Discovering the Mammoth

by John J. McKay

  The word “mammoth” appears near the end of the work. Following the main grammar and a list of common phrases useful to the traveler, Ludolf added an appendix of natural science terms. “Mammoth” appears in the section on minerals, because mammoth ivory was found buried in the earth.

  The mammoutovoi kost is a thing of great curiosity, which is dug out of the ground in Siberia. The vulgar tell wonderful stories about it; for they say that the bones be those of an animal which burrows in the ground, and in size surpasses all the creatures living on earth’s surface. They administer them medicinally for the same purposes as they do that which is called the horn of the unicorn. . . . [T]he more skillful tell me that these mammoutovoi kost are elephants’ teeth. So that it appears necessary that they were brought thither by the universal deluge, and in the lapse of time have been more and more covered with earth.

  From this point on, the word and idea of the mammoth began to spread fairly quickly through the Republic of Letters. In 1697, Robert Hooke, the brilliant but argumentative curator of experiments for the British Royal Society, mentioned the word in a public lecture: “We have lately had several Accounts of Animal Substances of various kinds, that have been found buried in the superficial Parts of the Earth . . . , [such as] the Bones of the Mammatovoykost, or of strange Subterraneous Animals, as the Siberians fancy, which is commonly dug up in Siberia, which Mr. Ludolphus judges to be the Teeth and Bones of an elephant.” By then, Witsen had grown tired of waiting for Ides to publish his journal of the mission to China so he encouraged the mission’s secretary, Adam Brand, to publish his shorter journal. In 1698, Brand did just that in his native German. His version of the journal did not include the passage on the mammoth discovered near Turukhansk. However, as an appendix, Brand added Ludolf’s natural history lexicon with its entry on the mammoth. Over the next year, English and French translations were published with help from Witsen.

  In early 1696, just three months before Ludolph’s Grammatica was published, Ivan V, Peter’s brother and co-tsar died, leaving Peter the sole autocrat of one of the largest empires to have ever existed. Until then, Peter had allowed his circle of advisers, which included his mother, to represent him in most things while he gave his attention to pet projects, such as modernizing and building up his military. Not everyone was happy to have the foreigner-loving tsar as their uncontested ruler. Peter dealt harshly with complainers and plotters. A year later, when he felt secure on the throne, he shocked the court by announcing he would be leaving the country and visiting the west for over a year. Peter’s absence was officially a secret; he did not believe his countrymen would respond well to his abandoning them to consort with even more foreigners. In March, the Grand Embassy left Moscow. It was officially headed by three of his most trusted companions. The 250 members included sons of nobles, guards, musicians, five dwarves, and sixty-seven “volunteers” who were to learn valuable technical skills. Among then was a six-foot-eight cadet named “Peter Mihailov,” who absolutely was not the tsar.

  After crossing northern Germany and conferring with great rulers and thinkers, the embassy reached the Netherlands in August. Peter ignored the government, went straight to the shipbuilding town of Zaandam, and enrolled as an apprentice carpenter. His attempt to learn the craft was a disaster. Every day, large crowds gathered to watch the Russian giant, who absolutely was not the tsar, attempt to work. After a week, he gave up and fled to Amsterdam where he was met by Witsen. Witsen found a house for Peter and arranged for him to apprentice on a frigate being constructed by Gerrit Pool at the Dutch East India Company’s shipyard. Here he could learn in peace, because the shipyard was closed to the public. During the five months that Peter stayed in Amsterdam, Witsen scheduled his work so that he would spend one day each week with the tsar. He also accompanied him whenever he left the city.

  Peter was fascinated by the cabinets of curiosities that he he saw when visiting upper-class Europeans. It might have been in this context that he and Witsen discussed mammoths. In a letter written to Gjisbert Cuper the following July, he reported that the tsar had himself seen mammoth bones along the banks of the Don River during a military campaign against the Turks at the mouth of the river. Thirty leagues below Olonets he and his entourage—a group that probably included Ides—saw that the river had uncovered a great mass of bones, including those of men and elephants. The tsar believed them to be the remains of part of Alexander the Great’s army that had come north to fight the Scythians. Fedor Golowin, one of the official heads of the embassy, told Witsen that he had frequently seen mammoth bones during his time as governor of Siberia. Later, Peter would order the chief administrators in Siberia to pay attention to mammoth reports and offered a reward to anyone who could find a complete mammoth skeleton and bring it back for the cabinet that he was assembling.

