FOOTNOTES:
[60] Note 46.
[PART III.]
THE VARIOUS EXPEDITIONS.
[CHAPTER XII.]
THE ARCTIC EXPEDITIONS.—THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE.—SEVERE CRITICISMS ON NORDENSKJÖLD.
The Arctic expeditions made during the period from 1734 to 1743 have only in part any connection with the object of this work. These expeditions were, it is true, planned by Bering, and it was due to his activity and perseverance that they were undertaken. He secured vessels, men, and means, and had charge of the first unsuccessful attempt; he was responsible to the government, and in his zeal went just as far as his instructions would allow him. But his own special task soon taxed his time too heavily to permit him to assume charge of the Arctic expeditions. They were not carried out until several years after his departure from Yakutsk,—after he had ceased to be their leader. We have already shown Bering's important relation to them, something which has never before been done in West European literature. Hence our object, namely, to give Bering his dues, may therefore best be accomplished by giving a short account of the results achieved by these expeditions.
The world has never witnessed a more heroic geographical enterprise than these Arctic expeditions. In five or six different directions—from the Petchora, the Obi, the Yenesei, and the Lena—the unknown coasts of the Old World were attacked.[61] For a whole decade these discoverers struggled with all the obstacles which a terrible climate and the resources of a half developed country obliged them to contend with. They surmounted these obstacles. The expeditions were renewed, two, three, yes, even four times. If the vessels were frozen in, they were hauled upon shore the next spring, repaired, and the expedition continued. And if these intrepid fellows were checked in their course by masses of impenetrable ice, they continued their explorations on dog sledges, which here for the first time were employed in Arctic exploration. Cold, scurvy, and every degree of discomfort wrought sad havoc among them, but many survived the long polar winter in miserable wooden huts or barracks. Nowhere has Russian hardiness erected for itself a more enduring monument.
It was especially the projecting points and peninsulas in this region that caused these explorers innumerable difficulties. These points and capes had hitherto been unknown. The crude maps of this period represented the Arctic coast of Siberia as almost a straight line. It was first necessary for the navigators to send cartographers to these regions, build beacons and sea-marks, establish magazines, collect herds of reindeer, which, partly as an itinerant food supply, and partly to be used as an eventual means of conveyance, followed along the coast with the vessels, while here and there, especially on the Taimyr peninsula, small fishing stations were established for supplying the vessels.
In the summer of 1737 Malygin and Skuratoff crossed the Kara Sea and sailed up the Gulf of Obi. In the same year the able Ofzyn charted the coast between the Obi and the Yenesei, but was reduced to the rank of a common sailor, because in Berezov he had sought the company of the exiled Prince Dolgoruki.
In the year previous, Pronchisheff all but succeeded in doubling the Taimyr peninsula, and reached the highest latitude (77° 29') that had been reached by water before the Vega expedition. But it was especially in the second attempt, from 1738 to 1743, that the greatest results were attained. The two cousins, Chariton and Dmitri Laptjef, who were equipped anew and vested with great authority, attacked the task of doubling the Taimyr and Bering peninsulas with renewed vigor. By extensive sledging expeditions, the former linked his explorations to those undertaken by Minin and Sterlegoff from the west, and his mate, Chelyuskin, in 1742, planted his feet on the Old World's most northerly point, and thus relegated the story of a certain Jelmerland, said to connect northern Asia with Novaia Zemlia, to that lumber-room which contains so many ingenious cartographical ideas. But even these contributions to science were, perhaps, surpassed by those of Dmitri Laptjef. As Lassenius's successor he charted, in three summers, the Siberian coast from the Lena to the great Baranoff Cliff, a distance of thirty-seven degrees. On this coast, toward the last, he found himself in a narrow strait, from ten to twenty yards wide, and he did not stop until there was scarcely a bucketful of water between the polar ice and the rocky shore. But Cape Schelagskii, on the northeast coast, where Deshneff a century before had shown the way, he did not succeed in doubling.
