Discovering the Mammoth

by John J. McKay

  At least one copy of the map made it to the hands of young Peter. Among the many versions of the map is one dedicated to Peter. The design is identical to the 1687 version. The young tsar was delighted by it. Witsen, by then, had figured out that the future of Russia would belong to Peter. This was by no means guaranteed at the time, as at this point, Sophia was still the regent of Russia. Peter was only fifteen and the junior tsar next to his elder half brother. Despite his many medical problems, Ivan had married in 1684. Though childless at the time, he would father five children before his death. Sophia was still regent, and many believed she was planning to declare herself sole ruler of Russia. The rumor happened to be correct; his cousin Winius was ordered to have a hundred portraits of Sophia printed; these were essentially coronation portraits. He sent the request to Witsen in 1687 to have them printed in the Netherlands. Winius must have sent other intelligence that led Witsen to believe Peter (or rather, his court faction) would prevail in the coming showdown with Sophia. Winius wasn’t his only source of information. Twenty years had passed since his trip to Moscow and Witsen had cultivated an extensive network of informants. One of these was probably Prince Yakov Dolgoruky. Dolgoruky was a trusted member of the court. Later he would be a close confidant of Peter’s, and, when he spent a month in Amsterdam on diplomatic mission in 1688, he and Witsen would spend many hours together speaking honestly and confidentially. Whatever the source of his faith in Peter, Witsen had a prominent dedication to Peter placed on the map’s cartouche.

  Witsen’s five-year delay in releasing the map was due to more than perfectionism. There was a genuine risk in revealing the depth of his knowledge of Russia’s eastern territories. Like the Spanish and Portuguese shipping routes of the previous century, such knowledge could be considered state secrets. Witsen’s Russian sources could have been in real danger if their identities had become known. A twentieth-century study of the place names on the map showed that most were derived from Russian forms of the names, meaning he received most of his information from Russians and not from Western travelers. In the eighteenth century, Gerhard Friedrich Müller went through the Russian archives and decided that Winius was the source of most of Witsen’s geographical information. Luckily for both Witsen and Winius, in his letter thanking Witsen for the map, Peter encouraged him to continue his researches. Witsen did just that. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense. The Russians did not have an accurate map of the east. They had sketch maps of small areas, and travel itineraries of the major rivers, but no one had assembled all of this information into a large modern map. This introduction led to a friendship that would benefit both Witsen and Peter for the next thirty years.

  In 1690, Witsen received a letter in the name of the two tsars asking for advice on how to improve trade with China and Persia. Once again, cousin Andreas may have had a hand in this. With the shift of power, Winius had become the head of the foreign ministry. By this time, Witsen had a title to accompany his intellectual prestige. He was one of the mayors of Amsterdam (there were four). He would hold the office thirteen times. His advice was only moderately useful. He extolled the virtues of free trade (such as opening Archangel to Amsterdam merchants) and urged a new war against the Chinese to attempt to retake the Amur delta. It was a major concession by the Russians to admit that a foreigner had more knowledge of the subject than they did. Peter’s faction knew what a valuable resource they had in Witsen. During the coming years, they would turn to him for advice and for aid in trade, in hiring experts, and in acquiring arms for Peter’s wars.

  His new relationship with the highest circles of Russian power encouraged him to do something his friends had been requesting for years. He began organizing his twenty-five years of research into a book. Noord en Oost Tartarye (Northern and Eastern Tartary) came out in 1692, though, as with his map, “came out” is a bit strong of a description. Witsen had the book printed and bound, but kept all the copies and presented them to friends and respected others. In some cases, he gave the copies on the explicit condition that the recipients never let the copy leave their homes. Witsen’s caution was based on his previous experience with plagiarism and intensified by his physical condition. He was over fifty, in increasingly ill health, and almost certainly clinically depressed. He wanted to be generous with his knowledge but feared others stealing his legacy. None of this stopped him from using the map to his political, financial, and intellectual advantage. He presented several copies of his book to influential Russians, including the two tsars to whom it was dedicated. Marion Peters, his biographer, suggests some other likely recipients: Feodor Golovin, who negotiated the Treaty of Nerchinsk; Matvei Gagarin, the future governor of Siberia, and cousin Winius. The book is divided into two parts. The first is an historical and political narrative of Siberia and the surrounding lands. The second part deals with the geography and resources of northeast Eurasia. Like Olaus Magnus had done in the previous century, Witsen links his description to his earlier map.

