Part 28

At the other end of the road, on this side of the lake, two Russian officers behaved in the most abominable way towards those Poles who were building the same road but took no part in the insurrection. One of the two officers rushed into their tent, swearing and shooting at the peaceful convicts with his revolver, badly wounding two of them.

Now, the logic of the Siberian military authorities was that as a Russian officer had been killed several Poles had to be executed. The court-martial condemned five of them to death: Szaramówicz, a pianist, a handsome man of thirty who was the leader of the insurrection; Celínski, an ex-officer of the Russian army, a man of sixty, because he had once been an officer; and three others whose names I do not remember.

The Governor-General telegraphed to St. Petersburg asking permission to reprieve the condemned insurgents, but no answer came. He had promised us not to execute them, but after having waited several days for the reply, he ordered the sentence to be carried out secretly early in the morning. The reply from St. Petersburg came four weeks later, by post: the Governor was left to act ‘according to the best of his understanding.’ In the meantime five brave men had been shot.

The insurrection, people said, was foolish. And yet this handful of insurgents obtained something. The news of it reached Europe. The executions, the brutalities of the two officers, which became known through the proceedings of the court, produced a commotion in Austria, and Austria interfered in favour of the Galicians who had taken part in the revolution of 1863 and had been sent to Siberia. Soon after the Baikál insurrection the fate of the Polish exiles in Siberia was substantially bettered, and they owed it to their insurgents--to those five brave men who were shot at Irkútsk, and those who had taken arms by their side.

For my brother and myself this insurrection was a great lesson. We realized what it meant to belong in any way to the army. I was away; but my brother was at Irkútsk, and his squadron was dispatched against the insurgents. Happily, the commander of the regiment to which my brother belonged knew him well, and, under some pretext, he ordered another officer to take command of the mobilized part of the squadron. Otherwise Alexander, of course, would have refused to march. If I had been at Irkútsk, I should have done the same.

We decided, then, to leave the military service and to return to Russia. This was not an easy matter, especially as Alexander had married in Siberia; but at last all was arranged, and early in 1867 we were on our way to St. Petersburg.

PART FOURTH

ST. PETERSBURG--FIRST JOURNEY TO WESTERN EUROPE

Early in the autumn of 1867 my brother and I, with his family, were settled at St. Petersburg. I entered the university, and sat on the benches among young men, almost boys, much younger than myself. What I had so longed for five years before was accomplished: I could study; and, acting upon the idea that a thorough training in mathematics is the only solid basis for all subsequent scientific work and thought, I joined the physico-mathematical faculty in its mathematical section. My brother entered the Military Academy for Jurisprudence, whilst I entirely gave up military service, to the great dissatisfaction of my father, who hated the very sight of a civilian dress. We both had now to rely entirely upon ourselves.

Study at the university and scientific work absorbed all my time for the next five years. A student of the mathematical faculty has, of course, very much to do, but my previous studies in higher mathematics permitted me to devote part of my time to geography; and, moreover, I had not lost in Siberia the habit of hard work.

The report of my last expedition was in print; but in the meantime a vast problem rose before me. The journeys that I had made in Siberia had convinced me that the mountains which at that time were drawn on the maps of Northern Asia were mostly fantastic, and gave no idea whatever of the structure of the country. The great plateaux which are so prominent a feature of Asia were not even suspected by those who drew the maps. Instead of them several great ridges, such as, for instance, the eastern portion of the Stanovói, which used to be drawn on the maps as a black worm creeping eastward, had grown up in the topographic bureaux, contrary to the indications and even to the sketches of such explorers as L. Schwartz. These ridges have no existence in nature. The heads of the rivers which flow toward the Arctic Ocean on the one side, and toward the Pacific on the other, lie intermingled on the surface of a vast plateau; they rise in the same marshes. But, in the European topographer’s imagination, the highest mountain ridges must run along the chief water-partings, and the topographers had drawn there the highest Alps, of which there is no trace in reality. Many such imaginary mountains were made to intersect the maps of Northern Asia in all directions.

To discover the true leading principles in the disposition of the mountains of Asia--the harmony of mountain formation--now became a question which for years absorbed my attention. For a considerable time the old maps, and still more the generalizations of Alexander von Humboldt, who, after a long study of Chinese sources, had covered Asia with a network of mountains running along the meridians and parallels, hampered me in my researches, until at last I saw that even Humboldt’s generalizations, stimulating though they had been, did not agree with the facts.

