The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II

by A. E. Nordenskiöld

KLAPROTH received a similar account of the mammoth's way of life from the Chinese in the Russo-Chinese frontier and trading town Kyachta. For mammoth ivory was considered to be tusks of the giant rat tien-shu, which is only found in the cold regions along the coast of the Polar Sea, avoids the light, and lives in dark holes in the interior of the earth. Its flesh is said to be cooling and wholesome. Some Chinese literati considered that the discovery of these immense earth rats might even explain the origin of earthquakes.[222]

It was not until the latter half of the last century that a European scientific man had an opportunity of examining a similar find. In the year 1771 a complete rhinoceros, with flesh and hide, was uncovered by a landslip on the river Wilui in 64° N.L. Its head and feet are still preserved at St. Petersburg. All the other parts were allowed to be destroyed for want of means of transport and preservation.[223] What was taken away showed that this primeval rhinoceros (Rhinoceros antiquitatis Blumenbach) had been covered with hair and differed from all now living species of the same family, though strongly resembling them in shape and size. Already, long before the horns of the fossil rhinoceros had attracted the attention of the natives, pieces of these horns were used for the same purposes for which the Chukches employ strips of whalebone, viz. to increase the elasticity of their bows. They were considered at the same time to exert a like beneficial influence on the arrow, tending to make it hit the mark, as, according to the hunter's superstition among ourselves in former days, some cat's claws and owl's eyes placed in the bullet mould had on the ball. The natives believed that the crania and horns of the rhinoceros found along with the remains of the mammoth belonged to

gigantic birds, regarding which there were told in the tents of the Yakut, the Ostyak and the Tunguse many tales resembling that of the bird Roc in the Thousand and One Nights. Ermann and Middendorff even suppose that such finds two thousand years ago gave occasion to Herodotus' account of the Arimaspi and the gold-guarding dragons (Herodotus, Book IV. chap. 27). Certain it is that during the middle ages such "grip-claws" were preserved, as of great value, in the treasuries and art collections of that time, and that they gave rise to many a romantic story in the folk-lore both of the West and East. Even in this century Hedenström, the otherwise sagacious traveller on the Siberian Polar Sea, believed that the fossil rhinoceros' horns were actual, "grip-claws." For he mentions in his oft-quoted work, that he had seen such a claw 20 verschoks (0.9 metre) in length, and when he visited St. Petersburg in 1830, the scientific men there did not succeed in convincing him that his ideas on this subject were incorrect.[224]

A new find of a mammoth mummy was made in 1787, when the natives informed the Russian travellers SARYTSCHEV and MERK, that about 100 versts below the village Alasejsk, situated on the river Alasej running into the Polar Sea, a gigantic animal had been washed out of the sand beds of the beach in an upright posture, undamaged, with hide and hair. The find, however, does not appear to have been thoroughly examined.[225]

In 1799 a Tunguse found on the Tamut Peninsula, which juts out into the sea immediately south-east of the river-arm by which the Lena, steamed up the river, another frozen-in mammoth. He waited patiently five years for the ground thawing so much as that the precious tusks should be uncovered. The softer parts of the animal accordingly were partly torn in pieces and destroyed by beasts of prey and dogs, when the place was closely examined in 1806 by ADAMS the Academician. Only the head and two of the feet were then almost undamaged. The skeleton, part of the hide, a large quantity of long hair and woolly hair a foot and a half long were taken away. How fresh the carcase was may be seen from the fact that parts of the eye could still be clearly distinguished. Similar remains had been found two years before, a little further beyond the mouth of the Lena, but they were neither examined nor removed.[226]

A new find was made in 1839, when a complete mammoth was uncovered by a landslip on the shore of a large lake to the west of the mouth of the Yenisej, seventy versts from the Polar Sea. It was originally almost entire, so that even the trunk appears to have been preserved, to judge by the statement of the natives that a black tongue as long as a month-old reindeer calf was hanging out of the mouth; but it had, when it was removed in 1842, by the care of the merchant TROFIMOV, been already much destroyed.[227]

Next after Trofimov's mammoth come the mammoth-finds of Middendorff and Schmidt. The former was made in 1843 on the bank of the river Tajmur, under 75° N.L.; the latter in 1866 or the Gyda tundra, west of the mouth of the Yenisej in 70° 13' N.L. The soft parts of these finds were not so well preserved as those just mentioned. But the finds at all events had a greater importance for science, from the localities having been thoroughly examined by competent scientific men. Middendorff arrived at the result that the animal found by him had floated from more southerly regions to the place where it was found. Schmidt on the other hand found that the stratum which contained the mammoth rested on a bed of marine clay, containing shells of high northern species of crustacea which still live in the Polar Sea, and that it was covered with strata of sand alternating with beds, from a quarter to half a foot thick, of decayed remains of plants, which completely correspond with the turf beds which are still formed in the lakes of the tundra. Even the very beds of earth and clay in which the bones, pieces of hide, and hair of the mammoth mummy were enclosed, contained pieces of larch, branches and leaves of the dwarf birch (Betulct nana), and of two northern species of willow (Salie glauca, and herbacea).[228] It appears from this that the climate of Siberia at the time when these mammoth-carcases were imbedded, was very nearly the same as the present, and as the stream in whose neighbourhood the find was made is a comparatively inconsiderable tundra river, lying wholly to the north of the limit of trees, there is no probability that the carcase drifted with the spring ice from the wooded region of Siberia towards the north. Schmidt, therefore, supposes that the Siberian elephant, if it did not always live in the northernmost parts of Asia, occasionally wandered thither, in the same way that the reindeer now betakes itself to the coast of the Polar Sea. VON BRANDT, VON SCHMALHAUSEN, and others, had besides already shown that the remains of food which were found in the hollows of the teeth of the Wilui rhinoceros consisted of portions of leaves and needles of species of trees which still grow in Siberia.[229]

Soon after the mammoth found on the Gyda tundra had been examined by Schmidt, similar finds were examined by GERHARD VON MAYDELL, at three different places between the rivers Kolyma and Indigirka, about a hundred kilometres from the Polar Sea. With respect to these finds I can only refer to a paper by L. VON SCHRENCK in the Bulletin of the St. Petersburg Academy, T. XVI. 1871, p. 147.