The written description accompanying the drawing bears some resemblance, in proportion, at least, to that supplied by the “ancient painter,” Remessow. Remessow is Semyon Ulianovich Remezov, a life-long resident of Tobolsk, engineer, architect, historian, cartographer, the largest source of information for Strahlenberg’s map, and an icon painter. Strahlenberg is being an ungrateful jerk in dismissing him as a mere painter especially since, in the only context that he gives, he is to choosing Remezov’s description as the most dependable and using it to base his own conclusions. It’s a shame that they were completely wrong. Remezov was never in the place where Strahlenberg says he saw the whale-like skeleton. Although Remezov produced the first atlas of Siberia, he did it by collating observations made by others. The only parts he surveyed himself were along the Ural Mountains. If Remezov was the source of the story, he would have been repeating something told him by one of his own informants, possibly one of his sons who traveled deeper into Siberia than he ever did.
Despite being wrong, Strahlenberg’s approach to the mammoth represents positive movement in a new direction. Before his writings, all accounts of the mammoth had been descriptive—observations of the ivory and repetition of the opinions of Russians and Siberian natives—and not analytical. Most writers tried to fit the mammoth into a biblical framework. Strahlenberg was not free from a biblical worldview. In fact, he was a very religious man. His accomplishment was in removing the biblical explanation from its privileged position, rejecting it, and searching for a naturalistic explanation based on several lines of evidence. His discussion of the name of the mammoth revolves around the biblical Behemoth, but he doesn’t consider for moment that the mammoth is a Behemoth. His discussion is a matter of historical linguistics only. He considers the Deluge as possible explanation for the presence of the bones and rejects it, though with firm assurances that he is not questioning the historical reality of the Deluge. If he had published sooner, his conclusions might have been of some influence during the decade. But that honor would go to another.
There is a chance that Strahlenberg met Vassili Tatishchev while still in Russia. He arrived in Tobolsk at about the same time that Messerschmidt and Strahlenberg left on their expedition eastward. Even if they did not meet in person at that time, they soon heard of each other and became correspondents. Tatishchev was the ideal civil servant for Peter the Great. He was intelligent, conservative, well versed in multiple fields, and eager to take on new challenges. Peter entrusted him with a number of special projects. In 1720, his was made director of mines and sent to the Urals to locate and develop to new sources of ore. One Swedish prisoner we know for a fact that he met in Siberia was Schönström. The two shared a deep interest in history. Tatishchev helped Schönström locate books and other materials. The friendship might not have been entirely innocent. Schönström was the cousin of Emanuel Swedenborg, the assessor of the Swedish Board of Mines and later a famous mystic. After the war, Tatishchev used Schönström to gain a proper introduction to Swedenborg and to the Swedish Scientific Society. A few months before his death, Tsar Peter gave Tatishchev permission to travel to Sweden and study their mining technology and other industries and engage in a little political spying. Tatishchev stayed for a year and a half.
Tatishchev used his time in Sweden to pursue far more than his official goals. He visited Strahlenberg several times and helped him edit his short history of Russia. In the spring of 1725, he met with Benzelius. At some point, the conversation touched on the mammoth. Tatishchev revealed that during his own travels in Siberia, he had done some research into the subject. At the end of 1721, in his capacity as director of mines, he had sent a detailed questionnaire to officials in various districts. In it, he not only asked about minerals, he also questioned them about other aspects of natural history, antiquities, and subterranean petrifactions. The questionnaire included instructions for specific objects to be sent to him. One of the listed objects was mammoth bones. He later explained that this wasn’t just for his own curiosity. The tsar himself had ordered Tatishchev to hunt for a complete mammoth skeleton. Later, Peter authorized him to offer a reward. It would not be claimed in Peter’s lifetime, or even in that century. The information provided by Tatishchev thrilled Benzelius. He asked him to write an article for the society. Tatishchev did so in the form of a letter to Benzelius dated May 12, 1725.
The letter is well organized, detailed, and more scientific that anything written before. Tatishchev starts out by describing mammoth ivory and how it’s used in trade. He adds a new piece of information here and that is an estimate of the size of the annual trade, fifty to one hundred puds (one to two metric tons). He then describes the beliefs of uneducated Siberians, repeating the Müller/Novitsky account of movable horns, adding that some believe that fresh air that kills mammoths when they tunnel out of riverbanks. This is followed by the “opinions of learned men, which however do very widely differ from each other.” Some believe that these are elephants from the East Indies carried north by the Deluge and buried. By now they recognize that the curve of mammoth tusks are different than elephant tusks, but ascribe the difference to their being warped from being buried so long. He mentions the theory of Burnett and others that the the North might have been warm once was thrown into the the cold by a sudden “mutation of the axis of the earth.” He mentions the joke of nature idea and finally the possibility that mammoth remains are Behemoths.
