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Steamer Corwin,
East Cape, Siberia, July 1, 1881.
After getting our search
party on board at Tapkan, we found it impossible, under the conditions of
ice and water that prevailed, to land our Chukchi dog-driver, who lives
there, and who had come off with the party to get his pay. He was in
excellent spirits, however, and told the Captain that since he had received
a gun and a liberal supply of ammunition he did not care where he was put
ashore Cape Serdzekamen, East Cape, or any point along the shore or edge of
the ice-pack would answer, as he could kill plenty of birds and seals, and
get home any time. The dogs and sledges were left in his care at Tapkan, to
be in readiness in case they should be required next winter.
Speeding southward under
steam and sail we reached East Cape yesterday at seven in the morning. By
this time the wind was blowing what seamen call a "living gale," whitening
the sea, and filling up the air with blinding scud. We found good anchorage,
however, back of the high portion of the Cape, opposite a large settlement
of Chukchis. East Cape is a very bold bluff of granite about two thousand
feet high, which evidently has been overswept from the northwest. I eagerly
waited to get off and to climb high enough to make sure of the trends of the
ridges and grooves, and to seek scratches, bossed surfaces, etc. But the
howling, shrieking norther blew all day, and had not abated at eleven
o'clock last night.
This morning Mr. Nelson and I went ashore to see what we could learn. The
village here, through which we passed on our way up the mountain-side,
consists of about fifty huts, built on a small, rocky, terminal moraine, and
so deeply sunk in the face of the hill that the entire village makes
scarcely more show at a distance of a few hundred yards than a group of
marmot burrows. The lower portion of the walls is built of moraine boulders,
the upper portion and the curving beehive roof of driftwood and the ribs of
whales, framed together and covered with walrus hide or dirt.
During the winter the huts are entered by a low
tunnel, so as to exclude the cold air as much as possible. The floor is
simply the natural dirt mixed into a dark hairy paste, with much that is not
at all natural. Fires are made occasionally in the middle of the floor to
cook the small portion of their food that is not eaten raw. Ivory-headed
spears, arrows, seal nets, bags of oil, rags of seal or walrus meat, and
strips of whale blubber and skin, lie on shelves or hang confusedly from the
roof, while puppies and nursing mother-dogs and children may be seen
scattered here and there, or curled snugly in the pots and eating-troughs,
after they have licked them clean, making a kind of squalor that is
picturesque and daring beyond conception.
In all of the huts, however, there are from one
to three or four luxurious bedrooms. The walls, ceiling, and floor are of
soft reindeer skins, and [each polog has] a trough filled with oil for heat
and light. After hunting all day on the ice, making long, rough, stormy
journeys, the Chukchi hunter, muffled and hungry, comes into his burrow,
eats his fill of oil and seal or walrus meat, then strips himself naked and
lies down in his closed fur nest, his polog, in glorious ease, to smoke and
sleep. I was anxious to
reach the top of the cape peninsula to learn surely whether it had been
overswept by an ice-sheet, and if so from what direction, and to study its
glacial conditions in general and the character of the rocks. I therefore
hastened to make the most of my opportunity, and pushed on through the
village towards the lowest part of the divide between the north and south
sides, followed by a crowd of curious boys, who good-naturedly assisted me
whenever I stopped to gather the flowers that I found in bloom. The banks of
a stream coming from a high basin filled with snow was quite richly flowered
with anemones, buttercups, potentillas, drabas, primulas and many species of
dwarf willows, up to a height of about a thousand feet above the level of
the sea; beyond this, spring had hardly made any impression, while nearly a
thousand feet of the highest summits were still covered with deep snow.
Mr. Nelson soon left me in pursuit of a bird, and in crossing a rocky ridge
to come up with me again, he came upon a lot of other game, which seemed to
interest him still more, namely, dead natives scattered about on the rough
stones at one of the cemeteries belonging to the village. The bodies of the
dead, together with whatever articles belonged to them, are simply laid on
the surface of the ground, so that a cemetery is a good field for
collectors. A lot of ivory spears, arrows, dishes of various kinds, and a
stone hammer, formed the least ghastly of his spoils. Leaving Mr. Nelson
alone in his glory, I pushed on to the top of the divide, then followed it
westward to the highest summit on the peninsula, whence I obtained the views
I was in search of.
The dividing ridge all along
the high eastern portion of the peninsula is rounded from nearly north to
south. The curves on the north begin almost at the water's edge, while the
south side is quite precipitous along the shore. There is also a telling
series of parallel grooves and ridges trending north and south across the
peninsula. The highest point is about twenty-five hundred feet above the
sea, and the mountainous portion has been nearly eroded from the continent
and made an island like the two Diomedes, the wide gap of low ground
connecting it with the high mainland being only a few feet above tide-water.
In this low portion there is here and there a rounded upswelling of more
resisting rock, with trends, all telling the same story of a vast
oversweeping ice-flood from the north.
