above 800 miles with the same dogs, men and animals having equally suffered from cold, hunger, and fatigue. Neither discomfort, however, nor danger prevented Wrangell from undertaking a third excursion in the following spring. He had great difficulty in procuring the necessary dogs, a disease which raged among them during the winter having carried off more than four-fifths of these useful animals. At length his wants were supplied by the people of the Indigirka, where the sickness had not extended, and on March 14, 1822, he again set out for the borders of the Polar Sea. During this expedition a large extent of coast was accurately surveyed by Wrangell, who sent out his worthy assistant Matiuschkin, with two companions, in an unloaded sledge, to see if any further advance could be made to the north. Having accomplished ten versts, Matiuschkin was stopped by the breaking up of the ice. Enormous masses, raised by the waves into an almost vertical position, were driven against each other with a dreadful crash, and pressed downwards by the force of the billows to reappear again on the surface covered with the torn-up green mud which here forms the bottom of the sea. It would tire the reader were I to relate all the miseries of their return voyage; suffice it to say, that worn out with hunger and fatigue, they reached Nishne Kolymsk on May 5, after an absence of fifty-seven days. Such sufferings and perils might have excused all further attempts to discover the supposed land in the Polar Sea, but nothing daunted by his repeated failures, Wrangell determined on a fourth expedition in 1823, on which he resolved to start from a more easterly point. On reaching the coast, the obstacles were found still greater than on his previous visits to that fearful sea. The weather was tempestuous, the ice thin and broken. It was necessary at times to cross wide lanes of water on pieces of ice; at times the thin ice bent beneath the weight of the sledges, which were then saved only by the sagacity of the dogs, who, aware of the danger, ran at their greatest speed till they found a solid footing. At length, about sixty miles from shore, they arrived at the edge of an immense break in the ice, extending east and west further than the eye could reach. We climbed one of the loftiest hummocks,' says Wrangell, 'whence we obtained an extensive view towards the north, and whence we beheld the wide ocean spread before our gaze. It was a fearful and magnificent, but to us a melancholy spectacle! Fragments of ice of enormous size floated on the surface of the water, and were thrown by the waves with awful violence against the edge of the ice-field on the further side of the channel before us. The collisions were so tremendous, that large masses were every instant broken away, and it was evident that the portion of ice which still divided the channel from the open ocean, would soon be completely destroyed. Had we attempted to ferry ourselves across upon one of the floating pieces of ice, we should not have found firm footing upon our arrival. Even on our own side fresh lines of water were continually forming, and extending in every direction in the field of ice behind us. We could go no further. With a painful feeling of the impossibility of overcoming the obstacles which nature opposed to us, our last hope vanished of discovering the land, which we yet believed to exist. We saw ourselves compelled to renounce the object for which we had striven through three years of hardships, toil, and danger. We had done what honour and duty demanded; further attempts would have been absolutely hopeless, and I decided to return.' They turned, but already the track of their advance was scarcely discernible, as new lanes of water had been formed, and fresh hummocks raised by the sea. To add to their distress, a storm arose, which threatened every moment to swallow up the ice island, on which they hoped to cross a wide space of water which separated them from a firmer ground. 'We had been three long hours in this position, and still the mass of ice beneath us held together, when suddenly it was caught by the storm, and hurled against a large field of ice: the crash was terrific, and the mass beneath us was shattered into fragments. At that dreadful moment, when escape seemed impossible, the impulse of self-preservation, implanted in every living being, saved us. Instinctively we all sprang at once on the sledges, and urged the dogs to their full speed. They flew across the yielding fragments to the field on which we had been stranded, and safely reached a T part of it of firmer character, on which were several hummocks, where the dogs immediately ceased running, conscious, apparently, that the danger was past. We were saved! We joyfully embraced each other, and united in thanks to God for our preservation from such imminent peril.’ But their misfortunes did not end here; they were cut off from the deposit of their provisions; they were 360 versts from their nearest magazines, and the food for the dogs was now barely sufficient for three days. Their joy may be imagined when, after a few versts' travelling, they fell in with Matiuschkin and his party, bringing with them an abundant supply of provisions of all kinds. To leave nothing undone which could possibly be effected, Wrangell advanced to the eastward along the coast, past Cape North, seen in Cook's last voyage, and proceeded as far as Koliutschin Island, where he found some Tchuktchi, who had come over from Behring's Straits to trade. With this journey terminated Wrangell's labours on the coasts, or on the surface of the Polar Sea, and, at the beginning of the following winter, we find him taking a final leave of Nishne Kolymsk. On January 10, 1824, he arrived at Jakutsk, and a few months later at Petersburg. If we consider the difficulties he had to encounter, and his untiring zeal and courage, in the midst of privations and dangers, it is only fair to admit that his name deserves to be ranked among the most distinguished explorers of the Arctic world. CHAPTER XXI. THE TUNGUSI. Their Relationship to the Mandschu-Dreadful Condition of the Outcast Nomads TH THOUGH both belonging to the same stock, the fate of the Tungusi and Mandschu has been very different; for at the same time when the latter conquered the vast Chinese empire, the former, after having spread over the greatest part of East Siberia, and driven before them the Jakuts, the Jukahiri, the Tchuktchi, and many other aboriginal tribes, were in their turn subjugated by the mightier Russians. In the year 1640 the Cossacks first encountered the Tungusi, and in 1644 the first Mandschu emperor mounted the Chinese throne. The same race which here imposes its yoke upon millions of subjects, there falls a prey to a small number of adventurers. However strange the fact, it is, however, easily explained, for the Chinese were worse armed and less disciplined than the Mandschu, while the Tungusi had nothing but bows and arrows to oppose to the Cossack fire-arms; and history (from Alexander the Great to Sadowa) teaches us that victory constantly sides with the best weapons. In their intellectual development we find the same difference as in their fortunes between the Mandschu and the Siberian Tungusi. Two hundred and fifty years ago the former were still nomads, like their northern kinsfolk, and could neither read nor write, and already they have a rich literature, and their language is spoken at the court of Peking; while the Tungusi, oppressed and sunk in poverty, are still as ignorant as when they first encountered the Cossacks. According to their occupations, and the various domestic animals employed by them, they are distinguished by the names of Reindeer, Horse, Dog, Forest, and River Tungusi; but although they are found from the basins of the Upper, Middle, and Lower Tunguska, to the western shores of the Sea of Ochotsk, and from the Chinese frontiers and the Baikal to the Polar Ocean, their whole number does not amount to more than 30,000, and diminishes from to year year, in consequence of the ravages of the small-pox and other epidemic disorders transmitted to them by the Russians. Only a few rear horses and cattle, the reindeer being generally their domestic animal; and the impoverished Tunguse, who has been deprived of his herd by some contagious disorder, or the ravages of the wolves, lives as a fisherman on the borders of a river, assisted by his dog, or retires into the forests as a promyschlenik or hunter. Of the miseries which here await him, Wrangell relates a melancholy instance. In a solitary hut in one of the dreariest wildernesses imaginable, he found a Tunguse and his daughter. While the father, with his long snow-shoes, was pursuing a reindeer for several days together, this unfortunate girl remained alone and helpless in the hut, which even in summer afforded but an imperfect shelter against the rain and wind, exposed to the cold, and frequently to hunger, and without the least occupation. No wonder that the impoverished Tungusi not seldom sink into cannibalism. Neither the reindeer nor the dogs, nor the wives and children of their more |