  Witsen’s book on the Tartary provides a great deal more information about the mammoth, which served to broaden the mystery of the animal without offering any solutions. Witsen begins by repeating what he said in his two shipbuilding books: spring floods uncover ivory on the banks of rivers, the ivory resembles elephant ivory, and the natives call it Mammoutekoos. A significant difference between this description and the version in his two shipbuilding books is that, although he still credits the Deluge with depositing the ivory in the north, he no longer draws a connection with the supposed elephants’ bones found in Mexico. Additional information from Russia might have made cast some doubt on his previous conclusions. As he continues, he describes a second type of Siberian ivory: “At [the market] they also peddled the horns and teeth of the Behemoth, called by the Russians Mammout or Mammona . . . they say [the mammona] is dark brown and gives off a great stench: it is rarely seen and if seen betides many disasters: it has a tail like a horse’s: short feet and other trifles that they believe.” He tells his readers some of the products that the locals make from this ivory: “The Samoyeds make their arrowheads, and the Muscovites make all sorts of things which elsewhere are made from real ivory.” He goes on to say that mammoth bones and ivory are mined from the ground and that the Mammona tooth is only nine inches long. By this point in his life he had been to India and seen live elephants, something that would have further influenced his theorizing on the mammoth. He has too much information at this point and is struggling to bring it all into a coherent whole. Rather than putting forth a solution that he has no faith in, he takes the honest path of giving his readers all of his data, however confused, and letting them draw their own conclusion.

  Witsen mentions an alternative to the Deluge theory that, he says, some people think explains the presence of elephants in Siberia. He tells us: “Some Muscovites of that location [Siberia] are of opinion that by long ago the globe or world twisted, and that it is now cold where it had been hot, so that elephants, finding themselves in cold regions, ceased to exist.” This idea of twisting the world to change the climate was something new when Witsen mentioned it. In 1681, Thomas Burnet published the first volume of his Sacred History of the Earth. In it, he attempted to explain the geology of Genesis and the world as we now see it through mostly naturalistic processes. In the original creation, Burnet told his readers, the earth was almost perfectly smooth and the pole was perpendicular to the ecliptic. There were no seasons, the climate was temperate in all latitudes all year around, and mankind lived in an eternal springtime. The Deluge was caused by the cracking open of the earth’s surface allowing a layer of water between the crust and the core to surge to the surface in the form of “the fountains of the deep.” The earth we see today is the wreckage of the Edenic past, covered with ugly heaps of stone and with the axis tipped to make great parts of the earth, in the north and south, barely habitable. Burnet’s book was sixteen years in the future when Witsen visited Moscow in 1665. It’s unlikely that the merchants he talked to at that date ha
d independently arrived at the idea of a sudden shift in the earth’s axial tilt changing climates. This explanation must have come from one of Witsen’s informants at a much later date. The idea of combining mammoths with Burnet’s theory would have come from a very westernized Russian, from one of the Westerners living in the merchants’ quarter, or a Westerner employed by the government, such as Winius.

  By 1692, Witsen’s books had exposed a rarefied strata of European society to the word “mammoth” and to the idea of elephant-like ivory coming out of Siberia. However, in all three books, his mention of the mammoth was buried deep within discussions of other things. We know from his letters that some people noticed the mammoth and wanted to know more about it, but we can literally count those people on one person’s fingers. Witsen’s greatest contribution to understanding the mammoth wasn’t in his own research; it was in using his intellectual prestige and connections to promote the next generation of thinkers.

