Travels in Siberia (22 page)

After the second Bering voyage, travelers began to come to Siberia from all over. Among non-Russians, the English, French, and Germans predominated, though Swedes and Swiss and others traveled there as well. A Hungarian soldier named Benyowsky who had been captured while serving in the Polish army ended up in exile in Kamchatka and did a number of horrible things there; the book he wrote afterward falls into the category of Siberian adventures of questionable veracity. Nor were the travelers from Europe only. When a detachment of Bering’s men explored the coast of Japan, a contemporary Japanese account recorded the event and described the appearance of these new strangers, noting that “their eyes were the color of sharks.” In 1789, Japanese sailors who had shipwrecked on the Siberian coast were sent by the Russians to Irkutsk, and from there crossed Siberia and continued to St. Petersburg, whence four of them returned to Japan by ship around the world.

The first American to travel in Siberia was the famous John Ledyard, one of the most footloose souls who ever lived. (I have written about him in my book
Great Plains
.) Ledyard had sailed the Bering Strait and North Pacific with Captain Cook and apparently there devised the idea of exploring western North America by approaching it from Asia. Meeting up with Thomas Jefferson in Paris, Ledyard interested him in this notion, and Jefferson then sought permission from the Empress Catherine for Ledyard to cross Russia. Ledyard’s journey would be Jefferson’s first attempt at sending an expedition to the American Northwest, a mission later carried out successfully by Lewis and Clark. Catherine, however, hated all revolutionaries, Americans especially, and to Jefferson’s request she returned a firm no.

Nothing daunted, late in the year 1787 Ledyard went anyway. Unable to cross from Finland because of ice conditions, he walked clear around the Gulf of Bothnia to St. Petersburg in the middle of the winter. Finding Catherine not in residence at the moment, he charmed some kind of permission from a high-ranking
chinovnik
and then set out. He had made it remarkably far—all the way to Yakutsk—before Catherine learned of this contravention of her wishes and fell into a rage. She ordered him brought back by closed conveyance, never stopping, to be questioned first and then expelled at the Polish border. The grueling return destroyed Ledyard’s health and may have undermined his sanity. Soon after, he determined to explore inner Africa, and when he was in Egypt and a hitch came up in these plans he took too much emetic and died. There is a statue of him at Dartmouth College, which he had attended briefly before a journey called him away.

Almost twenty years after Ledyard, an American did cross Siberia from one end to the other, but going in the opposite direction. In this case the motive—Yankee determination to collect a debt—was perhaps a more compelling one than wanderlust or exploration. In 1804, a young sea captain named John D’Wolf sailed the 206-ton three-masted brig
Juno
loaded with trade goods and provisions from Bristol, Rhode Island, around Cape Horn and then north to the Russian settlements in Alaska. In New Archangel (present-day Sitka), he sold not only all his supplies but also the ship itself to Alexander Baranov, manager of the Russian American Company. Not having the $50,000 purchase price, Baranov gave D’Wolf a note payable at the company’s offices at St. Petersburg. D’Wolf wintered in New Archangel. The next year, in a small ship Baranov provided, he sailed to Kamchatka. There he spent another winter. The next year he sailed to Okhotsk. While crossing the Sea of Okhotsk, he had the experience of running up on the back of a drowsing whale. The ship sat there for a while until the whale submerged.

From Okhotsk a sketchy and obstacle-filled road led inland. D’Wolf endured a journey of swamps, mountains, mosquitoes, and tedium. “At first I was quite pleased with the idea of this land excursion, but I found in a very little while that it was no joke,” he wrote. In a month he had reached Yakutsk, and Irkutsk a month after that. From Irkutsk he followed the main road, the Siberian Trakt, and traveled joltingly by carriage for thirty-five hundred more miles, arriving in St. Petersburg about two
months later, at the end of October. Not including his sail from Kamchatka, his trip across Siberia had taken five months. When he presented himself at the offices of the Russian America Company, he learned that a duplicate note had reached his employers in Rhode Island by ship sometime earlier, and they had already sent an agent to collect the money, and the business had been concluded. D’Wolf’s voyage and sale of ship and goods had earned them a profit of $100,000. Contrary weather and other delays kept him from returning home until April of the following year. He had been gone for three years and eight months.

