Waldseemüller not only brings us back to the walrus; he demonstrates a crisis of knowledge that was happening during the Renaissance. It was a crisis that, in part, fueled the Renaissance and led to the scientific revolution. During the Renaissance, the world the Europeans knew became vastly larger in size and complexity. In the south, Vasco da Gama demonstrated that the Atlantic and Indian Oceans were connected and that is was possible to sail from Europe to the rich markets of Asia. Columbus demonstrated that exotic markets were reachable by sailing west. A few years later, his peers realized that these lands were not part of Asia, but entirely new and unsuspected lands. Economic ambition, the search political advantage, and plain curiosity drove Europeans to explore this new larger world. For the next two centuries, it seemed every ship brought back tales of new places, cultures, plants, and animals. As literate Europeans tried to make sense of these reports, they found old organizations of knowledge insufficient to the task. One of those organizations was the bestiary. A bestiary was a compendium of known animals. Many were beautifully illustrated books combining scientific knowledge of ancient authorities, like Aristotle and Pliny, with moral lessons from the church. The walrus was unknown to the ancients and not part of the standard corpus of bestiary animals. Although the ivory had been known for over six hundred years, no illustrations of a walrus are known to have existed before 1500.
The one written source that described walruses and was available to Waldseemüller was the eccentric and prolific genius St. Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus). In the mid-thirteenth century, Albert wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s De Animalibius. Departing from the usual bestiary formula of moral lessons, his was primarily a scientific tract and included many animals not known to Aristotle. In his section on whales, he says that one type of whale has two long canine teeth, usually one cubit, but sometimes two or even four cubits long. He says that the texture of the teeth is like that of an elephant or a boar. It uses these teeth for fighting and to pull itself up on the rocks where it sleeps. One cubit—eighteen inches—is a realistic size for a walrus tusk. Three to six feet is unknown, but easily within the range for a narwhal tooth or mammoth tusk. Albert’s physical description is followed by a bizarre description of walrus hunting that involved sneaking up on them while they slept on the rocks, slipping a rope through a cut in their skin, tying the end of the rope to a tree, and waking them by throwing rocks at their heads, upon which the frightened walruses would run out of their own skins in their rush to get back to the sea. Someone was pulling Albert’s leg, so it’s safest to assume that the giant tusks were another exaggeration and not evidence of accurate knowledge of mammoths. What’s important here is that Albert’s prestige—him eventually being a saint and all—led to his story being uncritically believed until the middle of the sixteenth century—the same time that Desceliers produced his white elephant map.
One of the most famous depictions of the walrus came from Olaus Magnus, the last Catholic bishop of Uppsalla, Sweden. In 1518, Magnus traveled into the north of Sweden selling papal indulgences in order to raise money for the construction of a new St. Peters in Rome. He wasn’t a very good salesman; he spent most of his time collecting information on native folkways and natural history. In 1539, he published the first part of the results of his research in the form of a lavishly illustrated map. In 1555, he published a text version of his researches carefully linked to the illustrations on the map. Near the White Sea is a monster, with thick short legs, tusks in its lower jaw, spiky hair, and a very annoyed expression at a group of Sami who are throwing snowballs at it. The description in his book begins “To the far North, on the coast of Norway, there lives a mighty fish, as big as an elephant, called morse or rosmari . . .” This hits all the important points used by Waldseemüller. Further on, he writes: “They will raise themselves with their Teeth as by Ladders to the very tops of Rocks, that they may feed on the Dewie Grasse, or fresh Water, and role themselves in it.” This matches elements from Albert. He also includes the bizarre hunting anecdote.
Most of Magnus’s sources are known to us. Albert’s tale was well known in the sixteenth century and was quoted in a half dozen books printed before 1550. During his travels, Magnus met with Bishop Erik Valkendorf of Trondheim, Norway, who had seen walruses during a trip to the northern part of his diocese in 1512 and described them in a letter. The spiky hair on his walrus could have come from Albert or from Valkendorf. What we lack is a source for the legs and the comparison to an elephant. In his description, Magnus names two earlier travelers in Russia who wrote about the importance of the ivory trade with the Middle East, Paulus Jovius and Maciej z Miechowa. Both of these writers mention Albert’s hunting tale, neither mentions legs. While it’s possible Magnus took those details from Waldseemüller’s map or from later copies of it by Laurent Fries, it’s unlikely that Waldseemüller simply made up those details. Everything we know about him points to his being a very careful researcher. Albert used the word “elephant” to describe the nature of walrus ivory, but nothing else in his description suggested elephantness. In any case, the tusks in Waldseemüller’s drawing are one of the least elephant-like things about it.
