Adams’s account, unfortunately, was not much more than a short travel narrative. Though interesting in its own right, the actual description of the mammoth and the conditions of its preservation lacked important details. Many readers were disappointed that he didn’t have more to say about the soil and the place where it had been preserved. Adams devotes far more energy in describing the people and landscape of northern Siberia. He waxed poetic about the sparkling, snow-covered mountains; the happy songs and folk dances of the Evenki; and the beauty of Kumak Surka, which he declared should be subject of a national song for the peoples of the north. He promised to write a more extensive tract about the country and its people at a later date. Those who had hoped for more substantial fare about the mammoth were doomed to disappointment. Adams made no drawings and wrote no description of the mammoth in situ. His description of the skin and bones was short and superficial, though he promised to write a detailed study of the skeleton at a later date. Along with the copies of the memoir that he sent to Germany and Britain, he included a note offering to sell the skeleton in order to fund an expedition across the North Pole to Canada.
Meanwhile, Tilesius patiently continued to work on reassembling the skeleton. When it was complete, Emperor Alexander came to see it and was delighted. He bought it from Adams for eight thousand rubles, a considerable sum of money. Adams took the money and departed for his new job in Moscow, forgetting his plans to write more about the mammoth, the people of Kumak Surka, or his expedition to the pole and leaving Tilesius simmering in his wake. Tilesius spent the next two years writing the paper that Adams should have written. In it he tries to maintain the politeness expected in a formal scientific paper, but, despite calling Adams his “illustrious colleague,” his contempt seeps through. He carefully points out every instance of Adams using a wrong term of anatomy, even though, being a marine biologist, he would have just learned them himself. He complains that Adams was happy to share details of the Evenki’s lives “but important details, such as the position of the mammoth body in the ice and sand, he omitted.” He exaggerates every bit of damage to the skeleton until it sounds as if Adams brought back nothing more than a box of bone chips and a ragged piece of rawhide.
As with the physical reconstruction, Tilesius approached his written report in a thorough and conscientious manner. He familiarized himself with the relevant literature from the previous century and corresponded with experts in other fields. In the first half of the report, he makes a plausible speculation of how the native Siberians could have come to believe there were living mammoths underground. He describes the wide territorial range where mammoth ivory had been discovered and exported. He describes the older theories of how elephant bones could have been transported from the tropics to the Arctic. He lists some of the better-known reports of fossil ivory in ancient and medieval literature, like the description of Theophrastus and several English regional histories. He then directs readers who might want to know about other animals frozen in the Siberian earth to Pallas’s account.
Meanwhile, when Julius Klaproth returned from Siberia and Mongolia, he went to the academy’s library and continued his study of Eastern languages using the collection of Chinese and Manchurian manuscripts stored there. The word and legends of the mammoth from the east continued to interest him. In the library, he located many of the same sources that the Kanxi emperor had used in his monumental natural history. Tilesius had Klaproth write a section on these legends and included it at the beginning of his report directly following Pallas’s conclusions on the etymology of mammoth. Tilesius was a great admirer of Pallas, so, even though he includes Klaproth’s etymology, he makes it clear that, in his opinion, Pallas’s was the correct one.
In his historical review of mammoth scholarship, Tilesius pays special attention to several recent scientific expeditions, using them as a call to action for the academy to send out more expeditions and to have trained people ready to recover important finds before they are lost. Of these expeditions, Pallas and the Vilui rhinoceros have a special place of honor in Tilesius’s estimation. He emphasizes the importance of the rhino three separate times. He also mentions Gavril Sarychev who, while travelling from Kamchatka to Yakutsk in 1787, heard about the intact carcass of a great animal recently uncovered on the Alazea River. Though he and his travelling companion were eager to go to the spot, worsening weather prevented them from doing so. Tilesius gives this as an example of the difficulties in recovery even when the right people are present. He quotes extensively from Gmelin and other travelers on the subject of the frozen ground in Siberia pointing out that there is no mystery to the mammoths being preserved for thousands of years; the mystery is how they became buried in the frozen earth in the first place. It is in this section that he tells the story of his receiving the hair of a mammoth from Captain Patapov in Kamchatka.
