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Exploring and Mapping Alaska
The Russian America Era, 1741â"1867
By Alexey Postnikov, Marvin Falk, Lydia Black UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 University of Alaska Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60223-252-5
CHAPTER 1
The Russian Advance Toward the Pacific Ocean
On his 1507 world map, the cartographer Martin Waldseemueller (1470–1518) showed the American continents separated from Asia by an expanse of ocean, thus predicting the existence of the still unknown Pacific Ocean with an opening to the north. Just five years later the Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa, crossing the Isthmus of Panama, discovered the Pacific Ocean. It took an additional two centuries before a strait opening to the Arctic Ocean was proven through the discovery of northwestern America by Russian pioneers and seamen who cut the difficult trail through Siberia to the Far East.
In North America the Asian Pacific side differed substantially from the European Atlantic side. The Atlantic Ocean separates the Old and the New Worlds by an immense expanse of water, whereas the northern Pacific Ocean separates Eurasia from North America by a mere fifty-three miles at the Bering Strait. Although the eastern shores of America may have been reached by Irish monks and Vikings, there were no sustained contacts between the inhabitants of Europe and the Americas before Columbus.
In contrast, Eurasia and North America were joined together during the ice ages by a landmass now called the Bering Land Bridge. The first people to penetrate America did so from northeastern Asia and gradually populated both American continents. What became the Bering Strait formed as a result of postglacial melting, flooding the land bridge. In the course of millennia, close trade and cultural relations continued to be maintained across Bering Strait.
Thus, in this special ethnohistoric region — Beringia — contact between the Old and New Worlds was continuous, though the rest of the world had no knowledge of it. Starting in the mid-eighteenth century, Russian pioneers, fur hunters(promyshlenniki), and traveling scientists also came to North America, securing the expansion of the Russian state eastward. There are substantial differences between these developments and the first contacts between the Spanish and the Indians of the Caribbean islands.
Members of the Christopher Columbus expedition suddenly found themselves in a totally foreign ethno-cultural environment. They interacted with the Natives who, according to the then-prevalent Christian teaching, had no rightful place on this earth. This was held to be evidence that they were not human and thus justified the genocide of local Native populations by the "civilized" Europeans.
Russians, too, shed a great deal of Native blood in their conquest of Siberia and later movement a farther east, but the nature of this movement and their relationship with local populations was different. The process of colonizing Siberia, Kamchatka, the Aleutian Islands, and coastal Alaska by Russia lasted almost three centuries. Due to the length of this period, Russian pioneers, promyshlenniki, and Cossacks integrated with the natural and ethnic environment of the regions they moved into. The several generations of these pioneers who replaced each other over time not only lived next to and with the Natives, but actively exchanged information with them.
Geographic information was needed for the continuing eastward advance. Local place names were particularly important, as they provided a means of orientation in an unknown territory. They were diligently collected by the pioneers and in many instances gradually became accepted as their own. Because of this, Native geographic names, though often in distorted form, can be found on modern maps of Siberia, the Aleutian Islands, and Alaska.
As early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Russians moving toward the east occupied territories beyond the Urals, which separate Europe from Asia. Siberia was joined to Russia as a result of Ermak's incursions of 1581–1585. The settling of the immense expanses of Siberia was accomplished by people from many different social strata of the Russian population. Cossacks, fugitive serfs, small-time entrepreneurs, and noblemen moved to the east, into the virgin, sparsely populated localities where they were free to be their own bosses. They overcame harsh natural conditions and actively interacted with local tribes and nations who helped them adapt to the environment in their new home and showed them how to use the natural resources.
Resettlement of ordinary Russian people generally took place in a peaceful manner. Governmental initiatives established a Russian administration, imposed iasak (head tax) upon the local population, and recovered precious metals for the benefit of the state. Sometimes the local nomadic and hunting populations offered armed resistance, but there were also instances where Natives voluntarily joined Russians to defend against hostile attacks by their neighbors or to gain support in feudal and kin group conflicts. These processes were not accompanied by the extermination and dislocation of local populations as was the case with the Indians of North America in the course of European colonization moving inland from the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean.
The history of inhabitation of Siberia is well reflected in modern historical and geographical literature. Russian pioneers reached the Pacific Ocean coast early. In 1639 a detachment led by Ivan Moskvitin traveled down the Ulya River to the Sea of Okhotsk. The following year Cossacks from his detachment sailed north on the ocean to the mouth of the Okhota River and south to the Shantar Islands. While sailing to the south, the Cossacks learned about the Amur River and the Natives inhabiting the area, who were then called Gilyak (Nivkh in modern nomenclature). The Okhotsk ostrog (fortified outpost) was founded in 1647. This ostrog would play an important role in the future.
