Discovering the Mammoth

by John J. McKay

  Some otherwise unidentifiable animals appear in ancient Chinese literature that could be mammoths. The best candidates are usually referred to as giant rodents (shu). Mammoths might seem unusual candidates for inclusion in the order rodentia, but there is a certain logic to it. An uneducated person finding a mammoth carcass buried in the ground would try to compare it to an animal they knew. Familiar large animals—cattle, horeses, bears—do not burrow. Most medium-sized burrowing mammals are clearly what they are, even in skeletal form—rabbits, badgers, martens. But burrowing rodents come in hundreds of types and sizes, from the very tiny to the big enough to eat. Lacking a specific name for a new subterranean animal, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to simply call it a rodent. In the Shen i king, a book by So Tung-fang, minister to the early Han dynasty emperor Wu (140–87 BC), the following passage appears: “In the regions of the north, where ice is piled up over a stretch of country ten thousand miles long and reaches a thickness of a thousand feet, there is a rodent, called k’i shu, living beneath the ice in the interior of the earth. In shape it is like a rodent, and subsists on herbs and trees. Its flesh weighs a thousand pounds and may be used as dried meat for food; it is eaten to cool the body [i.e. reduce fever]” T’ao Hung-king, in the fifth century, wrote a pharmacopeia entitled Ming i pieh tu and, in the eighth century, Ch’en Ts’ang-k’i wrote a work called Pen-tsao Shi-I on the omissions of previous pharmacopeias. Both included sections on the fen or fyn (an animal that moves in the ground) also known as fyn shu (hidden rodent). They told their readers that there were two types of fen, the common small mole and the other fen, which was the size of a water buffalo. Later writers right up to the time of the Kangxi emperor repeated these stories.

  The Kangxi emperor believed that the description of deep ice in the Shen i king showed accurate knowledge of the Arctic Ocean and he made the connection between the various shu and the mammoth. He even made a connection between the mammoth and the elephant. He confidently wrote, “In both these points, the ancient books are confirmed . . . In Russia, near the shores of the northern ocean, there is a rodent similar to an elephant, which makes its way underground and which expires the very moment it is exposed to light or air. Its bones resemble ivory, and are used by the natives in manufacturing cups, platters, combs, and pins. Objects like these we ourselves have seen.” The emperor didn’t need to trust Westerners for confirmation of this conclusion. Before he completed or published his opus, Tulishen, a trusted agent of his, returned from a mission to the shores of the Caspian Sea and reported of Russia: “In the coldest parts of this northern country is found a species of animal which burrows under the ground, and which dies when exposed to the sun and air. . . . The Russians collect the bones of this animal, in order to make cups, saucers, combs, and other small articles . . . The foreign name of this animal is mo-men-to-wa [mammoth]; we call it k’i shu.” A giant mole that lives in the frozen north and is never seen alive certainly sounds like a frozen mammoth carcass. The emperor and his agents believed they were one and the same. It’s tempting to leave it there, but there is a problem in accepting the emperor’s conclusion that the k’i shu was a mammoth. None of the old sources mention ivory. In China, ivory isn’t just a beloved artistic medium, as in Europe, it also had medicinal uses. The pharmacopeias mention the medicinal value of its meat, but never mention ivory.

  Whether the early Chinese actually traveled to Siberia to buy ivory is a difficult question to answer. There are no surviving accounts of Chinese travelers in the North or even second-hand references of such accounts. But they did have some knowledge of the people to the north. The chronicles of the Eastern Zhou (770–256 BCE) mention the tribes in the Amur valley. Sources from the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) describe tribes farther up the Pacific coast possibly as far as the Bering Straits. Walrus ivory artifacts from that period have been found on both the Siberian and the Alaskan sides of the Bering Sea that appear to have been carved with metal tools—tools that could only have come from China. There is good evidence that the tools were paid for with ivory. Beginning in the sixth century BCE, Chinese chroniclers wrote about a people called the Sushen who lived north of China in what are now Manchuria and the Russian Maritime Province. The chronicles describe the Sushen as difficult and warlike and take time to describe their weapons, which included armor made of bone. In more recent times, anthropologists have described people on both sides of the Bering Sea making armor out of walrus ivory.

