting and other purposes. Why could not an enterprising man of destiny like the grey-eyed Walker or unhappy Maximilian penetrate the Amoor and found a new government on an island that nobody owns? ”

“ Very few of the lower animals of Siberian origin have reached the British Islands. Most of those which were formerly thought to be Siberian are either of East European or of Central and South Asiatic origin, though they probably joined the Siberian migration on their way to England. The Arctic migration brought a greater variety of species to this country than the Siberian, but neither the one nor the other has contributed more than a small percentage to the British fauna. ”

“ In order to ascertain whether any truth lay at the bottom of the view, generally adopted in Siberia, that the continent of America extended along the north coast of Asia to the neighbourhood of the islands situated there, CHICHERIN, Governor of Siberia, in the winter of 1763 sent a sergeant, ANDREJEV with dog-sledges on an ice journey towards the north. He succeeded in reaching some islands of considerable extent, which Wrangel, who always shows himself very sceptical with respect to the existence of new lands and islands in the Polar Sea, considers to have been the Bear Islands. ”

“ But few people today realize the immensity of Siberia. You could take a map of the whole United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, and add to it a map of Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Austria (before the war) , Holland, Denmark, the Turkish Empire, Greece, Roumania, and Bulgaria, and lay all these together down on Siberia alone and have territory left. Nearly five thousand miles of the main line of the great Trans-Siberian railway are in this one country. ”

“ Siberia has received a great many individuals of high culture in the persons of its political exiles. Men of liberal education, active intellects, and refined manners have been in large proportion among the banished Poles, and the exiles of 1825 included many of Russia’s ablest minds. The influence of these exiles upon the intelligence, habits, and manners of the Siberians, has left an indelible mark. As a new civilization is more plastic than an old one, so the society of Northern Asia may have become more polished than that of Ancient Russia. ”

“ The explorers soon preferred to reach the islands by sledge journeys on the ice, and thus at last discovered the whole of the large group of islands which is named New Siberia. The islands were often visited by hunters for the purpose of collecting mammoth tusks, of which great masses, together with the bones of the mammoth, rhinoceros, sheep, ox, horse, etc., are found imbedded in the beds of clay and sand here. ”

“ To use Chvoinoff’s own expression, the island is formed of the bones of this extraordinary animal, mixed with the horns and heads of the buffalo, or something like it, and some horns of the rhinoceros.”
New Siberia and the Lächow Islands off the mouth of the river Lena, are, for the most part, only an agglomeration of sand, ice, and Elephants’ teeth. At every tempest the sea casts ashore new quantities of mammoths’ tusks, and the inhabitants of Siberia carry on a profitable commerce in this fossil ivory. ”

“ This was unexpected news. We had heard that the Navy Departments of Russia and the United States had been instructed to send ships to Bering Sea to assist the Company in making soundings and laying down the cable between the American and Siberian coasts, but we had never expected to see either of these vessels at Gizhiga. The simultaneous arrival of a loaded bark, a steam corvette, a Russian Commissioner, and a correspondent of the New York Herald certainly looked like business, and we congratulated ourselves and each other upon the improving prospects of the Siberian Division. ”

“ The hour of our long and ardently desired liberation seemed at hand. If once we got free, it lay within the bounds of possibility that we might reach, if not the somewhat mythical Gillis’ Land, then at least the uninhabited Arctic coasts of Siberia. Siberia had, in fact, become the rosiest of our hopes. Some, indeed, still indulged in extravagant expectations and counted on the discovery of new lands, even while they drifted with the ice. But our wishes for the most part had become so subdued, that the discovery of the smallest cliff would have satisfied our ambition as discoverers. ”

“ The absence of large manufactures doubtless accounts in a measure for the fact that Siberia, according to the census of 1897, only contains eleven towns inhabited by over 10,000 souls. Eight of these (including the two cities of Tomsk and Irkutsk, which have each 50,000 inhabitants) are situated on the postal-road which passes from the foot of the Ural to Tiumen, to terminate on the shores of the Pacific at Vladivostok; Omsk is situated somewhat to the south of the old postal-road, at the point where the Trans-Siberian Railway crosses the Irtysh ”

“ One of the coldest regions of the earth is Siberia. It is a vast tract reaching to the Arctic Circle; it is the north part of the Continent of Asia; it is intersected by great mountain-ranges. Here, if anywhere, we should find the Drift; here, if anywhere, was the ice-field, "the sea of ice." It is more elevated and more mountainous than the interior of North America where the drift-deposits are extensive; it is nearer the pole than New York and Illinois, covered as these are with hundreds of feet of débris, and yet there is no Drift in Siberia! ”

“ P. A. Novopashennoi for an hydrographic survey of the Arctic coast of Siberia. After charting Chaun Bay the vessels separated, the " Vaigach " following the coast westward and the “Taimir” turning N. for the New Siberia Islands. A small new island was discovered E. of this group and named General Vilkitski Island. Bennett I. was found to be much smaller than had been supposed, and no sign of Sannikov Land (reported on more than one occasion to have been seen from Kotelnoi, New Siberia I.) was discovered on the route to Taimir Land. Here the two vessels met, and continued the coast survey. ”