As a result of the labors of this great Northern Expedition, the northern coast of the Old World got substantially the same cartographical outline that it now has. The determinations of latitude made by the Russian officers were very accurate, but those of longitude, based on nautical calculations, were not so satisfactory. Their successors, Wrangell, Anjou, Middendorff, and even Nordenskjöld, have therefore found opportunity to make corrections of but minor importance, especially in regard to longitude.
But it is necessary to dwell a little longer on these expeditions. Their principal object was not so much the charting of northern Siberia as the discovery and navigation of the Northeast passage. From this point of view alone they must be considered. This is the connecting thought, the central point in these scattered labors. They were an indirect continuation of the West European expeditions for the same purpose, but far more rational than these. For this reason Bering had, on his expedition of reconnoissance (1725-30), first sought that thoroughfare between the two hemispheres without which a Northeast and a Northwest passage could not exist. For this reason also he had, on his far-sighted plan, undertaken the navigation of the Arctic seas, where this had not already been done by Deshneff, and for this same reason the Admiralty sought carefully to link their explorations to the West European termini, on the coast of Novaia Zemlia as well as Japan. Moreover, the discovery of a Northeast passage was the raison d'être of these expeditions.
This alone promised the empire such commercial and political advantages that the enormous expenditures and the frightful hardships which these expeditions caused Siberia, might be justified. For this reason the government, summer after summer, drove its sailors on along the Taimyr and Bering peninsulas; for this reason, in 1740, it enjoined upon D. Laptjef to make a last attempt to double northeast Asia from Kamchatka, and this would undoubtedly have been accomplished if the unfortunate death of Bering had not occurred shortly after;[62] and for this reason, also, the government caused the charting of the coast by land after all nautical attempts had miscarried.
Any extended documentary proof of the correctness of this view must be considered unnecessary. The instructions expressly state the object of the expedition: to ascertain with certainty whether vessels could find a passage or not. Müller says the same. Scholars like Middendorff, Von Baer, and Dr. Petermann look upon these expeditions from the same standpoint, and have seen fit to give them the place of honor among all the geographical efforts in the Northeast passage.[63] Some Swedish scholars alone have found it necessary to maintain a different view. Dr. A. Stuxberg and Prof. Th.
M. Fries in Upsala have published accounts of the history of the Northeast passage, in which not a word about these expeditions is found. Between the days of Vlaming and Cook, from 1688 until 1778, they find nothing to be said of explorations in this part of the world, and the charting of these waters does not, in their opinion, seem to have any connection with the history of the Northeast passage. Prof. Fries attempts to justify this strange method of treatment by the assertion that those expeditions did not seek the navigation of the Northeast passage, and did not undertake to sail a ship from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But what authority, what historical foundation, have such assertions? Simply because the Russians parceled out this work and went at it in a sensible manner; because they did not loudly proclaim their intention to sail directly from the Dwina to Japan; because they had been instructed by the visionary and fatal attempts of West Europe,—yes, one is almost tempted to say, just because those Russian expeditions alone are of any importance in the early history of the passage, the Swedish historians pass them by; Prof. Fries has even ventured the assertion that the discovery of the Northeast passage by these Russian expeditions, one hundred and thirty-seven years before Nordenskjöld, is a discovery hitherto unsurmised by anyone but the author of this work. I am not disposed to wrangle about words, and still less to interfere with anyone's well-earned privileges. By the discovery of the Northeast passage, I understand that work of geographical exploration, that determination of the distribution of land and water along the northern boundary of the Old World, that traversing and charting of the coast which showed the existence of the passage, but not the nautical utilization of it. This is the European interpretation of this question. In any other sense McClure did not discover the Northwest passage. If it is permissible to speak of the discovery of the Northeast passage after the time of Bering and the Great Northern Expedition, it is equally permissible to speak of the discovery of the Northwest passage after the time of the great English expeditions. If some future Nordenskjöld should take it into his head to choose these waters as the scene of some great nautical achievement, McClure, according to Prof. Fries's historical maxims, could not even find a place in the history of this passage, for it was not his object to sail a ship around the north of the New World. I very much doubt, however, that the Professor would in such a case have the courage to apply his maxims.