  Ever since word of the Treaty of Nerchinsk had arrived in Moscow, Peter’s advisers had been planning a major trade and diplomatic mission to Beijing to test the terms of the treaty. Russia had a severe shortage of literate agents who were sensitive enough to make their way through foreign cultures without causing the same offenses that had brought failure on every previous mission to China. They turned to Witsen to recommend a leader for the mission. Witsen recommended Evert Ysbrants Ides, a German-Dutch merchant from Holstein. Ides was an excellent choice and had the advantage of already being known in Moscow. Ides was born in 1657, which put him about halfway between Witsen and Peter in age. He came from a family of small merchants—his grandfather was listed in the tax rolls as a Höker, a word that roughly translates as “grocer.” By the time he was twenty, Ides was trading with Russia, sending ships from Hamburg and Amsterdam to Archangel. Although his firm traded as far away as Italy, he had enough faith in Russia as the future of his fortune that he purchased a home in Moscow and moved there in 1690. He became well known in the foreign quarter and even entertained the tsar himself in his home. Then he went bankrupt. Wars in Germany and the loss of ship with its paid-for cargo (and crew) destroyed his investments. Knowing of the terms of the Treaty of Nerchinsk, he petitioned the tsars for permission to lead a caravan to China and for a loan to buy some trade goods. A surprised Ides found himself drafted to be Peter’s diplomat to the Chinese court and well compensated for the job above and beyond what he would have made on a simple trading expedition.

  On March 14, 1692, Ides left Moscow at the head of a ninety-man caravan with instructions to exchange official ratifications of the treaty, determine the best items for trade, feel out official attitudes toward the treaty, and request that a Chinese envoy be sent to Moscow. Peter charged Ides with making careful observations of people and resources along the way and provided him with a secretary and an artist to aid in that task. Witsen sent Ides a version of his map both to guide him and so Ides could bring back additions and corrections for the next version of the map. The most direct route from Moscow to China is the one that the Trans-Siberian Railway follows today, around the southern end of the Ural Mountains, across the steppe lands at the center of Eurasia, across Lake Baikal, and on to the Amur. Unfortunately, the steppe lands were controlled by Kirghiz nomads and considered unsafe at the time. Ides’s caravan had to take a much more roundabout path through the north to reach Lake Baikal. This route followed the same course that Yermak took across the central Urals to Tobolsk, the capital of Siberia, then down the Irtysh River to its junction with the Ob, up the Ob and its tributary the Ket, making a portage to the Yenisei basin, and finally following its tributaries upstream to Lake Baikal. By October 1692, the mission was at the way station of Makofskoi on the Ket portage. It was here that Ides heard an amazing story about the mammoth.

  I had a Person with me to China, who had annually went out in search of these Bones; he told me, as a certain truth, that he and his Companions found the Head of one of these Animals, which was discovered by the fall of such a frozen piece of Earth. As soon as he opened it, he found the greatest part of the Flesh rotten, but it was not without difficulty that they broke out his Teeth, which were placed before his Mouth, as those of the Elephants are; they also took some Bones out of his head, and afterwards came to his Fore-foot, which they cut off, and, carried part of it to the City of Trugan [Turukhansk], the Circumference of it being as large as that of the wast of an ordinary Man. The Bones of the Head appeared somewhat red, as tho’ they were tinctured with Blood.

  Ides goes on to tell of the different theories he had heard considering the nature of the animal. The “Heathens of Jakuti, Tungusi, and Ostiacki” believe that it is a living animal that burrows through the ground. As evidence, they point to places where the ground has been heaved up or sunk down by the animals on the march. Mammoths cannot breathe surface air. If they should accidentally come to surface, such as by tunneling out of a riverbank, they immediately die. Naturally, Ides gives more credence to the opinions of Christian Russians. From them, he was told the same story that Witsen recorded. Mammoths are a type of elephant that lived in Siberia before the Deluge when that part of the world was warmer. He concedes that this “is no very unreasonable conjecture,” though he is more inclined to think that they were not local but, rather, elephants from India whose bodies had been carried north by the Deluge and left there when the waters receded.

