The Voyage Of The Vega Round Asia And Europe Part 54

1-5. b.u.t.tons to carrying straps, representing heads of the Polar bear, seals &c., carved in walrus ivory, one-half of the natural size.

6. Carrying strap with a similar b.u.t.ton, carved, in the form of a seal, one-third.

7. Stone chisel, one-half.

8. Comb one-third.

9. b.u.t.tons of bone, gla.s.s, or stone, to be placed in holes in the lips, natural size.

10. Ivory diadem, two-thirds. ]

On the north side of the harbour we found an old European or American train-oil boiling establishment. In the neighbourhood of it were two Eskimo graves. The corpses had been laid on the ground fully clothed, without the protection of any coffin, but surrounded by a close fence consisting of a number of tent poles driven crosswise into the ground. Alongside one of the corpses lay a _kayak_ with oars, a loaded double-barrelled gun with locks at half-c.o.c.k and caps on, various other weapons, clothes, tinderbox, snow-shoes, drinking-vessels, two masks carved in wood and smeared with blood (figures 1 and 2, page 241), and strangely-shaped animal figures. Such were seen also in the tents. Bags of sealskin, intended to be inflated and fastened to harpoons as floats, were sometimes ornamented with small faces carved in wood (figure 3, page 241). In one of the two amulets of the same kind, which I brought home with me, one eye is represented by a piece of blue enamel stuck in, and the other by a piece of iron pyrites fixed in the same way.

Behind two tents were found, erected on posts a metre and a half in height, roughly-formed wooden images of birds with expanded wings painted red. I endeavoured without success to purchase these tent-idols[350] for a large new felt hat--an article of exchange for which in other cases I could obtain almost anything whatever. A dazzlingly white _kayak_ of a very elegant shape, on the other hand, I purchased without difficulty for an old felt hat and 500 Remington cartridges.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ESKIMO GRAVE. (After a drawing by O. Nordquist.) ]

As a peculiar proof of the ingenuity of the Americans when offering their goods for sale, it may be mentioned in conclusion that an Eskimo, who came to the vessel during our stay in the harbour, showed us a printed paper, by which a commercial house at San Francisco offered to "sporting gentlemen" at Behring's Straits (Eskimo?) their stock of excellent hunting shot.

As the west coast of Europe is washed by the Gulf Stream, there also runs along the Pacific coast of America a warm current, which gives the land a much milder climate than that which prevails on the neighbouring Asiatic side, where, as on the east coast of Greenland, there runs a cold northerly current. The limit of trees therefore in north-western America goes a good way _north of_ Behring's Straits, while on the Chukch Peninsula wood appears to be wholly wanting.

Even at Port Clarence the coast is devoid of trees, but some kilometres into the country alder bushes two feet high are met with, and behind the coast hills actual forests probably occur. Vegetation is besides already luxuriant at the coast, and far away here, on the coast of the New World, many species are to be found nearly allied to Scandinavian plants, among them the _Linnaea_. Dr. Kjellman therefore reaped here a rich botanical harvest, valuable for the purpose of comparison with the flora of the neighbouring portion of Asia and other High Arctic regions.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ANIMAL FIGURE FROM AN ESKIMO GRAVE.

_a._ From above.

_b._ From the side (One-third of the natural size.) ]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ETHNOGRAPHICAL OBJECTS FROM PORT CLARENCE.

1-2. Wooden masks, found at a grave, one-sixth of the natural size.

3. Amulet a face with one eye of enamel, the other of pyrites from a harpoon-float of sealskin, one-third.

4. Oars, one-nineteenth.

5. Boathook, one-twelfth.

6. The hook or carved ivory, one-fourth.

7. Carved knife handle (?) ofivory, one-half. ]

Dr. Almquist in like manner collected very extensive materials for investigating the lichen-flora of the region, probably before very incompletely known. The harvest of the zoologists, on the other hand, was scanty. Notwithstanding the luxuriant vegetation land-evertebrates appeared to occur in a much smaller number of species than in northern Norway. Of beetles, for instance, only from ten to twenty species could be found, mainly Harpalids and Staphylinids, and of land and fresh-water mollusca only seven or eight species, besides which nearly all occurred very sparingly.

