Russia | Page 7

the Ob and
of the Ostiak country had already been published by Sebastian Munster
and by Herberstein a generation before the Cossacks entered Sibir. The
very name of this town is marked on Munster's map.
In 1579, Yermak began the second plundering expedition, which in two
years resulted in the capture of the Tatar kingdom. When the
conquerors entered Sibir they had been reduced from over 800 to about
400 men. But this handful represented the power of the Tsars and
Yermak could sue for pardon, with the offer of a kingdom as his
ransom. Before the close of the Sixteenth Century the land had been
finally subdued. Sibir itself, which stood on a high bluff on the right
bank of the Irtish, exists no more, having probably been swept away by

the erosions of the stream. But ten miles farther down another capital,
Tobolsk, arose, also on the right bank, and the whole of the north was
gradually added to the Tsar's dominions. The fur trappers, more even
than the soldiers, were the real conquerors of Siberia. Nevertheless,
many battles had to be fought down to the middle of the Seventeenth
Century. The Buriats of the Angora basin, the Koriaks, and other tribes
long held out; but most of the land was peacefully acquired, and
permanently secured by the forts erected by the Cossacks at the
junction of the rivers, at the entrance of the mountain passes, and other
strategic points. History records no other instance of such a vast
dominion so rapidly acquired, and with such slender means, by a
handful of men acting mostly on their own impulse, without chiefs or
instructions from the centre of authority.
Even China allowed the Cossacks to settle on the banks of the Amur,
though the treaty of Nerchinsk required the Russians to withdraw from
that basin in 1689. But during the present century they have been again
attracted to this region, and the Government of St. Petersburg is now
fully alive to the advantages of a free access by a large navigable
stream to the Pacific seaboard. Hence, in 1851, Muraviov established
the factory of Nikolaievsk, near the mouth of the Amur, and those of
Mariinsk and Alexandrovsk at either end of the portage connecting that
river with the Bay of Castries. During the Crimean war its left bank
was definitely secured by a line of fortified posts, and in 1859 a ukase
confirmed the possession of a territory torn from China in time of peace.
Lastly, in 1860, while the Anglo-French forces were entering Pekin,
Russia obtained without a blow the cession of the region south of the
Amur and east of the Ussuri, stretching along the coast to the Corean
frontier.
And thus was completed the reduction of the whole of North Asia, a
territory of itself alone far more extensive than the European continent.
In other respects there is, of course, no point of comparison between
these two regions. This Siberian world, where vast wildernesses still
remain to be explored, has a foreign trade surpassed by that of many a
third-rate European seaport, such as Dover or Boulogne. Embracing a
thirteenth part of the dry land on the surface of the globe, its population

falls short of that of London alone; it is even more sparsely peopled
than Caucasia and Turkestan, having little over one inhabitant to 1,000
acres.
Accurate surveys of the physical features and frontier-lines are still far
from complete. Only quite recently the first circumnavigation of the
Old World round the northern shores of Siberia has been accomplished
by the Swedish explorer, Nordenskjöld. The early attempts made by
Willoughby, Chancellor, and Burrough failed even to reach the
Siberian coast. Hoping later on to reach China by ascending the Ob to
the imaginary Lake Kitaï--that is, Kathay, or China--the English
renewed their efforts to discover the "north-east passage," and in 1580
two vessels, commanded by Arthur Ket and Charles Jackman, sailed
for the Arctic Ocean; but they never got beyond the Kara Sea. The
Dutch succeeded no better, none of the voyages undertaken by Barents
and others between 1594 and 1597 reaching farther than the
Spitzbergen and Novaya Zembla waters. Nor were these limits
exceeded by Hendrick Hudson in 1608. This was the last attempt made
by the navigators of West Europe; but the Russian traders and fishers of
the White Sea were familiar with the routes to the Ob and Yenisei
Gulfs, as is evident from a map published in 1600 by Boris Godunov.
However, sixteen years afterwards the navigation of these waters was
interdicted under pain of death, lest foreigners should discover the way
to the Siberian coast.
[Illustration: SIBERIAN NATIVES.]
The exploration of this seaboard had thus to be prosecuted in Siberia
itself by means of vessels built for the river navigation. In 1648,