His finishes with an account of his own researches and conclusions. Through Tatishchev’s official position, he had acquired three relatively complete tusks. Although Peter the Great had died by then, he had not done so before beginning his cabinet of curiosities (the Kunstkammera) and founding a university. He sent to two best tusks to those institutions and kept the third for his own experiments, which, among other things, involved carving “various pieces of work.” Much as he tried he was not able to find an intact skull, but he was able to find a rotten and crumbling one to give him a general idea of its size and shape which he prononced elephantine. Tatishchev had more authority than most to make that judgment. He had actually seen an elephant. The shah of Persia sent one to Peter the Great that lived for several years in St. Petersburg. After its death, it’s bones were given to the Kunstkammera.
Tatishchev did not dismiss all native beliefs out of hand as simple superstition, he tested one of them. One of the pieces of evidence that Siberian natives offered for their belief that mammoths tunneled through the earth was the rapid appearance of humps and pits in the ground. Such humps and pits, both small and large, are common and mysterious features of permafrost soils. It would be another two hundred years before that was understood. Tatishchev found a newly formed pit and had himself lowered into it. At the bottom, he found moving water, which convinced him that pits were caused by underground rivers. He took water samples and examined them. The water was filled with lime, but the tusks he examined were not. Of the opinions of the learned, he rejects the idea that they are elephants saying all the explanations, like the Deluge or Hannibal, for how elephant bones could end up in Siberia are flawed. To him, all the available evidence revealed was that the mammoth was an unknown animal of unknown nature.
Tatishchev finished the letter humbly: “I, therefore, conclude, that so long as anyone cannot aver, that he has seen this animal, many doubts must still necessarily remain, which must be left to time and farther observations to clear up.” Though the letter offered no solution to the mammoth question, the society seemed happy with it. Within months they published it in the form of a small pamphlet. The letter was also published in an English language newspaper, adding to its circulation. Four years later they published it again in a slightly revised form in their journal. After that, the mammoth dropped off the agenda of the society. They had questioned the returning prisoners, examined all the bones and teeth they could, and they had sought out expert testimony from someone well placed gather evidence. There was little else they could do at that point.
But the so
ciety didn’t have the last word out of Sweden on the topic. As the mammoth question was winding down, Olaus Rudbeck took in a brilliant student as a boarder. Karl Linné (Carolus Linnaeus) would soon become famous for his scheme for cataloging and naming everything in the natural world. In the first edition of his Systema Naturae (1835), the mammoth, in the form “Mammatowacost,” appears in small Gothic script as the last entry in the mineral kingdom. Linné did not mean to imply that mammoths were a mineral product; his decision to place it there was based on the same logic that caused Ludolf to call it a mineral, the old definition of fossils as things found in the earth. Linné had a whole subcategory in the mineral kingdom for “Petrified Quadrupeds.” It was here that he placed mammoths. He stubbornly kept mammoths and other fossils in the mineral kingdom for thirty years before finally dropping the entire mineral kingdom from his classification scheme. Later, when asked about the mammoth, he imperiously pronounced that it was a giant walrus and that was that.
Despite the intellectual exchanges that took place during this sorry chapter in Sweden’s history, the fate of the prisoners after Poltava was a tragedy, pure and simple. Thousands did not survive their captivity. Those who did survive were separated from their families and communities for more than ten years. They came home as strangers. But it is undeniable that the officers’ time in captivity produced a treasure trove of scientific progress. Not only did they advance European knowledge of the archaeology, anthropology, geology, geography, and natural history of Russia and northern Asia, they trained a generation of Russian scientists and provided them with intellectual contacts in the West. From this, can we come to the Panglossian conclusion that everything works out for the best? Of course not. The world would not have been any worse off if it had taken us twenty years longer to learn about Siberia and more prisoners had survived.
CHAPTER 5
ACADEMIES AND JOURNALS
Between the villages of Burgtonna and Gräfentonna, near Erfurt in Thuringia, is a hill, and beneath that hill is a layer of clean white sand that has proven useful in several handicrafts, including filling hourglasses. Because of the value of the fine sand, workers in the quarry are careful and methodical in harvesting the sand so as not to contaminate it. In December 1695, they uncovered “some awful big bones” in the sand and, in a scenario now familiar, sent word to the castle to find out what to do with them. Luckily for us, the lord of the land, Duke Fredrick II of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, was an enlightened despot who was both a patron of the arts and sciences and an avid collector. More than simply ordering the workmen to save the bones for his collections, he had them leave them in place and slowly uncover them. There is no record of who directed the excavations, but several educated people kept tabs on the work, including the duke’s librarian and Witsen’s loyal correspondent Wilhelm Ernst Tentzel. The bones that the workmen had uncovered were revealed to be those of a leg. The foot had five digits and a short ankle. Many observers thought they looked close enough to human to believe the workmen had uncovered a giant. After the lower portion of the limb was uncovered, some nasty weather postponed the work for a few weeks. When the workers returned in January, they proceeded up the body, uncovering the upper leg bones, a pelvis, vertebrae with ribs in place, shoulder blades, forelegs, and then a “hideous head” unlike anything they had ever seen. Here, they were instructed to excavate a large space around the skull so that it could be viewed from all directions. Lying near the top of the skull were two eight-foot-long ivory tusks. With the entire skeleton nicely uncovered, the duke made a special trip from Gotha on January 23 to view it, bringing along a large entourage that included a number of doctors from the university and Tentzel.
