Discovering the Mammoth

by John J. McKay

  The model of these trips may have been that of Cornelius de Bruyn. With an introduction and funding from Witsen, he traveled down the Volga and Don in 1705 with the tsar and recorded his opinion of mammoth bones found near Voronezh before continuing on to study the Caspian Sea and explore Persia. In 1717, Peter sent Gottlob Schober to make the same trip and explicitly instructed him to observe natural history along the way. In 1715, Peter sent Lorenz Lange to China to hunt for the elusive opportunities for trade. He was pleased enough with Lange’s work that he sent him on a second trip in 1719. It was on the trip that he and Bell examined the mammoth tusks that Bell would eventually present to Sloane. At Kiakta on the Chinese border they met Tulishen, the Kianxi emperor’s envoy, who was heading west. It may have been during this meeting that Tulishen learned the word “mammoth” and made the connection that it and the fyn-shu were the same animal. During his second trip to the West in 1716, Peter stopped in Danzig and viewed the collection of Johann Philipp Breyne, a local doctor and fellow of the Royal Society. While there, Peter asked Breyne to recommend someone who could “undertake a voyage through Russia and make a description of everything remarkable.” Breyne recommended his fellow physician, Daniel Messerschmidt. Messerschmidt had been taught by the same missionaries Peter had allowed to come to Russia to teach. From them he would have gained an idea of what to expect there. After some consideration, he accepted Peter’s job offer and left for St. Petersburg in February 1718. After a year of planning, setting objectives, and gathering equipment, he left for Siberia in March 1719. In September, he arrived in Tobolsk and began interviewing the Swedish officers, including Philipp Tabbert von Strahlenberg.

  Messerschmidt was heartbroken when Strahlenberg received his orders to return home. He wrote in his journal for May 13, 1722: “I separated myself with many tears from the pious, honest, hardworking, loyal Tabbert, my only friend and support. I am now left wholly abandoned, without society or aid. I will never forget my dear Tabbert.” He promptly sank into a deep depression. His journals from this period include meditations on biblical verses related to the Apocalypse. But he didn’t allow this to disrupt his work schedule. Everywhere he went, he made careful measurements of the latitude. He continued to collect samples. He was particularly thorough on the topic of birds, filling eighteen notebooks on this one topic. On January 16, 1724, while wintering in Irkutsk, he was presented with an almost perfect mammoth skull by Michael Wolochowicz. He prepared several precise and detailed drawings of the skull (front, rear, and profile views), a femur, a tooth, and a very mature tusk. These were of such high quality that they were still being used by foreign scientists at the beginning of the next century. In his thoroughness, he had Wolochowicz give sworn testimony regarding the circumstances of their discovery. Wolochowicz said that the bones had been found on the banks of the Indigirka River near the Arctic Ocean. Although a soldier, Wasile Erlow, was the actual discoverer, Wolochowicz went to the site to supervise the excavation. On the far bank of the river, he saw a piece of skin protruding from the earth. On account of its size, he assumed it was from the same animal as the bones. He described the skin as, “very thick, and cover’d with long Hair, pretty thick set and brown, somewhat resembling Goats Hair: Which Skin I could not take for a Goat, but of the Behemoth; in as much as I could not appropriate it to any Animal that I knew.” Messerschmidt sent the skull back to St. Petersburg with one of his periodic reports.

  While still on the road, Messerschmidt sent the drawings of the head, the testimony of its discovery, a piece of ivory, and a tooth to Breyne. Among Messerschmidt’s contacts, Breyne was an excellent choice to examine these new findings. He eagerly pursed the subject; he sought out and read existing accounts of discoveries and opinions about the mammoth and wrote a paper on the topic. From the materials that Messerschmidt sent him, Breyne was fully convinced that the mammoth was an ordinary elephant carried to Siberia by the Deluge. He drew no conclusions from the piece of skin covered by long hair, which Wolochowicz had not recovered but only detailed in his testimony notes. In 1728, he wrote a small paper on the teeth that was published in the journal of the scientific society in Danzig. This journal had no circulation beyond its members, and that was its final year of existence. Breyne’s paper and Messerschmidt’s drawings might have been forgotten at this point, but Breyne was determined not to let that happen, and he was a corresponding member of the Royal Society.

