The following summer, when his family returned to the peninsula, Shumachov found a dead walrus on the beach below the mysterious mass. I am not sure why Adams, the person who recorded Shumachov’s story, thought the walrus was important enough to mention. It might be that, in stopping to look at the walrus, Shumachov was reminded of the mysterious mass on the hill and attempted to examine it again. Shumachov’s primary reason for investigating a dead walrus would not have been to harvest it for food; a dead walrus on the beach would be a smelly mess in no time, though a welcome buffet to seagulls, foxes, and polar bears. The only practical reasons for giving it a second look would have been to see if the thick skin was salvageable or if it had tusks that he could cut off and sell. Having looked at the walrus, whatever he thought of it, Shumachov also checked the mysterious mass on the bluff. By now, enough had eroded out that he could distinguish that it was made up of two separate large parts, but he still could not tell what they were.
By the third summer, in 1801, Shumachov was able to identify the mass as a mammoth. The two parts he had seen the previous summer were revealed as feet, one flank was visible, and, most importantly, he could see one of the tusks. Returning to the summer camp, he told the others about his discovery. Shumachov expected the news to be cause for celebration; instead, the older members received it with expressions of sadness. The old men explained to him that several generations before, a hunter had discovered a mammoth carcass near the same spot. He and his whole family died soon after. Because of that, the people of the region viewed mammoth carcasses as portents of disaster. Shumachov became sick with worry and retired to his cabin to await his doom. After several days of not dying, he decided the old superstition might be not true and began to think about the value of the tusks, which he described as large and beautiful. He called his brothers and returned to the bluff. They did not have the time or the tools to chip them out of the rock-hard, frozen ground, so they covered the whole carcass with grass and left a guard to keep other people away. The next year was colder than usual and the mammoth did not thaw any further. It is possible that Shumachov’s efforts at hiding his treasure insulated it from whatever warmth there was that year.
Finally, at the end of the fifth summer, in 1803, the bluff had eroded and thawed enough for the mammoth to break free and tumble down onto the beach. The following March—in the dead of winter, a time of little activity before the spring hunting and fishing season arrived—Shumachov and two companions left their village and returned to the peninsula to collect the ivory treasure. The tusks were nine feet long and weighed two hundred pounds each, a bit larger than the average set of tusks collected by ivory hunters, but not extraordinary in size. A few days later, Roman Boltunov, a merchant from Yakutsk, arrived in Kumak Surka and bought the tusks. The price was fifty rubles’ worth of trade goods—roughly two thousand dollars in modern currency. For a people who lived almost completely outside of the money economy, this would have been a tremendous boon to the village.
When he heard that the ivory came from an intact mammoth, Boltunov asked Shumachov to show him the carcass. As an ivory trader, Boltunov would have known how rare sightings of mammoth carcasses were. He would also have known that educated Russians from the West and other Europeans were quite interested in mammoths and would pay handsomely even for information about them. He decided that it was definitely worth his time, at least four days, to get a firsthand look at the mammoth. It was snowing heavily when they got to the site. Scavengers had already discovered this large block of free meat and eaten parts of it. Much of the face had been torn away. Still, the majority of the body was still there and in one piece. Boltunov cleared away enough snow to get a good look at it and examined the head. What he saw was bigger than any animal he had ever seen or heard of. It was covered with long, rust-colored hair. It had a fat body and thick legs. He made some measurements on the spot. After returning, he wrote down some of the details and later, on the opposite side of the same sheet, made a drawing of it from memory. He was correct that the trip would be worthwhile; when he returned to Yakutsk, the head of the merchant’s guild bought his notes and drawing.
At first glance, Boltunov’s drawing is laughably wrong; it looks like a mutant combination of a boar and an elephant. But, considering the information he had to work with, it is not a bad reconstruction. It demonstrates an intelligent mind and an active curiosity attempting to extract the most from a small amount of information. It is very possible, even likely, that Boltunov had never seen a picture of an elephant and had no reference point for “elephant-ness.” He would, however, have seen a boar. Most large mammals he would have been familiar with—dogs, cattle, horses, and reindeer—had long relatively thin legs and heads that rose up from the body. Only bears and pigs had thick bodies, heavier legs, and heads that protruded forward from the body on almost imperceptible necks. In his written description, he twice refers to the mammoth’s “swinishness.”