Beginning, then, with the beginning, in a purely inductive way, I collected all the barometrical observations of previous travellers, and from them calculated hundreds of altitudes; I marked on a large-scale map all geological and physical observations that had been made by different travellers--the facts, not the hypotheses--and I tried to find out what structural lines would answer best to the observed realities. This preparatory work took me more than two years; and then followed months of intense thought, in order to find out what the bewildering chaos of scattered observations meant, until one day, all of a sudden, the whole became clear and comprehensible, as if it were illuminated with a flash of light. The main structural lines of Asia are not north and south, or west and east; they are from the south-west to the north-east--just as, in the Rocky Mountains and the plateaux of America, the lines are north-west to south-east; only secondary ridges shoot out north-west. Moreover the mountains of Asia are not bundles of independent ridges, like the Alps, but are subordinated to an immense plateau--an old continent which once pointed towards Behring Strait. High border ridges have towered up along its fringes, and in the course of ages terraces, formed by later sediments, have emerged from the sea, thus adding on both sides to the width of that primitive backbone of Asia.

There are not many joys in human life equal to the joy of the sudden birth of a generalization, illuminating the mind after a long period of patient research. What has seemed for years so chaotic, so contradictory, and so problematic takes at once its proper position within an harmonious whole. Out of the wild confusion of facts and from behind the fog of guesses--contradicted almost as soon as they are born--a stately picture makes its appearance, like an Alpine chain suddenly emerging in all its grandeur from the mists which concealed it the moment before, glittering under the rays of the sun in all its simplicity and variety, in all its mightiness and beauty. And when the generalization is put to a test, by applying it to hundreds of separate facts which seemed to be hopelessly contradictory the moment before, each of them assumes its due position, increasing the impressiveness of the picture, accentuating some characteristic outline, or adding an unsuspected detail full of meaning. The generalization gains in strength and extent; its foundations grow in width and solidity; while in the distance, through the far-off mist on the horizon, the eye detects the outlines of new and still wider generalizations.

He who has once in his life experienced this joy of scientific creation will never forget it; he will be longing to renew it; and he cannot but feel with pain that this sort of happiness is the lot of so few of us, while so many could also live through it--on a small or on a grand scale--if scientific methods and leisure were not limited to a handful of men.

This work I consider my chief contribution to science. My first intention was to produce a bulky volume, in which the new ideas about the mountains and plateaux of Northern Asia should be supported by a detailed examination of each separate region; but in 1873, when I saw that I should soon be arrested, I only prepared a map which embodied my views and wrote an explanatory paper. Both were published by the Geographical Society, under the supervision of my brother, while I was already in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. Petermann, who was then preparing a map of Asia, and knew my preliminary work, adopted my scheme for his map, and it has been accepted since by most cartographers. The map of Asia, as it is now understood, explains, I believe, the main physical features of the great continent, as well as the distribution of its climates, faunas, and floras, and even its history. It reveals, also, as I was able to see during my last journey to America, striking analogies between the structure and the geological growth of the two continents of the northern hemisphere. Very few cartographers could say now whence all these changes in the map of Asia have come; but in science it is better that new ideas should make their way independently of any name attached to them. The errors which are unavoidable in a first generalization are easier to rectify.

At the same time I worked a great deal for the Russian Geographical Society in my capacity of secretary to its section of physical geography.

Great interest was taken then in the exploration of Turkestan and the Pamírs. Syévertsoff had just returned after several years of travel. A great zoologist, a gifted geographer, and one of the most intelligent men I ever came across, he, like so many Russians, disliked writing. When he had made an oral communication at a meeting of the Society he could not be induced to write anything beyond revising the reports of his communication, so that all that has been published under his signature is very far from doing full justice to the real value of the observations and the generalizations he had made. This reluctance to put down in writing the results of thought and observation is unfortunately not uncommon in Russia. His remarks on the orography of Turkestan, on the geographical distribution of plants and animals, and especially on the part played by hybrids in the production of new species of birds, which I have heard him make, or on the importance of mutual support in the progressive development of species which I have found just mentioned in a couple of lines in some report of a meeting, bore the stamp of more than an ordinary talent and originality; but he did not possess the exuberant force of exposition in an appropriately beautiful form, which might have made of him one of the most prominent men of science of our time.

