AMONG THE SAMOYEDS.*
IN the course of a pleasant little book called Polar Gleams published last year, the author, Miss Helen Peel, made men- tion of a fellow-traveller, who accompanied her party as far as the Strait of Yngoria and was there left behind to pass the winter among the Samoyed inhabitants of the mainland.
The book now before us, The Great Frozen Land, is the
work of that gentleman, Mr. Jackson, and recounts the expe- riences of his winter sojourn, and the attempts that he made to explore the little-known coast of the Arctic sea. The author has since started upon a more ambitious undertaking, known as the Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition, leaving his journals to be compiled into their present shape by Mr.
Arthur Montefiore. The journey of which they treat was undertaken, one might say, as a kind of preliminary canter to the more important attempt at Polar exploration upon which the author is now engaged. The present enterprise of which he is the leader has for its object, if not the discovery of a way to the North Pole through Franz Joseph Land, at least the thorough exploration of that tract and of the country that lies north of it, and it was mainly with a view to acquiring information and experience that might be useful in the Arctic life which he contemplated, that Mr. Jack- son passed a winter among the Samoyeds of Russian Siberia. Another object that Mr. Jackson had in view failed through the unwillingness evinced by the Samoyeds to accompany him eastwards. They would have nothing to do with the Yalmal Peninsula, averring that " very bad men'' lived there ; neither could they be induced to journey towards the Poderata River ; nor had the island of Nova Zembla any attractions for them to outweigh the difficulties of getting there. Perhaps in the last instance it was fortunate for the author that he did not succeed in persuading them, for a further acquaintance with Samoyed boats proved that an extended sea-journey would not have been without serious risks. As it was, he was fain to fall back upon a hasty explora- tion of Waigatz Island,—a more or less sacred land in the eyes of the Samoyeds, who are accustomed to bury their dead there,—and a journey from Habarora to the Pechora River, across the great frozen tundra, whose wilds are still very imperfectly known, even to Russian traders.
In the matter of physical strength and temperament our author seems to have been very well fitted for the adventures and extremely trying experiment upon which he embarked. But he suffered throughout from one disadvantage, and that a rather serious one. Naturally, he could not speak a word of Samoyed,—that was to be expected; but neither did he know a word of Russian, the only language in which he could have hoped to communicate with his Samoyed com- panions. In consequence, he found himself compelled to learn two languages at one and the same time,—painfully picking up Russian words from those Russians whom chance threw across his path, and, with even greater difficulty, exchanging what he picked up for the Samoyed equivalents. So great was his perseverance that he is enabled to add quite a long vocabulary to his book, but one cannot but recognise that much energy must have been wasted by his omission to learn even a little Russian before he started. The picture that he
draws of the Samoyeds at home is attractive enough in one way, and singularly unattractive in another. Their manners
and their morals are more than usually good ; their customs, more than usually beastly. The Samoyed is a kindly, honest, and very trustworthy friend,—hospitable to the stranger and very good to his own belongings. He is also fairly indus- trious and sober. But he is dirty—beyond all conception.
We will not quote the author's general description of the life in the " choom " or Samoyed tent ; it is not a pleasant thing to dwell upon. It will be quite sufficient to give his experiences of the dinner-hour " When I returned in the afternoon to the choom in a driving storm of sleet, I found Vassili and his wife in great fettle. He bad killed a deer in the morning, and they had been indulging in one of their big feeds. In fact, as I sledged up to the choom, he and his wife were only just concluding a three hours' feast. Squatting on skins, they had a rough piece of plank in front of -them, on which lay the stomach of a reindeer. This was almost full of blood, drained from the deer,—in fact, it formed their soup-tureen. They each had a hind leg, on which some of the • The Great From Land, By Frederick G. Jackson. Loudon: Macmillan and Co. hide still remained, and cutting off chunks of the meat, were dipping them in the crimson soup and then greedily swallowing the bonne bouehe. As a fitting background to the picture, pieces of the carcase, still dripping with blood, hung all round the interior of the choom. On the ground were small, dark pools of blood, and my sleeping-bag, though as well out of the way as the size of the interior would allow, was well sprinkled with the same natural dye. As they sat there grinning a welcome to me, with their cheeks and brows all smeared with gore, they looked for all the world like the blood-eating ghouls of one's childish fancy."
