“Concerning this animal there are very different reports. The heathens of Jakuti, Tungusi, and Ostiacki, say that they continually, or at least, by reason of the very hard frosts, mostly live under ground, where they go backwards and forwards; to confirm which they tell us, that they have often seen the earth heaved up when one of these beasts was upon the march, and after he was passed, the place sink in, and thereby make a deep pit. They further believe, that if this animal comes so near to the surface of the frozen earth as to smell the air, he immediately dies, which they say is the reason that several of them are found dead on the high banks of the river, where they unawares came out of the ground.
“This is the opinion of the Infidels concerning these beasts, which are never seen.
“But the old Siberian Russians affirm, that the Mammuth is very like the Elephant, with this difference only, that the teeth of the former are firmer, and not so straight as those of the latter. They also are of opinion that there were Elephants in this country before the Deluge, when this climate was warmer, and that their drowned bodies, floating on the surface of the water of that flood, were at last washed and forced into subterranean cavities; but that after this universal deluge, the air, which before was warm, was changed to cold, and that these bones have lain frozen in the earth ever since, and so are preserved from putrefaction till they thaw, and come to light, which is no very unreasonable conjecture, though it is not absolutely necessary that this climate should have been warmer before the Flood, since the carcases of the drowned elephants were very likely to float from other places several hundred miles distant to this country in the great deluge which covered the surface of the whole earth. Some of these teeth, which doubtless have lain the whole summer on the shore, are entirely black and broken, and can never be restored to their former condition. But those which are found in good case, are as good as ivory, and are accordingly transported to all parts of Muscovy, where they are used to make combs, and all other such-like things, instead of ivory.
“The above-mentioned person also told me that he once found two teeth in one head that weighed above twelve Russian pounds, which amount to four hundred German pounds; so that these animals must of necessity be very large, though a great many lesser teeth are found. By all that I could gather from the heathens, no person ever saw one of these beasts alive, or can give any account of its shape; so that all we heard said on this subject arises from bare conjecture only.”
It is possible this recital may seem suspicious to some readers. We have ourselves felt some difficulty in believing that this head and foot were taken from the ice, with the flesh and skin, when we consider that the animal to which they belonged has been extinct probably more than ten thousand years. But the assertion of Ysbrants Ides is confirmed by respectable testimony of more recent date. In 1800, a Russian naturalist, Gabriel Sarytschew, travelled in northern Siberia. Having arrived in the neighbourhood of the Frozen Ocean, he found upon the banks of the Alasœia, which discharges itself into this sea, the entire body of a Mammoth enveloped in a mass of ice. The body was in a complete state of preservation, for the permanent contact of the ice had kept out the air and prevented decomposition. It is well known that at zero and below it, animal substances will not putrefy, so that in our households we can preserve all kinds of animal food as long as we can surround them with ice; and this is precisely what happened to the Mammoth found by Gabriel Sarytschew in the ice of the Alasœia. The rolling waters had disengaged the mass of ice which had imprisoned the monstrous pachyderm for thousands of years. The body, in a complete state of preservation and covered with its flesh as well as its entire hide, to which long hairs adhered in certain places, found itself, again, nearly erect on its four feet.
The Russian naturalist Adams, in 1806, made a discovery quite as extraordinary as the preceding. We borrow his account from a paper by Dr. Tilesius in the “Memoirs of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg” (vol. v.). In 1799, a Tungusian chief, Ossip Schumachoff, while seeking for mammoth-horns on the banks of the lake Oncoul, perceived among the blocks of ice a shapeless mass, not at all resembling the large pieces of floating wood which are commonly found there. The following year he noticed that this mass was more disengaged from the blocks of ice, and had two projecting parts, but he was still unable to make out what it could be. Towards the end of the following summer one entire side of the animal and one of his tusks were quite free from the ice. But the succeeding summer of 1802, which was less warm and more windy than common, caused the Mammoth to remain buried in the ice, which had scarcely melted at all. At length, towards the end of the fifth year (1803), the ice between the earth and the Mammoth having melted faster than the rest, the plane of its support became inclined; and this enormous mass fell by its own weight on a bank of sand. In the month of March, 1804, Schumachoff cut off the horns (the tusks), which he exchanged with the merchant Bultenof for goods of the value of fifty roubles (not quite eight pounds sterling). It was not till two years after this that Mr. Adams, of the St. Petersburg Academy, who was travelling with Count Golovkin, sent by the Czar of Russia on an embassy to China, having been told at Jakutsk of the discovery of an animal of extraordinary magnitude on the shores of the Frozen Ocean, near the mouth of the river Lena, betook himself to the place. He found the Mammoth still in the same place, but altogether mutilated. The Jakoutskis of the neighbourhood had cut off the flesh, with which they fed their dogs; wild beasts, such as white bears, wolves, wolverines, and foxes, had also fed upon it, and traces of their footsteps were seen around. The skeleton, almost entirely cleared of its flesh, remained whole, with the exception of one fore-leg. The spine of the back, one scapula, the pelvis, and the other three limbs were still held together by the ligaments and by parts of the skin; the other scapula was found not far off. The head was covered with a dry skin; one of the ears was furnished with a tuft of hairs; the balls of the eyes were still distinguishable; the brain still occupied the cranium, but seemed dried up; the point of the lower lip had been gnawed and the upper lip had been destroyed so as to expose the teeth; the neck was furnished with a long flowing mane; the skin, of a dark-grey colour, covered with black hairs and a reddish wool, was so heavy that ten persons found great difficulty in transporting it to the shore. There was collected, according to Mr. Adams, more than thirty-six pounds’ weight of hair and wool which the white bears had trod into the ground, while devouring the flesh. This Mammoth was a male so fat and well fed, according to the assertion of the Tungusian chief, that its belly hung down below the joints of its knees. Its tusks were nine feet six inches in length, measured along the curve, and its head without the tusks weighed 414 pounds avoirdupois.
Mr. Adams took every care to collect all that remained of this unique specimen of an ancient creation, and forwarded the parts to St. Petersburg, a distance of 11,000 versts (7,330 miles). He succeeded in re-purchasing what he believed to be the tusks at Jakutsk, and the Emperor of Russia, who became the owner of this precious relic, paid him 8,000 roubles. The skeleton is deposited in the Museum of the Academy of St. Petersburg, and the skin still remains attached to the head and the feet. “We have yet to find,” says Cuvier, “any individual equal to it.”