In the last part of his historical section, Tilesius presents Adams’s account. He says this is necessary because it was only published in obscure newspapers that were unavailable to most people. He edited out what he saw as the unnecessary travelogue parts and heavily annotated the rest. Tilesius’s notes include useful scientific information, petty corrections to Adams’s understanding of anatomy, and endless carping about the various indignities he has had to suffer. One detail of Adams’s account that Tilesius did not comment on was the mammoth’s sex. Adams, in passing, says the mammoth was a male. He does not say what part of the mammoth led him to that conclusion. Perhaps it was something to do with the skin, the lower part of the skin.
In the second half of the report, he gets into the nitty-gritty of anatomy. In this, he is on more familiar ground. Tilesius was a marine biologist who had never written about mammals but the basics of writing an anatomical description are the same whether for a king crab, a sea cucumber, or a mammoth. He begins with the general characteristics of all elephant-kind, focusing on the skull. He then moves on to the more specific differences between the two living species of elephants, the mastodon, and the mammoth. The purpose of this review is to establish that the mammoth is a distinct species. Cuvier’s and Blumenbach’s determinations were recent enough that Tilesius felt it necessary to establish this on his own. He did not accept their arguments as proof. Breaking with Cuvier, he states that all four species belong to a single genus, which he calls Elephantorum. Adams had come to this same conclusion.
With this established, Tilesius moves on to giving a detailed description of the skeleton that he had restored. To illustrate his points, he prepared two large prints, one of the complete reassembled skeleton with an inset of one of the femurs, the other of a skull and jaw. Because he decided to leave the skin on the skull, he used of one of the academy’s other skulls as a model for the second sheet. In this, he gives his readers more than basic measurements of the large bone and completed skeleton. His final mounting was twenty feet long and eleven feet, three inches tall. Because he pointed the tusks outward, rather than inward, their tips were ten feet apart. The whole thing was held together with small iron bars and stood on a sixteen-foot base. He points out important points of muscle and ligament attachments. These are marked with letters and then discussed in the text. In this way, he proves the animal had a trunk, an important point since none of the witnesses saw one.
Tilesius’s frustrations would turn out to not to be limited to Adams. He finished his paper in 1810 and submitted it to the academy, but they sat on it for two years before approving it for publication. Another three years passed before it finally was published. That little business of Napoleon invading the country and burning Moscow to the ground might have had something to do with the second delay. When the academy failed to act on his paper, Tilesius had several sets of his drawings printed and sent them to scientists in Europe and America along with letters detailing some of his conclusions.
During these intervening years, Tilesius made the acquaintance of the American ambassador John Quincy Adams. Adams seems to have genuinely liked Tilesius. His diaries from thi
s period mention visiting him several times. On one visit, Tilesius took the future president to the museum and gave him a tour. At the time, the mammoth was on display, but Adams merely noted its existence, giving it as many words as he did Peter the Great’s taxidermied horse. On the occasions that he visited Tilesius in his home, the visits seem to have consisted primarily of Adams patiently listening while Tilesius complained about his job and the state of the sciences in Russia. Science was on the decline, he said. There were only two members in the entire academy that measured up to the standards of men of the previous century, such as Pallas and Gmelin. It was impossible to find decent engravers to prepare his drawings for publication. It was impossible to find good paper for the work. Even if they could find decent paper and even if they could sell all the copies, he did not think the people who bought them would read them. He never acknowledges that Napoleon and two decades of war in Europe might have had an effect on the supplies, personnel, and budget available to him.