Among remarkable fishes may be mentioned the same black marsh-fish which we caught at Yinretlen. The avi-fauna was scanty for a high northern land, and of wild mammalia we saw only musk-rats. Even the dredgings in the harbour yielded, on account of the unfavourable nature of the bottom, only an inconsiderable number of animals and algae.

On the 26th July, at three o'clock in the afternoon, we weighed anchor and steamed back in splendid weather and with for the most part a favourable wind to the sh.o.r.e of the Old World. In order to determine the salinity and temperature at different depths, soundings were made and samples of water taken every four hours during the pa.s.sage across the straits. Trawling was besides carried on three times in the twenty-four hours, commonly with an extraordinarily abundant yield, among other things of large sh.e.l.ls, as, for instance, the beautiful _Fusus deformis_, Reeve, with its twist to the left, and some large species of crabs. One of the latter (_Chionoecetes opilio_, Kroyer) the dredge sometimes brought up in hundreds. We cooked and ate them and found them excellent, though not very rich in flesh. The taste was somewhat sooty.

Lieutenant Bove constructed the diagram reproduced at page 244, which is based on the soundings and other observations made during the pa.s.sage, from which we see how shallow is the sound which in the northernmost part of the Pacific separates the Old World from the New. An elevation of the land less than that which has taken place since the glacial period at the well-known Chapel Hills at Uddevalla would evidently be sufficient to unite the two worlds with each other by a broad bridge, and a corresponding depression would have been enough to separate them if, as is probable, they were at one time continuous. The diagram shows besides that the deepest channel is quite close to the coast of the Chukch Peninsula, and that that channel contains a ma.s.s of cold water, which is separated by a ridge from the warmer water on the American side.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sh.e.l.l FROM BEHRING'S STRAITS. _Fusus deformis_, Reeve. ]

If we examine a map of Siberia we shall find, as I have already pointed out, that its coasts at most places are straight, and are thus neither indented with deep fjords surrounded with high mountains like the west coast of Norway, nor protected by an archipelago of islands like the greater part of the coasts of Scandinavia and Finland. Certain parts of the Chukch Peninsula, especially its south-eastern portion, form the only exception to this rule. Several small fjords here cut into the coasts, which consist of stratified granitic rocks, and in the offing two large and several small rocky islands form an archipelago, separated from the mainland by the deep Senjavin Sound. The wish to give our naturalists an opportunity of once more prosecuting their examination of the natural history of the Chukch Peninsula, and the desire to study one of the few parts of the Siberian coast which in all probability were formerly covered with inland ice, led me to choose this place for the second anchorage of the _Vega_ on the Asiatic side south of Behring's Straits. The _Vega_ accordingly anch.o.r.ed here on the forenoon of the 28th July, but not, as was at first intended, in Glasenapp Harbour, because it was still occupied unbroken ice, but in the mouth of the most northerly of the fjords, Konyam Bay.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DIAGRAM, Showing the Temperature and Depth of the water at Behring's Straits between Port Clarence and Senjavin Sound. By G.

BOVE. ]

This portion of the Chukch Peninsula had been visited before us by the corvette _Senjavin_, commanded by Captain, afterwards Admiral, Fr. Lutke, and by an English Franklin Expedition on board the _Plover_, commanded by Captain Moore. Lutke stayed here with his companions, the naturalists MERTENS, POSTELS, and KITTLITZ, some days in August 1828, during which the harbour was surveyed and various observations in ethnography and the natural sciences made.

Moore wintered at this place in 1848-49. I have already stated that we have his companion, Lieut. W.H. Hooper, to thank for very valuable information relating to the tribes which live in the neighbourhood. The region appears to have been then inhabited by a rather dense population. Now there lived at the bay where we had anch.o.r.ed only three reindeer-Chukch families, and the neighbouring islands must at the time have been uninhabited, or perhaps the arrival of the _Vega_ may not have been observed, for no natives came on board, which otherwise would probably have been the case.

