Through Siberia

The steamer Beljetchenko.—Fellow-passengers.—Card-playing.—Cost of provisions.—Inspection of convicts’ barge.—An exile fellow-passenger.—Obi navigation.—The Ostjaks.—Their fisheries.—Feats of archery.—Marriage customs.

The Siberians are rich in time. Days to them are of little consequence; hours of no moment. With them “Time is not money.” “What difference,” said a coachman at Ekaterineburg to a friend of mine for whom he had lost his train, “what difference one way or other could an hour make, or for that matter two hours either?” Moreover, the arrival and departure of steamers are not announced by a.m. and p.m., but the date simply is given; and of course you are expected to be in readiness to start at any moment of the twenty-four hours. We deemed it unsafe, therefore, to sleep at the hotel on Monday night, the 2nd of June, lest we should be left behind; so, getting our tarantass and luggage on the pier, I crept inside the vehicle, and there spent the early part of the night, till, at dawn, the steamer arrived. For a Siberian steamer, the Beljetchenko, belonging to Messrs. Kourbatoff and Ignatoff, was good, and her dimensions, compared with others upon which I subsequently travelled, were large. She was a paddle-boat, with fore-cabins and saloons for first-class passengers, and after-cabins for those of the second class, whilst the deck was allotted to a considerable number of third-class passengers and discharged soldiers who were “homeward bound.” All told, the passengers, I should imagine, could not have counted less than from 100 to 150. Among those of the first class were some pleasant people, such as officers of the army, navy, and gendarmerie, and a few school girls going home for summer holidays from Petersburg, a distance of 3,000 miles. There were specimens also of the ubiquitous Russian merchant, travelling on business. Our first impressions of these travellers were unfavourable. Some of the gentlemen were taking leave, if I mistake not, at Tobolsk, of friends, and this event is usually accompanied in Siberia with the drinking of a great deal of wine; so that, when one of the naval officers came to take his place in the sleeping saloon, he was in a condition “unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” We were spared further inconvenience of this kind by the captain, who had received injunctions from one of the proprietors, Mr. Ignatoff, to look after “Mr. Missionary,” as the captain insisted upon calling me, and on which I did not undeceive him. For the payment of three second-class fares he gave us for sleeping the second-class ladies’ cabin—intended for five persons—in which we were comfortable enough at night, whilst we sat where we pleased by day. The captain was also instructed to charge £2 instead of £4 for the carriage of our tarantass, and also to deal leniently with our heavy excess of baggage and books. As our voyage lasted several days, it was not a matter for surprise that time hung heavily upon the hands of some of the passengers, but I was hardly prepared for the amount of card-playing with which much of it was killed. In no country that I have visited have I seen a tenth part of the card-playing that I witnessed in Siberia. The Russian Government exercises a monopoly in the manufacture of playing-cards, the profits being applied to the support of the Foundling Hospital at Moscow, and 110 tons of cards are annually carried on the Petersburg-Moscow railway. I am told that the amount of card-playing in European Russia also is very considerable; that there are clubs in Petersburg where the gambling is frightful. As for our fellow-passengers, there was a clique who played by day and quarrelled by night, and sometimes did not leave off their games till seven in the morning. By the time the journey was five days old, £20 had been lost by a young officer, who told me that in the small towns of the interior, in which soldiers are quartered, where there is little congenial society and nothing to do, card-playing is the daily constant resource of the officers. The habit, moreover, is not confined to men, but is indulged in, though apparently in a less degree, by women also. On board the steamer the game was not accompanied by excessive drinking, and, happily, several of the passengers—especially the ladies—spoke French, and a few could read English, so that in their society we passed an agreeable time.