A footnote about John D’Wolf is that he happened to be the uncle of Herman Melville. D’Wolf’s wife, Mary, was Melville’s father’s sister. Tall, straight, long legged, with a crest of white hair, D’Wolf personified the Yankee sea captain; he “made so strong an impression on me, that I have never forgotten him,” Melville wrote in his novel
Redburn
, adding inaccurately that this uncle had been lost in the White Sea some years later: D’Wolf was in fact alive when
Redburn
was written, and he died in the bosom of his family at the age of ninety-two. Melville included the incident about sailing onto the back of the whale in
Moby-Dick
.

Many people who you might not think of as ever having been in Russia, were. For example, Captain John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, served as a mercenary in the army of the Holy Roman Emperor before going on to his adventures in America. Captured by the Tatars in 1603, he escaped through northwest Russia. John Quincy Adams, the future president, accompanied the American government’s minister to Russia in 1781 as his personal secretary and French interpreter; Adams was only fourteen at the time. He returned to St. Petersburg when he was forty and the U.S. minister himself, and remained for five years, through the Napoleonic wars. The democrat Adams and the autocrat Alexander I got along fine. Another future president, James Buchanan, occupied the ministerial post in 1832 and 1833. A Presbyterian from Pennsylvania, Buchanan was shocked at what he saw as the irreligiosity of the Russians, and especially at the royal family’s habit of holding grand fetes and balls on Sundays. Alexander Herzen, the revolutionary thinker and hero, remembered as a young man seeing Buchanan at some event and noticing how his plain black frock coat and top hat stood out among the gaudy uniforms and court finery.

Samuel Colt, the arms manufacturer, attended the coronation of Tsar Alexander II; Colt made several visits to Russia, selling guns. While on the trip memorialized in
Innocents Abroad
, Mark Twain met Alexander II on the Black Sea in 1867. Twain compared him to “a tinsel King.” Whistler’s mother, of the well-known painting, got up from her straight-back chair long enough to go to Russia with Whistler’s father, an engineer, who helped his hosts build docks and railroads. Dumas père, the Marquis de Custine, Admiral John Paul Jones, Théophile Gautier, Booker T. Washington, Lewis Carroll—a list of unexpected sojourners in Russia could go on and on.

The nineteenth century was the great age of travel, when private citizens made long journeys to distant and almost-unexplored parts of the globe. Among alluring destinations, Siberia rivaled Africa and western North America. Many dozens of books about travel in Siberia came out in those years and up to the Bolshevik revolution. Per usual, the English travelers outdid almost everybody else. Englishmen saw Siberia on foot, and by boat, cart, and sledge. As a title of a book by an Englishman,
Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey Through Russia and Siberian Tartary from the Frontiers of China to the Frozen Sea and Kamchatka
, by Captain John Dundas Cochrane, Royal Navy, gives the general idea. Soon after setting out on this cross-continental stroll, Captain Cochrane was accosted by robbers who took all his possessions and clothes, overlooking only his waistcoat; Cochrane tied the waistcoat around his middle and continued on.

Englishmen went to Siberia to examine mineral resources, visit prisons, look for trade opportunities, distribute Bibles, study the natives, hunt, botanize. Intrepid Englishwomen ventured far into Siberia as well. To cite another representative title,
On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers
, by Kate Marsden, of the Royal British Nursing Association, is the story of that lady’s search for a miraculous root said to cure leprosy, and for the lepers themselves. Wealthy people in St. Petersburg gave Miss Marsden money, and eventually she located some lepers in the northern wilds and set up a leper colony. Breaking under the strain of the trip, she then returned to England and spent the rest of her life as an invalid. As far as I could find out, no book before or since has ever mentioned the Siberian lepers. Miss Marsden is also the only traveler I know of to express concern about the sufferings of draft horses in Siberia.

Experts from Poland came to oversee mines, Norwegians to work in the fur trade, Danes to help in the dairying in western Siberia. The German scientist Alexander von Humboldt traveled Siberia in 1829 to establish meteorological stations, by international agreement, and to do studies on terrestrial magnetism. He and others like him continued the tradition of German-speaking scientists in Siberia. Americans of any kind were rare in Siberia until after 1850; then they became almost as numerous as Englishmen. The Americans’ main focus was on mining and trade, with some Christian evangelizing. Perry McDonough Collins, a businessman looking into commercial possibilities for the United States, went on a wide-ranging jaunt through eastern Siberia in 1860 and devised the transcontinental telegraph project that brought George Kennan to Chukotka. American aggressiveness in trade beat most competitors. By the end of the nineteenth century, American products, from canned goods to McCormick reapers, could be found throughout the habitable parts of eastern Siberia.