Nor does Baron Nordenskjöld concede to the Great Northern Expedition a place in the history of the Northeast passage. The "Voyage of the Vega" is an imposing work, and was written for a large public, but even the author of this work has not been able to rise to an unbiased and just estimate of his most important predecessors. His presentation of the subject of Russian explorations in the Arctic regions, not alone Bering's work and that of the Great Northern Expedition, but also Wrangell's, Lütke's, and Von Baer's, is unfair, unsatisfactory, inaccurate, and hence misleading in many respects. Nordenskjöld's book comes with such overpowering authority, and has had such a large circulation, that it is one's plain duty to point out palpable errors. Nordenskjöld is not very familiar with the literature relating to this subject. He does not know Berch's, Stuckenberg's, or Sokoloff's works. Middendorff's and Von Baer's clever treatises he uses only incidentally. He has restricted himself to making extracts from Wrangell's account, which in many respects is more than incomplete, and does not put these expeditions in the right light. It is now a couple of generations since Wrangell's work was written, which is more a general survey than an historical presentation. While Nordenskjöld devotes page after page to an Othere's, an Ivanoff's, and a Martinier's very indifferent or wholly imaginary voyages around northern Norway, he disposes of the Great Northern Expedition, without whose labors the voyage of the Vega would have been utterly impossible, in five unhappily written pages. One seeks in vain in his work for the principal object of the Northern Expedition,—for the leading idea that made these magnificent enterprises an organic whole, or for a full and just recognition of these able, and, in some respects, unfortunate men, whose labors have so long remained without due appreciation. In spite of Middendorff's interesting account of the cartography of the Taimyr peninsula, Nordenskjöld does not make the slightest attempt to explain whether his corrections of the cartography of this region are corrections of the work of Laptjef and Chelyuskin, or of the misrepresentations of their work made by a later age.
About the charting of Cape Chelyuskin he says: "This was done by Chelyuskin in 1742 on a new sledging expedition, the details of which are but little known; evidently because until the most recent times there has been a doubt in regard to Chelyuskin's statement that he had reached the most northerly point of Asia. After the voyage of the Vega, however, there can no longer be any doubt."[64]
The truth is, ever since 1843,[65] when Middendorff published the preliminary account of his expedition to the Taimyr peninsula, no doubt has prevailed that all who are familiar with Russian literature, or even with German literature, on this subject, have long since been convinced of the fact that the most northern point of Asia was visited and charted a century and a half ago,—that the details of Chelyuskin's expedition, so far from being unknown, are those parts of the work of the Northern Expedition which have been most thoroughly investigated and most often presented. Nordenskjöld's recognition of Chelyuskin's work comes thirty-eight years too late; it has already been treated with quite a different degree of thoroughness than by the few words expended on it in the "Voyage of the Vega." In 1841, Von Baer accused Chelyuskin of having dishonestly given the latitude of the most northerly point of Asia, and these charges Nordenskjöld prints as late as 1881 without any comment whatever. If he had only seen Von Baer's magazine for 1845[66] he would there have found the most unreserved retraction of them and most complete restitution to Chelyuskin on the part of Von Baer, and would thus have escaped ascribing to a man opinions which he renounced a generation ago. Middendorff is likewise very painstaking in presenting the history of these measurements, and is open and frank in his praise. He says: "In the spring of 1742 Chelyuskin crowned his work by sailing from the Khatanga River around the eastern Taimyr peninsula and also around the most northerly point of Asia. He is the only one who a century ago had succeeded in reaching and doubling this promontory. The fact that among many he alone was successful in this enterprise, must be attributed to his great ability. On account of his perseverance, as well as his careful and exact measurements, he stands preëminent among seamen who have labored in the Taimyr country." And furthermore, in 1785, Sokoloff published a very careful and extensive account of these labors, together with an extract from Chelyuskin's diary relating to the charting of the Taimyr peninsula, which later was published in German by Dr. Petermann.[67] The difference in latitude of the northern point of the Taimyr peninsula as determined by Chelyuskin and by Nordenskjöld is scarcely three minutes.[68]