He regards the gigantic power of Russia as in an unconscious co-partnership with England in the grand cause of commerce and civilisation. He also makes the curious and true remark that, notwithstanding the astonishing successes of the Normans in Europe, they were never numerous enough to establish their language in any of the conquered countries. Their unparalleled successes, therefore, seem to express the idea that those feeble bands of warriors were strengthened every where to accomplish the purposes of Providence.
We now come to the overland journey to Siberia. On the 23d of July, they reached the port of Ochotsk, where, however, they were met by masses of floating ice. Here Sir George had the first intelligence from England, which brought to his English heart the glad tidings of the birth of a Prince of Wales. They found this settlement a collection of huts on a shingly beach. The population is about 800 souls. A more dreary scene can scarcely be conceived than the surrounding country. Not a tree, and even scarcely a green blade is to be seen within miles of the town. The climate is on a par with the soil. The summer consists of three months of damp and chilly weather, during great part of which the snow still covers the hills, and the ice chokes the harbour, and this is succeeded by nine months of dreary winter. But when men find fault with such a climate as this, the fact is, that the fault is their own. Those climates were never intended for the residence of man; they were intended for the white bear, the seal, the whale, and the fur-bearing animals. To those inhabitants, they are perfectly adapted. If the rage of conquest, or the eagerness for gain, fixes human beings in the very empire of winter, they are intruders, and must suffer for their unsuitable choice of a locale.
The principal food of the inhabitants is fish. On fish they feed themselves; their dogs—which are equivalent to their carriage horses—their cattle, and their poultry, are also chiefly fed on fish. All other provisions are ruinously dear. Flour costs twenty-eight rubles the pood,—(a ruble is worth about a franc, the pood is thirty-six English pounds.) Beef is so dear as to be regarded as a treat, and wines and groceries have to pay a land carriage of seven thousand miles.
Here, too, the people drink tea in the style in which it was introduced in more primitive days into Europe. It is of the kind known as brick tea, being made up in cakes, and is consumed in great quantities by the lower orders in Siberia, being made into a thick soup, with the addition of butter and salt.
On the 27th of the month, they began their journey across Siberia. After leaving the shore, and boating the river Ochota, to an encampment where they were to meet their horses, hired at the rate of forty-five rubles a horse, on an agreement to be conveyed to Yakutsh in eighteen days, they struck into the country, which exhibited forests of pine, their progress being about four or five miles an hour. The Yakuti appear to be very industrious; young and old, male and female, being always occupied in some useful employment. When not engaged in travelling or farming, men and boys make saddles, harness, &c.; while the women and girls keep house, dress skins, prepare clothing, and attend to the dairy. They are also remarkably kind to strangers, for milk and cream, the best things they had to give, were freely offered in every village. This was the 10th of July, yet the snow was still partially lying on the ground. From day to day they met caravans of horses; and one day they were startled by the shouts of a party at the head of them. Their next sight was a herd of cattle running wildly in all directions, and the cause was seen in a huge she-bear and her cub moving off at a round trot. On this route, the bears are both fierce and numerous. The country had now become more fertile; there was no want of flowering plants, and the forests were enlivened by the warbling of birds, which, contrasted as it was with the deathlike silence of the American woods, was peculiarly grateful to the ear. In the course of the day, the vexatious incident occurred of meeting the courier, with the letters from England, which had been looked for so anxiously on the arrival of the travellers in Siberia; but the bags of course could not be opened on the road.
The presence of the Cossack, who attended the party, was of great importance in quickening the movements of the natives; but they seemed kind and good-natured, full of civility to the strangers, and not without some degree of education. The Yakuti have a singular mode of estimating distances. In Germany, a common measure of distance is the time that it takes to smoke a pipe. In this part of Siberia, they take as their unit the time necessary for boiling a kettle of a particular sort of food. They tell you, that such and such a place is so many kettles off, or half a kettle, or, as the case may be, only part of a kettle.
At last they arrive at the Lena. This is described as one of the grandest rivers in the world. At a distance of thirteen hundred versts from the sea, (three versts are equal to two miles,) it is from five to six miles wide. Its entire length is not less than four thousand versts. The word Lena implies lazy—a name justified by the circuitous flowing of its stream. At Yakutsk, the seat of the Governor, they were received with great civility in this capital of the province, latitude sixty-two north, and longitude one hundred and thirty east. The extreme temperature of summer and winter is almost beyond belief, the thermometer having, risen in the shade to 106° of Fahrenheit, and in winter having fallen to 83° below zero—making a difference of 189°. In this district are the enormous deposits of mammoth bones. Spring after spring, the alluvial banks of the lakes and rivers crumbling under the thaw have given up their dead; and the islands opposite to the mouth of the Yana, and, as there was reason for believing, even the bed of the ocean itself, teems with those mysterious memorials of antiquity. The question is, how do those bones come there? Sir George, after giving the opinions of some of the professors of geology, conceives the most natural account of the phenomenon to be, that those animals or their bones were swept from the great Tartarian pasturages of Cobi, by the waters of the Deluge, towards the ocean. We must acknowledge that this has long been our own opinion. It must be remembered that the Scriptural account states the rising of the Deluge to have been gradual. The rain fell forty days and nights. All living things would of course make their way to the heights to escape the rising inundation of the valleys. The cattle thus grouped together in immense herds, (the buffalos in the prairies at the present day sometimes exceed five thousand in one pasturage,) thus gathered into one mass, would be finally submerged, and swept away in whatever irresistible current rushed over the spot on which they stood. The frost of the region, which penetrates the earth to the depth apparently of some hundred feet, would thenceforth preserve them from decay. The tusks form an article of considerable trade, the ivory selling from a shilling to one and ninepence a pound, according to the perfection of the tusks.
One of the travellers' especial wishes was, to have visited the town of Kiachta, the place of commerce between the Russians and the Chinese. But a note from the Governor mentioned that the Chinese had suddenly stopped all communication. But a few words may be given to a commerce so peculiar. By the treaty of Nertshinsk, a reciprocal liberty of traffic was stipulated; and accordingly caravans on the part of the Russian government, and individual traders, used to visit Pekin. But the Muscovites exhibited so much of the native habits in "drinking and roystering," that, after exhausting the patience of the Celestials during three-and-thirty years, they were wholly excluded. But a cessation of five years having taken place, the Russians in 1728 obtained a treaty, by which individuals were permitted to trade on the frontier; and Kiachta was built. But public caravans were permitted to go on to Pekin. At length, in 1762, Catherine fixed the grand emporium at Kiachta.
This town, standing on a beach of the same name, is within about half a furlong of the Chinese village of Maimatschin, (about the fiftieth parallel of latitude,) being one thousand miles from Pekin, and four thousand from Moscow. Such are the enormous distances through which the eagerness for money-making drives the children of men.
The materials of the Russian traffic are furs, woollens, cottons, linen, &c., with articles in tin, copper, iron, &c.—the whole amounting to about nineteen millions of rubles. The Chinese products are tea, silks, sugar-candy, &c.—nominally to the amount of seven millions of rubles, but probably rising to thrice the value. The chief time of the market is the winter. To the chief Russian merchants this is a species of monopoly, and a most thriving one, some of them being millionnaires, and living in the most sumptuous manner, the "merchant princes" of the wilderness!
We had some curiosity to know the condition of the exiles to Siberia from this intelligent eye-witness. But he gives little more than a glance to a subject on which the public mind of England is at present so much engaged.