great difficulty and danger. We had often to ascend steep icebergs ninety feet high and to descend at great risk to the sledges... at other times, we had to wade up to our waists through drift snow, and if we came to smooth ice it was covered with sharp, crystallized salt which destroyed the ice-runners and made the draught so heavy that we were obliged to harness ourselves to the sledges, and it required our utmost efforts to drag them along... Both men and dogs were completely exhausted. We had only three days’ provisions left, and it appeared very doubtful whether we might venture further... The want of provisions now obliged us to return; and I was forced to content myself for the present with having ascertained that for forty miles to the east of Cape Shelagsky, the coast trended in a southeast direction.567
Three years later, he succeeded in rounding Cape Shelagsky all the way to East Cape, covering 1,530 miles in seventy-eight days. In so doing, he demolished any lingering theory (as espoused by an English admiral as late as 1817) about a land bridge connecting Asia and America. It was Wrangel who provided incontrovertible and final proof that the continents were nowhere joined.
Although the map of the Arctic coastline had been completed by Wrangel, the difficulty of penetrating the ice of the Kara Sea, and the shortness of the period during which the mouth of the Yenisey was ice-free, long prevented any shipping between Central Siberia and European ports. As late as 1840, the Russian Admiralty concluded that a commercial passage through the Kara Sea was “altogether impracticable.”568 But in the 1870s attempts to establish a route were pioneered by Captain Joseph Wiggins, an Englishman, and Baron Adolf Nordenskiöld, a Swede. After several attempts, Wiggins succeeded in 1874 in reaching the mouth of the Ob, and in the following year, Nordenskiöld the mouth of the Yenisey. Two years after that, Wiggins reached and ascended the Yenisey for 1,000 miles to Krasnoyarsk. Not to be outdone, Nordenskiöld in a 350-ton steamer, the Vega, originally built for the northern whaling trade, proceeded right through the Northeast Passage and rounded the tip of Asia in 1878-79. As a result of that historic voyage, a Siberian Trading Syndicate was optimistically formed in England, with the Russian government granting it the right to ship goods to the heart of Siberia, duty-free. But even as the Vega was completing its mission, another began that would bring home to the world how treacherous for shipping the Russian Arctic was.
This was the voyage undertaken to the North Pole by U.S. Navy Lieutenant George Washington De Long in the Jeannette. Sailing from San Francisco on July 8,1879, De Long passed through Bering Strait to Wrangel Island, and followed its coast to the north. On September 5, the ship became trapped in pack ice, and for the next twenty-one months drifted helplessly with it through Arctic seas. On June 12, 1881, still 750 miles south of the North Pole (and 600 miles north of the Siberian coast), the ice began to tighten its grip, until “the deck bulged upward and the oakum and pitch were squeezed out of the seams.”569 On the following day, the Jeannette sank, leaving a shipwrecked crew in three open boats to find their way through a maze of narrow sea-lanes and hummocks of rotten ice. After nine weeks of scrambling, they found themselves off Faddeya Island, one of the three large islands of the New Siberian group, and at last beheld the open sea. They now desperately rowed southwestward toward the Lena Delta, more than 100 miles away, but before they could make much progress, a storm smashed one of their boats and separated the other two.
Under De Long’s chief mate, one crew reached the mouth of the Lena safely and proceeded upriver for help. The other under De Long also made it to shore, but ultimately perished; they were not found until the following spring, when on March 23,1882, De Long’s arm was discovered sticking out of the snow. It was the grisly fate of this expedition that evidently first gave the American public its abiding (and somewhat distorted) notion of what Siberia was like.
From the beginning of the conquest, of course, there were those who had borne witness to Siberia’s potential as a “virgin land.” In this view, it enjoyed a kinship with the “promised land” of America – a land of opportunity, relatively free of tsarist despotism and serfdom, where a man had a fighting chance to make a new life. Dostoyevsky observed that those “who are adept at solving life’s problems nearly always remain in Siberia and gladly put down roots there,” whereas the others returned home with slanders against it as a savage place.570 But he thought it possible whatever one’s vocation “to be supremely happy” there and to prosper over time. “The young ladies bloom like roses,” he wrote in The House of the Dead, “the wild game flies about the streets and comes to meet the hunter of its own accord. An inordinately large amount of champagne is drunk. The caviar is marvellous. In some localities the crops give a fifteen-fold yield.” The relative freedom Siberians enjoyed also gave them an appreciation of human dignity and civil rights, and it was not uncommon for travelers to note with surprise and admiration that Siberians somewhat resembled Americans “in their manners, customs, and even in their mode of life.”571
The notion, or feeling, that Siberia and its people were distinctive fostered an impulse toward regional autonomy and even a movement toward the creation of a separate state. Its adherents championed the cause of democratic freedoms, and made common cause with the Siberian natives against colonial rule. At the very least, the Siberian Autonomist movement (secretly formed in 1864) demanded local self-government through elected representatives and an end to using Siberia as a dumping ground for criminals. But others went further: they envisioned throwing off the colonial yoke entirely and establishing a new, independent, prosperous Siberian “nation,” free to follow its own peculiar path of development. Sympathizers (secret and otherwise) existed in some of the highest councils of government, and the promise of Siberia seems to have taken possession even of Muravyov-Amursky’s soul. “Like all men of action of the government school,” Peter Kropotkin tells us in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1885), “he [Muravyov] was a despot at the bottom of his heart; but he held advanced opinions, and a democratic republic would not have quite satisfied him.... He had gathered around him a number of young officials, quite honest, and many of them animated by the same excellent intentions as himself. In his own study, the young officers... discussed the chances of creating the United States of Siberia, federated across the Pacific Ocean with the United States of America.”572 Muravyov’s white colonnaded mansion overlooking the Angara River in Irkutsk, in fact, was sometimes called the “White House” (as noted earlier) in unmistakable tribute to such ideas. In 1878, a journal published in Geneva by Russian populists predicted that Eastern Siberia’s economic interests would eventually link it more naturally to Washington than to St. Petersburg, and it was the fantasy of one would-be assassin of Alexander II that Siberia would secede from the empire and join itself outright to the United States.
Partly to counteract such notions, the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (with branches in Eastern and Western Siberia) began to disseminate a good deal of ethnic and geographical data to encourage the idea of an overarching imperial community and to make educated Russians more aware of the scope and diversity of the empire. And toward the end of the nineteenth century even native Siberians began to be recognized as “citizens” with equal status under the law.