There are two entries with the heading “Behemoth.” The longer of the two is about the Behemoth of Job. It examines the various ideas about the animal that the word it could refer to and dismisses the musings of “Talmudic Doctors” as fairy tales. The second “Behemoth” entry is labeled “Natural History” and consists of two long sentences about the animal of the far north which is claimed to be the source of a beautiful type ivory. The Turks and Persians use it to make sword handles. The description is very similar to that of Father Avril sixty-five years earlier. The “Mammoth” entry is also a small one and equally out of date. It describes “Mammoth” as the name for large bones found along rivers in Siberia, which some people believe come from elephants. It misstates Gmelin as saying they look like ox bones. The “Mammoth” entry refers the reader to the “Fossil Ivory” entry in the previous volume for more information.
The “Fossil Ivory” entry is considerably longer than all the others combined but contains the same errors as the “Mammoth” entry. This not surprising as it was added a few months earlier and is probably the source referred to when creating the later “Mammoth” entry. The author, Baron d’Holbach, writes of Gmelin in flattering terms, calling his narrative of his travels excellent, but once again accuses him of saying the tusks come from oxen. He then corrects Gmelin by saying there are bones of two animals found in Siberia and that the ivory comes from the one that is not an ox, which is exactly what Gmelin wrote. D’Holbach’s approach to the word is a little confusing. In his entry for “Mammoth,” he states the word refers to the ivory. Here, because the entry is titled “Fossil Ivory,” he generally uses the word in that sense, except for a paragraph on native beliefs. The Yakuts, he says, believe the ivory comes from an animal they call mammon or mammut. He follows this with the usual short mention of the “fabulous” underground creature that they believe in. There is a breath of irony in his confusion over the word. Nicolaas Witsen used the word in both senses and very much like d’Holbach does, first saying it is the name of the ivory, then saying the Siberians believe it comes from a beast of that name. Johann Bernhard Müller, in his Life and Customs of the Ostyaks, was the last to use the word as the name of the ivory. D’Holbach’s use of it that way was based on scholarship a half century out of date. However, two centuries later he would be vindicated in his use. In 1976, Michael Heaney published a study of the likely source of the word in Siberian languages and determined that it came from two words in the Mansi language meaning “earth horn.”
D’Holbach admits that the ivory resembled elephant ivory and touches on the perplexing problem of getting these elephants to Siberia. He looks at the possibility, mentioned by others, that the armies of some would-be conquerors brought them and rejects it. While the most common objection to this idea is that there is no record of such a thing, d’Holbach is blunter and asks why any ancient would want to go to the ends of the earth to battle Scythians and Hyperboreans. He then goes in the more daring direction of claiming these were a different type of elephant, native to Siberia during an unrecorded era when that part of the earth was warmer. Some revolution of the globe must have changed the climate in the ensuing centuries and buried the thousands of dead elephants. There are two things that he does not say in describing that scenario. He does not use the dreaded word “extinct.” He hints at it, but openly stating it is still more than he will risk. Nor does he claim the cataclysm was the biblical Deluge. Earth history had become secularized enough by the 1760s that he didn’t feel obliged to mention it.
Daubenton, who authored many of the entries on natural history, might have been a better choice to write more current “Mammoth” and “Fossil Ivory” entries, but it wasn’t to be. A third contributor had an interest in mammoths. This was the great Voltaire, who was a regular correspondent of the most influential person in Russia: the empress Catherine II, or Catherine the Great. In the first edition of his history of Russia, he repeats a part of Avril’s description calling the source of the ivory a Siberian animal, larger than the Nile crocodile, that is hunted for its teeth. He rejects that the ivory could have come from elephants, mentioning only foreign armies as a means to get the ivory into the Arctic. In the second edition of his history, he writes that he has been corrected and that that the animal is the walrus. He doesn’t mention, or isn’t aware, that there were two types of ivory supplying the Siberian trade and that walrus ivory was only a small part of that trade.