  In his letter to Cuper, Witsen recounts two other stories about mammoths that do not appear in Noord en Oost Tartarye. The first is the story told by Ides’s traveling companion, as Witsen possessed Ides’s manuscript by this time. Too busy to deal with it himself, Ides sent his journal, Witsen’s map, and all of the notes concerning improvements to the map to him in one large, unedited package. In 1697 Witsen corresponded with Leibniz about Ides’s observations on Siberian ethnography. With Witsen, the problem publishing the journal was that it was written in the Low German dialect spoken around Hamburg and not in proper, literary High German. After the turn of the century, he found the time to edit the journal, translate it into Dutch, and have it published in 1704. The book was very well received. So much so that an English edition appeared in 1705 and a German one in 1707. Ides’s story of the frozen mammoth would become a standard part of mammoth lore. Yet Witsen had a low opinion of his second new source. In his letter to Cuper, he refers to the tale told by a Jesuit named Avrie as “ridiculous and untrue” and “a decorated lie.” What offended him was that the good father seemed to be saying that there were still living elephants in northern Siberia.

  How did the Jesuit Avrie come to this conclusion? In 1681, seventeen years before Witsen wrote to Cuper, a letter from Ferdinand Verbiest, the head Jesuit at the Kangxi emperor’s court in Beijing, arrived in Europe and called on his Jesuit brothers to join him in China. The Vatican and the Order of Jesus were happy to fill his request but were unsure how best to do that. The sea voyage was so perilous that only one in three missionaries made it to China alive. What was needed was a safe land route to China. They knew it was physically possible; merchants and diplomats had journeyed safely there and back in the past. What they needed to know was whether it was politically possible. With this goal in mind, they decided to send a French member of the order, Father Philippe Avril (not Avrie, as Witsen called him), and four companions to reconnoiter the unknown middle of Eurasia. Western Europeans were still uncertain about the inland extent of the Chinese Empire, and his superiors greatly underestimated the distance involved. Avril’s journey began in 1685 and took him through Rome, Cyprus, and Syria to Armenia where he met Louis Barnabe, another Jesuit with extensive knowledge of the Central Asian trade routes. Avril was undeterred when he learned the true length of the journey. He was happy for the opportunity to preach the Gospels to “the Barbarians” along the way. Barnabe joined him and the group continued on to the Caspian Sea, where they sailed to the mouth of the Volga and up to Astrakhan. Avril tried to join several caravans going east but was denied permission by the local authorities every time. After several months of delay, they gave him permission to go to Moscow and plead his case. After another full year of delay in Moscow, the government not only refused him permission to go any farther east, it ordered him out of the country. Avril’s eviction had little to do with his mission. Sophia, who was nearing the end of her days as regent for her brothers, had recently sent ambassadors west to recruit allies for another campaign against the Turks and Krim Tatars. She felt her ambassadors had been badly treated by the French court, and Avril was the first Frenchman available to whom she could return the ins
ult.

  The mission wasn’t a complete failure. Like Witsen before him, Avril used his year in Moscow to gather information about the east from merchants. And, like Wisten, hidden among the intelligences about Siberia was a description of the source of Siberian ivory.

  Besides furs of all sorts . . . they have discover’d a sort of Ivory, which is whiter and smoother than that which comes from the Indies.

  Not that they have any Elephants that furnish ‘em with this Commodity (for the Northern Countries are too cold for those sort of Creatures that naturally love heat), but other Amphibious Animals, which they call by the Name of Behemot, which are usually found in the River Lena, or upon the Shores of the Tartarian-Sea [Arctic Ocean]. Several teeth of this Monster were shewn us at Moskow, which were ten Inches long, and two at the Diameter at the Root . . .

  But certainly nobody better understands the price of this Ivory than they who first brought it into request; considering how they venture their Lives in attacking the Creature that produces it, which is as big and as dangerous as a Crocodile.

  Later, on his way out of the country, Avril met with I. A. Musin-Pushkin, the governor of Smolensk, who had served a stint in Siberia. Musin-Pushkin gave Avril some additional intelligence on his Behemot.