The trunk was gone when he saw the carcass; the bloody base of the trunk could very well have resembled a pig’s snout. The tusks in his drawing look bizarre; one seems to be pointing up while the other points down. Karl von Baer, who examined the drawing in the 1860s, believed that Boltunov was inexpertly trying to indicate that he believed the tusks should have pointed outward. Even in Baer’s time, most scientists incorrectly believed they pointed outward. Yet Boltunov correctly placed the tusks in the upper jaw, not in the lower as they would have been in that of a boar, and he was actually trying to show that the tusks are pushed together in the snout, which is in fact correct. Mammoths’ tusks start much closer together than those of living elephants and curve out before curving around and back in. Nevertheless, the eyes in this rendering are far too high on the head, and the drawing also shows tiny ears on top of the mammoth’s head, which do not match Boltunov’s written description. There, he says the ears were six vershoks (about eleven inches) long and on the “outside” of the head. The problems with the eyes and ears are probably the result of faulty memory and the amount of time that had passed between committing his first observations to paper and making the drawing. The body is more elephant-like than boar-like, boxy, with pillar-like legs and a short tail. The only other boar-like details on the body are what appear to be fetlocks and thin hooves. The hooves might be his interpretation of the elephant’s toenails as a cleft hoof. Boltunov drew little lines around the mammoth that indicate hair running the full length of its body. Finally, at the top of the page he made a separate drawing of a mammoth’s tooth, which, with its washboard surface, would have been very different from those of any mammal he was familiar with.
In the 110 years since Evert Ysbrants Ides first reported the discovery of a mammoth carcass in 1692, only four more had been reported, and none of them had been recovered, made available for European scientists to examine, or even very well described. Dozens more were probably discovered during that time, but not reported. Pallas’s half of a woolly rhinoceros, from 1772, was the closest that the eighteenth century had to offer to a mammoth until Shumachov’s discovery. But as luck and fate would have it, Mikhail Adams, a naturalist from St. Petersburg (not from Scotland or England, as is sometimes reported), was also in Siberia at this same time. Although only twenty-seven, Adams was already a veteran field biologist. Soon after the kingdom of Georgia was annexed to the Russian Empire, he traveled in the entourage of General Apollo Musin-Pushkin to inspect economic resources of the new territory and brought back samples of several previously unknown species of flowers.
The series of events that brought Adams to Siberia began, in part, when a Russian sailor named Adam Krusenstern found himself with time to spare in Canton, China. Krusenstern was one of a group of young officers who had been sent to spend a few years training with the British Navy. While several of his comrades spent the years fighting the French Navy during Britain’s on again, off again war with the revolutionary republic, Krusenstern took every opportunity he could to see the world. By transferring from ship to s
hip, he went first to the United States and the Caribbean, then to the Cape Colony (South Africa), which the British had just seized from the Dutch East India Company, from there to India, and, finally, on to China. At every step along the way, Krusenstern was impressed with the advantages that would come to Russia if they could increase the amount of trade they conducted by sea. It was in Canton that his ideas for trade came together to form a grand plan.
In 1799, some months before Shumachov spotted his mammoth, Krusenstern watched a small American ship arrive in Canton from the Oregon Country. The ship carried a load of furs that sold quickly and brought top prices. Why, he wondered, couldn’t the Russians do the same and bring furs directly from Alaska to sell in Chinese ports? At the time, the only point at which Russia was allowed access to China was the Siberian border town of Kiakhta. The terms of that trade had changed very little since the time of Peter the Great.