When Gerhard Friedrich Müller and Gmelin wrote their memoirs of their time in Siberia, both mentioned the trade in mammoth ivory. Müller’s account was a formal description of the importance of the trade to the Russia Empire. Gmelin’s was more of a passing anecdote. In Yakutsk, he saw Cossacks going out for the express purpose of hunting for ivory, though he suspected many were using that as an excuse to engage in other trade. This was a change from the time of Messerschmidt and the Swedish POWs. Lorenz Lange and others mentioned that some of the lower-ranking Swedish officers in Tobolsk made a living carving mammoth ivory for the China trade. However, no one mentioned the existence of ivory hunters making a systematic effort to supply that industry. It’s most likely that collecting ivory was something trappers and traders did when the opportunity presented itself, but not something they made a special effort to do. Just twenty years later, things had changed considerably. When Steller attempted to go to the Arctic coast at the mouth of the Kolyma River to hunt for mammoth remains, he was not following a random hunch; he had definite intelligence that that was the best place to hunt for ivory. His intelligence was good. The region between the Kolyma and Lena Rivers was so rich in fossil ivory that some nineteenth-century maps labeled it “the Mammoth Coast.” After 250 years of exploitation, it’s still one of the best places to “hunt mammoths.” What had happened over the intervening years was thanks in large part to Peter the Great’s immense curiosity. In 1722, he issued an order that should anyone find ivory, they should search the area for the rest of the skeleton and send the bones to the Kunstkamera. His successors left this law on the books. With this, following up on reports of mammoths went from an act of idle curiosity to an imperial duty made attractive by the existence of a bounty and lucrative commercial possibilities. By the middle of the century, Yakutsk had a formal ivory market and was the main export center in the empire. In 1840 Alexander Middendorff estimated that about 110,000 pounds of ivory were exported every year and that the tusks of 20,000 mammoths had been sold since the conquest of Siberia. This systematic collection of ivory and bones greatly added to the materials available for scholars to examine. Despite a fire in 1758 that destroyed many items in the natural history collection, the Kunstkamera had three mammoth skulls and “countless” tusks to work with in the late 1760s.
By the mid-1760s, most of the first generation of members of the Russian Imperial Academy were gone. Some died in Russia. Some stayed for a few years or decades, then returned to the homes of their youth. Only Müller remained year after year, watching members come and go. In 1765, after forty years at the academy, he abruptly moved to Moscow to open a new model school. Since the death of Peter the Great, various attempts had been made to create a proper system of primary education to provide Russian-born civil servants for the empire. The results had been mixed. Now it was Catherine the Great’s turn. Like Peter before her, Catherine was eager to modernize her realm and cultivated relationships with major thinkers in the West.
The plan for the school came from Ivan Betskoi, her adviser on educational matters. Betskoi envisioned a system that would educate both well-born girls and promising boys. The boys’ school would be open to both the well-born and foundlings (orphans and abandoned, illegitimate children). He originally offered the job of establishing the boys’ school to Anton Büsching, the director of the Lutheran school in Moscow. Büsching politely declined—he was making plans to return to Germany—but recommended Müller. Müller was an excellent choice. He was one of the few academicians who took his educational duties seriously; he frequently wro
te about educational reform. Betskoi recognized the appropriateness of the match and offered the job to Müller, who accepted. Moving to the old capital did not mean breaking his ties with the academy. He remained an academician and became the deputy for the academy in Moscow, performing functions such as preparing expeditions into Siberia. Although more than twenty years had passed since his work during the Great Northern Expedition, Müller’s firsthand knowledge was still invaluable. One who greatly appreciated his experience was a man named Peter Simon Pallas.
Pallas arrived in St. Petersburg in 1767, on the direct invitation of the empress, to join the academy as a naturalist. He spent his first year in St. Petersburg, studying the collections and documents in the Kunstkamera and reading books on the natural history of his new home. Pallas had a great respect for his predecessors. During his time in the Kunstkamera, he discovered the papers of Messerschmidt. Although many of his samples were lost in the 1758 fire, all of Messerschmidt’s papers were still safely preserved. Pallas thought they were of great value, and he would eventually gain permission to publish some of them along with unpublished reports by Steller. Later, he would arrange to publish some of Müller’s journals in Germany.
