From Paris to New York by Land

by Harry De Windt

[88] These vessels also carry passengers.

It has already been shown in a previous chapter that the natural resources of the Yakutsk district would probably repay an extension of the Trans-Siberian line to this now inaccessible portion of the Tsar's dominions. Indeed it is more than probable that in a few years the mineral wealth of this province, to say nothing of its agricultural possibilities, will render the construction of a line imperative, at any rate as far as the city of Yakutsk. The prolongation of this as far north as Gijiga is no idle dream, for I have frequently heard it seriously discussed, and even advocated, by the merchant princes of Irkutsk. A railway to Gijiga would open up Kamtchatka, with its valuable minerals, furs, and lumber, and also Nelkan, near Ayan, where gold has lately been discovered in such quantities that a well-known Siberian millionaire has actually commenced a narrow-gauge railway about two hundred miles in length, to connect the new gold-fields with the sea. Even this miniature line is to cost an enormous sum, for it must pass through a region as mountainous and densely wooded as the eight hundred odd miles which separate Yakutsk from the coast. But although this latter section of the Franco-American line, short as it is, would entail a fabulous outlay, there is here, at any rate, some raison-d'être for a railway, viz., the vast and varied resources of the region through which it would pass, whereas to the north of Gijiga on the one hand, and Verkhoyansk on the other, we enter a land of desolation, thousands of miles in extent, chiefly composed of tundra, as yet unprospected, it is true; but probably as unproductive, minerally and agriculturally, as an Irish bog. The reader is already aware that tundra is impassable in summer, for its consistency is then that of a wet bath sponge. The foot sinks in over the knee at every step, and a good walker can scarcely cover a mile within the hour. In winter the hard and frozen surface affords good going for a dog-sled and could, no doubt, be made to support a rolling mass of metal; but even then I doubt whether the thaws and floods of springtime would not find the rails and sleepers at sixes and sevens. This opinion is, of course, purely theoretical, for the experiment of laying a line of such magnitude under such hopeless conditions has yet to be tried.

Chat Moss in England is the nearest approach I can think of to these Siberian swamps, but the railway across the former is only four miles long, and cost, I am told, something like thirty thousand pounds. At this rate the tundra section of the Bering Straits Railway would alone involve an outlay of twenty million sterling; probably far more, for every foot of timber for the roadway would have to be imported into this treeless waste. And how is this expenditure going to be repaid by these barren deserts, in winter of ice, and in summer of mud and mosquitoes. Let another Klondike be discovered near, say, Sredni-Kolymsk, and I have no doubt that surveys for a line to this place would be commenced to-morrow by the Russian Government, but neither gold, not any other mineral has yet been found so far north in anything like paying quantities. Draw a straight line on the map from Verkhoyansk to Gijiga and it will divide the southern (or productive) portion of Siberia from the northern (and useless) wastes about three thousand miles in length, which a Paris-New York railroad would have to cross.[89]

[89] "Around the North Pole lies a broad belt of inhospitable land, a desert which owes its special character rather to water than to the sun. Towards the Pole this desert gradually loses itself in fields of ice; towards the south in dwarfed woods, becoming itself a field of snow and ice when the long winter sets in, while stunted trees struggle for existence only in the deepest valleys or on the sunniest slopes. This region is the tundra. Our language possesses no synonym for the word tundra. Our fatherland possesses no such track of country, for the tundra is neither heath nor moor, neither marsh nor fen, neither highlands nor sand-dunes, neither moss nor morass, though in many places it may resemble one or other of these. 'Moss Steppes' some one has attempted to name it, but the expression is only satisfactory to those who have grasped the idea of steppe in its widest sense."—Brehm.

A so-called prospectus issued by a syndicate, inviting the public to subscribe for a "preliminary survey" for a Franco-American line, came under my notice the other day. Here is an extract:

"Ten years ago the name Siberia called up a picture of wastes of snow and ice. To-day the same Siberia is a land filled with thriving villages, producing grain and various vegetables; that great compeller of civilisation, the railway, has broken down the bars between the world and Siberia. Besides its countless resources of the soil, besides its rivers filled with valuable fish, and its forests inhabited by fur-bearing animals, Siberia is now beginning to show to the world its resources of gold, iron, copper, manganese, quicksilver, platinum, and coal, the yearly output of which is but a feeble index of what it will be when the deposits are developed."

All this is very true regarding certain portions of Siberia. The Amur, Altai, Yenesei, and even Yakutsk provinces. But although the writer goes on to enlarge upon the boundless possibilities which would be opened up by the construction of a railway from Europe to America, he fails to mention that it would have to traverse an Arctic and unproductive Sahara thousands of miles in extent.

Some enthusiastic visionaries mentioned in an earlier portion of this chapter have laid stress on the fact that the passenger traffic over this portion of the line would be enormous, that surging crowds of sea-sick victims would gladly endure even three weeks in a train in preference to a stormy passage across the Atlantic, and so forth. But I fancy a moment's serious thought will show the absurdity of this theory. In the first place a journey by rail from Paris to New York would certainly occupy over a month under the most favourable conditions, for while in summer time all might be comparatively plain sailing, gales, snow-drifts, and blizzards would surely, judging from our own experiences, seriously hamper the winter traffic, especially along the coast. If this leviathan railway is ever constructed it must, in the opinion of the ablest Russian engineers, depend solely upon (1) the transport of merchandise, and (2) the development of the now ice-locked regions it will traverse. The scheme has never been, as many people seem to imagine, simply to convey passengers and their belongings from one terminus to the other, for even Jules Verne would probably hesitate to predict the existence of this line as one of restaurants and sleeping-cars.

But let us assume that the railway has actually reached East Cape at a cost of, say, fifty millions sterling from Irkutsk, which is probably a low estimate. Here we are confronted by another colossal difficulty, the passage of Bering Straits, which (at the narrowest part) are forty miles across. Here my friends the theorists have again been very busy, and all kinds of schemes have been suggested for the negotiation of this stumbling-block, from a bridge to balloons. Both are equally wild and impracticable, although the former has been warmly advocated by a Parisian gentleman, who never having been nearer even Berlin than the Gare du Nord, can scarcely be expected to know much about the climatic conditions of North-Eastern Siberia. As a matter of fact, the mightiest stone and iron structure ever built would not stand the break-up of the ice here in the spring time for one week. A tunnel could no doubt be made, for the depth of the Straits nowhere exceeds twenty-seven fathoms, and the Diomede Islands could be conveniently utilised for purposes of ventilation. But what would such a subway cost? And above all, where is the money coming from to repay its construction?

In Northern Alaska almost the same difficulties would be met with as in Arctic Siberia, for here also spongy tundra covers enormous tracts of country. A company has, however, been formed for the purpose of laying a line between Iliamna on Cook's Inlet and Nome City which will, when completed, be really useful and profitable. Cook's Inlet is navigable throughout the year, and it is proposed to run a line of steamers from Seattle on Puget Sound to this port, where passengers will be able to embark on a comfortable train for Nome instead of facing a long and painful journey by dog-sled. I understand that this work has actually been commenced by the "Trans-Alaskan Railway Company," but not with any idea of connection with a possible Siberian system. This will be merely a local railway, which, judging from the increasing prosperity of Nome, and the fact that the line will pass through the rich Copper River country, should certainly repay its shareholders with interest. The extension of the White Pass Railway as far as Dawson City is only a question of time, but the idea of prolonging it to Bering Straits was not even hinted at when I was in Alaska.