Nothing was satisfactory about that arrangement. The trade was regularly shut off at the whim of the Chinese court. Hauling goods overland from European Russia to Kiakhta often damaged them, lowering their value. The shipping costs were high. For Alaskan furs, the situation was simply ridiculous. Furs had to be carried on unsatisfactory ships from Alaska to Okhotsk, on the Siberian coast, overland to Kiakhta, where they were sold to Chinese merchants who carried them across the Gobi Desert to their final destination in cities near the coast. A robust sea trade would not only make commerce with China easier and more profitable; it would solve a host of problems with managing the eastern end of the sprawling Russian empire. Every supply, from bread to nails, that went to the Russian Far East and Alaska had to come from European Russia by pack train, a trip that could take up to a year. Krusenstern envisioned a trade in which supplies for the colonies would be brought from European Russia across the Atlantic and around South America. After delivering the supplies to Alaska and Okhotsk, the ships would take loads of furs directly to their primary market on the Chinese coast. Finally, after selling the furs, the ships would return to Russia carrying Chinese luxury goods.
When he returned to St. Petersburg, Krusenstern wrote a detailed proposal and submitted it to his superiors. He arrived at a bad time. Both the admiralty and commerce ministry were undergoing administrative shakeups and the people he had expected to look favorably on his plan had all been ousted. The new regime appeared uninterested. Convinced his plan would never see the light of day, he considered retiring from the navy.
Krusenstern should not have been so impatient. Two years later, the tsar, Paul I, was assassinated and a group of forward looking ministers was appointed by the new tsar, Alexander. Among them were Nikolai Mordvinov at the admiralty and Nicolai Rumiantsev at the commerce ministry. They discussed Krusenstern’s plan, found sponsors, and presented it to the emperor. What Krusenstern did not know was that for years there had been support at the court for some kind of expedition to the Pacific. The ministers knew the advantage of expanding trade with China. They knew how badly Alaska was managed. They felt that it was necessary for the prestige of Russia to send a scientific expedition to the South Seas similar to those that James Cook, George Vancouver, and Jean-François Lapérouse had made for the British and French. Mordvinov and Rumiantsev were both supporters of a Pacific expedition and pushed through a plan in, what was by Russian bureaucratic standards, a record time of barely a year.
Krusenstern had some idea that his plan was being discussed, but it came a surprise to him when, in August 1802, he was notified by the admiralty that an expedition based on his plan had been approved and that he was in charge. Furthermore, they wanted him to find two ships, outfit them, hire a crew, and leave before winter. The plan he was handed was vastly more ambitious than anything he had envisioned and took much longer to pull together than the two months Rumiantsev had initially ordered. By the time he left, a full year later, Krusenstern’s commercial voyage to China included a full diplomatic mission to Japan, a major inspection tour of operations in Alaska for the Russian-American Company, scientific projects everywhere on the route, orders to map badly understood parts of the Siberian coast, and anything else anyone with influence at the court could think of.
The mission creep and bloat that had happened to the China project were not limited to the sea voyage. While Krusenstern prepared his ships, Rumiantsev began planning a second approach to China, by land, through Kiakhta. For years, the vice-minister of foreign affairs, Adam Czartoryski, had been developing his own plan to open China to greater trade. With Rumiantsev’s support, he was able to create a great embassy with the goal of showing the flag in Beijing and improving the terms of trade at Kiakhta. The embassy was originally planned as consisting of forty people headed by Count Yuri Golovkin. By the time it left St. Petersburg, in July 1805, it had swollen to nearly three hundred people, including younger sons of the very best families, their servants, a fourteen-piece orchestra, Cossacks, and a contingent of scientists, including Mikhail Adams. The final objectives of the mission included opening the entire Chinese border to trade, allowing Russian merchants complete freedom to travel inside China, establishing a permanent legation in Beijing, opening the Amur River to Russian boats, and setting up a trade station in Canton. To make the journey easier, the embassy traveled in four groups that would reunite in Irkutsk. The scientists were assigned to the last group.