While in St. Petersburg, Pallas wrote his first major paper: an illustrated article about Siberian skulls that he had seen in the Kunstkamera. Speaking of the mammoth skulls and tusks, he confirms what is by then the scientific consensus: the mammoth is an elephant. He reviews the wide spread of mammoth bones from France to Siberia to French and English America. He also mentions some of the theories of how the bones had been transported to the places where they are found. While it is reasonable that the Romans could have brought elephants to France and Spain, no human agency, whether Hebrew tribes or Mongol armies, could account for the sheer numbers of mammoths in Siberia, nor could it explain why most are found in the farthest north part of Siberia. Additionally, no humans would have left thousands of valuable tusks behind. He gives a nod to the fact that many people believe the Deluge or some similar catastrophe brought them there, but does not commit to supporting any theory, though the most likely cause for them being found in the far north is something like the Deluge. He must have figured that most of his readers knew what a mammoth skull looked like and did not feel it was necessary to include an illustration of one. What he does illustrate is the skull of the “ox” that Gmelin had sent from Yakutsk. Pallas corrects Gmelin’s identification and correctly labels it a buffalo. He backs this up with a discussion of Indian and South African buffalo, even mentioning North American bison (a misconception that continues to this day; bison are not buffalo). The third type of skull he looks at is that of a rhinoceros. This was not the same skull Spiridon Portniagin had seen fifty years earlier. That one was never recovered. It could have come from a second unknown skull that Gmelin heard about but didn’t see that was found on the Lower Tunguska River. Whatever the provenance, the illustration leaves no doubt that it is a rhinoceros. Along with the skull, he includes a plate of two long horns that he identifies as having come from rhinoceroses. Pallas does not think either the buffalo or the rhinoceros represent new species. The known buffalo and rhinoceroses show enough variation that the Siberian skulls could fit within believable parameters.
Barely a year after his arrival, he was assigned to lead his own expedition into Siberia. His was one of several who traveled to together before heading off to pursue their individual objectives. Gmelin’s nephew, Samuel, journeyed into Central Asia, where he died of dysentery in the captivity of a Turkmen khan before he could be ransomed. The Abbé Chappe stayed in western Siberia to observe a transit of Venus across the sun and collected mammoth bones while he was there, leading to his later conversations with Ben Franklin. Müller gave Pallas the instructions he had written for Krasheninnikov in 1737. These were the same kind of instructions most of the academics had carried during the Northern Expedition: go deep into Siberia, look at everything.
The academy accepted his paper on fossil skulls and published it in their journal a year after Pallas left for the East. As fine as the paper was, it would have been much more impressive if the academy had waited before publishing it. After leaving the younger Gmelin and Chappe, Pallas, a painter, and three other naturalists forged their way deeper into Siberia. He writes of eagerly anticipating the “greater miracles” the land had to offer. Mammoths were on his mind, and he reported that “from the Don to the northeast corner of Asia, there is not a river, especially among those that flow through the plains, that does not have bones of elephants or other animals foreign to this clime along its banks.” He arrived in Irkutsk an hour before midnight on March 14, 1772. The horses, he writes, were tired. He knew the city held curiosities that he wanted to see and stories that he wanted to hear about the unknown lands across Lake Baikal. Irkutsk did not disappoint. Governor Adam de Brill told him that he had the preserved parts of an unknown large animal that Pallas immediately recognized as a rhinoceros. He was exceptionally lucky that almost everyone involved in bringing the animal to his attention had understood its importance. The rhino had been discovered by a group of Yakut (Sakha) hunters in December on the banks of the Vilui River, the last major tributary of the Lena, which falls into it well above the Arctic Circle. The rhino was nearly complete when they found it, but enough of it was in a bad state of decay that they decided to cut the feet and head from the carcass and leave the rest behind. Even if they had wanted to retrieve the entire body, it would have been almost impossible to dig the unexposed parts out of the frozen ground in midwinter. The hunters took the good parts to Ivan Argunov, the district magistrate, who took a notarized statement from them detailing the location and position of the carcass and then sent the parts and statement to Yakutsk. The authorities there kept one foot and sent the rest on to Irkutsk, where de Brill received them just three weeks before Pallas’s arrival.