I also had a clear view of the coast mountains
for a hundred miles or thereabouts, all of which are tellingly glaciated in
harmony with the above generalization. Most f the rock is granite with
cleavage planes that cause it to weather rapidly into flat blocks. One
conical black hill, fifteen hundred feet high, is volcanic rock, close-
grained and dense like some kinds of iron ore. I saw an Arctic owl, a big
snowy fellow, fitting his place; also, snow-buntings and linnets. When the
natives saw Mr. Nelson returning without me they said that he had killed me,
not being aware of the fact that he understood their language.
On my way down to the shore I crossed another of
the village cemeteries in a very rough and steep slope of weathered granite,
several hundred feet above the village and to the westward of it. Whole
skeletons or single bones and skulls lay here and there, wedged into chance
positions among the stones, weathering and falling to pieces like the
ivory-pointed spears, arrows, etc., mixed with them. The mountain that they
were lying on is crumbling also - dust to dust. Some of the corpses have had
stones piled on them, and their goods on top of all; others were laid on the
rough rocks with a row of big stones on the lower side to keep them from
rolling down. The damp,
lower portion of the wild north wind, as it was deflected up and over the
slopes and frosty summit of the peninsula, has given birth to a remarkably
beautiful covering of white ice crystals on the windward sides of exposed
boulders, and in some places on the snow. The crystals resemble white
feathers in their aggregate forms, but are firm and icy in structure, and as
evenly and gracefully imbricated on each other over the rough faces of the
rocks as are the feathers on the breast of a bird. The effect is marvelously
beautiful and interesting as seen on those castellated rock- piles, so
frequently found on bleak summits. The points of the feathers grow to
windward, and indicate by their curves all the varying directions pursued by
the interrupted wind as it glints and reverberates about the innumerable
angles of the rock fronts. Thus the rocks, where the exposure to storms is
greatest, and where only ruin seems to be the object, are all the more
lavishly clothed upon with beauty - beauty that grows with and depends upon
the violence of the gale. In like manner do men find themselves enriched by
storms that seem only big with ruin, both in the physical and the moral
worlds. We weighed
anchor and got away at two o'clock in the afternoon and reached the West
Diomede Island village at half-past four. Here we took aboard the boatswain
and Mr. Nelson's man, whom we had left to make observations on the currents,
tides, etc. He was to have been assisted by the natives, but the rough
weather prevented work. About half- past five we left the Diomede for Marcus
Bay in order to land Joe, the Chukchi. The sea is smooth now, at a quarter
of an hour before midnight, and there is a lovely orange-and-gold sunset.
The gulls are still on the wing.
July 2. Clear, calm, sunful; the coast of Asia
is seen to excellent advantage; crowds of glacial peaks, ice-fountains, and
fords far in- reaching. The snow on them is melting fast. About noon
[Opposite Cape Chaplin.] twelve canoes from a large village twenty miles
north of Marcus Bay came off to trade. The schooners that came to this
region to trade were perhaps afraid to touch here. Consequently the Corwin
was the first vessel with trade goods that they have seen this year, and the
business in bone and ivory went on with hearty vigor. A hundred or more
Chukchis were aboard at once, making a stir equal to that of a country fair.
One of them spoke a little whaler English, three quarters of which was
profanity and nearly one quarter slang. He asked the Captain why he did not
like him, [and intimated that] if he should come ashore to his house he, the
Indian, would show him by his treatment that he liked him very much.
We are now, at five in the afternoon,
approaching Marcus Bay, where Joe lives, for the purpose of taking him home.
For his month's work and his team of five dogs he has been paid a box of
hard bread, ten sacks of flour, some calico, a rifle, and a considerable
quantity. of ammunition. Although this is doubtless five times more than he
expected, he does not show any excitement or rise of spirits, but only a
stoical composure, which seems so Arctic and immovable that I doubt whether
he would move a muscle of his face if he were presented with the whole
ship's cargo and the ship itself thrown in.
Steamer Corwin,
St. Lawrence Island, Alaska,
July 3, 1881. St.
Lawrence Island, the largest in Bering Sea, is situated at a distance of
about one hundred and twenty miles off the mouths of the Yukon, and
forty-five miles from the nearest point on the coast of Siberia. It is about
a hundred miles in length from east to west and fifteen miles in average
width; a dreary, cheerless-looking mass of black lava, dotted with
volcanoes, covered with snow, without a single tree, and rigidly bound in
ocean ice for more than half the year.