These problems point to a lost source known, at least, to Waldseemüller and possibly also to Magnus and one other. Sigismund von Herberstein traveled in Russia on a mission for the Holy Roman Emperor in 1517, the year after Waldseemüller’s map was printed, and again in 1526. Herberstein is responsible for the “cz” spelling of “tsar” (i.e. “czar”). Herberstein’s original reports are gone, but he published a book-length description of Russia in 1549. To his own observations, he added details gleaned from other travelers’ accounts. On the walrus, Herberstein made the same observations on the value of the ivory trade as had been made by Jovius, Miechowa, and Magnus. His physical description adds the detail we’ve been looking for—legs. He wrote: “It has short feet, like those of a beaver; a chest rather broad and deep compared to the rest of its body; and two tusks in the upper jaw protruding to a considerable length.” Short beaver legs are not long mammoth legs, but they are legs and beavers are furry, like mammoths. Long tusks in the upper jaw are more like those of walruses and mammoths than the boar-like lower jaw tusks of Waldseemüller’s and Magnus’s maps. Herberstein, like Waldsemüller, was a careful researcher. It’s unlikely that he would have made up such specific details. Saying that the walrus was a very large animal with legs does not prove that the lost source knew something about mammoths as a source of ivory. The best we can say is that it’s suggestive. Herberstein never went beyond Moscow, so he had to have depended on someone else for his knowledge of walruses. If the lost source really existed, was it the same source that convinced Desceliers to change his elephant-like creature (almost certainly inspired by Waldseemüller) into a true elephant? What did the early sixteenth-century mapmakers and travelers know about the mammoth that other intellectuals of the period did not?
While the mapmakers suggest a lot and leave only questions, the travelers suggest the answer to one of our questions. Maciej Miechowa, mentioned above, was a Polish polymath who wrote the first great history/geography of the lands between Germany and the Caspian Sea, which in those days meant Poland and Russia. The Two Sarmatias was published in 1517. Miechowa’s description of the walrus is worth looking at in detail.
In Yugria and Karelia some moderate mountains rise. . . . Beyond the mountains, the ocean is moderate along the whole northern coast: there the fish called the morss [walrus] climbs from the sea onto the mountains by its teeth, chaffing himself during the ascent. And while to the top of the mountain shall come, making a path to be followed henceforth: fall flying to the other side of the hill. The latter nations gather together the teeth which are broad and white and very large and they take the most weight and sell it to the Moscovites: the Moscovites, however, use these to sell to the Tartars and Turks who use them to make handles for knives and swords and also spears.
At first glance, this does not seem to add anything new.
The walrus lives by the sea; it climbs ashore using its teeth; the locals trade its ivory to the Russians, who sell it to knife-makers in the Middle East. But it does say something new. Albert said walruses climb onto the shore to sleep. Magnus said the climb to high meadows to graze. Miechowa says they climb high into the mountains and some fall to the other side—that is, inland—where their ivory is gathered, not hunted, by Yugrians. To put it another way, the Yugrians-Mansi—to whom we are indebted for the word “mammoth”—find and collect ivory inland from the Arctic Ocean to sell to the Russians. Miechowa, like so many others for centuries before him and decades after, conflated the walrus and mammoth ivory trades together, but, in his description of the source of that trade, he described only the trade in mammoth ivory. In describing this as the normal form of ivory trade, Miechowa pushes the date of a trade in mammoth ivory, as distinct from walrus ivory, back to the beginning of the sixteenth century. As with the casual way the monks of St. Anthony used the word “mammoth” sixty years later, Miechowa’s description of gathering mammoth ivory as a normal thing means it probably dates into the previous century.