  Strahlenberg left Messerschmidt because the Great Northern War had finally come to an end. Back in St. Petersburg, this meant that funds spent on the war were finally available for secular, nonmilitary projects. Against the recommendations of many of his correspondents, Peter chose to ignore the general lack of education in his country and approach the creation of his academy from the top down. The plan he approved was modeled on the French Académie des sciences. The scholars were to be employees of the crown working on projects assigned or approved by a royal appointee. The scholars were expected to give public lectures and privately tutor promising Russian students. He had several scientifically savvy advisers, including Tatishchev, recommend foreign scholars for recruitment. Johann Schumacher, his librarian and the curator of the Kunstkamera (his now extensive natural history collection), traveled west to buy books, develop contacts with other societies, and meet with the suggested scholars. The formal plan was approved in early 1724, and by the end of the following year, sixteen foreign professors had settled in St. Petersburg and taken up their duties. The director was Schumacher’s superior Lavrentii Blumentrost. Peter donated the Kunstkamera and his personal library to the academy. In this first class were two who would add to the knowledge of the mammoth: the astronomer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, the brother of the royal cartographer of France, and the young historian Gerhard Friedrich Müller. Two years later, Johann Georg Gmelin arrived to take up the chair of natural history. All three would later have opportunities to contribute to the understanding of the mammoth.

  Peter did not live to see the academy in action. In November 1724, he fell ill. The illness developed into pneumonia, and he died the following January. Being Peter, he didn’t let a little thing like dying slow him down. During his last weeks, he continued to plan new enterprises and dispatch orders. Admiral Fyodor Apraksin was called to his bedside to plan an expedition to the easternmost end of the empire to see if it was connected to North America and if any other European powers were in the region. By Christmas, they had completed the plan. In less than five weeks, they selected the personnel, ordered the supplies, and wrote all the necessary permissions. Vitus Bering and two other naval captains set off for the Pacific coast two days before the tsar’s death on January 28, 1725. It took two years to reach the coast. Along the way, they gathered carpenters and blacksmiths to build their ships, they ordered supplies and sent them ahead, and they interviewed people knowledgeable about the land they would be crossing. At Yeniseiesk the met Messerschmidt heading west. The two stayed together for almost three weeks, exchanging notes and comparing maps. Messerschmidt was using a version of Witsen’s map but, having made it most of the way to the coast, he would have had valuable new data to add to it. Bering was most likely using a map by Johann Homann, which included information from Strahlenberg’s map. If Messerschmidt recognized the work of “dear Tabbert,” no record has survived of it.

  Messerschmidt was not carrying his newly acquired mammoth skull when he met Bering. His method of work was to finish each day by writing up his observations, carefully packing his samples, and categorizing each one according to his own system. About twice a year he would write up a report and send it along with the samples to Johann Blumentrost, the brother of the academy director. These became property of the academy after its establishment. His methods were so thorough that Shumacher brought some of his reports with him on his recruiting mission to show Westerners the kind of workmanship he was seeking. Messerschmidt sent the mammoth skull and his report on it to St. Petersburg two years before meeting Bering. When he reached the capital a yea
r later, he was met with a cold reception. Peter’s successors had little interest in his grand plans of exploration and had left the academy severely underfunded. The Blumentrost brothers ordered him to turn all of his journals and samples, including the skull, over to the Kunstkamera and limited his access to them. A committee that included Müller and Delisle made an official study of his materials and recataloged them according to the academy system. He was only permitted to keep a few of the duplicates that he had collected for himself. Had he not sent the mammoth teeth to Breyne, it is unlikely he would have been allowed to keep them, either. Many of his claims of compensation for expenses incurred while collecting samples were refused, too. Finally, bitterly, he packed up and headed back to Danzig. Along the way, he was shipwrecked and lost all his remaining belongings and samples.

