Читать книгу Eastbound through Siberia - Georg Wilhelm Steller - Страница 10
ОглавлениеWHAT COMES TO MIND WHEN AMERICANS HEAR THE name Steller depends on whether they live in Alaska, have an interest in the natural world, or are challenged spellers who think it is an adjective. Correctly spelled, his name has been affixed to a noisy jay, a huge sea eagle, a northern eider duck, a bellowing sea lion, an icy mountain rising from the Bering Glacier, a cove on Alaska’s westernmost island, the largest chiton, the extinct northern sea cow, and many plants, such as the slender rockbrake. Apart from the natural world, a street and a high school in Anchorage are also named after him. Yet he is still not well known, his reputation still primarily defined by the journal of the voyage with Bering that landed him on Kayak Island in July of 1741.
What compelled us, after spending fifteen years on the translation of Steller’s book about Kamchatka, to embark on the current translation project was both the fascinating subject matter and the desire to acquaint a larger audience with this extraordinary scientist, explorer, and human being. For almost a century, readers have been gaining the impression from the Journal of the Sea Voyage that he was ill-tempered and rather intolerant, sympathetic portrayals in the popular literature notwithstanding (see the bibliography). In the texts here translated, a much more nuanced image of a more likable man emerges. The journal in particular reveals his humanity, his strength of character, his intense dedication to scientific discovery, and his wry sense of humor. The stamina with which he endured both awkward and perilous situations and met the burdensome challenges he faced as a member of this expedition is extraordinary. The history of the colonization of Siberia can be found in many sources, so we have included here only enough historical context to help understand Steller’s writing. By the time he arrived in St. Petersburg in 1734, Russia had, starting in the late sixteenth century, expanded its influence eastward across the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, bringing some ten million square kilometers of inhospitable territory, rich in natural resources and inhabited by various indigenous peoples, under Moscow’s control.
Fig. Intro.1. Sweetvetch (Wikipedia, Hedysarum hedysaroides).
Though the Russian government tried to control settlement, administration, trade, and economic growth, it was the people who came and who were already there that shaped Siberian development. The first men (and they were almost exclusively men) to open up the region to settlement were the freebooting Cossacks and the independent Russian promyshlenniks who hunted and trapped fur-bearing animals.1 They were followed by peasant settlers, dissident religious communities, and involuntary settlers—that is, convicts, political exiles, and prisoners of war dispatched to the region for “safekeeping” by the central authorities. There were the sluzhivs—state employees who encompassed both civil administrative officials and military personnel sent to protect Russia’s vital interests. And since the czar was the nominal head of the Russian Orthodox Church, every ostrog2 had either a chapel or a church that was supported by the government, as were the ecclesiastical personnel. The relationship between the natives and the invaders was one of conflict and coexistence. Some natives served voluntarily as guides and interpreters, and socializing and marriage took place between Russians and non-Russians, but much of this contact was unwelcome and painful for the indigenous people. As Hartley summarizes, “The opening up of Siberia in the seventeenth century and the expeditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were extraordinary feats of courage and endurance, but at the same time they were violent and traumatic, both for the participants and for the indigenous people with whom they came in contact” (xviii).
In theory, the czar wielded absolute authority over Siberia; in practice, the conquest, exploitation, administration, and defense of Siberia were supervised by two intertwined bureaucracies. One was centered in Moscow—the Siberian Office,3 emerging slowly and haphazardly with no grand master plan. These officials were collectively in charge of the daily operations—they supervised appointments and the activities of the top Siberian officials, formulated rules for their personal behavior and treatment of the indigenous population, devised plans for permanent settlements, established yasak4 quotas, and developed ways to protect their investment in Siberia.
The other level of administrative bureaucracy was dispersed throughout Siberia, far removed from central authority and so remote it might take two years for an official to reach his destination. It was headed by scores of voevods5 with their own assistants, stationed in strategically located, fortified outposts. In addition to controlling all the supplies, they essentially had the power of life and death over those within their jurisdiction. Particularly in the remote regions of northeastern Siberia, trustworthy men were less willing to serve, and the corrupt ones were removed only when their abuses became unbearable. A voevod received generous remuneration, but he also expected to receive the essentials from the local inhabitants. All the native subjects were required to give him gifts on the holidays, and his subordinates also expected to receive their share. So indigenous people were under an enormous burden. It is understandable that they frequently expressed their anger (Dmytryshyn, Crownhart-Vaughan, and Vaughan, 18–20, 22; Hartley, xvi–xvii).
While the challenges and tensions of this conquest of Siberia were likely unknown to or ignored by the Europeans eager to receive any knowledge about foreign lands, what news trickled into Europe about the area was enthusiastically read and disseminated. An announcement about the Second Kamchatka Expedition, later named the Great Northern Expedition and, like the First Kamchatka Expedition, headed by the Danish captain Vitus Bering, appeared in the Neue Leipziger gelehrte Anzeigen of November 1733, while Steller was still in Halle. Since Halle is not very far from Leipzig and one of his professors was closely connected to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (Hintzsche, Quellen 1:xix), it is very likely that Steller heard of this enormous undertaking before leaving Halle in August of 1734 and possible that he resolved then to join it. Spanning ten years between 1733 and 1743 and involving directly or indirectly more than three thousand people with an estimated cost of 1.5 million rubles or one-sixth the income of the Russian government, its greatness lay in its size, the distance it had to go across the Northern Hemisphere, and the complexity of its goals.