  Ides report has become quite famous because it is the first description of a specific frozen mammoth. When the Chinese chronicles mentioned the fyn-shu—if indeed that meant mammoth—they mentioned that they were found buried only as a general characteristic. They never described a specific discovery. When Witsen reported that the mammoth is “dark brown and gives off a great stench,” his sources were probably describing a rotting carcass—later discoverers would complain about the horrible smell—but, again, this is a general characteristic, not the description of a specific mammoth. Unfortunately, the mission artist, Johann Georg Weltsel, died of a fever a few days before the mission arrived in Makofskoi. If he had attempted to make some sketches based on the ivory hunter’s description they would have been the first done since the mammoth went extinct 10,000 years earlier.

  As a diplomatic effort, his three-year mission was a failure. The Chinese rejected the tsar’s gifts. Peter didn’t blame Ides for the failure, however, and was generally pleased with his work. After paying back the loans, Ides made a very nice profit and Peter continued to entrust him with important tasks. For a time, he managed a large portion of the Russian arms industry. Immediately after the voyage he was made the official representative of the Russian state for certain types of printing, including maps, in the Netherlands. Both of these enterprises would keep him in close contact with Witsen. Peter had given Ides permission to publish his journal outside Russia, and Witsen was eager to have it, but Ides was busy with his new duties and couldn’t be bothered with the work of preparing it for publication. Several years would pass before Europe would hear his account of the mammoth. Meanwhile, Witsen was nurturing other travelers.

  In the early 1690s, Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf was the youngest of a family of well-known German intellectuals. His uncle, Hiob Ludolf, who raised him, was a diplomat and orientalist best known for his studies of Ethiopia and the Amharic language. Hiob took his nephew on his diplomatic missions to London where he introduced him to influential Englishmen and to other diplomats. During one of these trips, Heinrich secured a position as secretary to the Danish ambassador and soon became the personal secretary to Prince George of Denmark. He seemed destined for a brilliant diplomatic career. Then his life took an abrupt left turn. After five years with Prince George, Ludolf suffered some sort of mental breakdown. One of his friends wrote that he lost his reason after reading books by Rosicrucians. Whether or not the Rosicrucians were to blame, his unstable condition and increasing mystical obsessions made him an unsuitable secretary for a royal. Prince George had become quite fond of his secretary and made sure Ludolf would not b
e abandoned to the fates. He put him under the care of a highly respected doctor, provided him with a generous pension, and used his influence to smooth the way for Ludolf to follow his interests. In a way, Ludolf ended up living the dream of every underpaid academic.

  As a young man, while living with his uncle, Ludolf had picked up an interest in and talent for languages. When he recovered his health, he decided to travel to Russia to study the language. To him, this was as much a religious enterprise as it was an intellectual one. Ludolf’s pietistic beliefs placed a high value on missionary work. Successful missionaries should speak the local language and very few Westerners spoke Russian. Ludolf saw a need and set out to fill it. He left Denmark in the summer of 1692 and arrived in Russia at the beginning of the new year. He spent eighteen months there, mostly in Moscow, and made good use of the time. He became friends with Patriarch Adrian and the tsar. Peter was unconverted but enjoyed listening to Ludolf’s musical performances on the bass. The time spent with religious figures aided him in teasing out the differences and relationship between spoken Russian and the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic. Ludolf left Moscow in the summer of 1694 and arrived in Amsterdam that October, where he was met by Witsen. Witsen was highly impressed by Ludolf’s work and urged him to publish it. When they heard about his project, his old friends in England were eager to see it and arranged for the Oxford Press to publish it. The result was Grammatica Russica, the first systematic study of spoken Russian published in any language, including Russian. Ludolf wrote it fairly quickly while staying with Witsen, but there was a delay in publishing because no printer in the British Isles owned a Cyrillic typeset. Witsen knew the publishing industry well and had previously acquired a Coptic typeset for Oxford. He had no trouble locating a Cyrillic one, which he bought and sent over with Ludolf and the manuscript. The book was ready for sale in May 1696.