  Sometime during the Tang dynasty (618–906), a new substance began to appear in China. It was called ku-tu and was a form of tribute from northern tribes. Hung Hao, a twelfth century diplomat, described it as: “The ku-tu horn is not very large. It is veined like ivory, and is yellow in color. It is made into sword-hilts.” Sien-yu Ch’u, a poet and calligrapher wrote that “ku-tu is a horn of the earth.” This could describe mammoth, walrus, or even narwhal ivory, the latter two often being collected along the shore rather than hunted. The word ku-tu spread to Central Asia, Persia, and the Arab world picking up various spellings and pronunciations along the way. Although it might not always have referred to the same material, it always had the same approximate meaning of a substance of unknown origin, brought by northern merchants, and very desirable for making knife and sword hilts.

  In the early twentieth century, the American anthropologist Berthold Laufer wrote several papers on ivory in China in which he looked at the trade in walrus ivory. His conclusion was that ku-tu was almost entirely walrus ivory. As for that “almost,” he explained that mammoth, walrus, and narwhal were collected by people of the north and traded south. Along the way, they would be cut to sizes that were easy to transport, with the bad parts cut away, and indiscriminately mixed together. Once away from the coast, the next merchants down the line would have had no point of reference to understand what any of those animals were. It was all ku-tu to them. By the time the ivory made it to China or Central Asia no one could say what kind of animal produced ku-tu.

  By the early modern period, long-distance trade routes had penetrated Siberia on all sides and, on all sides, end consumers wanted ivory. For centuries, most of that trade consisted of walrus ivory with occasional pieces of narwhal and mammoth mixed in. In the late medieval period, Russian merchants pushed farther east and, in doing so, eventually came into direct contact with people selling giant tusks, much too big to have come from a walrus. The people selling them called them “mammoth.”

  In the thirteenth century, as the Norsemen abandoned the White Sea region, it came under the political control of the Russian city-state of Novgorod, located near the Baltic Sea south of modern St. Petersburg. Novgorodian merchants had been trading on the White Sea almost as long as the Norsemen, the most important difference being that, while the Norse were only visitors to the area, the Russians slowly built up a permanent presence by setting up trading posts and controlling important portages between river systems. The merchants were followed by settlers who established farms and towns. Many of them came fleeing the Mongol invasion that conquered all the other Russian states except Novgorod and its neighbor Pskov. All of these settlers eventually became subjects of Novgorod. In 1251, Norway and Novgorod concluded a treaty ceding the entire White Sea to to the Russian city-state. By then, the more adventurous merchant families had advanced out of the White Sea watershed eastward to the Pechora River watershed covering the west side of the northern Ural Mountains. Though they were never able to exert control across the mountains into Siberia, they were able to establish regular trade there. This created a direct path from the mammoth regions of northern Siberia to Novgorod and Western Europe.

  The Russians called the area straddling the northern Urals “Yugria.” The Yugrians were two different peoples, the Samoyeds (now Nenets) along the coast and the Voguls (now Mansi) along the rivers. Today, the last Mansi only live on the eastern side of the mountains along the lower reaches of the Ob River. When the first Novgorodian merchants arrived, the Mansi populated a large part of the Pechora basin o
n the western side of the mountains. The Mansi are one of the keys to explain how the idea of a mammoth came west. The most recent linguistic research argues that the word “mammoth” is almost certainly derived from a Mansi construction meaning “earth horn.” The etymology is important. It shows that the Mansi were not just the middlemen connecting the Novgorodians with ivory collectors farther east. It shows that the Mansi had clear—probably first-hand—knowledge of the origin of mammoth ivory. That the Russians picked up the word indicates that, at the point when they began to distinguish between mammoth and walrus ivory, it was Mansi merchants who they turned to to provide a name for the less familiar ivory. It might have been as simple a matter as someone saying, “Hey, why are these two pieces different?” It might also have been that larger pieces of mammoth ivory were being traded, even whole tusks. This was definitely happening by the beginning of the seventeenth century. To best understand the slow process of differentiating the mammoth ivory from that of the walrus, let’s go to the end of the story and work our way backwards.

