The men divided into two parties to hunt for food. Twelve went upriver, but turned back without much luck after twenty days. Not far from where they were to link up with the rest, nine insisted on stopping for the night – and disappeared without a trace. The following spring (1649), the sixteen survivors constructed driftwood boats and went up the river, where (rather bravely, in their dependent condition) they managed to subdue the Anauls, a local subgroup of the Yukaghirs), from whom they collected tribute. On an island in the river, Dezhnev also founded Anadyrsk.
Meanwhile, oblivious of Dezhnev’s success, Mikhail Stadukhin, the veteran Cossack and explorer, also set out to find the Anadyr, proceeding overland. He had a much easier time of it. Since Dezhnev’s departure, it had been learned that the upper courses of the Anyuy and Anadyr rivers were not far apart, separated only by a modest mountain ridge. With the help of Yukaghir guides, in 1650 Stadukhin and another party under Semyon Motora located the fabled river after only a few weeks march.
Dezhnev and Motora joined their commands; but Stadukhin, who was unhappy to find that Dezhnev had gotten to the Anadyr first, attempted to lord it over the others and assume control. They resisted, and he established his own rival camp, interfering with their tribute collection, terrorizing the natives (with whom Dezhnev had established a rapport), and at one point even punching Dezhnev in the face. Attempting to escape from Stadukhin’s abuse, Dezhnev and Motora crossed the mountains to the south by sled in search of the Penzhina River (which empties from the north into the Sea of Okhotsk) “to find new non-tribute paying people and to bring them under the sovereign’s exalted hand.”64 Lacking a native guide, however, they were unable to find the trail, and after three weeks returned rather than brave the rigors of a winter in the wilds.
The ill-will bred by Stadukhin among the natives proved costly. In the autumn of 1650, nine servicemen and promyshlenniks were wiped out in an ambush, and the Russians managed to resubjugate the natives only after bloody hand-to-hand combat with axes and knives. Finding his situation untenable, and the fur resources of the Anadyr in any case scant, Stadukhin in February 1651 set out himself for the Penzhina River with a band of followers, and (perhaps a better pathfinder than Dezhnev) succeeded in reaching the northern coast of the Okhotsk Sea.
Absent Stadukhin, Dezhnev and Motora set up a dual command. But late in December 1651, Motora was killed in a fight with the Anauls, and soon thereafter Dezhnev began work on two boats to carry him back to Srednekolymsk by sea. He soon realized that he lacked the means to make a vessel strong enough to cope with the hazards he would face, and in any case wanted more to show for his efforts before he returned. In June 1652, while exploring the estuary of the Anadyr, he discovered a walrus rookery on a long triangular sandspit on the south side of the entrance to the bay. Hundreds of walruses were lolling about, and the sand was strewn with tusks. Dezhnev collected as many as he could, and in 1654 returned for more, in company with Yury Seliverstov, a new arrival from Yakutsk, who subsequently tried to claim the honor and profit of the discovery for himself.
Much to his astonishment, on this second excursion Dezhnev came upon a Koryak settlement where he found the Yakut concubine of Fedot Alekseyev. She told him that after their boat had been wrecked, most of the Russians (including Alekseyev) had been killed by Koryaks or had succumbed to disease. A few others, however, including Alekseyev’s son, had pushed off in boats into the unknown.
In the autumn of 1654, Dezhnev decided he’d had enough and petitioned his superiors for his back salary and a successor to relieve him of his command. He reviewed his service since leaving Yakutsk, called attention to the hardships he had endured and how much he had undertaken at his own expense. Five years were to pass, however, before Kurbat Ivanov (the Cossack who had discovered Lake Baikal) finally arrived with reinforcements to take his place. With two-and-a-half tons of walrus ivory in tow, as well as the fur tribute collected during the duration of his stay, Dezhnev set out for Yakutsk. By the time he got there, in the spring of 1662, more than nineteen years of back salary were due him. And from Yakutsk he proceeded at once to Moscow to collect. There, in September 1664, he made sure the Siberian Department understood the extent of his long sacrifice. His body, he told them, had been scarred all over with wounds; he had collected tribute on several major rivers without “salary in money and grain”65; and during this time, he had “suffered all kinds of want and destitution, ate larch and pine bark, and accepted filth for twenty-one years.” On the Anadyr especially, he told them, “I risked my head, shed my blood, suffered great cold and hunger, and all but died from starvation.”66 In the end, the government thought he deserved better, and in January 1665 he was promoted to Cossack commander and paid about 625 rubles in goods and cash – a substantial sum at the time.
Returning to Yakutsk (where his Yakut wife, Abakayada Sichyu, had given birth to their son, Lyubima) Dezhnev served with distinction in the district before retiring to Moscow in 1672. But to the end he remained oblivious to the historic importance of his pioneering voyage. Indeed, the geographical question that was later to animate cartographers, explorers, merchants, and politicians alike – whether Asia and America were joined by land – had not yet been definitely asked. In Dezhnev’s own opinion, the outstanding event of his career had been the discovery of the walrus rookery, which had somewhat made up for the comparative lack of sables on the Anadyr.
Knowledge of Dezhnev’s voyage soon faded in Moscow, and only a blurred memory of it remained in the Siberian northeast. But he would one day take his rightful place in the pantheon of explorers hallowed by posterity. “By answering an important scientific question,”67 as one scholar remarks, “Dezhnev had placed himself alongside Columbus, who had discovered the new world; Vasco de Gama, who had discovered the southern limits of Africa; and Magellan, who had found the route around South America.” In recognition of his achievement, his name would be given to the northeasternmost extremity of Asia (Cape Dezhnev), to a mountain range on the Chukchi Peninsula, and to a bay on the western shore of the Bering Sea.
Although Dezhnev enjoyed a posthumous fame, other unsung heroes, perhaps equally deserving of renown, lay buried forever along the Russian Arctic coast. In 1940, a topographical survey party working on the east side of the Taimyr Peninsula found, on an islet 80 miles southeast of Cape Chelyuskin (the northernmost point of Eurasia), pots, frying pans, rusty knives, beads, pewter plates, jewelry, coins, crosses, and other objects of early date. In an adjacent bay, they subsequently found the ruins of a driftwood hut and similar relics, as well as navigational instruments, a chess set, the remains of leather shoes with cleated heels, and several skeletons, including one of a woman or a boy. Dated to 1618, years before the Cossacks were believed to have reached the Lena, these objects bear witness to the anonymous triumph of a daring party of explorers who had rounded the Taimyr Peninsula and Cape Chelyuskin 125 years before a heavily equipped naval expedition barely managed to repeat the deed.
Endnotes
§§ On May 15, 1591, the Tsarevich Dmitry, while playing with a knife in the courtyard of his residence at Uglich, reputedly cut his own throat in an epileptic fit. This unlikely demise understandably aroused grave suspicions, but there must have been a number of political figures not eager to see him come to power. As a child he had already begun to manifest “sadistic traits reminiscent of his father’s” (Vernadsky, “The Death of Tsarevich Dmitry,” p. 16), liked to watch as animals were slaughtered, and for his own sport decapitated snowmen fashioned in the likeness of various aristocrats.