  That should have been the sad end of Daniel Messerschmidt, but he was called back for one brief encore. When Strahlenberg published his book on northeast Asia, he used considerable material that he had gained during his year with Messerschmidt, whom he remembered as a “worthy Friend, . . . [whose] Stay had been longer than mine, and who, as a Man of Letters, might probably have been fitter for this Work than myself.” This brought him to the attention of Tatishchev, who pushed the academy to bring him back to St. Petersburg in 1731 to edit his journals and notes and organize his collections so that they might be of use to other scholars. Almost immediately, they were put to use. Bering had completed his journey in February 1730 and met with almost as a cold a reception as Messerschmidt had received. The admiralty responded to his report with a yawn and filed it away his plans for follow-up missions with no comment. Things changed the following year. Anna, the new empress, had among her inner circle several supporters of the academy and Peter’s program of exploring the east. The academy was once again fully funded, Bering’s plan was pulled out of the admiralty files, and plans were made to enact it. In preparation, several of the principals of the expedition availed themselves of Messerschmidt’s expertise and notes.

  The Second Kamchatka Expedition, or Great Northern Expedition, grew to be one of the largest, most comprehensive, and most expensive scientific and exploratory missions in history. By the time they set out in 1733, it included three components. The first was a series of small expeditions with the goal of mapping the entire Arctic coast of the empire. The second was to proceed to the Pacific coast to build ships. They then split into two groups with one attempting to find a trade route to Japan and the other sailing due east to find the North American coast. The latter would be under the personal command of Bering. The third component was a group from the academy, led by Müller and Gmelin, who were to conduct scientific and historical research in Siberia and support Bering as needed. The academic contingent included more than a dozen students, artists, and technicians, one of whom was Joseph-Nicolas Delisle’s ne’er-do-well half brother Louis de l’Isle de la Croyère as an astronomer-cartographer. The academy contingent was to leave Moscow in late summer, catch up with Bering in Tobolsk, and continue with him to the Pacific. When they left on August 8, 1733, they had with them forty wagonloads of supplies, including nine wagons of scientific instruments, a small library, writing and painting supplies, and several kegs of Gmelin’s favorite German wine (for medicinal purposes), all protected by fourteen soldiers and a drummer.

  The first year on the road for the academics was productive and almost pleasant. They leisurely made their way to Tobolsk. Gmelin collected and described plants, while Müller combed through local archives for historical records. De la Croyère attempted to make astronomical observations, but was in far over his head. Their stay in Tobolsk overlapped Bering’s only for a short while. When they left, rather than following him to directly to Irkutsk, they followed the Tom River to its headwaters. From here, the trip became less pleasant as they encountered uncooperative officials, impassable landscapes, and Siberian mosquitoes. Almost two years passed before they caught up with Bering in Yakutsk. Bering, weighed down by administrative and logistical matters, had yet to advance to the coast for his own voyage to North America. He and the academics took a strong dislike to each other. In order to avoid the commander, Müller and Gmelin began making short trips into the countryside. It was either during one of these side trips or on the road home that they encountered the mammoth (neither gives a date).

