Discovering the Mammoth

by John J. McKay

  In the fall of 1581, a large band of Volga River pirates, fleeing the law, followed the Kama River into the Stroganov lands. Rather than see a threat in the unruly force that had entered their lands, the sons of Grigori and Yakov saw the opening they had been looking for. They paid the leader of the pirates, Vasily Timofeyevich, called Yermak (“the millstone”), to take his men across the mountains to break the power of the khan of Sibir and open the east to the family’s agents. On September 1, Yermak departed for Sibir at the head of a force of 540 Cossacks, three hundred Polish and Swedish POWs, two priests, and a runaway monk who had signed on as the cook. Hearing of the invasion, Ivan was enraged. By now, he was old, in ill health, and possibly insane. His war in the west had finally ended in defeat. The state was almost bankrupt. In a fit of rage, he had killed his eldest son and heir. And, to make things worse, the Stroganovs had stripped the border defenses to outfit Yermak. Siberian tribes were crossing other parts of the Urals unopposed and raiding eastern Muscovy. He sent messengers to accuse the Stroganovs of treason and to order the expedition back, but by the time the messengers reached him, Yermak had already conquered Isker, the capital of Sibir, and made a fugitive of the ruler Khan Kuchum. As the Stroganov cousins were making peace with their god and waiting for the executioner to come knocking at their door, Ivan Koltso, one of Yermak’s crew, arrived at the Kremlin with an enormous load of furs and the message that the expedition had destroyed the khanate and annexed its lands in the name of the tsar. Ivan sent pardons, gifts, and honors to Yermak and his band. Most of the band and the first group of reinforcements died over the next few years trying to hang on to their conquest—Yermak drowned trying to swim in the gold chain mail Ivan had sent him—but, in the end, they were successful in adding a rich new province to the empire.

  Yermak’s expedition removed an enemy on one side of the kingdom and brought in unexpected new revenues. Over the next few decades, trappers, traders, and various malcontents, generically called promyshleniki, pushed the borders of Russia all the way to the Pacific Ocean and the frontiers of China. More than anything it was fur that drove that advance. For the eighty years following the conquest of Sibir, revenue flowing to treasury from the fur trade completely made up for the exhaustion of the old trapping grounds and steadily increased beyond it. But the methods of the promyshleniki were not sustainable. Their advance was so fast precisely because the trappers were exhausting one river basin after another in a frantic rush to stay profitable. The fur trade income peaked at about the time Witsen visited Moscow. Both the Siberian Prikaz and the settlers in Siberia were actively searching for new sources of wealth. One of the new items added to the state monopoly list was mammoth ivory.

  Witsen discovered mammoth ivory during one of his clandestine visits to the market in 1665. At the time of his trip to Moscow, the Netherlands controlled all of the trade coming out of Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka), including its ivory trade. Witsen had seen and handled complete elephant tusks. This put him in an excellent position to evaluate Siberian ivory. What he found in the market was, according to him, “a little coarser and redder than fresh ivory” from Asia but he had no doubt that it was real elephant ivory. Of its origin, he writes: “Rivers in a certain Muscovite region, rushing down from the mountains often uncover on their banks heavy teeth, which are judged to be Elephants that were washed there at the time of Deluge and covered with earth: they are called by the Russians Mammotekoos. Mammot is Russian for a large dangerous animal and koos means bone.” Witsen did not believe that the elephants from whom the ivory came had ever been native to Siberia; he agreed with the opinion that they must have drowned and had their bodies carried there by the biblical flood. To bolster the Deluge theory, he points out that Spanish travelers claimed to have discovered elephant bones and ivory in Mexico another land where elephants did not exist. Witsen wrote about mammotekoos in all four of the works he published in his lifetime.