Ivory has been a valuable item of trade in all of the civilizations that fringe Eurasia for all of recorded history. When the peoples of northern Eurasia entered the long-distance trade networks that connected them with those civilizations, they met the end-consumers’ demand with any type of ivory they had access to. At some point, toward the middle of the last millennium, along a trade route that passed through the lands of the Yugrians/Mansi, mammoth ivory began to move in significant enough quantity that it became distinguished from walrus and narwhal ivory. This occurred sometime before 1500. Still, it took decades for the end-consumers in Europe to absorb that knowledge. Miechowa was given a big hint before 1517 but lacked enough comparative data to know he was hearing something new. Western mapmakers, striving to synthesize an early version of data overload, probably processed and lost one, maybe two, sources that described the mammoth as an animal, not just a source of ivory that was distinct from the walrus. There are probably a lot of lost documents that refer to the mammoth ivory trade hidden in monasteries, chancelleries, and libraries in Russia, the Middle East, and Central Europe. James’s “maimanto” was not discovered until 1950, and the St. Anthony monastery account books were unknown until the 1970s. Logan’s elephant tooth was only attached to an unknown animal in 1692, and I discovered Finch’s “Mamanta Kaost” in 2011. Who knows what remains to be discovered.
CHAPTER 3
EASTERN TRAVELERS
In the years following Logan and Finch visiting Pustozersk and James wintering at Archangel, there must have been many other travelers and merchants who visited Russia and heard about the mysterious ivory-producing animal, the mammoth. Unfortunately, if they left written accounts, we haven’t discovered them yet. The next traveler whose thoughts about the mammoth have survived was Nicolaas Witsen, a young member of a Dutch trade mission to Moscow. Witsen’s family was deeply involved in the grain trade with Russia, and he had already expressed an interest in the country. The year before the trip he sent a list of questions to the Dutch agent living there about all aspects of life in Russia. After his visit, his casual interest became a lifelong fascination with the Russian far east, the unknown lands beyond the Urals. Witsen didn’t keep his love to himself. He wrote, he collected tales from travelers, he encouraged others to go to and learn about that quarter of the world, and he helped those others get published. In doing so, he, more than anyone else, deserves credit for introducing the word and concept of the mammoth to the West.
Witsen came from a prominent Amsterdam family that was active in both politics and the economy. His father was elected the mayor of Amsterdam four times and was also Rembrandt’s landlord (in 1658 he caused the artist’s bankruptcy by unexpectedly recalling a loan). Born in 1641, he lived during the golden age of the Dutch Republic. During his youth, the Dutch East India Company fielded the largest merchant fleet in the world and controlled the lion’s share of trade from Asia. Since his family had a big hand in that trade, he was in a perfect position to learn about the exotic cultures and environments of the rest of the world. Witsen had an extensive education and had already made one trip abroad—to England with his father in 1656—when he was appointed to take part in the mission to Moscow. After taking a roundabout route to avoid cities experiencing an outbreak of the plague, the Dutch party arrived in Moscow on January 20, 1665. It left on May 12. Witsen didn’t have an official position in the embassy; it was primarily intended to be an educational trip preparing him to take his position overseeing the family’s business interests. This gave him plenty of free time to explore the city, though he often had to slip away from his guards in disguise to do so. During those four months, he met Samoyeds, Tartars, and Persians; became friends with Patriarch Nikon and Archil Bagration, four-time king of the Georgian kingdom of Imereti; toured the markets; made drawings of buildings; and began collecting travelers’ accounts of the far east to make a “contribution to the explanation and description of the earth.” Many of the contacts he made during that trip would correspond with him for the rest of their lives. One of the most important of those was a distant cousin, Andreas Winius, who at the time served as the mission’s interpreter, and would eventually rise to become the minister in charge of the Siberian Prikaz, the office that oversaw many of the royal monopolies on products coming out of Siberia, which, by the end of the century, included mammoth ivory.