The fares for travelling and the charges for provisions were low. The three second-class tickets for the whole journey of 8 days cost only £4, and for a dinner of 4 or 5 courses—soup, fish, meat, game, and pastry,—only 2s. were charged. I remembered this tariff with a sigh in California, where the price was double for a meal not half so good, with wretched attendance into the bargain. It must be confessed, however, that provisions on the river’s bank were extremely cheap—so cheap that one almost hesitates to put it on paper. At Surgut I was offered a pair of ducks for 2½d.; 10 brace of riabchiks, a sort of grouse about the size of a partridge, cost 1s.; a couple of fish called yass, weighing, I supposed, 1½ lb. each, were offered for 1½d.; and 10 large fish, as a lot, for ¼d. each. At Juchova I was offered for 5d. a couple of pike, weighing probably 20 lbs., and a live duck for 1¼d.; whilst at the villages in the district we passed, which are not easily accessible, a young calf, I was told, could be bought for 6d.

As we ploughed along, there was tugged at our stern a barge laden with convicts, to which Dr. Johnson’s definition of a ship as “a prison afloat” would with accuracy apply. The barge was a large floating hull, called the Irtish, 245 feet long, and 30 feet beam, 11 feet high from the keel to the deck, with a 4-feet water-line. It was made expressly for the transport of convicts, of whom it was intended to carry 800, with 22 officers. Below it was fitted with platforms for sleeping, like those described in the jails, whilst at either end of the craft were deck-houses eight feet high, containing a small hospital, an apothecary’s shop, and apartments for the officers and soldiers in charge. The space between the deck-houses was roofed over, and the sides closed by bars and wires, painfully suggestive of a menagerie, or reminding one of the cage-cells in the old jail at Edinburgh. The vessel had neither masts nor engines, and bore a pretty close resemblance to a child’s Noah’s ark. At one of our stoppages I was trying to make a sketch of this unique craft, when the officer came and invited me to inspect it. We therefore went on board, with hands and pockets full of reading matter for distribution; and if the bars were suggestive of a menagerie, so, I must add, was the mode in which the occupants received our literary food. Not that they were rude, but so delighted were they with the pictures, and so eager to get the papers that contained them, that we found it hard work to hold our own. We had afterwards an opportunity of testing the value in money of this apparent eagerness for reading material. In former years I had always given both Scriptures and tracts. This year it was urged, and I think rightly, that it is better, when possible, to sell them. To offer them, however, for money to convicts seemed almost a mockery. Nevertheless we tried it, and requested the officer to let us know how many prisoners would like to give 2½d. for a copy of the New Testament, or the Book of Psalms. To my surprise he came at a subsequent stopping-place, bringing the money for 44 copies, and said that one man was in such haste to get his book that he had been to him three times to ask for it. As we proceeded on our course, and, looking back, saw the broad keel of the barge ploughing its way after us, one could not help feeling for its strange freight, and the many heavy hearts that were being tugged along further and further from the dear place called “home.” But such thoughts received little enlargement at the halting-places, when the barge was drawn up to the bank; for the hilarity thereon of men, women, and children was much more noisy than that of the free people on the steamer. One might have thought that the convicts were having a good time of it; and it had been observed to us at Tiumen, as a noteworthy remark, that although, of the 800 prisoners on board, probably 250 would be murderers, nevertheless 20 soldiers would suffice to control them. They had a considerable amount of freedom on the barge, though they could not go, of course, indiscriminately to whatever part of the vessel they pleased.

At one of the halting-places we dropped a Polish exile, a doctor. He was the same man we had seen with his little comforts in the prison at Tobolsk. He was not on the barge, but travelled, as such prisoners usually do, on the steamer, as a second-class passenger, in a cabin near ours, with a gendarme who kept him, and who, we had opportunities of observing, never allowed him to go for a moment out of his sight. We had ingratiated ourselves into the gendarme’s favour by giving him books, as we had given also to the soldiers, passengers, and all on board, and we wished to chat with the prisoner; but his guard was faithful to his duty, and would not suffer him to be spoken to. When it was time for the prisoner to go on shore, he walked erect out of his cabin, dressed in private clothes, wearing shaded spectacles, and smoking a cigar. But he was landed at a miserable place on the 62nd parallel, where, at the beginning of June, the leaves were not out, and it had not ceased occasionally to snow; at a village where an educated man could, I presume, find little agreeable society or congenial occupation. His hair was already grey, and as he sat upon his little stock of clothes, with the gendarme standing near, and watching our ship as it glided away, we felt we had left him in a sorry place in which to spend his declining years. We heard that he had a second time incurred punishment, by trying to escape from Nertchinsk. But it was a melancholy illustration of the meaning of Siberian exile.