  The first place Witsen wrote about the ivory was in, of all things, a book on shipbuilding. Following the death of his father in 1669, Witsen discovered a great number of drawings and notes on naval architecture among the elder Witsen’s papers. This inspired him to write a book on the subject. The book, Aeloude and Hedendaegsche Scheepsbouw en Bestier (Ancient and Modern Shipbuilding and Governance), was large and lavishly illustrated. The production was so difficult that two different publishers combined their resources to print it. This made it very expensive (twelve guilders or over a thousand dollars today). In spite of that, it was in very high demand. There was nothing else like it. The rich and powerful, even monarchs, bought copies and studied it, despite the fact that it was written in Dutch, hardly a universal language. The first part of the book is an overview of historical ships from Antiquity to Witsen’s own time. This is where he mentions the mammoth. For the first two and a half pages of his book, he writes about sailing in the Bible. When he mentions Noah and the Deluge, he digresses to give some proofs of the Flood. First are reports of ships found buried or far from the ocean. Next, he mentions elephant remains in Siberia and Mexico. The only other proof he offers is the same seashells on mountains that had puzzled writers for the previous two thousand years. In 1690, Witsen released a second, expanded version of the book. In this edition, he added a description of a specific mammoth find near Kiev made five years earlier. The print run of this book was probably much smaller. He biographers weren’t even aware of it until the early twentieth century.

  In reading his book, many of the elite of Europe were first exposed to the idea of elephant bones in Russia and to the word “mammoth.” How many took note of that fact is unknown. Probably not very many. Bones and seashells were not the reason they were reading the book; shipbuilding was. One person who did take note, however, was Leibniz, a correspondent of Witsen’s. Leibniz was aware of the book months before it came out. When he was finally able to examine a copy four years later, he took extensive notes on the contents. The first time Leibniz mentions the mammoth passage is in the manuscript of his Protogaea, written in 1692 or 1693. By then, Witsen’s third book mentioning the mammoth had come out, but the wording Leibniz uses exactly matches that in the two shipbuilding books. A second writer who learned about the mammoth from these books was Wilhelm Ernst Tentzel. Tentzel wrote a monthly journal on recent scientific advances, history, and other subjects he thought interesting. In his February 1690 issue, he mentions Witsen’s book and the buried ships that appear in the same paragraph as the mammoth. His interest at the time was, as Witsen intended, as evidence for the Flood. Five years later he would be involved in his own controversy over buried bones and use Witsen’s description of the mammotekoos and bones in Mexico to bolster his case. Witsen, Leibniz, and Tentzel were regular correspondents with each other during that decade. Finally, someone with more influence than the three of them combined read the shipbuilding book and took notice. He had good reason to; he was Peter I, tsar of all the Russias, and Siberia was his personal property.

  Peter the Great was born the year after the first edition of Witsen’s book went on sale. While no monarch has what could be called a normal childhood, Peter’s was exceptionally violent and tempestuous, even by the standards of the time. Peter’s father, Aleksei, to whom Witsen had presented his credentials seven years earlier, was only the second of the Romanov dynasty. The position of the family was by no means secure and they had to constantly navigate their way among the old, powerful families of Muscovy. Aleksei married twice, first to Maria Miloslavskaya and second to Natalia Narishkina. Between them, he fathered sixteen children. At the time of his death, three males survived. Fedor and Ivan, the sons of Maria, were both in dangerously bad health. Peter, the only son born to Natalia, was strong as an ox, but only four years old and third in line. Aleksei’s eldest son was sworn in as Fedor III, and died six years later leaving no heir.

  This created a succession crisis. The Miloslavskis naturally supported Ivan while the Naryshkins supported Peter. Though the obvious choice should have been Ivan
, the older of the two, his health was so bad that no one expected him to live very long. Ivan was severely epileptic and nearly blind, and may have suffered from a variety of other problems (diagnosing the physical and mental health of historical figures is more of a parlor game than a science among historians). Patriarch Joachim, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, sought to thread the needle by calling an assembly of the leading citizens of Moscow. The crowd chose Peter by acclamation. This type of royal election was common in Europe east of Vienna, but many cried foul because no time had been allowed for anyone but Muscovites to participate. Among the chief complainers were the streltsy (musketeers) a hereditary military caste created by Ivan IV. At the time, the streltsy were unhappy with the powers that be over a number of issues including late pay and abusive officers. The Miloslavskis fanned their discontent and played up their fears that Peter was a mere tool of corrupt forces around the court and that even darker plots were being hatched by the Naryshkins against the two princes.