“ Siberia.—This great territory resembles Russia in surface and climatic features. Like the former "west" of the United States, Siberia is the open "east" into which much of the surplus population of Russia, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries is moving, attracted by fine farming lands. The European emigrant becomes a producer when settled in Siberia, and, at the same time, a consumer of Russian manufactures. In five years more than one million people thus became occupants of the new country in Siberia. Russian trade is encouraged by a heavy tariff on foreign goods brought into Siberia. ”

“ Here, however, it was the isolation of the island that made it so. A hardy stock of men, nearly related to ourselves, have occupied it since the ninth century; and continental Greenland is peopled as far as the 75th degree—though, perhaps, only as a summer residence.
Far to the east of Nova Zembla and opposite to the country of the Yukahiri—a hardy people on the rivers Kolyma and Indijirka, and within the Arctic Circle—lies the island of New Siberia. I find from Wrangell’s Travels in Siberia that certain expatriated Yukahiri are believed to have fled thither. Have they lived or died? ”

“ The second winter was passed at Yakutsk, where the ships that were to chart the Arctic coast of Siberia were built and launched with crews of some hundred men.
It was the end of June, 1735, before the main forces were under way again for the Pacific. From Yakutsk to Okhotsk on the Pacific, the course was down the Lena, up the Aldan River, up the Maya, up the Yudoma, across the Stanovoi Mountains, down the Urak river to the sea. A thousand Siberian exiles were compelled to convoy these boats. [11] Not a roof had been prepared to house the forces in the mountains. ”

“ However, land is so abundant in Siberia that often the peasants, when they find after they have reclaimed it that its productive qualities decrease, rather than be bothered with a repetition of the processes of manuring, etc., pack up their traps and migrate elsewhere, literally, to ‘fresh woods and pastures new,’ where probably the foot of man has never trod. ”

“ Meanwhile, Russia was busily opening up the north-east coast of Siberia, partly with a view to getting some control over the unmanageable Chukches, the only Siberian tribe who succeeded in resisting their somewhat rough and ready methods, and partly with a view to developing trade in that direction and to discovering whether or not the Asiatic and American continents were united. ”

“ Her avaricious eyes are fixed on the kingdom of Corea, and the whole of Manchuria may yet become Russian soil.
Siberia is by no means the inhospitable land of ice which the name suggests to our minds. That designation applies well to its northern half, but not to the Siberia of the south. Here are vast fertile plains, prolific in grain, which need only the coming railroad facilities to make this region the granary of the Russian empire. The great rivers and the numerous lakes of the country abound in valuable fish; large forests of useful timber are everywhere found ”

“ Siberia is at least thirty times more extensive than Great Britain and Ireland, but its scanty population forms a miserable contrast to its enormous size. Containing scarcely three millions of inhabitants, it is comparatively three hundred times less peopled than the British Islands. This small population is, moreover, very unequally distributed, consisting chiefly of Russians and Tartars, who have settled in the south or in the milder west, along the rivers and the principal thoroughfares which lead from the territory of one large stream to the other. ”

“ Siberia is thought of as a terrible ice-desert, without life, without variety, without charm, as a frozen land under the curse of heaven and of miserable exiles. But it is entirely forgotten that Siberia includes a full third of Asia, and that a region which is almost twice as large as the whole of Europe, which extends from the Ural to the Pacific Ocean, from the Arctic sea to the latitude of Palermo, cannot possibly be excessively monotonous nor uniform in all its parts. But people usually picture only one district of Siberia, and even that in a false light. ”

“ In the economical awakening of Siberia, and particularly of it richest part—the basin of the Amur—an important rôle will doubtless be played by the United States, which is the nearest civilized neighbor, with whom Russia can have no serious misunderstandings. The trade of North America with Vladivostok has hitherto not been very extensive, and has been confined to the importation of small quantities of flour, other foodstuffs, machinery, agricultural implements, leather, etc., from San Francisco. Owing to the absence of economical life in Siberia, nothing else, of course, was to be expected. ”

“ Siberia was another mine of contrasts and surprises, and the longer I was there the more I began to comprehend the vast possibilities of this formidable stretch of country. It is a continent in itself, with all the natural advantages to enable it to become rich and prosperous. Her future development has the same chance as that of Canada, and her wealth is even larger. To say nothing of Siberia's inexhaustible mines, the land is better watered, and the timber-forests even more extensive.
The population is still slumbering in its cradle. The life they lead is archaic in the extreme. ”

“ In winter they sometimes use an ice-breaker, which apparently works very slowly, for generally the railway provides, for passengers and goods, sledges on which to traverse the frozen waters.
Our boat is overcrowded. Passengers of all nations and of all grades. Besides Russian officials, there are foreign tradesmen, a few Germans, one American, and a Dane, a detachment of soldiers guarding convicts, and a few settlers. And so I have an opportunity of watching the four leading classes of this new country. These are, indeed, the four different elements by which Siberia is becoming populated. ”

“ If any lasting gain is totaled from the great Russian bedlam, emphasized in it prominently must be the opening of Siberia to the world. As boys and girls, and even as grown men and women, we thought of Siberia as an arctic waste of snow and ice, ravaged by man-hunting wolves, dotted with world-lost exile mines, peopled by a strange semi-barbaric race in fur and lambskin and dwelling in half-real dusk beneath the bondage of the knout. ”