Inasmuch as it lies broadsidewise to the way
pursued by the great ice-sheet that once filled Bering Sea, it is traversed
by numerous valleys and ridges and low gaps, some of which have been worn
down nearly to the sea-level. Had the glaciation to which it has been
subjected been carried on much longer, then, instead of this one large
island, we should have had several smaller ones. Nearly all of the volcanic
cones with which the central portion of the island is in great part covered,
are post- glacial in age and present well-formed craters but little
weathered as yet. All
the surface of the low grounds, in the glacial gaps, as well as the flat
table-lands, is covered with wet, spongy tundra of mosses and lichens, with
patches of blooming heathworts and dwarf willows, and grasses and sedges,
diversified here and there by drier spots, planted with larkspurs,
saxifrages, daisies, primulas, anemones, ferns, etc. These form gardens with
a luxuriance and brightness of color little to be hoped for in so cold and
dreary- looking a region.
Three years ago there were about fifteen hundred
inhabitants on the island, chiefly Eskimos, living in ten villages located
around the shores, and subsisting on the seals, walruses, whales, and water
birds that abound here. Now there are only about five hundred people, most
of them in one village on the northwest end of the island, nearly two thirds
of the population having died of starvation during the winter of 1878-79. In
seven of the villages not a single soul was left alive. In the largest
village at the northwest end of the island, which suffered least, two
hundred out of six hundred died. In the one at the southwest end only
fifteen out of about two hundred survived. There are a few survivors also at
one of the villages on the east end of the island.
After landing our interpreter at Marcus Bay we
steered for St. Michael, and in passing along the north side of this island
we stopped an hour or so this morning at one of the smallest of the dead
villages. Mr. Nelson went ashore and obtained a lot of skulls and specimens
of one sort and another for the Smithsonian Institution. Twenty-five
skeletons were seen. A
few miles farther on we anchored before a larger village, situated about
halfway between the east and west ends of the island, which I visited in
company with Mr. Nelson, the Captain, and the Surgeon. We found twelve
desolate huts close to the beach with about two hundred skeletons in them or
strewn about on the rocks and rubbish heaps within a few yards of the doors.
The scene was indescribably ghastly and desolate, though laid in a country
purified by frost as by fire. Gulls, plovers, and ducks were swimming and
flying about in happy life, the pure salt sea was dashing white against the
shore, the blooming tundra swept back to the snow-clad volcanoes, and the
wide azure sky bent kindly over all -nature intensely fresh and sweet, the
village lying in the foulest and most glaring death. The shrunken bodies,
with rotting furs on them, or white, bleaching skeletons, picked bare by the
crows, were lying mixed with kitchen-midden rubbish where they had been cast
out by surviving relatives while they yet had strength to carry them.
In the huts those who had been the last to
perish were found in bed, lying evenly side by side, beneath their rotting
deerskins. A grinning skull might be seen looking out here and there, and a
pile of skeletons in a corner, laid there no doubt when no one was left
strong enough to carry them through the narrow underground passage to the
door. Thirty were found in one house, about half of them piled like
fire-wood in a corner, the other half in bed, seeming as if they had met
their fate with tranquil apathy. Evidently these people did not suffer from
cold, however rigorous the winter may have been, as some of the huts had in
them piles of deerskins that had not been in use. Nor, although their
survivors and neighbors all say that hunger was the sole cause of their
death, could they have battled with famine to the bitter end, because a
considerable amount of walrus rawhide and skins of other animals was found
in the huts. These would have sustained life at least a week or two longer.
The facts all tend to show that the winter of
1878-79 was; from whatever cause, one of great scarcity, and as these people
never lay up any considerable supply of food from one season to another,
they began to perish. The first to succumb were carried out of the huts to
the ordinary ground for the dead, about half a mile from the village. Then,
as the survivors became weaker, they carried the dead a shorter distance,
and made no effort to mark their positions or to lay their effects beside
them, as they customarily do. At length the bodies were only dragged to the
doors of the huts, or laid in a corner, and the last survivors lay down in
despair without making any struggle to prolong their wretched lives by
eating the last scraps of skin.
Mr. Nelson went into this Golgotha with hearty
enthusiasm, gathering the fine white harvest of skulls spread before him,
and throwing them in heaps like a boy gathering pumpkins. He brought nearly
a hundred on board, which will be shipped with specimens of bone armor,
weapons, utensils, etc., on the Alaska Commercial Company's steamer St.
Paul. We also landed at
the village on the southwest corner of the island and interviewed the
fifteen survivors. When we inquired where the other people of the village
were, one of the group, who speaks a few words of English, answered with a
happy, heedless smile, "All mucky." "All gone!" "Dead?" "Yes, dead, all
dead!" Then he led us a few yards back of his hut and pointed to twelve or
fourteen skeletons lying on the brown grass, repeating in almost a merry
tone of voice, "Dead, yes, all dead, all mucky, all gone!"
About two hundred perished here, and unless some
aid be extended by our government which claims these people, in a few years
at most every soul of them will have vanished from the face of the earth;
for, even where alcohol is left out of the count, the few articles of food,
clothing, guns, etc., furnished by the traders, exert a degrading influence,
making them less self-reliant, and less skillful as hunters. They seem
easily susceptible of civilization, and well deserve the attention of our
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