Any systematic exploration and scientific discovery of Siberia was due in large part to Peter the Great, who, in order to implement his vision of expanding the Russian Empire, drew foreign scholars to Russia to create a scientific academy in St. Petersburg, inaugurated in 1725, that resembled those he had visited in Europe. Young and mostly German-speaking scholars initially formed the core of the academicians. One of their tasks was to organize and eventually accompany scientific expeditions to the unexplored lands east of the Urals. The German physician and naturalist Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt’s journey from 1720 to 1727 to western and central Siberia marked the beginning of research into geography, mineralogy, botany, zoology, ethnography, and philology in this region as well as opening up the area to trade and economic development.
The possible existence of a land bridge between northeastern Asia and North America, posed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz as a way of answering questions about the common origin of humans, among other interests, prompted Peter the Great to mount the First Kamchatka Expedition (1728–1730) after an initial expedition of two geodesists in 1719 had failed. After also failing to reach the North American coastline, Bering proposed a Second Kamchatka Expedition whose primary goals were to search for a sea route to North America and Japan and to survey the northern and eastern coast of Siberia. Under Czarina Anna these goals were greatly expanded into investigating the flora, fauna, minerals, and peoples of Siberia and opening up access to developing Siberia’s resources. What had initially been a huge undertaking became for Bering an even bigger logistical nightmare. Because Russia viewed this expedition as providing information that would give it the strategic upper hand, especially in comparison to its neighboring countries, no one on the expedition was to reveal anything about its purpose or findings. It was this imposed secrecy that is largely responsible for the fact that much of the information gathered was published only much later, some of it not until today. Some of the information may still be lying unread or even undiscovered in the archives; some, unfortunately, may be lost forever.
Not surprisingly, these overly ambitious goals fell somewhat short, but amazingly much was actually achieved: the European discovery of Alaska (i.e., the Aleutian Islands and part of what is today known as Southeast Alaska) and the Commander Islands, notably Bering Island; a detailed cartographic assessment of the northern and northeastern coast of Russia and the Kurile Islands; considerable groundbreaking ethnographic, historic, and scientific research into Siberia and Kamchatka; and the refuted existence of a northeast passage and of the legendary land mass in the North Pacific.
In order to fulfill all these objectives, the expedition was divided into three independent detachments: (1) the Northern, charged with exploring the eastern sea route from the mouth of the Ob River to the Pacific; (2) the Pacific; and (3) the Academic. The Pacific or Maritime group was further divided into two. The first, led by Bering himself, was to sail to Kamchatka from Okhotsk and from there search for the legendary “Joao-da-Gama-Land,” named after the Portuguese explorer who claimed to have discovered a land mass north of Japan. Then they were to sail farther east to the coast of North America. The other division, under the command of the Danish captain Martin Spangberg, was to investigate and chart the sea route from Okhotsk to Japan and China.
Steller eventually joined the third contingent—the Academic group, composed of a small number of scientists. The leaders—Professor Gerhard Friedrich Müller (history and ethnography), Johann Georg Gmelin (natural history), and Louis de l’Isle de la Croyère (astronomy and geodetics)—left St. Petersburg in August 1733, traveling together to Tobolsk, the seat of the Siberian Office. De la Croyère traveled separately from there, in March 1735 meeting up with Müller and Gmelin in Irkutsk, the center of Russian trade with China and an important stopping place for the expedition. Even though the local authorities, in this case the Irkutsk Provincial Government, were legally mandated to provide the researchers all the aid they required, neither boats nor food supplies were ready for the trip down the Lena to Yakutsk; thus, these three members took the opportunity to sail across Lake Baikal and to investigate the region from the eastern shore to the Chinese border, returning to Irkutsk for the winter.
They were finally able to continue their journey in 1736, getting as far as Yakutsk, where they were to meet Bering and travel together to Kamchatka, but they were again stuck without transportation and food supplies to get them to Okhotsk and then Kamchatka. Because of poor health, Müller and Gmelin eventually received permission to return to St. Petersburg, finally arriving in 1743. Before leaving Yakutsk, Müller and Gmelin had given the student Stepan Krasheninnikov detailed instructions for fulfilling his role as the preliminary researcher on Kamchatka. Beginning in 1737 Krasheninnikov studied mostly the southern part of the peninsula. He spent ten years as a member of the expedition, eventually became a professor at the Academy of Sciences, and was commissioned to write up the results of both his and Steller’s research about Kamchatka, which appeared in 1755, the year of Krasheninnikov’s death, with the title Opisanie Zemli Kamchatki or Description of Kamchatka.