The sh.o.r.e at the south-east part of Konyam Bay, in which the _Vega_ now lay at anchor for a couple of days, consists of a rather desolate bog, in which a large number of cranes were breeding.

Farther into the country several mountain summits rise to a height of nearly 600 metres. The collections of the zoologists and botanists on this sh.o.r.e were very scanty, but on the north side of the bay, to which excursions were made with the steam-launch, gra.s.sy slopes were met with, with pretty high bushy thickets and a great variety of flowers, which enriched Dr. Kjellman's collection of the higher plants from the north coast of Asia with about seventy species. Here were found too the first land mollusca (Succinea, Limax, Helix, Pupa, &c.) on the Chukch Peninsula.[351]

We also visited the dwellings of the reindeer-Chukch families. They resembled the Chukch tents we had seen before, and the mode of life of the inhabitants differed little from that of the coast-Chukches, with whom we pa.s.sed the winter. They were even clothed in the same way, excepting that the men wore a number of small bells in the belt. The number of the reindeer which the three families owned was, according to an enumeration which I made when the herd had with evident pleasure settled down at noon in warm sunshine on a snow-field in the neighbourhood of the tents, only about 400, thus considerably fewer than is required to feed three Lapp families. The Chukches have instead a better supply of fish, and, above all, better hunting than the Lapps; they also do not drink any coffee, and themselves collect a part of their food from the vegetable kingdom. The natives received us in a very friendly way, and offered to sell or rather barter three reindeer, a transaction which on account of our hasty departure was not carried into effect.

The mountains in the neighbourhood of Konyam Bay were high and split up into pointed summits with deep valleys still partly filled with snow. No glaciers appear to exist there at present. Probably however the fjords here and the sounds, like St. Lawrence Bay, Kolyutschin Bay, and probably all the other deeper bays on the coast of the Chukch Peninsula, have been excavated by former glaciers. It may perhaps be uncertain whether a true inland-ice covered the whole country; it is certain that the ice-cap did not extend over the plains of Siberia, where it can be proved that no Ice Age in a Scandinavian sense ever existed, and where the state of the land from the Jura.s.sic period onwards was indeed subjected to some changes, but to none of the thoroughgoing mundane revolutions which in former times geologists loved to depict in so bright colours. At least the direction of the rivers appears to have been unchanged since then. Perhaps even the difference between the Siberia where Chikanovski's _Ginko_ woods grew and the mammoth roamed about, and that where now at a limited depth under the surface constantly frozen ground is to be met with, depends merely on the isothermal lines having sunk slightly towards the equator.

[Ill.u.s.tration: KONYAM BAY. (After a photograph by L. Palander.) ]

The neighbourhood of Konyam Bay consists of crystalline rocks, granite poor in mica, and mica-schist lowermost, and then grey non-fossiliferous carbonate of lime, and last of all magnesian schists, porphyry, and quartzites. On the summits of the hills the granite has a rough trachytic appearance, but does not pa.s.s into true trachyte. Here however we are already in the neighbourhood of the volcanic hearths of Kamchatka, which for instance is shown by the hot spring, which Hooper discovered not far from the coast during a sledge journey towards Behring's Straits. In the middle of the severe cold of February its waters had a temperature of +69 C.

Hot steam and drifting snow combined had thrown over the spring a lofty vault of dazzling whiteness formed of ma.s.ses of snow converted into ice and covered with ice-crystals. The Chukches themselves appear to have found the contrast striking between the hot spring from the interior of the earth and the cold, snow, and ice on its surface. They offered blue gla.s.s beads to the spring, and showed Hooper, as something remarkable, that it was possible to boil fish in it, though the mineral water gave the boiled fish a bitter unpleasant taste.[352]

The interior of Konyam Bay was during our stay there still covered by an unbroken sheet of ice. This broke up on the afternoon of the 30th July, and had almost, rotten as it was, suddenly brought the voyage of the _Vega_ to a termination by pressing her ash.o.r.e.