With the mammoth project out of the way, Tilesius was able to work on writing up his discoveries during the Krusenstern expedition. A bibliography of his writing shows a flurry of small papers appearing over the next five years, culminating in the volume of his drawings from the South Seas. Three of these papers appeared in the same volume of the academy journal as the mammoth paper. Although his professional life flourished during these years, his personal life was in decline. He had married a much younger woman after returning from the Pacific, and it was not a happy marriage. Eventually, she would run away with another man, leaving him with a young son to take care of. At this point, Tilesius decided he had had enough of Russia. He packed up his things, took his son, and returned to Germany in 1814, where he moved back in with his mother.
When the embryology pioneer Karl von Baer joined the academy in 1834, he developed a side interest in Siberian exploration and sought out members who had known Adams and had been present during the restoration of the skeleton to learn more about it, “but they had heard nothing more special and only said that Adams had embellished his report.” Adams should be forgiven his weaknesses as a paleontologist and geologist; these were not his areas of expertise. When he heard about the discovery, he recognized its importance and rushed to recover what he could. Had another year passed, it is unlikely that there would have been enough of the mammoth left to add anything to what the European naturalists already knew. Adams also paid far more attention to the people who actually found the mammoth than most naturalists of the time would have. Adams told the story of the actual discovery in Shumachov’s voice. He also included some details of the life of the Evenki, though these were strongly colored by the “noble savage, happy child” of nature ideology popular at the time.
The Siberians did not remember Adams as fondly as he remembered them. When Shumachov learned about the generous reward given to Adams by the emperor, he made the difficult and probably frightening journey to St. Petersburg to protest. The skeleton, he said, was a gift from the Batouline to the emperor. It was not Adams’s to sell. According to Tilesius, Adams, safely ensconced in Moscow, laughed off the criticism. Shumachov, no doubt, would have been doubly offended to know that the mammoth would come to be known as the Adams Mammoth and that some later retellings of the story would even call Adams the mammoth’s discoverer. Shumachov returned to his people, and there he vanishes from Western history. Adams, on the other hand, continued to be remembered in Evenki history. An example from five hundred miles away and three generations later demonstrates this.
In February 1869, a scientist named Gerhard von Maydell was in the second year of an expedition to northeastern Siberia on behalf of the Russian Geographic Society. While wintering in Nizhne-Kolymsk, well above the Arctic Circle, he received a message from Magistrate Ivaschenko of Vekhoyansk (the coldest place in the northern hemisphere) that some hunters had found a mammoth cadaver not far from Nizhne-Kolymsk. Ivaschenko’s message gave a detailed description of the location, near the Alazea River, and named the hunters. As soon as the weather permitted, Maydell headed for the location and tracked down the hunters. Their leader, named Foca, denied knowing anything about mammoths. Maydell pressed him and Foca claimed he had not seen the mammoth himself and could not help Maydell find it. Maydell finally had to quote Ivaschenko’s message to “prove” to Foca that he had seen the mammoth. Faced with proof and forty pounds of tobacco, Foca relented and agreed to take Maydell to the spot.
At the time, the imperial government was offering a bounty of up to three hundred rubles, supplies, and even a medal to anyone who reported the remains of a mammoth—a fortune in Siberia at the time. In 1929, V. I. Tolmachoff wrote that to his knowledge, between the time Peter the Great first offered a bounty and the revolution, despite the bounty increasing to one thousand rubles by 1914, only one person ever claimed the bounty. Maydell explained Foca’s reluctance this way: “the natives of the area have such a bad memory of Adams’s expedition that, where possible, they conceal their discoveries because they are afraid of being forced to work and provide haulage.”
Foca’s reluctance was not unique. In 1882, Alexander Bunge landed on Moustakh Island to set up a weather station as part of Russia’s contribution to the first International Polar Year. Moustakh lies a few miles southeast of the Bykovsky Peninsula, where Shumachov found his mammoth. Seeing that the Russians were on the island to stay, the local headman reluctantly showed Bunge the remains of a frozen mammoth that had been found twenty-five years earlier. The locals sold the ivory to a trader, who told the district magistrate about the mammoth. Like Foca’s people, the Moustakh natives so feared being dragooned into unpaid labor that, when the local magistrate came to investigate, they buried the mammoth and told him that they had chopped it up and thrown it into the sea. Over the years, they occasionally dug the mammoth up to feed bits of it to their dogs. By 1882, there was very little of it left for Bunge to examine.
