This river’s name, Angara, is a proper name in the language of the Buryat and Tungus, and until now I have not been able to ascertain what it actually means or why it is applied to large rivers. One Angara River flows into one end of Lake Baikal in a delta with three arms; the other flows from the lake’s other end and past Irkutsk. This latter Angara does not, like other rivers, flood in spring but instead floods in the fall even though the weather is the most constant then. As wet as the spring is, the fall is dry—entirely free of rain; so heavy rains cannot, as in other places, cause the strong increase in water flow. Rather, it is due to the Angara’s gradually freezing and ceasing to flow. For two hundred kilometers below Irkutsk, near Balaganskoi Ostrog, it freezes a month earlier than at Irkutsk, and as the ice gradually sets up, freezing closer to the town, the water backs up more and more because the ice downstream impedes the current. As soon as the river freezes solid in Irkutsk, the water gradually disappears. This year it rose so high that it was level with the streets and flooded the basements. Eventually the water recedes and returns to the river. Also, this river does not freeze for good at once but within twenty-four hours sometimes breaks up again six to ten times. This year, the Angara resembled a boggy meadow more than a river, the great flood having inundated all the pastures and fields. When the water reached its highest level close to freeze-up, it swept up whole fields and deposited them in front of the town so that the river indeed looked more like a boggy meadow.
Fig. 1.2. Traveling on the Lena with rafts and doshcheniks. (Ann Arnold adapted this and the other drawings from her book Sea Cows, Shamans, and Scurvy: Alaska’s First Naturalist—Georg Wilhelm Steller [New York: Frances Foster Books, 2008] and granted us permission to use them.)
As soon as the Angara is frozen solid, Lake Baikal is, too, but like the Angara it often freezes only to be torn open again by the winds. On the lake and on the Angara, the doshcheniks go to the Selenga River and the Posolsky Monastery and from there regularly to Irkutsk with goods for sale until the middle of December, which deserves to be noted as something special in this region. Yet the trips in late fall are not without danger, because sometimes the vessels drift with the ice around and around for six to seven weeks, not being able to sail either into the Selenga or to the other shore, suffering distress and deprivation in the process. The distance between where the Angara flows out of the lake and Irkutsk is over one hundred kilometers by water but only ninety-six by land. The river flows so rapidly that, with little rowing, you can drift from Nikolski to Irkutsk in four to five hours. Pulling a boat upriver, however, requires close to four full days and the great effort of many workers. The river has rapids, here called shiveri, that you have to pay close attention to going up- or downriver. The Angara also divides into protoki or channels, forming big and small islands here and there.
Both Lake Baikal and the Angara are surrounded by tall, rugged cliffs, decreasing in height and ruggedness as they approach Irkutsk; just before Irkutsk they become lower on both sides, constituting the most pleasant landscape you can imagine. In this respect, the Siberian Cossacks’ natural intelligence shown by their sensible choice of this place—as well as of Yeniseysk and Tomsk—has to be admired. You almost come to believe that they had all the necessary architectural, mathematical, and physical reasons for establishing a town on a list before their eyes and followed them. To be sure, from Nikolskaya Zastava to Irkutsk—that is, a hundred kilometers downriver, on either side of the Angara—there is no place as suitable a location for a town as the one where it was built. For immediately above Irkutsk, at the place called Krest3 not far from the church built in honor of the Trinity, the mountains on both sides of the Angara hug the banks, leaving—much to the regret of the town’s residents—no suitable room for grain fields or a pretty village or estate. If the Angara’s dammed-up waters had not turned the few level places into bogs as well as calm lakes, the residents feel that the trip to Nikolski would be ever so much more pleasant and the area would have been better cultivated. As it is, there are only huts built of necessity and named after the merchants who built them. Still, the ample scenery and images inspire the viewers to utmost delight.
The region around the outlet4 of the Angara is above all worth noting. Around Listvenishnoe Zimov’e, seven kilometers from where the Angara flows out of the lake, tall, forested mountains form a semicircle like an amphitheater. In the middle before the outfall, an imposing rock rises out of the water, thirteen feet tall and twenty-one feet wide, called Shamanski kamen, Shaman’s Rock, which the Buryats and Tungus venerate, even considering it divine, and they habitually swear on it and are afraid of it as if it were God himself. They will rather admit any guilt than go there to kiss it. It is less respected by the gulls, who have completely painted it white with their excrement. At that point, the river is very fast and the noise so overpowering [In text, prächtig, dazzling; we assume Steller meant mächtig, mighty.] that nobody is able to understand another’s word. It is also dangerous to get there and then only possible in small boats. Among the rocks are field stones, pieces of wood, and rags that the natives [In text, heathens; replaced with natives where appropriate] have thrown there as offerings. The rock itself is a coarse, blackish-gray sandstone mixed with spar. I am sending a piece of this nature-made idol to the Kunstkammer as a testament to heathen foolishness, though I do not know which of the god’s members it resembles.
To the right side of the Angara’s source above the lake, approximately forty kilometers from Nikolski, the eternally snow-covered Tunkinski Range is visible, with the tallest mountains on the whole lake and among those I’ve ever seen anywhere. They are visible though only in clear weather not far from Tulun, the first place in the Irkutsk district, three hundred kilometers from town. From the middle of the area opposite Medvedev’s Church, you can see between the mountains toward the source of the Angara and the Tunkinski Range for over a hundred kilometers, which reveals that Irkutsk was built in a direct line from the source of the Angara though the river has many bends. Below Ilimsk where the Ilim River flows into the Angara from the left, the Angara loses its name and becomes the Tunguska; from then on till it flows into the Yenisey, sixty-seven kilometers from the town of Yeniseysk at Tunginskoi Ostrog, it is known as the Tunguska. Downriver, the Tunguska has many porogi or rapids that cause considerable dangers and costs for the merchants. These rapids are clearly formed by the cliffs that extend underwater into the river. Nine of these are especially big and dangerous. The first is called Strelovskoi Porog, seventy-one kilometers from the town of Yeniseysk, ten before the Tunguska joins the Yenisey; the second is Murskoi Porog; the third Kasina Shivera [waterfall]; the fourth Aplinskoi Porog; the fifth, Shamanskoi Porog, is called that because a shaman fell in there and broke his neck. The sixth is called Dolgoi Porog, the seventh Padunskoi Porog because it is very steep and precipitous. The eighth, Pianoi Porog [the Drunken One; WH, Anm. 58], has its name from a plant that makes people drunk, of which Dr. Gmelin will give extensive information; the ninth is called Pochmel’noi Porog [R, Hangover Rapids], and I could say more about it if I didn’t know that Professor Müller has described all you need to know in the greatest of detail. While the water around Irkutsk is very clean, it gradually becomes less so, mixed with diverse kinds of pollution the closer it gets to the Yenisey.
The fish in the Angara are as follows: common sturgeon [R, oseter; Acipenser sturio], sterlet [Acipenser ruthenus]5 and starry sturgeon [In text, Schebriga; best guess Acipenser stellatus; WH, Anm. 65]. But these fish are never caught below Bratskoi Ostrog where the Ilim flows into the Irkut even though they are numerous in Lake Baikal because they are used to swimming upstream and not downstream. Siberian taimen [Hucho taimen] and sig [common whitefish] sometimes swim up the Irkut into Lake Baikal, but as soon