The distance from Tobolsk to Tomsk by water is 1,600 miles, which we accomplished in 8 days. We overtook more than one freight steamer, but saw few other vessels, and no timber rafts. The banks were low and flat, and houses of rare occurrence. On the second day from Tobolsk we stopped at Samarova, where the Irtish runs into the Obi; and on the third day we stopped at Surgut, a place of 1,200 inhabitants. Three days later we touched at Narim, which has a population of 2,000.

We did not land sufficiently near to any of these towns to allow of a visit, and the steamer picked up and set down few passengers. Herds of half-wild horses were seen from time to time on the prairies. They were not shod, were unfamiliar with the taste of oats, and had in the summer to find their own living. In the winter they are used for the transport of dried and frozen fish. The natives have an ingenious way of catching fish through holes in the ice, especially in the case of the sturgeon, which in winter congregate in muddy hollows in the bed of the river, lying motionless in clusters for the sake of warmth. The Ostjak cuts a hole above them, sets a spring rod, and then forms a number of balls of clay, which he makes red hot and throws into the river below his bait. The heat rouses the sturgeon, which rise, swim up stream, and are caught. There are large fisheries in the gulfs of the Obi and the Taz, where the Russians pay rent for the sandbanks to the Samoyedes, and, having caught the fish in summer, they put them in ponds till the approach of winter. They are then taken out and frozen, and in this condition sent as fresh fish a journey of 2,000 miles to Petersburg.⁠[1] A large quantity of dried fish is also forwarded from the Obi to the great fair of Nijni Novgorod. Furs and hides likewise are sent there from the northern part of the province, together with rye, barley, oats, and buckwheat from the south.

Nothing, however, that we saw on the banks was more interesting perhaps than the aborigines, especially the Ostjaks, some of whom appeared paddling in their tiny canoes, and stealthily gliding among the bushes as the steamer approached. The Ostjaks inhabit a tract of country on either side of the Irtish and Obi, extending as far north as Obdorsk, on the south to Tobolsk, and nearly as far east as Narim. There is also a territory over which they roam on the left bank of the Yenesei below Turukhansk, though Mr. Howorth thinks that these are miscalled Ostjaks, being really Samoyedes. Their numbers are estimated at 24,000. They have no towns or villages, though they sometimes settle among the Russians. We saw on the banks the frames of some of their yourts, or tents, though the people were just then driven by the floods to higher ground. In the neighbourhood of the Obi they possess no reindeer; their wealth consists of boats, fishing-tackle, clothes, and utensils; and a nomad Ostjak who possesses goods to the value of £10 is deemed a rich man. In this district they have ceased to wear their native costume; and are become more or less Russianized; but the Ostjaks of the Yenesei still dress in the costume of their forefathers. These people are short of stature, with dark hair and eyes, and flat faces; in complexion and general appearance those we saw were not much unlike some of the Siberians. They live principally by fishing and the chase, and are very skilful in the use of the bow. In shooting squirrels, for instance, they use a blunt arrow, and take care to hit the animal on the head, so as not to damage the fur.⁠[2]

I had heard of these aboriginals, before leaving England, from Miss Alba Hellman in Finland, who thus writes of some of their marriage customs in expressive English: “The Ostjaks are carrying on the most shameless commerce with their daughters. A girl is a valuable thing while she is yet in her parents’ home. She then gets all possible care and protection. But is it therefore that she may be a good daughter, wife, or mother? By no means for that cause: an Ostjak father has the same object in his daughter’s feeding as he has in feeding his animals. Well fed, she will not long stay at home without the father getting good payment for her. The price of an ordinary wife was at the river Irtish (on the Obi the price is higher), first, from £20 to £30 in money; next, a horse, a cow, and an ox; then from 7 to 10 pieces of clothing; and lastly, a pood of meal, a few hops, and a measure of brandy for the wedding feast. And when a man cannot afford to pay all these things, he often steals the girl. So says Professor Castrén.”