  On the July 16, 1618, a British diplomatic mission, led by Sir Dudley Digges, arrived in Archangel, the primary Russian port on the White Sea. The purpose of the mission was to negotiate a loan for the tsar, Michael Romanov. Michael was in no mood to negotiate. When the advance party of the English arrived with half of the funds, he seized the money and sent them on their way. On hearing this, the ambassador ordered the rest of the mission to turn around and return home. By then it was October and Archangel was iced in. Sir Dudley took a small party, and the rest of the money, and traveled overland to Swedish territory on the Baltic Sea, and, from there, home. The rest of the party returned to Archangel to wait out the winter and the first ships of spring. Among those was the mission’s chaplain, Richard James. To occupy his time during the long winter nights, James compiled a lexicon of new and unusual words. Three quarters of the way through his lexicon, we find this entry: “maimanto, as they say, a sea Elephant, which is never seene, but according to the Samites [Samoyeds], he workes himself under grownde and so they find his teeth or homes or bones in Pechare [Pechora] and Nova Zemla.” James’s maimanto is not a walrus. Although sea elephant was one of many names used to describe walruses, James had already recorded the Russian word for walrus (mors). He also included the important details that mammoths were believed to live underground and were never seen alive, neither of which is true for walruses.

  Eight years before James wrote about the maimanto, Josias Logan visited Pustozersk on the Pechora River at the other end of the trade route to Archangel. Logan was the first representative of the British Muscovy Company to be sent to the town. Pustozersk sat on the flanks of the Ural Mountains, and by establishing a post there, the company hoped to acquire the wealth of Asia and eliminate most of the middlemen between England and China. His first sight of the town could not have been encouraging. After a difficult voyage across the Arctic coast of Russia, Logan arrived in July 1611 to find half the town in ashes and the governor missing. The only representatives of the government with any authority were an informal committee of tax collectors who were not sure they trusted him. While he waited for their approval to stay, Logan visited the local market and purchased “a piece of an Elephants Tooth,” which he sent back to London with an optimistic letter claiming that this must be evidence of an easy road from Pustozersk to China. At the time, Westerners had no idea how deep China reached into Asia. Many thought it was right over the Urals. Richard Finch, who was with Logan that day in the market, also wrote to the company about the transaction: “there is in the Winter time to bee had among the Samoyeds, Elephants teeth, which they sell in pieces according as they get it, and not by weight. . . . It is called in Russe, Mamanta Kaost.” Finch’s letter is especially important. There is no way to mistake what he means: the Russians had elephant tusks and they called them mammoth bones. Finch’s account was published in 1625 making it the earliest known appearance of any form of the word “mammoth” in print. The letter itself is the earliest appearance of the word in any form in a Western European language. There are, however, older written, but not formally published, Russian sources that use the word.

  The earliest known record of some form of the word “mammoth” is in the account books for the year 1578 at the Anthony of Siya Monastery near Archangel. The record is two simple words “pyatye mamantovakos,” or “one fifth mamant bone.” We can tease quite a bit of information out of those two words. The first few facts are pretty obvious: by 1578, the word “mammoth” was known west of the Urals, mammoth ivory was being traded across the Urals, and the Russians receiving the ivory knew that it was different from other forms of ivory, particularly the walrus ivory that they would have already been familiar with. That’s a lot. Beyond that, we can deduce that mammoth ivory was not new to them at that time. The words come with no explanation from the writer to the reader. The ivory is not a marvelous treasure; it’s simply something in their inventory. They were familiar enough with mammoth ivory to recognize that this piece is one fifth of a tusk, not more, not less. This familiarity means that a regular trade in mammoth ivory, recognized as such, had been going on for some time, at least most of the life of the writer and his intended readers. This pushes the trade back to the 1550s, if not further. How much earlier can we push it? That’s a tricky question. Now we have to turn to maps.