By the end of 1737, Steller had been sent to assist Müller and Gmelin, receiving his instructions (found after this introduction) from them in Yeniseysk. Per these instructions, every three months Steller was to send to the Academy of Sciences written descriptions and drawings of everything he had investigated and of any preserved specimens, all cataloged, as well as an accounting of all his activities. These were then to be forwarded to the Academy of Sciences. In addition to his research, Steller carried heavy administrative obligations for the formidable logistics of the whole enterprise, the scope of which is also spelled out in the instructions. Number 2, for example, identifies the five people in his party for whom Steller had the responsibility, to be augmented in Irkutsk by three sluzhivs to serve as escorts and additional helpers. It was up to Steller to look out for them all, to stand up for them if they encountered problems, and, above all, to see to it that they received their meager pay and rations, preferably on time. Since both pay and provisions had to first be requested from various government agencies and shipped out where they were to be allotted, a horrendous amount of paperwork had to be constantly generated, sent out, and followed up with more.
Further tasks, also requiring much paperwork, were the procuring of podvodi—that is, wagons or sleds—and their drivers; of boats and rafts and their crews; and of other workmen; and the purchasing or hiring of horses. At least from Yakutsk on, cattle and their drivers were part of the convoy, too. Steller’s lament in the “Description of Irkutsk” that he would be able to gather so much more valuable information if he did not have to spend so much time fighting for his pay expresses his frustration. He was even prompted to complain to Schumacher, the academy’s librarian, that a “person doesn’t need a tongue in these parts because everything is done in writing; I venture to say I could earn my living as a government clerk if I had to in the future” (Quellen 3:414).
All these memoranda, copies of memoranda, answers to memoranda, reminders, letters, and so on were of course handwritten, and each document painstakingly first repeated the contents of the document in response to which it was generated. And all that writing had to be done in cramped, occasionally sooty quarters, on board a boat amid chunks of ice, or by a campfire at night. In conjunction with the instructions, Steller was given 161 sheets of copied materials (document 26, Quellen 3:94–95). No wonder he needed an extra podvoda just to transport the books, papers, and instruments for his work (instruction 3). Since Steller’s Russian was limited, the student Gorlanov served as his translator and scribe of the various memoranda to various local government offices as well as the official reports to the Academy of Sciences and the High Governing Senate, but Steller of course first had to generate them.
These logistical challenges were on a par with those posed by the environment and the people. But because he was most in his element in nature, he seems not to have resented her challenges. Though a rudimentary system of trails and way stations, zimovia, had been established even on that most challenging section between Yakutsk and Okhotsk, horses still got irretrievably stuck in bogs, and at least twice Steller found himself lost in the forest. In the face of rivers choked with ice, seemingly bottomless bogs, steep mountains, bloodthirsty insects, incompetent helpers, and extreme weather, he almost always kept his cool and his good spirits. Although suffering diarrhea after another dunking in a raging river, he could still appreciate his good stomach and observe that he remained diligent and merry (143).
It should be clear from the wealth of information Steller gathered about the country and its people that he more than fulfilled his obligations to the state as outlined in the instructions he was given. While the state that employed him may not have benefited fully from his findings, these findings established a baseline for the research of later academicians and scholars, and they should still be of considerable interest to present-day scholars and to lay readers as well. It is our hope that you who read this find it so.
Notes
1. Cossacks, term applied to a great variety of men—adventurers, outcasts, restless misfits, homeless men—all of whom served either on horse or foot to supplement the streltsy. Pushkarev.
2. Originally a small fort in Russia and Siberia, encircled by twelve- to fifteen-foot-high palisades made from sharpened tree trunks, with a garrison. Later many of these forts developed into towns and cities.
3. Established in 1637 as a prikaz. In 1711 Peter the Great transferred many of its functions to the Office of the Guberniya of Siberia, in 1730 Empress Anna reestablished some of its powers, and in 1763 Catherine II abolished this office for good. Dmytryshyn, Crownhart-Vaughan, and Vaughan, 18–19.
4. All native men of Siberia and northern Asia between the ages of eighteen and fifty except the crippled, the blind, and converts to Russian Orthodox Christianity were required to take the oath of allegiance to the czar and to pay an annual yasak in furs. The amount varied depending on availability. Early in the seventeenth century, when sables were still abundant, the assessed quota was twenty-two sables per man per year. Dmytryshyn in Wood, 31. As the supply of fur became exhausted, yasak began to be paid in cash. Collection was often taken by force and marked by violence. “In 1695, the Siberian Office [again] instructed officials not to ‘execute or torture natives’ and noted that many had been killed, whipped to death or tortured, that bribes had been demanded from them and livestock stolen, leading to the ‘ruin of many tribute-paying people.’” Hartley, 38–39. Before Cossacks and hunters began to colonize Siberia, it was the form of levy the Mongol Tartars imposed on subject people. Czars were simply following the practice that existed in lands under Mongol rule. Hartley, 37–39.
5. Chief administrator of a district with far-reaching legal, economic, administrative, and police powers; term is old Slavic, originally meaning military commander, leader of warriors.