  Two weeks later, the streltsy rose up in bloody rebellion, mistakenly thinking they were protecting the monarchy. Two royal advisers were murdered in front of Peter and Ivan while Peter’s mother tried to protect them. Peter would have nightmares about this for the rest of his life. Two of his Narishkin uncles were murdered. Another dozen men on a carefully prepared hit list were killed along with guards, family members, and a few people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the chaos, Ivan’s older sister, Sophia, emerged as the spokesperson for the terrified boys. At one point, she stood before a courtyard of angry streltsy and won them over by promising them their back pay. Four days later, she was one of those who oversaw a new royal election. The new election was dominated by the streltsy. At the last minute, they wavered about actually deposing Peter, a prince of royal blood, and elected Peter and Ivan co-tsars. Patriarch Joachim provided the appropriate historical justifications for such an unusual arrangement. Sophia would rule as de facto regent for her brothers.

  Sophia was a remarkable woman. At a time when upper-class Russian women lived in seclusion and were rarely seen, she was able to address a courtyard full of angry soldiers and hold her own in negotiations with the most powerful men in the realm. Less than a week after her brothers’ coronation, she presided over a debate between factions in the church. With the Narishkins in hiding and her sisters too traditionalist to appear in public, she was the only adult Miloslavski of royal blood available to look after the tsars. Historians have not been kind to Sophia. For most of the last three hundred years she has been stereotyped as a pushy, scheming, unattractive, and perhaps lusty woman who was finally put in her “place” by a strong male (Peter). The same terms have been used for most strong women of the modern era not named Elizabeth, Catherine, or Victoria. But Sophia was not just a remarkable footnote to history, she is important to our story.

  During her regency, Sophia preferred to keep Peter and the surviving members of his family out of sight as much as possible. He lived in the village of Preobrazhenskoe with his mother and his tutor, Nikita Zotov. Zotov was an easy-going drunkard who let his charge do as he pleased. Peter’s intellectual strength lay in the technical arts. What pleased him was visiting with the inhabitants of the foreign quarter and learning about the outer world. They were happy to have him. The Scots and Germans taught him practical trades and modern military science, while the Swiss mercenary Fraz LeFort taught him about drinking and women. In 1688, Peter discovered a rotting English sloop on the lake at Preobrazhenskoe. A Dutch mercenary, Karsten Brand, helped him revamp it and taught him the basics of sailing. This was the beginning of Peter’s lifelong enthusiasm for ships and naval power. Other Dutch residents introduced him to the basics of shipbuilding . . . and they had a very good book on the subject.

  While Peter continued his eclectic education, interrupted by periodic journeys into the city for ceremonial occasions, Sophia tended to affairs of state. One of the crises she was called on to deal with was a little war in Siberia. Traders, trappers, missionaries, and bureaucrats reached the far end of Siberia long before sufficient numbers of farmers to feed them did. They traveled mostly on the rivers, by boat in the summer and sledge in the winter, building almost no roads on the boggy countryside. Even today, roads are rare in most of Siberia. Bringing large loads of bulky goods, specifically enough grain to feed a small settlement, was a difficult and expensive proposition. It could take three or four years for a shipment of grain to reach a remote place like Yakutsk, and by then, the majority of the load would be inedible. It was never a surprise to hear that a remote settlement had been devastated by starvation over the winter. Because of this, the promyshleniki were relieved and excited when they began to hear rumors of the Amur, a valley in the south filled with grain, cattle, and silver. Beginning in 1643, a number of Cossack groups attempted to conquer the valley, which the Chinese considered within their sphere of control. The resulting struggles were horrendous affairs involving kidnapping, plunder, and, it is reputed, cannibalism. The local Chinese authorities chased the Russians out of the lower and middle valley multiple times only to have them return as soon as the authorities were gone. In the 1660s, a group of Cossacks was able to establish a sort of free republic at Albazin, on the northern bend of the Amur.