  Item MS 24065 in the collections of the British Library is a large, hand-drawn and painted map of the world. It is signed by Pierre Desceliers and dated 1550. The map bears the coats of arms of King Henri II of France and the duc de Montmorency and was most likely custom-made as a gift to the king. This style of map is meant to be viewed spread out on a table rather than hung on a wall. Half of the text is legible to someone standing on the south side of the map and half by someone on the north side with the centerline lying at about eleven degrees north. The map is decorated with colorful vignettes of animals and people in distant parts of the world. There are twenty-five text boxes. Standing in Northwest Russia, near the White Sea and Scandinavia is an elephant. It stands at the end of the Siberia to Pechora to Archangel ivory trail. Desceliers intentionally put the elephant in that spot. All the other animals and people on the map are where they would be in life; camels are in Arabia and polar bears are in Greenland. The monsters are where legends say they should be; there is a gryphon in Central Asia. An army of Amazons is on the march where Herodotus said they should be. Any doubt that the elephant belongs in that spot is dispelled by a text box which tells us that the trade products of the Rucheni (Ruthenians or Russians) are “valuable pelts, falcons, gyrfalcons, white elephants [ylefanz blanc], bears, moose and others that they carry to other parts of the world.” With the exception of the elephant, Descelier’s description is an abridgement of a passage from an edition of Marco Polo well-known in his day. Three years later, Desceliers would produce another world map with an elephant in the same place. Although this one was without a caption, it demonstrates that the first was not an anomaly or mistake. He intended for that elephant to be there.

  Is Desceliers’s Russian elephant an indication that the mammoth ivory trade had reached the White Sea and that Western mapmakers knew about it by 1550? The most honest answer is somewhere between “maybe” and “probably.” Desceliers left us no clues. Many mapmakers of the time very scrupulously let us know their sources of information. Others just as scrupulously kept them secret, often because they had bribed ships’ captains to divulge information that was considered a state secret by some countries. Desceliers was one of the latter. We don’t know what his sources were or what they told him. Desceliers was part of a group of mapmakers called the Dieppe school because they lived and worked in the vicinity of Dieppe on the north coast of France. King Henri II was a major patron of the mapmakers. On two unsigned, earlier maps from the school (Desceliers might have been the creator of one) a different, unnamed beast inhabits the space where Desceliers put his elephant. Both animals are gray and have thick bodies and tusks j
utting up from their lower jaws, somewhat like a boar’s tusks. On the 1546 map, today known as the Dauphine map, this animal has a body like a domestic pig: thick, rounded, longish, and with thinner bent legs and cleft hooves. The other map from the 1547 Vallard atlas (named for an owner, not the artist) has a more elephant-like body, shorter in length and less rounded, with long, thick, and straight legs. Desceliers is often credited with having produced the pig-like one. Neither of these animals is a modern elephant, but they don’t resemble any other known species. They do, however, bear a resemblance to an animal on an earlier map by one of the most famous mapmakers of the century.

  Martin Waldseemüller is best known for his 1507 map of the world that was the first to use the word “America.” With such a claim to fame, it’s not surprising that first thing most writers say about his next world map, the Carta Marina of 1516, is that it does not use the word “America.” What they should have been saying was, “is that an elephant next to Norway?” The animal on Waldseemüller’s map looks enough like the animal on the Vallard map that it’s safe to say that it was the source for it. Waldseemüller’s animal has the same elephant-like, blocky body and thick legs. It also has the fan-like ears of an African elephant. What it lacks is an elephant-like head. It has no trunk and its tusks jut up from its lower jaw. Unlike the two Dieppe maps, Waldseemüller was good enough to provide a caption to tell us what the animal is supposed to be: “The walrus [morsus] is an elephant sized animal with two long, quadrangular teeth. It is hindered by a lack of joints. The animal is found on promontories in Northern Norway where it moves in great herds.” His morsus appears on a half-dozen other maps by different mapmakers over the next twenty years.