Fortunately the danger was observed in time. Steam was got up, the anchor weighed, and the vessel removed to the open part of the fjord. As on this account several cubic feet of coal had to be used for getting up steam, as our hitherto abundant stock of coal must now be saved, and as, in the last place I was still urged forward by the fear that a too lengthened delay in sending home despatches might not only cause much anxiety but also lead to a heavy expenditure of money, I preferred to sail on immediately rather than to enter a safer harbour in the neighbourhood from which the scientific work might continue to be prosecuted.

The course was now shaped for the north-west point of St. Lawrence Island. A little off Senjavin Sound we saw drift-ice for the last time. On the whole the quant.i.ty of ice which drifts down through Behring's Straits into the Pacific is not very great, and most of that which is met with in summer on the Asiatic side of the Behring Sea, is evidently formed in fjords and bays along the coast South of Behring's Straits accordingly I saw not a single iceberg nor any large block of glacier-ice, but only even and very rotten fields of bay-ice.

The _Vega_ was anch.o.r.ed on the 31st July in an open bay on the north-western side of St. Lawrence Island. This island, called by the natives Enguae, is the largest one between the Aleutian Islands and Behring's Straits. It lies nearer Asia than America, but is considered to belong to the latter, for which reason it was handed over along with the Alaska Territory by Russia to the United States.

The island is inhabited by a few Eskimo families, who have commercial relations with then Chukch neighbours on the Russian side, and therefore have adopted some words from their language.

Then dress also resembles that of the Chukches, with the exception that, wanting reindeer-skin, they use _pesks_ made of the skins of birds and marmots. Like the Chukches and Eskimo they use overcoats of pieces of seal-gut sewed together. On St. Lawrence Island their dress is much ornamented, chiefly with tufts of feathers of the sea-fowl that breed in innumerable flocks on the island. It even appears that gut clothes are made here for sale to other tribes; otherwise it would be difficult to explain how Kotzebue's sailors could in half an hour purchase at a single encampment 200 coats of this kind. At the time of our visit all the natives went bareheaded, the men with their black tallow-like hair clipped to the root, with the exception of the common small border above the forehead. The women wore their hair plaited and adorned with beads, and were much tattooed, partly after very intricate patterns, as is shown by the accompanying woodcuts. Like the children they mostly went barefooted and barelegged. They were well grown, and many did not look ill, but all were merciless beggars, who actually followed our naturalists on their excursions on land.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TATTOOING PATTERNS, FROM ST. LAWRENCE ISLAND.

1., 2. Face tattooing.

3. Arm tattooing. (After drawings by A. Stuxberg.) ]

[Ill.u.s.tration: TATTOOED WOMAN FROM ST. LAWRENCE ISLAND.

(After a drawing by A. Stuxberg.) ]

The summer-tents were irregular, but pretty clean and light huts of gut, stretched on a frame of drift-wood and whale-bones. The winter dwellings were now abandoned. They appeared to consist of holes in the earth, which were covered above, with the exception of a square opening, with drift-wood and turf.

During winter a sealskin tent was probably stretched over this opening, but it was removed for the time, probably to permit the summer heat to penetrate into the hole and melt the ice, which had collected during winter on its walls. At several tents we found large under-jaws of whales fixed in the ground. They were perforated above, and I suppose that the winter-tent, in the absence of other framework, was stretched over them. Ma.s.ses of whale-bones lay thrown up along the sh.o.r.e, evidently belonging to the same species as those we collected at the sh.o.r.e-dunes at Pitlekaj. In the neighbourhood of the tents graves were also found. The corpses had been placed, unburned, in some cleft among the rocks which are split up by the frost, and often converted into immense stone mounds. They had afterwards been covered with stones, and skulls of the bear and the seal and whale-bones had been offered or scattered around the grave.

