Children were met with in great numbers, healthy and thriving. In the inner tent the older children went nearly naked, and I saw them go out from it without shoes or other covering and run between the tents on the hoarfrost-covered ground. The younger were carried on the shoulders both of men and women, and were then so wrapped up that they resembled balls of skin. The children were treated with marked friendliness, and the older ones were never heard to utter an angry word. I purchased here a large number of household articles and dresses, which I shall describe further on.
On the morning of the 9th September we endeavoured to steam on, but were soon compelled by the dense fog to lie-to again at a ground-ice, which, when the fog lightened, was found to have stranded quite close to land. The depth here was eleven metres. At this place we lay till the morning of the 10th. The beach, was formed of a sandbank,[235] which immediately above high-water mark was covered with a close grassy turf, a proof that the climate here, notwithstanding the neighbourhood of the pole of cold, is much more favourable to the development of vegetation than even the most favoured parts of the west coast of Spitzbergen. Farther inland was seen a very high, but snow-free, range of hills, and far beyond them some high snow-covered mountain summits. No glaciers were found here, though I consider it probable that small ones may be found in the valleys between the high fells in the interior. Nor were any erratic blocks found either in the interior of the coast country or along the strand bank. Thus it is probable that no such ice-covered land as Greenland for the present bounds the Siberian Polar Sea towards the north. At two places at the level of the sea in the neighbourhood of our anchorage the solid rock was bare. There it formed perpendicular shore cliffs, nine to twelve metres high, consisting of magnesian slate, limestone more or less mixed with quartz, and silicious slate. The strata were nearly perpendicular, ran from north to south, and did not contain any fossils. From a geological point of view therefore these rocks were of little interest. But they were abundantly covered with lichens, and yielded to Dr. Almquist important contributions to a knowledge of the previously quite unknown lichen flora of this region.
The harvest of the higher land plants on the other hand was, in consequence of the far advanced season of the year, inconsiderable, if also of great scientific interest, as coming from a region never before visited by any botanist. In the sea Dr. Kjellman dredged without success for algæ. Of the higher animals we saw only a walrus and some few seals, but no land mammalia. Lemmings must however occasionally occur in incredible numbers, to judge by the holes and passages, excavated by these animals, by which the ground is crossed in all directions. Of birds the phalarope was still the most common species, especially at sea, where in flocks of six or seven it swam incessantly backwards and forwards between the pieces of ice.
No tents were met with in the neighbourhood of the vessel's anchorage, but at many places along the beach there were seen marks of old encampments, sooty rolled stones which had been used in the erection of the tents, broken household articles, and above all remains of the bones of the seal, reindeer, and walrus. At one place, a large number of walrus skulls lay in a ring, possibly remains from an entertainment following a large catch. Near the place where the tents had stood, at the mouth of a small stream not yet dried up or frozen, Dr. Stuxberg discovered some small mounds containing burnt bones. The cremation had been so complete that only one of the pieces of bone that were found could be determined by Dr. Almquist. It was a human tooth. After cremation the remains of the bones and the ash had been collected in an excavation, and covered first with turf and then with small flat stones. The encampments struck me as having been abandoned only a few years ago, and even the collections of bones did not appear to me to be old. But we ought to be very cautious when we endeavour in the Arctic regions to estimate the age of an old encampment, because in judging of the changes which the surface of the earth undergoes with time we are apt to be guided by our experience from more southerly regions. To how limited an extent this experience may be utilised in the high north is shown by RINK'S assertion that on Greenland at some of the huts of the Norwegian colonists, which have been deserted for centuries, footpaths can still be distinguished,[237] an observation to which I would scarcely give credence, until I had myself seen something similar at the site of a house in the bottom of Jacobshaven ice-fjord in northwestern Greenland, which had been abandoned for one or two centuries. Here footpaths as sharply defined as if they had been trampled yesterday ran from the ruin in different directions. It may therefore very readily happen that the encampments in the neighbourhood of our present anchorage were older than we would be inclined at first sight to suppose. No refuse heaps of any importance were seen here.
This was the first time that any vessel had lain-to on this coast. Our arrival was therefore evidently considered by the natives a very remarkable occurrence, and the report of it appears to have spread very rapidly. For though there were no tents in the neighbourhood, we had many visitors. I still availed myself of the opportunity of procuring by barter a large number of articles distinctive of the Chukches' mode of life. Eight years before I had collected and purchased a large number of ethnographical articles, and I was now surprised at the close correspondence there was between the household articles purchased from the Chukches, and those found in Greenland in old Eskimo graves.
