Nevertheless, the Russian advance across completely unfamiliar and often difficult terrain might at least have been slowed if the local population had realized how much of a cumulative threat they were. But in fact many natives initially regarded the explorers as newcomers for trade, and showed them hospitality or supplied them with advice, instructions, and guides in the traditions of the clan system. In some cases they even embraced them as allies or protectors against hostile neighboring tribes, and (being used to paying tribute to someone) a few groups were as willing to subject themselves to Russian authority as to that of their former Mongol, Kirghiz, or Buryat feudal lords.
But perhaps the paramount factor was that the Siberians were hopelessly divided among themselves. In any given region, adjacent or competing groups cherished a rancorous hatred toward one another, and in haphazard retaliatory raids fought over favored hunting or fishing grounds, honor, women, and goods. This greatly eased the Russian task of establishing control. The Buryats had clashed with the Yakuts, the Yakuts with the Tungus; and the Ostyaks and Voguls, though closely related, were hereditary foes. So, too, were the Koryak, Chukchi, and Yukaghir. And of course there was no supra-ethnic association among them all since, for example, the Tungus had never heard of the Ostyaks and Voguls, or the Buryats of the Kamchadals.
Some of the blood feuds approached a genocidal scale. The Yukaghir, for example, had once occupied the whole region between the Lena and the Anadyr rivers, from the Verkhoyansk Range to the Arctic Ocean. The Yakuts called the northern lights “Yukaghir Fire,”84 in homage to the multitudinous fires of Yukaghir encampments which in olden days had seemed as if reflected in the evening sky. But the Koryak, Chukchi, and Tungus had all become their deadly enemies, and by the time the Russians arrived, the Yukaghir population was so reduced as to make them the least of the northeastern tribes.
Although it is sometimes said (in mitigation of the conquest) that the Russians at least put an end to intertribal warfare, the opposite is true. The Russians deliberately exploited such hostilities, and otherwise endeavored to turn them to account. Ostyaks were used as auxiliary troops against the Voguls and Samoyeds, Yukaghirs against the Tungus, Koryak, and Chukchi, and Tungus against the Buryats, as a mercenary force. Yasak-paying natives also helped to impose the tax on their neighbors, even as the more defiant attacked their acquiescent brethren in punitive raids.
Less deliberately, but contributing to the same tempestuous results, the Russians by their exactions and campaigns put many natives to flight, driving one group into the territory claimed by another and creating animosities that had not existed before. The economic imperatives of yasak and trade also (as Robert Utley remarks about the American West) “gave rise to territorial ambitions in groups formerly content with the land they occupied. For now natives killed game not only for their own needs” but for yasak, and also “to pile up hides and furs for barter with the whites.”85 Ironware and copper utensils, metal arrowheads and tools became an indispensable pan of their lives. The Yakuts, for example, were prepared to pay for an iron pot with as many sable skins as it would hold.
Throughout the early conquest, which had seen the Russians rapidly establish their authority over the three greatest river basins of northern Asia as well as much of the Arctic coast, there had been innumerable firefights, skirmishes, ambushes, and raids; but except for the initial battle for Kuchum’s capital of Isker, almost no other sizable military confrontation had taken place. And the historic stature of Yermak’s campaign itself derived less from its scale than from its unforeseen results.
Then, in the valley of the Amur – the Black Dragon River – the Russians came up against the Chinese.
5
THE BLACK DRAGON RIVER
The tsar’s satraps had been feeling their way toward the margins of the Chinese Empire ever since settling Yakutsk. Increasing problems of provisionment in Eastern Siberia drove them nearer, as part of a frantic search for agriculturally productive land. In 1626, men in Yeniseysk had complained that their food was “such, that in Russia even animals would not accept it”;86 in 1629, the garrison at Krasnoyarsk had been driven by starvation to cannibalism; and eastward the scarcity of foodstuffs was even more severe. In the late 1630s, Russians operating along the Yenisey and Lena rivers began to hear rumors of a valley to the southeast where agriculture flourished, and where there were rich deposits of silver and other ores. Scouts collected similar information from Tungus on the Angara, and Ivan Moskvitin on the coast of the Okhotsk Sea had made the acquaintance of the Lamuts, a tribe related to the Tungus, who told him about rich lands to the south inhabited by the Gilyaks and Daurs. It was said (as it had been of the Buryats before them) that these people had prosperous and settled communities and all that the beleaguered frontiersmen in Eastern Siberia would require.
In June 1643, Vasily Poyarkov, the golova or “writing chief” at Yakutsk, undertook a general reconnaissance expedition to verify the various reports. With 133 men plus plenty of powder and shot (but few provisions, since he planned to requisition what he needed on the way), he ascended the Aldan River, a tributary of the Lena, crossed the Stanovoy Range after stationing forty-nine men at a blockhouse on the divide, and descended the Zeya River to the Amur.
The first Daurs Poyarkov encountered downstream were quite hospitable. They gave him yasak and hostages, and confirmed that grain was locally grown; but “in spite of his insistent demands, denied knowledge of any deposits of silver, copper, or lead ore.”87 They explained that the metal objects in their possession came by trade from the Mongols and the Chinese.
The Russians remained unsatisfied. Though generously supplied with foodstuffs, their cruelty toward the Daurs soon erased the goodwill, and their source of provisions dried up. As a result, during the winter of 1643-44 forty Russians starved to death, and some of the dead were apparently eaten by their companions. Spring at last brought some reprieve, as the detachment from the blockhouse arrived with fresh supplies; but as the Russians made their way down the Zeya, word of their barbarities preceded them, and the inhabitants prepared to fight. Near the mouth of the Sungari, an ambush wiped out a party of Russian scouts, and finding it impossible to land anywhere in safety, Poyarkov hastened downstream. At the mouth of the Ussuri (another of the Amur’s great affluents) he found himself in the land of the Goldi, and two weeks later came to the territory of the Gilyaks, whose settlements extended to the coast. A month later he was at the mouth of the Amur itself, where he passed another difficult winter (1644-45), and by the end of it had only sixty men left. Not daring to return up the Amur through hostile territory, in the spring of 1645 Poyarkov sailed into the stormy Sea of Okhotsk and, following the coast northward, three months later reached the mouth of the Ulya River, where Moskvitin had built a winter blockhouse six years before. During the winter of 1645-46, he collected yasak from the local Lamuts; when spring arrived, he crossed the mountains, sailed down the Maya River to the Aldan, and from there into the Lena to Yakutsk.