  There is, said he, beyond the Obi, a great River call’d Kawoina, into which another River empties it self, by the name of Lena. At the mouth of the first river that discharges itself into the Frozen Sea, stands a spacious Island very well peopl’d, and which is no less considerable for hunting the Behemot, an amphibious Animal, whose Teeth are in great esteem.

  Several things stand out in Avril’s account. His physical description of the ivory he saw and the amphibious animal that produces it is clearly that of a walrus. His transliteration of the word “mammoth” (or mamout or mamant) as behemot was something Witsen reported in Noord en Oost Tartarye. Walruses were then hunted in the Laptev Sea near the mouths of the Lena and Kaiwona (or Olonets). That he says the ivory was also hunted in the Lena is telling. The lower reaches of the Lena River are one of the richest grounds in Siberia for collecting mammoth ivory. Walruses live near salt water; they stay on the coast and don’t move up rivers. Avril was doing more than simply applying the behemoth name to the walrus. What he understood was a mash up of two sources of ivory, walruses on the coast and buried mammoth remains on the riverbanks. This is very much like Witsen’s two types of mammoth in his book. Avril’s account was first published in French in 1691. Within two years it had been translated into English, with the Protestant translator issuing an obligatory denunciation of Avril’s Catholicism before enthusiastically recommending the work.

  In 1705, Witsen began circulating pages of an updated edition of Noord en Oost Tartarye with a considerably expanded section on the mammoth. In this version, he repeats Ides’s story as well as almost everything Avril had to say on the topic while refraining from criticizing him. He must have reread the good father’s account while preparing the manuscript and recognized the similarities between their Behemoths. Because he gathered so much information about the mammoth into once place, the second edition of Noord en Oost Tartarye could have been of great use to anyone interested in the mammoth question, but Witsen printed only a few copies for his friends. And still he collected information from the east. In 1709, one of his Russian contacts sent him a complete mammoth’s jaw. He optimistically had a drawing made of it for an anticipated third edition of his book. He never completed that revision. He died in 1717. There is an apocryphal story that Peter was at his bedside at the end, but it’s sadly not true. Peter was in the Netherlands at the time. He was deeply saddened that he couldn’t have been there to say goodbye to his ally, mentor, and dear friend.

  In the last years of the seventeenth century and first years of the eighteenth, the mammoth became a permanent part of the world known to European intellectuals. Every report of the mammoth during those years was in some way touched by Nicolaas Witsen. He deserves some sort of title for that. In those years, several theories were proposed to explain the nature of the animal and meaning of the word. It was an elephant. It was a walrus. It was an animal native to Siberia. It was a tropical animal carried north by the Deluge. Witsen left the Republic of Letters with more questions than answers. Before Witsen, people did not even know to ask questions about these mysterious beasts. Now that they knew of the idea of the mammoth, they wanted to know more. More information would come, and when it did come, it would come in a sudden rush as the result of a national tragedy.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE SWEDES

  The Battle of Poltava (June 27, 1709) is a regular inhabitant of lists of great battles that changed the world. At this battle the armies of Peter the Great of Russia decisively defeated those of Charles XII of Sweden outside a small village in the free Cossack territory, which is now part of Ukraine. Charles, badly wounded, fled the battlefield and sought asylum in Moldavia, a tributary of the Turkish sultan. His small escort was the only part of his army to escape death or captivity at Russian hands. The bulk of his army attempted to follow him into Turkish territory, but, four days after the battle, they were surrounded by Russian cavalry and negotiated a surrender. Of the thirty thousand who began the campaign only five thousand survived to return home after peace was concluded twelve years later. The battle marked the end of Sweden as a great European power and the beginning of Russia’s geopolitical ascendancy. Somewhat ironically, this national tragedy for Sweden and personal tragedy for the prisoners and their families turned out to be a bonanza for European science and the study of the mammoth.