My traffic with the natives was on this occasion attended with great difficulty. For I suffered from a sensible want of the first condition for the successful prosecution of a commercial undertaking, goods in demand. Because, during the expeditions of 1875 and 1876, I found myself unable to make use of the small wares I carried with me for barter with the natives, and found that Russian paper-money was readily taken. I had, at the departure of the Vega from Sweden, taken with me only money, not wares intended for barter. But money was of little use here. A twenty-five rouble note was less valued by the Chukches than a showy soap-box, and a gold or silver coin less than tin or brass buttons. I could, indeed, get rid of a few fifty-öre pieces, but only after I had first adapted them by boring to take the place of earrings.
The only proper wares for barter I now had were tobacco and Dutch clay pipes. Of tobacco I had only some dozen bundles, taken from a parcel which Mr. Sibiriakoff intended to import into Siberia by the Yenisej. Certain as I was of reaching the Pacific this autumn, I scattered my stock of tobacco around me with so liberal a hand that it was soon exhausted, and my Chukch friends' wants satisfied for several weeks. I therefore, as far as this currency was concerned, already when-the Vega was beset, suffered the prodigal's fate of being soon left with an empty purse. Dutch clay pipes, again, I had in great abundance, from the accident that two boxes of these pipes, which were to have been imported into Siberia with the expedition of 1876, did not reach Trondhjem until the Ymer had sailed from that town. They were instead taken on the Vega, and now, though quite too fragile for the hard fingers of Chukches, answered well for smaller bargains, as gifts of welcome to a large number of natives collected at the vessel, and as gifts to children in order to gain the favour of their parents. I besides distributed a large quantity of silver coin with King Oscar's effigy, in order, if any misfortune overtook us, to afford a means of ascertaining the places we had visited.
For the benefit of future travellers I may state that the wares most in demand are large sewing and darning needles, pots, knives (preferably large), axes, saws, boring tools and other iron tools, linen and woollen shirts (preferably of bright colours, but also white), neckerchiefs, tobacco and sugar. To these may be added the spirits which are in so great request among all savages; a currency of which, indeed, there was great abundance on the Vega, but which I considered myself prevented from making use of. In exchange for this it is possible to obtain, in short, anything whatever from many of the natives, but by no means from all, for even here there are men who will not taste spirits, but with a gesture of disdain refuse the glass that is offered them. The Chukches are otherwise shrewd and calculating men of business, accustomed to study their own advantage. They have been brought up to this from childhood through the barter which they carry on between America and Siberia. Many a beaver-skin that comes to the market at Irbit belongs to an animal that has been caught in America, whose skin has passed from hand to hand among the wild men of America and Siberia, until it finally reaches the Russian merchant. For this barter a sort of market is held on an island in Behring's Straits. At the most remote markets in Polar America, a beaver-skin is said some years ago to have been occasionally exchanged for a leaf of tobacco.[238] An exceedingly beautiful black fox-skin was offered to me by a Chukch for a pot. Unfortunately I had none that I could dispense with. Here, too, prices have risen. When the Russians first came to Kamchatka, they got eight sable-skins for a knife, and eighteen for an axe, and yet the Kamchadales laughed at the credulous foreigners who were so easily deceived. At Yakutsk, when the Russians first settled there, a pot was even sold for as many sable-skins as it could hold.[239]
During the night before the 10th September, the surface of the sea was covered with a very thick sheet of newly-frozen ice, which was broken up again in the neighbourhood of the vessel by blocks of old ice drifting about. The pack itself appeared to have scattered a little. We therefore weighed anchor to continue our voyage. At first a détour towards the west was necessary to get round a field of drift-ice. Here too, however, our way was barred by a belt of old ice, which was bound together so firmly by the ice that had been formed in the course of the night, that a couple of hours' work with axes and ice-hatchets was required to open a channel through it. On the other side of this belt of ice we came again into pretty open water, but the fog, instead, became so dense that we had again to lie-to at a ground-ice, lying farther out to the sea but more to the west than our former resting-place. On the night before the 11th there was a violent motion among the ice. Fortunately the air cleared in the morning, so that we could hold on our course among pretty open ice, until on the approach of night we were obliged as usual to lie-to at a ground-ice.