North-east of the anchorage the sh.o.r.e was formed of low hills rising with a steep slope from the sea. Here and there ruinlike cliffs projected from the hills, resembling those we saw on the coast of Chukch Land. But the rock here consisted of the same sort of granite which formed the lowermost stratum at Konyam Bay. It was princ.i.p.ally at the foot of these slopes that the natives erected their dwellings. South-west of the anchorage commenced a very extensive plain, which towards the interior of the island was marshy, but along the coast formed a firm, even, gra.s.sy meadow exceedingly rich in flowers. It was gay with the large sunflower-like _Arnica Pseudo-Arnica_, and another species of Senecio (_Senecio frigidus_); the _Oxytropis nigrescens_, close-tufted and rich in flowers, not stunted here as in Chukch Land; several species of Pedicularis in their fullest bloom (_P. sudetica, P. Langsdorfii, P. Oederi_ and _P. capitata_); the stately snow auricula (_Primula nivalis_), and the pretty _Primula borealis_. As characteristic of the vegetation at this place may also be mentioned several ranunculi, an anemone (_Anemone narcissiflora_), a species of monkshood with flowers few indeed, but so much the larger on that account, large tufts of _Silene acaulis_ and _Alsine macrocarpa_, studded with flowers, several Saxifrages, two Claytoniae, the _Cl. acutifolia_, important as a food-plant in the housekeeping of the Chukches, and the tender _Cl. sarmentosa_ with its delicate, slightly rose-coloured flowers, and, where the ground was stony, long but yet flowerless, slightly green tendrils of the favourite plant of our homeland, the _Linnaea borealis_ Dr. Kjellman thus reaped a rich harvest of higher plants, and a fine collection of land and marine animals, lichens and algae was also made here. The ground consisted of sand in which lay large granite blocks, which we in Sweden would call erratic. They appeared however not to have been transported hither, but to be lying _in situ_, having along with the sand probably arisen through the disintegration of the rocks.

In the sea we found not a few algae and a true littoral evertebrate-fauna, poor in species indeed, something which is completely absent in the Polar seas proper. As I walked along the coast I saw five pretty large self-coloured greyish-brown seals sunning themselves on stones a short distance from land. They belonged to a species which I had never seen in the Polar seas.

As there was no boat at hand, I forbade the hunters that accompanied me, though the seals were within range, to test their skill as shots upon them. Perhaps they were females of _Histriophoca fasciata_, whose beautifully marked skin (of the male) I had seen and described at St. Lawrence Bay. The natives had a few dogs but no reindeer, which however might find food on the island in thousands. No _kayaks_ were in use, but large _baydars_ of the same construction as those of the Chukches.

St. Lawrence Island was discovered during Behring's first voyage, but the first who came into contact with the natives was Otto von Kotzebue[353] (on the 27th June 1816, and the 20th July 1817). The inhabitants had not before seen any Europeans, and they received the foreigners with a friendliness which exposed Kotzebue to severe suffering. Of this he gives the following account:--

"So long as the naturalists wandered about on the hills I stayed with my acquaintances, who, when they found that I was the commander, invited me into their tents. Here a dirty skin was spread on the floor, on which I had to sit, and then they came in one after the other, embraced me, rubbed their noses hard against mine, and finished their caresses by spitting in their hands and then stroking me several times over the face. Although these proofs of friendship gave me very little pleasure, I bore all patiently; the only thing I did to lighten their caresses somewhat was to distribute tobacco leaves. These the natives received with great pleasure, but they wished immediately to renew their proofs of friendship. Now I betook myself with speed to knives, scissors, and beads, and by distributing some succeeded in averting a new attack. But a still greater calamity awaited me when in order to refresh me bodily they brought forward a wooden tray with whale blubber. Nauseous as this food is to a European stomach I boldly attacked the dish. This, along with new presents which I distributed, impressed the seal on the friendly relation between us. After the meal our hosts made arrangements for dancing and singing, which was accompanied on a little tambourine."[352]