  One of the many, many injustices of war is the uneven treatment of prisoners. Officers are almost never treated as badly as enlisted men. The prisoners of Poltava were no exception to this rule. The common Swedish soldiers were marched off to labor in the frozen swamps of the Neva delta building Peter’s new capital city. For them, captivity was brutal and most died before the final peace was signed and they could be freed. For educated officers, captivity was, in the words of one, “not awful.” Officers were treated as exiles, not prisoners. This meant they were sent to a town and given full freedom of movement within the boundaries of their district. They took jobs and made significant contributions to the local economies. Peter took advantage of this sudden influx of so many Western-educated men. He gave them the freedom to practice their religion, build churches, and even to proselytize. The officers set up a school that was patronized by some of the most important families of Moscow. Many officers were put to work surveying the resources of the empire. Some married into the local population. When the war was over, Peter asked many to stay and continue working for him. The majority politely declined.

  Most of the places of exile were towns near the Ural Mountains. The largest number of the Swedish officers ended up in Tobolsk, where eventually they made up a quarter of the population. The governor of Siberia, Prince Matvei Gargarin, was a man of intelligence and curiosity (and fantastic corruption). He sent his prisoners to explore places as far away as Kamchatka on the Pacific, the high Arctic, and deep into Central Asia, where some were captured a second time by soldiers of the Djungar Khanate. Gargarin was most interested in mapping his gigantic province and surveying resources (you can’t steal what hasn’t been found yet). Scientific knowledge came second. Everywhere the Swedes went, they heard about the mammoth and saw mammoth ivory. Some lower-level officers even made a living as ivory carvers and, thus, learned a great deal about the properties of mammoth ivory, such as the many colors it came in, the texture, and the characteristic twist of complete tusks. This new knowledge was not disseminated westward into Europe as it was collected. Instead, most of it was released in one sudden rush when the prisoners returned home following the Treaty of Nystad in 1721, many of them bringing mammoth ivory with them.

  The one exception to this delay was Captain Johann Bernhard Müller who had been captured after the defeat at Poltava and sent to Tobolsk along with the other Swedish officers. In 1712, the ts
ar sent Müller down the Irtysh and Ob Rivers to study the Ostyaks (now known as Khanty) who inhabited the territory between Tobolsk and the Arctic Ocean. The metropolitan of Siberia, Philotheus, was involved in a major campaign to convert the Ostyaks at the time. When their paths crossed, Müller was able to compare travel notes with the metropolitan’s assistant, Grigory Novitsky. Parts of their two reports are so similar, that it’s easy to suspect Müller plagiarized Novitsky. Or perhaps the did collaborate, although that seems unlikely. Whatever the truth is, it was Müller’s report of the region, including plentiful descriptions of mammoth ivory, that got Peter’s attention and not Novitsky’s. The tsar was so pleased with it that he allowed it to be published abroad even before Müller was allowed to leave the country. Perhaps it was his flattering dedication to Tsarina Catherine that did the trick. The report was published in German in Berlin in 1720, in English the following year, and in most of the other major European languages before the end of the decade. Novitsky’s report went into the archives and wasn’t rediscovered and published until 1884.

  Müller’s account of the mammoth has many aspects that make it stand apart from other accounts. He makes no mention of the Behemoth and doesn’t speculate about the origin or meaning of the word, which he gives as “Mamant.” He also only uses the word as the name of the ivory and gives no name to the animal that produced mamant: “There is a Curiosity in Siberia,” he writes, “no where else to met with in any Part of the World, for ought I know. This is what the Inhabitants call Mamant, which is found in the Earth in several places, particularly in sandy Ground. It looks like Ivory both as to Colour and Grain.” Müller reviews the various explanations for the ivory. To him, it is impossible that it came from real elephants. Siberia, in general, is too cold for elephants and the ivory is most plentiful in the coldest parts of Siberia. That it might be ivory of tropical elephants washed there by the biblical Flood “is so absurd, that it needs no further Refutation.” Apparently, it did need refutation. Müller was almost alone in his generation in rejecting that idea out of hand. He says that he was originally attracted to the idea that it was Ebur fossile, or a trick of nature. After all, didn’t salt “grow” in the earth that was just as good as real salt from the sea and didn’t coal grow in English soil, too? (Novitsky used these same examples) What changed his mind about mammoth ivory, though, was hearing about ivory discovered with skulls and other bones that were still bloody. If the source of mamant was a real, living animal, what sort of beast was it? This is Müller’s real contribution to mammoth studies.