Such peaceful encounters were rare. Indeed, in the face of ambush, Arctic storms, shipwreck, and other perils, few expeditions had a happy end. The frontier breed was also a hard one, and (despite the common risks of their situation, which ought to have created solidarity) Russians in trouble could not always count on their own. In the summer of 1650, for example, one company under Timofey Buldakov, a Cossack from Yakutsk, worked their way along the coast until, just south of the New Siberian Islands (about halfway between the Yana and the Indigirka rivers), they were frozen in. In September, they began to drift with the ice far out into the ocean. They broke up their vessels to make sledges, and started to drag their supplies across the ice floes toward the coast. After nine days they finally made it to shore – half-naked, starving, debilitated by scurvy, and with frostbitten limbs. A little ways up the Indigirka River they came to a winter blockhouse where a company of tax collectors had encamped. The tax collectors had a sizable stock of wheat and flour, reserved for barter with the natives, but were unwilling to yield up a single morsel to their brethren, even though the latter offered to sell themselves to them as slaves.
Such were the pitiless characters with whom the hapless natives often had to deal.
In exploring the Siberian Arctic, many of the vessels used were also of extremely primitive construction, made entirely without iron from local materials, and held together by wooden nails and leather thongs. As often as not, they had only a wooden anchor to which a rock was attached, and oars and a single mast with a deerhide sail. Others, however, were of more substantial construction, related to a kind of coastal craft developed in Pomorye, the maritime region of northern Russia. It was from this region – the basin of the northern Dvina River and the coast of the White Sea – that a rather large proportion of Siberia’s promyshlenniks and Arctic explorers came. Some had been hunters and trappers, others deep-sea fishermen (pomorye means “sea people,” in old Russian) who had developed into seafarers by hunting sea mammals far from shore, sometimes following the pods of seals through the White Sea into the Arctic Ocean. Experience had taught them how to build boats capable of coping with floating ice, and to “follow the spring”61 in sailing along the coast, as the ice, thawed by the Gulf Stream, broke up progressively eastward “towards the sun.” Typically, their boat was “a relatively light maneuverable vessel of shallow draft, that had a flat-bottomed hull with curved sides. The form of the hull enabled it to avoid collisions with the ice or to ride up onto it if trapped, to negotiate leads or polynias (open water channels), and to be towed across shoals.”62 In navigating Arctic seas it was therefore more practical than “the heavier, deep-sea vessels (with flatter sides, angled at the chines, and deeper in draft)” that Western mariners used.
The Siberian version, developed in the district of Yakutsk, was somewhat larger and sturdier than its Pomorye model – up to 60 feet long, 20 wide, with a draft of 5 to 6 feet. Made of light dry pine or larch, it had a keel and a rigid frame, braced with crossbeams, and planking, “like Western ships.”63 Iron nails, spikes, and bolts contributed to its strength. In addition, this koch, as it was called, had a large canvas sail, iron anchors, and was furnished with a rudder, tiller, capstan, and even a wind-driven pump. Copper-cased compasses and compass sundials mounted in mammoth ivory, or pieces of lodestone set in bone, completed the basic equipment. Depending on its size, such a craft could carry up to fifty people, with a cargo reaching 45 tons.
Of all the Arctic voyages of the time, the most dramatic by far was that accomplished by Semyon Dezhnev, an enterprising Cossack soldier, in his search for the River Anadyr. A native of Pomorye (from the town of Pinega, near the mouth of the northern Dvina), Dezhnev had entered the Siberian service about 1630, assigned to Yeniseysk. Subsequently, he was transferred to Yakutsk, where he married a Yakut, and was then posted with the Cossack leader Dmitry Zyrian among the Yukaghirs on the Yana River. Over the next few years, he found himself in the vanguard of the coastal explorations, participating in the discovery of the Alazeya and Kolyma rivers.
Prospects along the Kolyma soon lured many promyshlenniks and traders, along with servicemen from Yakutsk, who crowded into the few settlements on its shores. An annual market held in August at Srednekolymsk brought together trappers and traders from all around, but the incentives to keep pressing eastward remained. Agents for wealthy merchants were constantly on the lookout for new opportunities, and the fate of one of them, Fedot Alekseyev, became linked to Dezhnev’s own. Alekseyev had originally hoped to base his operations in Yakutsk, but found upon his arrival there in 1639 that a number of other agents were already entrenched. He decided to try his luck on the Olenek, a river to the west, but the local Russian outposts were constantly under Tungus attack. He therefore headed east, making his way from the Yana to the Indigirka to the Alazeya rivers in turn, until he reached the Kolyma in 1646. Even here, the competition was already fierce, so he formed an expedition to find the Anadyr – one of the last untapped areas in the northeast. After five years on the Kolyma, Dezhnev, too, was restless for new opportunities, for despite his past energy and initiative, he had yet to be appointed to a position of command. Offering to lead the expedition as the state’s representative (in charge of collecting the tribute), he promised personally to bring back several hundred sables as a pledge of his success.
Several vessels were assembled and loaded with a cargo that included beads and copper buttons for trade, traps for sables, thirteen “lodestones in bone,” and crowbars to pry away the ice from the sides of their boats. After a false start in the summer of 1647, in June 1648 they set out again from Srednekolymsk in seven koches with a party of ninety men. Emerging from the mouth of the Kolyma, they sailed eastward along the Arctic coast, but lost four boats before the Chukchi Peninsula was reached, and a fifth in shipwreck on the peninsula itself. The remaining two, commanded by Dezhnev and Alekseyev, rounded the great northeastern cape of Asia, where on a bluff they saw a scaffold, like a tower, made of whalebones, and in the sea opposite two islands – the Diomedes – inhabited by Eskimo. Battling wind and storm, they disembarked on the cape, skirmished with Chukchi, once more put out to sea, and became separated in a storm. Dezhnev’s boat was thrown ashore well south of the Anadyr River on October 1. Alekseyev’s boat was also wrecked somewhere on the coast, where he and most of his companions eventually perished, except for his Yakut concubine.
In this astonishing voyage of one hundred days, Dezhnev and his companions had sailed over 2,000 miles through treacherous seas, evaded a whirlpool somewhere off East Cape, discovered the Diomede Islands, and had rounded the northeast tip of Asia eighty years before Vitus Bering sailed through the strait that bears his name.
Quite unaware of his achievement, however, Dezhnev knew only that his task was to survive and find the Anadyr. With twenty-five men, he ventured into the mountainous interior, and after some ten weeks of wandering found himself near the Anadyr’s mouth. Prospects on the river did not live up to their expectations, for the forest was scant, sables few, and much of the area bare tundra and rock.