The Siberia that the Siberian Prikaz watched over was a wild and unruly place. Few in Moscow had a clear idea of the extent of the territory. Western Europeans had even less of an idea. For them, the area east of the Ural Mountains was one of the least-known parts of the planet. Russia did not necessarily acquire Siberia “in a fit of absentmindedness,” as John Seeley once said of the British Empire, but their conquest of the east was nearly that unintentional and chaotic. When Ivan IV (not yet terrible) inherited the throne of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy in 1533, his realm covered slightly less than half of the European part of modern Russia and had dangerous borders in all directions except the ice-bound north. Muscovy was frequently isolated by wars with its neighbors. In the west, Poland and Sweden cut them off from the Baltic Sea and the rest of Europe. In the south and east, the successors of the Tatar Golden Horde, which had once conquered and devastated the Russian principalities, still controlled the rich black-earth lands of the Eurasian steppes. These khanates regularly raided Russian villages for slaves, imposing an enormous cost on Moscow for defense. The Khanate of Kazan, the successor to Great Bulgaria, was closest to Moscow. It straddled the Volga and cut the Mucovites off from the rich fur trapping lands of the southern and central Ural Mountains, which might have helped pay for that massive defense budget.
It’s hard to overestimate the importance of the fur trade in the development of the Russian state. From the very beginning, fur—primarily sable fur—was the single most valuable trade commodity for the Russian principalities and the largest source of revenue for the princes. For centuries, very little coined money circulated in the Russian lands; furs functioned as the primary currency. It was the quest for fur trapping country that had led the Novgorodians and other Russians to move out of their core homelands and conquer their way to the Arctic Ocean and the northern end of the Ural Mountains. But, by Ivan’s time, even those vast lands were being trapped out. The increase in the wealth of Western Europe brought about by the conquest of the Americas led to new luxurious fashions in which fur played a major role. Even squirrel pelts were valuable. To put it another way, the value of fur was rising just as Muscovy was running out of it. The Western European eagerness to buy pelts created a great opportunity for the Russians to improve their access to Western markets if they could gain access to new fur-trapping lands. To solve his strategic and economic dilemmas, Ivan chose the path that many leaders both before and after him have chosen in times of stress and almost always with bad results: he declared war on everybody.
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nbsp; Ivan’s first two campaigns were quick and successful. In the summer of 1552, he led his army down the Volga and laid siege to Kazan. Six weeks later his troops sacked the city and massacred most of the population thus gaining control of the western side of the Urals. Four years after that he continued down to the Volga and did the same to the Khanate of Astrakhan, gaining control of the entire length of the Volga River. With these two conquests, Ivan opened the way to the Caspian Sea and trade with Persia and the Middle East, increased access to untapped trapping country, and acquired rich agricultural lands in which to settle surplus peasants. Ivan now turned his attention to the Crimean Khanate, which blocked the way to the Black Sea. This led him into conflict with the Ottoman Turks, allies of the Krim Tatars, who sent an army across the sea and stopped his move in that direction. Undeterred, Ivan turned west and invaded Livonia (modern Estonia and Latvia), a principality that Poland and Sweden were in the process of dividing between themselves. The war was a disaster. Poland and Sweden had better armies, better weapons, and more wealth than Muscovy. Ivan’s determination and increasing mania led him drag out his inevitable defeat for twenty-five years. At one point, even Denmark was at war with Muscovy. During the darkest days near the end of the war, Ivan found out that he was also at war with another neighbor, the Khanate of Sibir which dominated the land between the Urals and the Yenessi River.
Early in his reign and prior to the start of this seemingly perpetual war with the world, Ivan made the decision that would lead to Russia becoming the largest country on earth. In 1558, soon after conquering Kazan, he gave the Stroganov brothers, Grigori and Yakov, exclusive rights to exploit a territory the size of Maryland on the Kama and Chusovaya Rivers along the central Urals. In the space of less than fifty years, the Stroganov family had combined superb business acumen with uncanny political instincts to become the richest family in Russia and favorites of the tsars. Ivan had given them their fiefdom on the simple terms that they create prosperous new province for him by opening mines, starting businesses and trapping, and that they bear the expenses of guarding the border. Things went so well for the first sixteen years that, in 1574, Ivan renewed the Stroganov privileges and gave the family permission to look for additional opportunities beyond the Urals. Over the years, a small number of individuals had crossed the mountains and brought back enough fur that canny businessmen like the Stroganovs had a good idea of the opportunities to be found there. They just needed to find the right opening to exploit those opportunities.
Discovering the Mammoth Page 8