  Müller, for his part, gives a description of the trade in mammoth ivory, which he considers one of the important commodities of Siberia. In his opinion, mammoths cannot be anything other than real elephants brought there by some great cataclysm in the earth. He does not claim that the cataclysm had to be the Deluge in particular. He describes how and where they are found and the products manufactured from them. Gmelin goes into much more detail than his colleague. In his account of the expedition, published in 1752, he dedicates twenty-five pages to the topic, making it one of the longest expositions on the mammoth up to that date. His conclusions are nothing new. The belief that the mammoth was an ordinary elephant carried to Siberia by the Deluge or some other catastrophe was approaching accepted wisdom by the time he wrote. The value of his account is that he makes some interesting connections and adds descriptions of of previously unknown discoveries. He describes two different discoveries that were reported to Yakutsk soon after Peter issued his orders that any good bones be sent to the Kunstkamera. For each, he describes the places they were found, riverbanks above the Arctic, and gives the names of the discoverers. He makes the connection between Siberian mammoths and elephant bones found in Central Europe and Dauphine, where the Theutobochus bones were found. He gives a good deal of space to the trade in walrus and narwhal ivory and how the three are combined and confused. His unique contribution to the mammoth question is that he describes the skulls of two other unknown large animals dug up in Siberia. Both skulls he says resembled large oxen. The first was described for him by the governor of Yakutsk. In 1722, he told Gmelin, a hunter named Spiridon Portniagin had returned from a trip to the Arctic coast with a good ivory tusk. Near the spot where he found the tusk, he found another skull that resembled a bull’s head, but with the horns on the nose. When the governor asked him to return to the spot and recover the skull, Portniagin begged off, pleading old age and an eye infection. At the same time, the governor was able to give Gmelin another skull that really did resemble an ox. Gmelin shipped the skull back to St. Petersburg. As for the skull with its horns on its nose? In another place, Gmelin mentioned his distrust of the wild tales that the Siberians told about the mammoth. He must have relegated this report to the same category. He didn’t pursue the topic any further. Taken together, his notes hint at a Siberia much stranger than had he and other Europeans and city-dwelling Russians had suspected.

  During their time in Yakutsk, Müller and Gmelin decided that they really didn’t want to go to the coast after all. Aside from their personal dislike for Bering, both had suffered serious bouts of ill health and wondered if they would even get out of Siberia alive. To avoid being completely negligent in their duties, they assigned de la Croyère, who had long since proven likable but incompetent, and Stephan Krasheninnikov, their most promising student, to go in their places. At Yeniseisk, on their return journey, they met Georg Wilhelm Steller, an adjunct academician who had been sent out to become Gmelin’s assistant in response to a request he had made three years earlier. The two senior academicians decided to send the young man to join Bering. Steller was a German physician who arrived in St. Petersburg a year after the academic contingent left, with little money in his pocket and no more coherent of a plan than seeking adventure. Through luck or plan, he soon met Theophan Prokopovich, the archbishop of St. Petersburg and a confidant of the late tsar, who had taken part in the discussions that led to the creation of the academy, and Joseph Amman, a fellow German and keeper of the academy’s botanical garden. The two older men were so impressed by Steller that they sponsored him for membership in the academy. At about this time he also sought out and met Messerschmidt, who was living
in bitter retirement. The two had both studied medicine under Friedrich Hoffman, but it was Messerschmidt’s stories of Siberia that held them together. During the last few months of Messerschmidt’s life, the two spent many evenings together talking about science and adventure in the far east. In one of these conversations, Steller learned about the mammoth. As a member of the academy Steller would have had access to the bones in the collections.

  From the moment he heard about the Great Northern Expedition, Steller desperately wanted to be a part of it, but he was a year too late to join. Amman had him help with his botanical projects, one of which was organizing Messerschmidt’s samples, giving him a chance to observe firsthand the young doctor’s vast knowledge of natural history. When Gmelin’s request for an assistant arrived, he was more than happy to recommend Steller for the job. After more than a year of bureaucratic delay, Steller’s contingent left the capital at the beginning of 1738. He chose a route that would take him to Yeniseisk by different rivers than Gmelin had so that he would be able to collect a different set of plants. After they met, Gmelin and Müller wasted no time in sending him on to join Bering while they continued west. Steller’s new duties and adventures were not enough to make him forget mammoths. After joining Bering, sailing to Alaska, being shipwrecked on a barren island, and barely surviving to return to Siberia, he immediately planned a solo expedition to the Kolyma River to hunt for mammoths. In the introduction to a book on beasts of the sea, he wrote, “My zeal is fired by those mammoth skeletons and the slight accounts of them.” He only made it halfway to his goal. Two years later, exhausted by ill health and increasingly bitter fights with local officials, he began the journey back to St. Petersburg. He died on the way. Leonhard Stejneger, Steller’s biographer, believes he was thinking about mammoths right up to the end. In one of his last communiques with the academy, Steller mentioned an unspecified plan that he wanted to propose after his return. Stejneger was sure this was to be another trip to the Arctic coast to look for mammoth remains.