Not an appetising scene. The author, however, was soon suf- ficiently reconciled to the spectacle to satisfy his own hunger from the same dish, and to discover in freshly-killed and raw deer's-meat a valuable preventive against scurvy; a food that he sometimes carried in a frozen condition in his pocket, cut into cubes and ready to be transferred, like marbles, to his mouth during his long reindeer journeys. For it was not only in the form of meat that Mr. Jackson proved the great utility of the reindeer, and he has marvellous tales to tell of their speed and endurance as animals of draught,—so marvellous, in- deed, that he must forgive us for suggesting that he has made a mistake in his figures. " I have myself," he writes, "driven three reindeer a distance of one hundred and twenty versts within twelve hours without feeding them, and I heard of a case where a Zirian drove three deer from Ishma, on the Pechora River, to Obdorsk, on the Obi, a distance of three hundred versts, within twenty-four hours A reindeer or Samoyed verst, by the way, is equal to four Russian versta." In other words, Mr. Jackson says that he has driven three deer for twelve hours, at the rate of forty Russian versts or twenty-seven English miles an hour. And the Zirian, with a similar team, covered seven hundred and ten miles in twenty- four hours. The latter, by the way, must have crossed the Ural mountains and one or two rivers into the bargain. Surely there must be some mistake. There exists, it is true, a well-known tradition of a reindeer which once—about 1700 we believe — carried important despatches for the King of Sweden eight hundred miles in forty-eight hours, and, dying in the service of its King, is • still preserved — in skeleton form — in a northern museum.
But that, after all, is only a tradition. Better authenti- cated records do not give a higher rate of speed than one hundred and fifty miles to nineteen hours, which is considerably higher than what is attained by any other animal. The account of the journey from Habarova to the Pechora River is excellently written, and the author's
description of the country which he crossed is worth quoting :— "Nothing that I know in nature can equal the dreariness and solitude of the tundra. Mile after mile as you travel along, there is no break in the monotony of this great frozen land. Everywhere is snow, everywhere the vast white plains. In the perspective of distances the very ridges melt into the general level, and, as you look round, everywhere you are met with the same great mantle of unbroken snow. The country lies before you as an earth that is dead, so still, so motionless, so rigid is the landscape. Life has fled before the icy winds which draw out of the north, and the land you traverse is surely the land of death. There is scarcely the cry of a single bird to break upon the ear in this untenanted wilderness ; the very streams are motionless masses of ice. Track there is none, and you may wander east, west, north, and south without landmark to set you right. Day after day, and week after week, your deer will gallop along their frozen way, and your compass, or, if the grey clouds will lift for a. while, the stars in the heaven aboNe will be your only guide."
The only break in the oppressive silence and unchanging quietude of the scene is the sudden onset of a fierce storm,— a storm which, one would think, must be attended on that desolate plain with almost the same terrors as it carries to
those at sea. Truly, the Arctic explorer has need of a greater hardihood and constancy than any other. Mr. Jack- son makes light of his discomforts and misadventures, as
befits a man who writes on the threshold of a still more dangerous journey. Hie notes upon Samoyed people, espe- cially upon the crypto-paganism of their religious observances, are interesting from more than one point of view; and it is evident that he learnt from them also a good many useful lessons in the matter of clothing and food, which should stand him in good stead upon his present quest. His book is well illustrated, and contains some useful appendices, among which not the least noteworthy is one that gives a full account of the Polar Expedition upon which the author is now engaged.
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