  The Kangxi emperor was unable to deal with their provocations because he had much more dangerous problems caused by rebellions in the south. But the problems in the north were never far from his mind; the Amur valley was the homeland of the Qing dynasty. In the early 1680s, with China proper pacified, he turned his attention to the invasion from these Russian barbarians. In 1684, the emperor sent a large and well-supplied army to the lower Amur. The army methodically moved west, driving the Russians before them. The Russians attempted to make a stand at Albazin, but were soon defeated. The Chinese allowed the survivors to retreat and razed their fort. At this point they were poised to do some real damage to Russian interests in Siberia. Instead of exploiting their momentum to further advantage, the Chinese moved down river to their base of operations and waited to see what the Russians would do. The emperor sent messages to Moscow requesting that envoys be sent to negotiate a settlement that would be satisfactory to both sides.

  Sophia understood that trade with China was far more important than the interests of a handful of out-of-control border ruffians. Since the beginning of the century, the tsars had been trying to open relations with China, but every attempt at making official contact had failed due to cultural misunderstandings. Sophia jumped at the chance to do what none of the men in her family had managed. After several delays, during which the promyshleniki rebuilt Fort Albazin, delegations from the two empires met at the Russian outpost of Nerchinsk on a tributary of the Amur almost three hundred miles west of Albazin. Sophia sent a large delegation that was met by a Chinese delegation ten times its size. Negotiations were carried out for the Russians by a Polish cavalry officer and for the Chinese by a French Jesuit. They negotiated in Latin and reached an agreement on August 27, 1689. According to the final settlement, Russia retreated from the valley and China agreed to allow regular trade through Nerchinsk.

  Sophia did not get to celebrate the Treaty of Nerchinsk. At the same time that the negotiations were wrapping up in the east, Sophia’s regency was coming to an abrupt and unanticipated end in Moscow. Sophia’s position had been dramatically weakened by two disastrous campaigns in the Crimea and by her half brother Peter turning seventeen in June. Amid rumors that Sophia was planning to murder Peter and rule in her own name, supporters of the two Romanovs engaged in a month of dramatic maneuvers that resulted in Peter taking control and Sophia being packed off to a convent. Peter’s half brother Ivan stayed on as co-tsar until his natural death seven years later from an unspecified illness. When word of the treaty reached the court, Peter and his advisers were thrilled at the opportunity and began planning a trade mission to Beijing.

  Besides being acquainted with Witsen’s pivotal book on shipbuilding from his childhood, Peter, po
ssibly through Winius, became aware of Witsen’s long study of Russia’s borderlands. At some point in the late 1670s, while collecting information about northern Asia, or Tartary as it was usually called, Witsen came up with the idea of creating a new map of that part of the world. Europe knew virtually nothing about northeastern Eurasia. Though maps of the world and Asia had been published since the first part of the previous century, anything east of the Ob and Irtysh Rivers and north of the Great Wall of China was pure speculation. A vague coastline had been created based on the writings of Pliny and the land was filled with place names drawn from the Bible, classical geographers, and the fables of Marco Polo. Witsen’s collected materials included enough sketch maps and travel itineraries, along with intelligence from his cousin, that he became confident that he had enough information about western and central Siberia to risk going public with a new map. Beginning in 1682, he printed a small number of maps and sent them to friends and prominent intellectuals around Europe, regularly making changes before more broadly releasing the map in 1687. The map was a huge success. Prominent mapmakers used his data to update their own maps. He was not happy about what he saw as plagiarism, but he decided to let it pass for the greater good of spreading knowledge.