The head and feet were in excellent condition. The delicate structure of the eyelids remained. Muscles and fat were preserved under the skin. Though the horns were missing, from the spots where they had been attached, he could tell it had been a two-horned rhino. Almost all of the skin was present and thickly covered with hair. All varieties of rhinoceros known in his day had very sparse hair, so he knew this one was something special. Of immediate concern was making sure it remained preserved in the best condition possible. It had already begun to give off a stench that he compared to “an ancient latrine.” He chose to dry it in an oven. The melting fat falling in the fire caused the oven to get too hot, and one of the feet was burned beyond any hope of saving. Naturally, the servants watching it were blamed, even though they had no experience roasting a rhinoceros. Before sending the parts to the academy, Pallas took careful measurements and wrote a detailed article for the academy. He regretted not having had time to have his artist prepare drawings of it, but the academy made up for this by having their own artists prepare excellent illustrations for the journal. Almost eighty years later, Johann Friedrich Brandt would publish an article on Siberian rhinoceroses in the academy’s journal that would include images of the head that, despite decades of improvements in printing technology and color, were not as good as the earlier ones. Both Ides’s traveling companion and Messerschmidt’s informant, Wolochewicz, witnessed mammoth remains with soft tissue attached, and Siberians spoke generally of bloody mammoths being found, but this was the first time the flesh of an ancient frozen animal had been recovered. It would be commented on and carefully studied well into the next century.
Among the first outsider to write about the discovery was the Dutch anatomist Peter Camper. Camper is primarily remembered for his efforts at racial classification, which were a precursor of the scientific racism of the nineteenth century. This ugly legacy has overshadowed his other accomplishments, including those in natural history. The year before Pallas’s description of the Vilui rhinoceros was published, Camper received the head of a rhino killed in southern Africa and dissected it. Camper wrote a monograph comparing various rhino sp
ecimens, both African and Asian, that was published in 1782. Five years before that, he sent to Pallas a short description and drawings of the African head to be used for comparative purposes. Pallas had the paper published in the academy’s journal along with comments of his own. Throughout his description, he points out details that differ from the Siberian head and suggests points for further investigation. In his conclusion, Camper says that he doesn’t think they were the same species and that he desires to dissect an Asian rhino for further comparison. He finishes with a meditation on fossil mammals, mentioning the “Ohio animal(s)” and elephants found in the gravels of his home country. Pallas’s comments mostly focused on teeth. Because the published drawings of the Vilui rhino showed it with its skin attached, Camper hadn’t been able to make those comparisons. In his note, Pallas mentions that he has a more recent letter from Camper describing his examination of a live young rhino at Versailles. Their conclusion is that rhino teeth are very confusing and the subject needs more study. Camper was already collecting bones for that purpose and would get the complete skull a Javan rhinoceros to add to his comparisons ten years later. Camper was also interested in elephants and hoped to get bones from mammoths and the Ohio animal to examine. The latter proved harder to collect than rhino skulls.
When Croghan sailed down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers with the mastodon bones that would stir so much interest in Britain and France, he had with him George Morgan, who collected a second box of bones. Back in New York, Morgan gave them to his brother, Dr. John Morgan. Dr. Morgan had a small collection of natural history curiosities that included a hairball from a cow and some bits of lava from Mt. Vesuvius. Despite the rarity of the bones and the public interest in them, Dr. Morgan treated them with surprising indifference. Years later, in 1783, Christian Friedrich Michaelis was shocked to find them unceremoniously piled in a corner still covered with dirt from Big Bone Lick. At the time he visited, Michaelis was hunting for some good mastodon bones to send to his father in the Netherlands. Michaelis offered to clean the bones, and Morgan gave him permission to borrow them for the purpose of have detailed drawings made. The artist who did the work was Charles Willson Peale. While Peale worked, several influential people made special trips to his shop to view the bones. This gave Peale the idea to open a natural history museum of his own. Michaelis, meanwhile, had been bitten by the fossil bug and sought out people who had been the Big Bone Lick and other fossiliferous places on the Ohio to learn as much as he could. He was a credible observer of anatomy. He had come to America during the revolution with Hessian mercenaries as an army doctor and stayed after the hostilities ended. He had excellent knowledge of human anatomy, but he was not that good with animal anatomy.
Discovering the Mammoth Page 20