As usual, global ambition reached for more. China, having grown much weaker since the days of Emperor K’ang-hsi, could not keep an expansionist Russia out of the Amur Valley, and in 1856 Siberia’s governor-general, Count Nikolai N. Muraviev, simply took it from China by fiat with a small force of gunboats and soldiers. This grab had the good (for Russia) effect of giving her river access to the Pacific and a vast valley of relatively temperate and arable land. Unfortunately, moving into the Amur also put Russia on a collision course with the other country expanding into the region—Japan. Eventually this would lead to the disastrous (for Russia) Russo-Japanese War. The early buildup to the conflict featured an obscure and intriguing episode of travel in Siberia: the long ride of Captain Fukushima Yasumasa. For the purposes of reconnaissance, this Japanese army officer traveled on horseback across European Russia, western and central Siberia, Mongolia, part of China, and the Primorskii Region northeast of Vladivostok in the years 1892 and 1893. Aside from a brief mention of this unprecedented feat, I can find nothing about it in English-language histories.

Another timely idea of Count Muraviev’s was the Trans-Siberian Railway. Building a line from the Urals to Vladivostok made obvious sense for Russia, but it presented engineering problems that were difficult even in that optimistic age of railroads. Bridges had to be erected across five
rivers wider than the Mississippi; swampy ground troubled the route for many hundreds of miles; and even with a shortcut across compliant China the track would have to extend for more than five thousand miles. Construction of the line was authorized by imperial edict in May 1891, and Tsarevitch Nicholas, visiting the Far East at the time, pushed a wheelbarrow of dirt along an embankment in Vladivostok to inaugurate the great enterprise. By 1898, the line building eastward had reached Irkutsk. By 1901, the tracks had been completed from one end of Siberia to the other, not including the section circumventing Lake Baikal (a huge ferry to take the trains across the lake served as a temporary measure; during the winter tracks were laid on Baikal’s ice). Regular service began in 1903. The section around the southern end of Baikal required thirty-eight tunnels and wasn’t opened until 1905.

In these early railroad years, when the Trans-Siberian was being built and just after, a lot of people from the American Midwest traveled in and wrote books about Siberia. As a Midwesterner myself, I pause to take note of this phenomenon. Adventurous sorts from Illinois and Indiana made trips by land, river, and rail, mostly for business but some for pleasure. The number of travelers from the state of Ohio alone is statistically off the charts. In 1898, John Wesley Bookwalter, an Ohio businessman, went on a summer journey of some length; his
Siberia and Central Asia
(1899) “intelligently comments on every aspect of life and includes hundreds of photographs,” says a bibliography. (Bookwalter later ran for governor of Ohio.) George Frederick Wright, a professor at Oberlin College, published
Asiatic Russia
in 1902, about his trip of the previous year. Senator Albert J. Beveridge, of Indiana, went through European Russia, Siberia, and Manchuria to write his
The Russian Advance
(1903). Beveridge was born in Ohio. Henry C. Rouse, president of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway, rode the Trans-Siberian in 1903 and wrote about it for the
New York Evening Post
. He also was born in Ohio. Ohio-born William Wheeler’s
The Other Side of the Earth
, about his Siberian train trip (“extremely superficial,” in the opinion of another bibliography), appeared in 1913.

That’s five people from Ohio visiting and writing about Siberia in the space of fifteen years, or an average of one Ohioan every three years. How can this oddity be explained? Were these people all inspired in their youth by stories about George Kennan, and did they want to be like
him? Or did the official closing of the American frontier at the end of the nineteenth century make them restless and eager to see some even wilder place, the “Wild East,” said to resemble the now vanished Wild West in many ways? Or perhaps something unknown in the flat, open landscape of the middle of America produces in a few of its citizens a strange affinity for the vastnesses of Russia. Maybe that happened to me; in any case, I am now at least the seventh person from Ohio to travel in and write about Siberia.