Miklúkho Makláy, well known in Australia, which towards the end of his life became the country of his adoption, belonged to the same order of men--the men who have had so much more to say than they have said in print. He was a tiny, nervous man, always suffering from malaria, who had just returned from the coasts of the Red Sea, when I made his acquaintance. A follower of Hæckel, he had worked a great deal upon the marine invertebrates in their life surroundings. The Geographical Society managed next to get him taken on board a Russian man-of-war to some unknown part of the coast of New Guinea, where he wanted to study the most primitive savages. Accompanied by one sailor only, he was left on this inhospitable shore, the inhabitants of which had the reputation of being cannibals. A hut was built for the two Robinsons, and they lived eighteen months or more by the side of a native village on excellent terms with the natives. Always to be straightforward towards them, and never to deceive them--not even in the most trifling matters--not even for scientific purposes--was his ethics. On this point he was most scrupulous. When he was travelling some time later on in the Malayan peninsula he had with him a native who had entered into his service on the express condition of never being photographed. The natives, as everyone knows, consider that something is taken out of them when their likeness is taken by photography. Makláy, who was collecting anthropological materials, confessed that one day, when the man was fast asleep, he was awfully tempted to photograph him, the more so as he was a typical representative of his tribe and he would have never known that he had been photographed. But Makláy remembered his promise and never did it. When he left New Guinea the natives made him promise to return; and a few years later, although he was severely ill, he kept his word and did return. This remarkable man has, however, published only an infinitesimal part of the truly invaluable observations he had made.

Fédchenko, who had made extensive travels and zoological observations in Turkestan--in company with his wife, Olga Fédchenko, also a naturalist--was, as we used to say, a ‘West European.’ He worked hard to bring out in an elaborated form the results of his observations; but he was, unfortunately, killed in climbing a mountain in Switzerland. Glowing with youthful ardour after his journeys in the Turkestan mountains, and full of confidence in his own powers, he undertook an ascent without proper guides, and perished in a snowstorm. His wife, happily, completed the publication of his ‘Travels’ after his death, and I believe she has now a son who continues the work of his father and mother.

I also saw a great deal of Prjeválsky, or rather Przewalski, as his Polish name ought to be spelt, although he himself preferred to appear as a ‘Russian patriot.’ He was a passionate hunter, and the enthusiasm with which he made his explorations of Central Asia was almost as much the result of his desire to hunt all sorts of difficult game--bucks, wild camels, wild horses, and so on--as of his desire to discover lands new and difficult to approach. When he was induced to speak of his discoveries he would soon interrupt his modest descriptions with an enthusiastic exclamation: ‘But what game there! What hunting! ...’ and he would describe passionately how he crept such and such a distance to approach a wild horse within shooting range. No sooner was he back at St. Petersburg than he schemed a new expedition, and parsimoniously laid aside all his money, trying to increase it by Stock Exchange operations, for a new expedition. He was the type of a traveller by his strong physique and his capacity for enduring the life of a mountain hunter, full of privations. He delighted in leading such a life. He made his first journey with only three comrades, and always kept on excellent terms with the natives. However, as his subsequent expeditions took a more military character, he began unfortunately to rely upon the force of his armed escort in preference to a peaceful intercourse with the natives, and I heard it said in well-informed quarters that if he had not died at the very start of his Tibet expedition--so admirably and peacefully conducted after his death by his companions, Pyevtsóff, Roboróvsky, and Kozlóff--he very probably would not have returned alive.

There was considerable activity at that time in the Geographical Society, and numerous were the geographical questions in which our section, and consequently its secretary, took a lively interest. Most of them were too technical to be mentioned in this place, but I must allude to the awakening of interest in navigation, in the fisheries and trade in the Russian portion of the Arctic Ocean, which took place in these years. A Siberian merchant and goldminer, Sídoroff, made the most persevering efforts to awaken that interest. He foresaw that with a little aid in the shape of naval schools, the exploration of the Norman Coast and the White Sea, and so on, the Russian fisheries and Russian navigation could be largely developed. But unfortunately that little had to be done all through St. Petersburg, and the ruling portion of that courtly, bureaucratic, red-tapist, literary, artistic, and cosmopolitan city could not be moved to take an interest in anything ‘provincial.’ Poor Sídoroff was simply ridiculed for his efforts. Interest in our far North had to be enforced upon the Russian Geographical Society from abroad.