In 1648, Fedot Alekseev and Semyon Dezhnev, advancing east along the coast of the Arctic Ocean from the Kolyma, passed through Bering Strait. It was then that the Russians first discovered the northeastern extremity of Asia, the closest point to America. Dezhnev named it Bolshoi kammnoi nos (Great Rocky Promontory), where "a goodly number of Chukchi live." He reported that across from this promontory were two islands inhabited by "the toothed ones" (labret-wearing people, Eskimos). By "Bolshoi kamennoi nos" did Dezhnev mean the entire Chukotka Peninsula? From Dezhnev's report it is evident that he received some information about the Chukotka Peninsula from the local inhabitants, the Yukagir and the Chukchi. He also learned from them that in Chukotka "the shore ice is not carried out to sea every year."
Following the official incorporation of the Amur region into Russia, 1649–1652, the attention of the Russian pioneers was focused mainly on the southern areas, which were more promising with respect to the development of agriculture. However, interest in the Okhotsk shore and Kamchatka did not wane.
The existence of Kamchatka was already known from verbal accounts, but more precise information contained on maps and other documentary sources dates from the 1690s. Ivan Golygin brought back information about Kamchatka, and, according to some data, the peninsula was drawn on maps as early as 1672.Exploration truly began with the journeys of Luka Morozko in 1695–1696 and of Vladimir Atlasov in 1696–1699.
EARLY MAPS OF SIBERIA
The Russians came to Siberia with the necessary skills to compile geographic descriptions and elementary cartography, representing localities in original Native tradition. There is extensive documentary evidence that testifies to various charts and graphic representations compiled in Siberia. In particular, a number of instructions to the pioneers have been preserved, and it is possible to reconstruct the methodologies used in field reconnaissance. This served as the basis for compilation of the charts the pioneers were required to submit along with their reports.
Dezhnev mentions compiling a chart when submitting information about his voyage of 1648. The commanders sent to Siberia to establish fortifications and to hold new lands received orders demanding that "charts" were to be submitted. For example, a 1594 order given to Prince Pytor Gorchakov, who was being sent to "Siberian cities with various supplies and for organization of local affairs," instructed him, after consulting with other commanders, "to seek out a location suitable for establishing the new city ... occupy the city and make a chart representing it as well as describing the various fortifications."
The initial cartographic investigations were conducted by the Russian pioneers along rivers and trails that served as basic "survey routes," to which all other geographic information was linked. In most instances, members of the local populations (Siberian Tartars, Evenk, Yakut, Yukagir, Chukchi, Eskimos, and others) served not only as guides, but were also providers of information about localities outside the survey routes. The results of such exploratory investigations were incorporated into the description of the charts, which then served as the basis for the compilation of maps. The Siberian surveys reflected the rich tradition of detailed geographic descriptions used by the Pomory people of the Russian North from whom many famous pioneers originated. They were skilled in compiling manuscript guides for coastal navigation in the northern seas. Elementary manuscript charts, transmitted from one generation to the next and constantly being upgraded and corrected, developed into the methodology used for the itinerant cartography employed in the explorations of Siberia, the Far East, the Aleutian Islands, and Alaska.
As early as the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries the Pomory sailors of northern European Russia had acquired the magnetic compass from the Novgorodians. There are testimonies by foreign authors of the sixteenth century that the Pomory provided not only descriptions, but also charts of considerable stretches of the coasts of the northern seas. For example, the Dutch who encountered Russians near Kolguev Island in 1594 acquired a chart of the coast from the White Sea to the Pechora River from a Pomor skipper. The Dutch cartographer Gerhard Mercator in a letter to the English geographer Richard Hakluyt reported that when compiling his map of Russia he received data about the north from a Russian.
The Russian archives contain information about the compilation of hundreds of charts dating from the 1640s to the 1670s made in the process of studying and exploring Siberian lands.
The combined cartographic resource would include charts compiled by the pioneers, the cartographic materials created in the course of diplomatic missions, drawings related to the construction of fortifications, exploration for useful minerals, the imposition of taxes (iasak), exploring river and land communication routes, and also land maps created to establish property boundaries. Even areas that were difficult to access in the north or in the mountains were explored and represented on the maps.
Every step in the settling of Siberia was accompanied by cartographic activity, and the descriptions of the charts and the charts themselves were widely accessible. However, as with early Russian cartographic representations in general, most have been lost.
Starting in the 1590s, Tobolsk, then the main administrative center in Siberia, and the Kazan department (from 1637, the Siberia department) in Moscow, received local and regional geographic descriptions and charts. These were compiled on orders from central as well as local officials. All these tasks were executed in the original pre-Petrine Russian cartographic style.
