The wandering Koriaks have Arab features, and small eyes, shaded with thick eye-brows; they are not so stout nor so tall as the stationary Koriaks; they are also less robust and courageous.
And yet, the nomads despise the sedentary tribe as slaves, and these quietly accept this servility. When a wandering Koriak presents himself to a sedentary one, the latter cringes to him, loads him with presents, and pockets all the disdain and insult hurled at him by his guest, without a word of reproach.
The nomads are very jealous of their wives. They slay them at once when caught in adultery, and sometimes even on a bare suspicion of infidelity. They take offence at everything. Their wives must appear sluttish and begrimed, for fear of irritating their husbands with too many luring charms. They never wash nor comb themselves; they never have any colour on their cheeks. “Why should they varnish themselves?” their husbands ask, “unless they want to please others.” They therefore, sometimes, hide really good clothing under a bundle of rags.
The manners of the fixed Koriaks are quite different. They receive strangers, in the way mentioned of the Laplanders by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and they would kill a guest who would refuse to take his place in the conjugal bed.
The Koriaks, whether vagrant or stationary, like all the inhabitants of Kamtchatka, have no religion. “A chief of these tribes,” says Krachenninikov, “with whom I had an opportunity of conversing, had no idea of the Divinity.” The Koriaks, however, fear an evil spirit, and sometimes sacrifice to him a reindeer, but without the object of satisfying themselves whether this sacrifice should bring them good or evil.
Could the name of worship be given to a superstitious custom, very prevalent among the stationary Koriaks, which consists in giving a place in the conjugal bed to stones swathed in clothing? “An inhabitant of Oukinka had two of these stones; a large one, which he called his wife, and a little one, which was his son. I asked him,” said Krachenninikov, “the reason of this strange act. He told me that, one day, when his body was covered with an eruption, he had found his great stone on the bank of a river; as he desired to take it, it blew on him like a human being, and, through fear, he cast it into the river. From this moment his malady got worse until the end of a year, when, having gone to search for the stone at the place he had thrown it, he was astonished to see it again at some distance from the spot, lying on a great flat stone with a little one beside it. He took them both, carried them to his dwelling, dressed them, and soon after his malady disappeared. Since that time, he said, I have always carried the little stone with me, and I love my stone wife more than my living one.”
This story of Krachenninikov shows to what extent of folly, the need of a belief in a Divinity may drive a man whose mind is neither enlightened nor directed.
The Kamtchatdales have dark skins, broad and flat faces and squat noses.[21] They have a fishy odour; they exhale also a strong scent of sea birds, and sometimes of musk, caused by their eating of the animal containing it without preparation.[22]
[21] Steller.
[22] Abbé Chappe.