In the years 1869-71 the bold Norwegian seal-hunters had quite unexpectedly opened the Kara Sea to navigation. To our extreme astonishment we learned one day at the Society that the sea which lies between the island of Nóvaya Zemlyá and the Siberian coast, and which we used confidently to describe in our writings as ‘an ice cellar permanently stocked with ice’, had been entered by a number of small Norwegian schooners and crossed by them in all directions. Even the wintering place of the famous Dutchman Barentz, which we believed to be concealed for ever from the eyes of man by ice-fields hundreds of years old, had been visited by these adventurous Norsemen.

‘Exceptional seasons and an exceptional state of the ice’ was what our elder navigators said. But to a few of us it was quite evident that, with their small schooners and their small crews, the bold Norwegian hunters, who feel at home amid the ice, had ventured to pierce the floating ice which usually bars the way to the Kara Sea, while the commanders of Government ships, hampered by the responsibilities of the naval service, had never risked doing so.

A general interest in Arctic exploration was awakened by these discoveries. In fact, it was the seal-hunters who opened the new era of Arctic enthusiasm which culminated in Nordenskjöld’s circumnavigation of Asia, in the permanent establishment of the north-eastern passage to Siberia, in Peary’s discovery of North Greenland, and in Nansen’s ‘Fram’ expedition. Our Russian Geographical Society also began to move, and a committee was appointed to prepare the scheme of a Russian Arctic expedition, and to indicate the scientific work that could be done by it. Specialists undertook to write each of the special scientific chapters of this report; but, as often happens, a few chapters only--botany, geology, and meteorology--were ready in time, and I, as secretary of the committee, had to write the remainder. Several subjects, such as marine zoology, the tides, pendulum observations, and terrestrial magnetism, were quite new to me; but the amount of work which a healthy man can accomplish in a short time, if he strains all his forces and goes straight to the root of the subject, no one would suppose beforehand--and so my report was ready.

It concluded by advocating a great Arctic expedition, which would awaken in Russia a permanent interest in Arctic questions and Arctic navigation, and in the meantime a reconnoitring expedition on board a schooner chartered in Norway with its captain, pushing north or north-east of Nóvaya Zemlyá. This expedition, we suggested, might also try to reach, or at least to sight, an unknown land which must be situated at no great distance from Nóvaya Zemlyá. The probable existence of such a land had been indicated by an officer of the Russian navy, Baron Schilling, in an excellent but little known paper on the currents in the Arctic Ocean. When I read this paper, as also Lütke’s ‘Journey to Nóvaya Zemlyá,’ and made myself acquainted with the general conditions of this part of the Arctic Ocean, I saw at once that the supposition must be correct. There must be a land to the north-west of Nóvaya Zemlyá, and it must reach a higher latitude than Spitzbergen. The steady position of the ice at the west of Nóvaya Zemlyá, the mud and stones on it, and various other smaller indications confirmed the hypothesis. Besides, if such a land were not located there, the ice current which flows westward from the meridian of Behring Strait to Greenland (the current of the ‘Fram’s’ drift) would, as Baron Schilling had truly remarked, reach the North Cape and cover the coasts of Laponia with masses of ice, just as it covers the northern extremity of Greenland. The warm current alone--a feeble continuation of the Gulf Stream--could not have prevented the accumulation of ice on the coasts of Northern Europe. This land, as is known, was discovered a couple of years later by the Austrian expedition, and named Franz Josef Land.

The Arctic report had a quite unexpected result for me. I was offered the leadership of the reconnoitring expedition, on board a Norwegian schooner chartered for the purpose. I replied, of course, that I had never been to sea; but I was told that by combining the experience of a Carlsen or a Johansen with the initiative of a man of science something valuable could be done; and I should have accepted had not the Ministry of Finance at this juncture interposed with its veto. It replied that the Exchequer could not grant the three or four thousand pounds which would be required for the expedition. Since that time Russia has taken no part in the exploration of the Arctic seas. The land which we distinguished through the subpolar mists was discovered by Payer and Weyprecht, and the archipelagoes which must exist to the north-east of Nóvaya Zemlyá--I am even more firmly persuaded of it now than I was then--remain undiscovered.

Instead of joining an Arctic expedition I was sent out by the Geographical Society on a modest tour in Finland and Sweden, to explore the glacial deposits; and that journey drifted me in a quite different direction.