Tentzel and the doctors, led by Johann Christoph Schnetter, all had a good laugh over the silly peasants who thought the bones were those of a giant. This much had changed in the eighty years since the Theutobochus controversy. By the last decade of the century, the numbers of those who still believed that there had ever been giants, other than the few individuals named in the Bible, were rapidly shrinking. There would be holdouts well into the next century, but giants were rapidly becoming irrelevant to scientific debates. While the doctors and Tentzel agreed on what the bones were not, they passionately disagreed about what they were. Schnetter and the doctors believed they were mineral formations, unicornu fossili, while Tentzel believed that they were the remains of a real elephant. Duke Fredrick chose not to take sides. He ordered the doctors and Tentzel to each submit a brief summarizing their arguments.
The doctors organized their arguments, and Schnetter wrote them up and had them published as a pamphlet and distributed around Europe by St. Valentine’s day. The entire pamphlet is seven pages long, and a sizable chunk of it is dedicated to describing the discovery. The title contains their conclusions: Kurtze doch ausführliche Beschreibung Des Unicornu Fossilis, oder gegrabenen Einhorns, Welches in der Herschafft Tonna gefunden worden (A short but detailed Description of the Unicornu Fossilis, or excavated Unicorn, which has been found in the Lordship of Tonna). Schnetter spends very little space laying out the argument itself. He assumes that most of the audience is already familiar with the idea of unicornu fossili. The largest part of the pamphlet is dedicated to citing contemporary writers who describe discoveries of unicornu fossili in neighboring parts of Germany. One piece found near Tonna a few years earlier resembled a stag’s horn, but was true unicornu fossili. When administered to patients, it cured them of “the falling sickness.” This presentation is another significant change from the arguments of Habicot and Riolan. Schnetter makes a few references to writers of antiquity, but most of his citations are to his contemporaries and discoveries made in recent years. Between these two parts, he makes a preemptive strike against Tentzel by explaining why the supposed bones could not be an elephant. One point he makes is that while the bones are not scattered, they are somewhat disarticulated. Each bone is separated from the next at least by the thickness of a hand. Another point he makes that the tusks appear to be hollow, not solid ivory. Schnetter could not have known that elephant tusks, as opposed to walrus tusks or narwhal teeth, are hollow for almost half their length. This fact had not been mentioned in any of the accounts available to him. While he admits that the skull bears some resemblance to an elephant’s, he writes that it cannot be one because the tusks in question are up by the eyes, and not by the mouth, where everyone knows an elephant’s should be. The doctors may have had a vested interest in this solution. Though prices had dropped steadily all through the century, that much unicorn horn would have brought a pretty penny in the medicinal market.
Tentzel wrote a short response, which he submitted directly to the duke. He took more time writing a detailed statement of his case and, by taking more time, was able to prepare a full rebuttal to the doctors’ arguments. He had a special advantage in preparing his case. As curator of the duke’s collections, he had access to fossils and other curiosities that he could compare with the bones. He had the bones themselves; the duke had had him collect as many of the remains as he could. By taking more time, he was able to interview the diggers and other witnesses to excavation. And he had Mullen’s pamphlet, with its detailed drawings of the skeleton and skull of the Dublin elephant. Tentzel’s public presentation appeared in the April issue of his journal Monatliche Unterredungen einiger guten Freunde von Allerhand Büchern (Monthly Conversations between Good Friends about All Kinds of Books). It runs 108 pages with an illustration of the skull. The skull almost exactly matches the one in Mullen’s pamphlet. To emphasize the similarities, Tentzel shows his skull from exactly the same angle as Mullen showed his. After a detailed description of the discovery, the fictional friends of the title take sides. Caecilius and Passagirer take Tentzel’s position, and Aurelius and Didius defend the doctors’. Naturally, most of the space is given to the former.
This was not the first time Tentzel had written about elephants or buried ivory in Monatliche. He had already given thought to the issue and developed opinions
on the subject. Like Habicot eighty years before him, Tentzel examines not just the form of the bones, but also their texture, declaring that they are too complex to be “sports of nature,” Stones which only coincidentally resemble bones. A large part of his treatise on the elephant is dedicated to making this argument. Next, armed with Mullen’s drawings he examines the individual bones finding that, although they are much larger, they almost exactly match the Dublin elephant in shape and proportion. Among other observers at the site was a Dutch sailor who had spent many years in India. When Tentzel interviewed him, the sailor informed him that elephants keep growing for their entire lives. By the size of the tusks, he estimated that the Tonna elephant must have been at least two hundred years old. (Overestimations of the life expectancy of elephants were typical in the literature of the times. Accurate knowledge of their life expectancy—fifty to seventy years—wouldn’t be available in Europe until the beginning of the nineteenth century.) Finally, Tentzel consulted the work of the pioneer microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who had written about the internal structure of ivory, to determine that the ivory was real elephant’s ivory. He even traveled to some neighboring principalities to examine ivory and bones in other princely collections.
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