As von Kotzebue two days after sailed past the north point of the island he met three _baydars_. In one of them a man stood up, held up a little dog and pierced it through with his knife, as Kotzebue believed, as a sacrifice to the foreigners.[355]

Since 1817 several exploring expeditions have landed on St. Lawrence Island, but always only for a few hours. It is very dangerous to stay long here with a vessel. For there is no known haven on the coast of this large island, which is surrounded by an open sea. In consequence of the heavy swell which almost constantly prevails here, when the surrounding sea is clear of ice, it is difficult to land on the island with a boat, and the vessel anch.o.r.ed in the open road is constantly exposed to be thrown by a storm rising unexpectedly upon the sh.o.r.e cliffs. This held good in fullest measure of the _Vega's_ anchorage, and Captain Palander was on this account anxious to leave the place as soon as possible. On the 2nd August at three o'clock in the afternoon we accordingly resumed our voyage. The course was shaped at first for Karaginsk Island on the east coast of Kamchatka, where it was my intention to stay some days in order to get an opportunity of making a comparison between the natural conditions of middle Kamchatka and the Chukch Peninsula. But as unfavourable winds delayed our pa.s.sage longer than I had calculated on, I abandoned, though unwillingly, the plan of landing there. The Commander's Islands became instead the nearest goal of the expedition. Here the _Vega_ anch.o.r.ed on the 14th August in a very indifferent harbour completely open to the west, north-west, and south, lying on the west side of Behring Island, between the main island and a small island lying off it.

[Footnote 344: The enmity appeared, however, to be of a very pa.s.sive nature and by no means depending on any tribal dislike, but only arising from the inhabitants of the villages lying farthest eastward being known to be of a quarrelsome disposition and having the same reputation for love of fighting as the peasant youths in some villages in Sweden. For Lieut. Hooper, who during the winter 1848-9 made a journey in dog-sledges from Chukotskoj-nos along the coast towards Behring's Straits says that the inhabitants at Cape Deschnev itself enjoyed the same bad reputation among their Namollo neighbours to the south as among the Chukches living to the westward. "They spoke another language." Possibly they were pure Eskimo. ]

[Footnote 345: There is still in existence a sketch of a tribe, living far to the south on the coast of the Indian Sea, who at the time of Alexander the Great used the bones of the whale in a similar way. "They build their houses so that the richest among them take bones of the whale, which the sea casts up, and use them as beams, of the larger bones they make their doors." Arrian, _Historia Indica_, XXIX. and x.x.x. ]

[Footnote 346: These strata were discovered during Kotzebue's cuc.u.mnavigation of the globe (_Entdeckungs Reise_, Weimar, 1821, i.

p. 146, and ii. p. 170). The strand-bank was covered by an exceedingly luxuriant vegetable carpet, and rose to a height of eighty feet above the sea. Here the "rock," if this word can be used for a stratum of ice, was found to consist of pure ice, covered with a layer, only six inches thick, of blue clay and turf-earth. The ice must have been several hundred thousand years old, for on its being melted a large number of bones and tusks of the mammoth appeared, from which we may draw the conclusion that the ice-stratum was formed during the period in which the mammoth lived in these regions. This remarkable observation has been to a certain extent disputed by later travellers, but its correctness has recently been fully confirmed by Dall. On the other hand, the extent to which the strong odour, which was observed at the place and resembled that of burned horns, arose from the decaying mammoth remains, is perhaps uncertain. Kotzebue fixed the lat.i.tude of the place at 66 15'

36". During Beechey's voyage in 1827 the place was thoroughly examined by Mr. Collie, the medical officer of the expedition. He brought home thence a large number of the bones of the mammoth, ox, musk-ox, reindeer, and horse, which were described by the famous geologist Buckland (F.W. Beechey, _Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Behring's Straits, 1825-28_. London, 1831, ii.

Appendix). ]