The casual exploitation of native labor is an ugly subtext to most scientific advances on the imperial frontiers, and Russia was no exception. Even when the laborers who dug up the temples and carried the specimens to the coast were paid, we should ask whether they had a choice in that transaction. The important papers that Adams brought gave him the power to conscript the local population for labor. In his account, he describes Shumachov’s village as having forty to fifty families, all engaged in putting up food for winter. He then mentions taking “ten Toungouses” with him to excavate the mammoth. If they all came from the village, that would mean he took a very significant portion of the able-bodied adult males and kept them from hunting during the time of year that was most essential to their survival. This is the reality that lies beneath Adams’s flattering narrative.
Adams and Tilesius were not the last people to study this particular mammoth. As other mammoths were discovered, like Foca’s and two others Maydell had the opportunity to examine, the conservators at the museum made minor changes to the skeleton based on new understandings and discoveries. When the first cave paintings were discovered in France in the second half of the century, they modified the line of the vertebrae to show the now familiar high shoulders and sloping back profile rendered in these ancient eyewitness drawings. They remounted the tusks on the correct sides of the head and later replaced them with tusks of the appropriate size. Today, two hundred years later, the skeleton is still on display at the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. We have carbon-dated the mammoth as 35,800 years old. We know that he was about forty-five years old when he died. We have teased DNA out of his hair. The Adams mammoth remains an important point of comparison for newer discoveries, and the Adams skeleton itself was a culmination of generations’ worth of intellectual evolution, from the dismissal of the concepts of giants and mythological beasts to the acceptance of the difficult ideas of extinction and the great age of the earth. Two centuries after his discovery, the Adams mammoth still teaches us what makes a mammoth a mammoth.
AFTERWORD
Shumachov’s mammoth was unquestionably the most important mammoth discovery of the nineteenth century. The assembled skeleton put to rest any remaining doubt that the mammoth was a type of elephant, and established it as a distinct species separate from the elephants of Africa and Asia. The dual-layered hair was accepted by most to mean the mammoth was adapted to a cool climate, though arguments still remained over whether it was truly adapted to an Arctic climate. Cuvier weighed in with an influential “no.” His belief was that the north had been temperate when mammoths lived there and that the same cataclysm that drove them extinct had also created modern Arctic conditions. His authority was enough to override Adams and Tilesius, who believed otherwise, and thus erroneously convinced most scientists for the rest of the century.
An important side effect of having so many anatomical questions answered about the mammoth with the Adams skeleton was that much of the debate moved from defining the animal to attempting to understand the environment in which it had lived and explaining its preservation. Many, if not most, naturalists agreed with Cuvier, who did not believe that the climate in the past could have dramatically different from that of the present. Permafrost was a complete mystery, and many did not even believe it was real; it had to be an erroneous observation made by ignorant Siberians. Gmelin noted that the soil near Yakutsk remained frozen during the summer, making it difficult to dig wells. No one followed up on his observation. In 1827, Fyodor Shergin, an employee of the Russian-American Company, made a concerted effort to dig a well through the frozen ground at Yakutsk. He finally broke through after nine years work at a depth of 120 meters. Karl von Baer collected reports of frozen soil and produced a map of the Eurasian permafrost region that coincided with the area where mammoth carcasses were found. Three separate northern expeditions made side trips to the site of Shumachov’s discovery during the nineteenth century in order to examine the permafrost there. Today that site is called Mamontovy Khayata, and for twenty years it has been the site of a joint German/Russian permafrost research project. This makes it possibly the best understood piece of permafrost on the planet.
Discovering the Mammoth Page 25