The numerous regional descriptions and geographic charts of Siberia formed a basis for compiling composite maps of Siberia. Thus, in 1626, in connection with the creation of a new Great Chart of the Muscovite State (1626–1627), the Tobolsk commander was entrusted with delivery to Moscow of the materials pertaining to Siberia. This assignment from Moscow was executed in 1633 when, along with the Rospis sibirskim gorodam i ostrogam (Description of the Siberian Cities and Fortified Outposts), the first general chart of what was then known of Siberia was created, which, unfortunately, has not survived.
The rospis (explanatory text accompanying a map) contains a detailed description of Western Siberia and the southern defensive line of the Russian State. Eastern Siberia is represented very fragmentarily, and the description ends with a mention of the routes along the Lower Tunguska and of the dispatch of noblemen from Mangazeya to the Lena for iasak collection.
According to V. N. Tatishchev: "in the time of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich [reign 1645–1676] a general land map of Russia and several particular maps were compiled; and from the general map it is evident that the compiler understood the Latin tongue, as he used many Latin words and he also divided the map by degrees." The chart, compiled in the fall of 1667 by the volunteer effort of Tobolsk commander P. I. Godunov, is in itself a direct continuation of the geographic and cartographic study of Siberia that began in the 1620s and 1630s.
This is the earliest map of Siberia that has survived, and became world renowned following Adolf Nordenskjold's 1887 discovery of Swedish copies of it. This 1667 chart has been published repeatedly. In 1962 the original of the rospis that accompanied the chart was published. Prior to that, only copies had been available. Even now, the original of this general schematic chart is known only from manuscript copies. It presents a number of unsolved puzzles. A comparison of all extant copies shows the similarities of the cartographic representation of Siberia (the gross reworking by Schleising excepted), except for insignificant differences and distortions in the transmission of geographic place names.
The chart shows an immense territory to the east of the Volga and Pechora that encompasses the whole of Siberia and the Far East. The chart of 1667, like most other early Russian maps, is oriented toward the south, and the meridian and the latitude net are absent. The cartographic image at first glance appears rather naive, but nevertheless it realistically represents the position and basic outlines of the branching river systems. Besides the major rivers, such as the Ob, Yenisey, Lena, Olenek, Kolyma, and Amur, many tributaries and small rivers and streams flowing into the ocean are shown. The Ural Mountains are represented relatively correctly. Specific lands and population distributions (Kalmyks, Bukhars, Mungals, Saians, Kyrgyz, Bashkirs, and others) are indicated by ethnonyms in the corresponding places. Characteristically, the outline of the Asian continent, bounded by ocean in the north and east, is represented in a rectangular form.
Here, for the first time (since Waldseemueller), we encounter a categorical assertion, expressed cartographically, that a direct sea passage from the Arctic Ocean to the Pacific is feasible. This idea was advanced by the chart's author on the basis of Dezhnev's voyage in 1648. Evidence for the limitation of the geographic data available to the Russians is the absence of the large peninsulas of Taimyr, Chukotka, Kamchatka, and the Anadyr and Kolyma Rivers, which debouch into the Pacific and Arctic Oceans, respectively.
The chart was compiled on "the testimony of men of various ranks who visited Siberian towns and fortified outposts and know the local environments, the routes, and the lands truly ... and also on the testimony of the visiting Bukhara men and Tartar noblemen." The main part of the description contains an enumeration of the cities, fortresses, winter habitations, and rivers with their tributaries; states the distances between population points, in versts and days of travel; and mentions bordering countries and their peoples, particularly the kingdom of China and the "Indian (Native) land" that lies "beyond the rock," that is, beyond the mountains.
When the chart of Siberia was being compiled in 1667, the first effort was made to establish standard symbols in Russian cartography. In the chart's description, the original rospis, are listed "signs for recognition on the chart of cities, fortified outposts (ostrogi); suburbs (slobody); rivers, lakes, neighborhoods (volosti); winter camps (zimovia); and nomadic camps (kochevia); specifically: V — volost, G — gorod, Z — zimovie, K — kochevie, M — monastery, O — ostrog, R — river, S — sloboda, and W — ozero (lake).
B. P. Polevoi, analyzing the chart of Siberia of 1667 and its corresponding description, advanced the hypothesis that a number of regional charts were appended to the surviving composite chart, which together formed a chart book or an atlas of Siberia and that the number of such charts corresponds to numbers in the chart's description; that is, there were 22 of them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Exploring and Mapping Alaska by Alexey Postnikov, Marvin Falk, Lydia Black. Copyright © 2015 University of Alaska Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA PRESS.
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