At the same time that Adams was traveling east across Siberia with the embassy, Krusenstern and his scientists had already been on the far side of the continent for more than a year. Following a voyage from St. Petersburg, south through the Atlantic, around Cape Horn, and across the South Pacific, they had arrived in St. Peter and Paul on the Kamchatka Peninsula in July 1804, just before Schmachov’s mammoth finally broke loose from the bluff and tumbled to the beach. Krusenstern spent the following year exploring and mapping the waters around Japan and eastern Siberia and supporting Nikolai Rezanov’s diplomatic mission to Japan. That mission ultimately failed because, among other reasons, the temperamental Rezanov refused to make the deep bow demanded of him by Japanese protocol. Krusenstern and Rezanov did not like each other, and Krusenstern was happy to see Rezanov take one of the expedition’s ships and sail off to Alaska, where he would plot the annexation of the west coast of America from Sitka to San Francisco.
Rezanov’s failure was his own and did not reflect on Krusenstern. The scientific component of the mission was a resounding success. His team corrected maps, made astronomical observations, collected botanical and zoological samples, and studied the flora, fauna, and people of the Marquesas Islands. Many of the expedition members went on to stellar careers in exploration and the sciences. The mission cartographer, Fabian von Bellingshausen, later discovered Antarctica in 1820. Krusenstern’s cabin boy, Otto von Kotzebue, became an important Pacific and Arctic explorer in his own right. The ship’s doctor, Grigory Langsdorff, became a diplomat and an important explorer in, of all places, Brazil. However, the scientist most important to our story was Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius.
Tilesius was a doctor and naturalist from Mühlhausen in central Germany. At thirty-four, he already had one scientific expedition under his belt, having traveled to Portugal in 1797 with Johann Hoffmannsegg to collect marine samples. Besides those credentials, he was also a first-rate scientific illustrator. This would be one of his primary responsibilities on the Krusenstern expedition. If he had done nothing else in his life, his paintings of the Nukuhiva natives would be enough for him to be remembered. Krusenstern thought enough of Tilesius that he renamed Mount Iwate in Japan Mount Tilesius. (Not surprisingly, the Japanese preferred to keep the original name.) While on this same expedition, Tilesius provided the first scientific descriptions for dozens of species of marine life, including the impressive and delicious king crab—Paralithodes camtschatica.
In August 1805, when the ship returned to Kamchatka for the third and last time, Tilesius heard that the captain of a supply ship that traded on the Arctic had recently seen a mammoth carcass. Captain Patapof claimed to ha
ve “lately seen a Mammoth elephant dug up on the shores of the Frozen Ocean, clothed with a hairy skin.” As evidence of this claim, he gave Tilesius some hair that he had cut from the animal’s hide. Tilesius met Patapof more than a year after Shumachov harvested and sold the tusks from his mammoth. It is possible that the two mammoths were one and the same or, perhaps, that Patapof’s mammoth was another that Shumachov said had been seen two years before he found his. However, it’s more likely he saw an unrelated one farther east. The journey from the Pacific to the Lena Delta was a difficult one at best and in most years not possible at all. Tilesius would have spent more time interrogating Patapof if the two ships had stayed together longer. As it was, Krusenstern and Patapof were both eager to put back to sea and, for Tilesius, at the time, the mammoth was no more than a novelty. His real interest was in marine biology. He packaged up the hair sample and sent it to Blumenbach at Göttingen, assuming he would be more interested in it.
While Krusenstern and his scientists sailed south to Canton, Golovkin and his scientists finally arrived at Kiakhta on the Chinese border. There, they were delayed for three months. The Chinese authorities were amazed at the size of the embassy. The Beijing court had only made plans for one hundred Russians, not three hundred. This was more than a matter of permission—though that was very important; the size of the embassy posed very real practical problems. Caravan stops in the Gobi Desert needed to be stocked with food and remounts for the Russians. The border authorities sent to Beijing for instructions and began negotiating with Golovkin. By the first of January, the Russian party had been pared down to 128 essential members. Even then, this number included many of the young dilettantes, the orchestra, and, thankfully, the scientists.
Discovering the Mammoth Page 23
