Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar Life. Thomas Wallace Knox
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of a fish drying establishment reminded me of the smells in certain quarters of New York in summer, or of Cairo, Illinois, after an unusual flood has subsided. One of our officers said he counted three hundred and twenty distinct and different smells in walking half a mile.
In 1865 one of the merchants started the enterprise of curing salmon for the Sandwich Island market. He told me he paid three roubles, (about three greenback dollars,) a hundred (in number) for the fresh fish, delivered at his establishment. Evidently he found the speculation profitable, as he repeated it the following year.
Illustration: A SCALY BRIDGE. Click to view.
When the salmon ascend the rivers they furnish food to men and animals. The natives catch them in nets and with spears, while dogs, bears, and wolves use their teeth in fishing. Bears are expert in this amusement, and where their game is plenty they eat only the heads and backs. The fish are very abundant in the rivers, and no great skill is required in their capture. Men with an air of veracity told me they had seen streams in the interior of Kamchatka so filled with salmon that one could cross on them as on a corduroy bridge! The story has a piscatorial sound, but it may be true.
House gardening on a limited scale is the principal agriculture of Kamchatka. Fifty years ago, Admiral Ricord introduced the cultivation of rye, wheat, and barley with considerable success, but the inhabitants do not take kindly to it. The government brings rye flour from the Amoor river and sells it to the people at cost, and in case of distress it issues rations from its magazines.
When I asked why there was no culture of grain in Kamchatka, they replied: "What is the necessity of it? We can buy it at cost of the government, and need not trouble ourselves about making our own flour."
There is not a sawmill on the peninsula. Boards and plank are cut by hand or brought from California. I slept two nights in a room ceiled with red-wood and pine from San Francisco.
On my second evening in Asia I passed several hours at the governor's house. The party talked, smoked, and drank tea until midnight, and then closed the entertainment with a substantial supper. An interesting and novel feature of the affair was the Russian manner of making tea. The infusion had a better flavor than any I had previously drank. This is due partly to the superior quality of the leaf, and partly to the manner of its preparation.
The "samovar" or tea-urn is an indispensable article in a Russian household, and is found in nearly every dwelling from the Baltic to Bering's Sea. "Samovar" comes from two Greek words, meaning 'to boil itself.' The article is nothing but a portable furnace; a brazen urn with a cylinder two or three inches in diameter passing through it from top to bottom. The cylinder being filled with coals, the water in the urn is quickly heated, and remains boiling hot as long as the fire continues. An imperial order abolishing samovars throughout all the Russias, would produce more sorrow and indignation than the expulsion of roast beef from the English bill of fare. The number of cups it will contain is the measure of a samovar.
Tea pots are of porcelain or earthenware. The tea pot is rinsed and warmed with hot water before receiving the dry leaf. Boiling water is poured upon the tea, and when the pot is full it is placed on the top of the samovar. There it is kept hot but not boiled, and in five or six minutes the tea is ready. Cups and saucers are not employed by the Russians, but tumblers are generally used for tea drinking, and in the best houses, where it can be afforded, they are held in silver sockets like those in soda shops. Only loaf sugar is used in sweetening tea. When lemons can be had they are employed to give flavor, a thin slice, neither rolled nor pressed, being floated on the surface of the tea.
Illustration: RUSSIAN TEA SERVICE. Click to view.
The Russians take tea in the morning, after dinner, after lunch, before bed-time, in the evening, at odd intervals in the day or night, and they drink a great deal of it between drinks.
In rambling about Petropavlovsk I found the hills covered with luxuriant grass, sometimes reaching to my knees. Two or three miles inland the grass was waist high on ground covered with snow six weeks before. Among the flowers I recognized the violet and larkspur, the former in great abundance. Earlier in the summer the hills were literally carpeted with flowers. I could not learn that any skilled botanist had ever visited Kamchatka and classified its flora. Among the arboreal productions the alder and birch were the most numerous. Pine, larch, and spruce grow on the Kamchatka river, and the timber from them is brought to Avatcha from the mouth of that stream.
The commercial value of Kamchatka is entirely in its fur trade. The peninsula has no agricultural, manufacturing, or mining interest, and were it not for the animals that lend their skins to keep us warm, the merchant would find no charms in that region. The fur coming from Kamchatka was the cause of the Russian discovery and conquest. For many years the trade was conducted by individual merchants from Siberia. The Russian American Company attempted to control it early in the present century, and drove many competitors from the fields. It received the most determined opposition from American merchants, and in 1860 it abandoned Petropavlovsk, its business there being profitless.
In 1866 I found the fur trade of Kamchatka in the control of three merchants: W.H. Boardman, of Boston, J.W. Fluger, of Hamburg, and Alexander Phillipeus, of St. Petersburg. All of them had houses in Petropavlovsk, and each had from one to half a dozen agencies or branches elsewhere. To judge by appearances, Mr. Boardman had the lion's share of the trade. This gentleman's father began the Northwest traffic sometime in the last century, and left it as an inheritance about 1828. His son continued the business until bought off by the Hudson Bay Company, when he turned his attention to Kamchatka. Personally he has never visited the Pacific Ocean.
Mr. Fluger had been only two years in Kamchatka, and was doing a miscellaneous business. Boardman's agent confined himself to the fur trade, but Fluger was up to anything. He salted salmon for market, sent a schooner every year into the Arctic Ocean for walrus teeth and mammoth tusks, bought furs, sold goods, kept a dog team, was attentive to the ladies, and would have run for Congress had it been possible. He had in his store about half a cord of walrus teeth piled against a back entrance like stove wood. Phillipeus was a roving blade. He kept an agent at Petropavlovsk and came there in person once a year. In February he left St. Petersburg for London, whence he took the Red Sea route to Japan. There he chartered a brig to visit Kamchatka and land him at Ayan, on the Ohotsk Sea. From Ayan he went to Yakutsk, and from that place through Irkutsk to St. Petersburg, where he arrived about three hundred and fifty days after his departure. I met him in the Russian capital just as he had completed the sixth journey of this kind and was about to commence the seventh. If he were a Jew he should be called the wandering Jew.
Trade is conducted on the barter principle, furs being low and goods high. The risks are great, transport is costly, and money is a long time invested before it returns. The palmy days of the fur trade are over; the product has greatly diminished, and competition has reduced the percentage of profit on the little that remains.
There was a time in the memory of man when furs formed the currency of Kamchatka. Their employment as cash is not unknown at present, although Russian money is in general circulation.
Illustration: CHANGE FOR A DOLLAR. Click to view.
There is a story of a traveler who paid his hotel bill in a country town in Minnesota and received a beaver skin in change. The landlord explained that it was legal tender for a dollar. Concealing this novel cash under his coat, the traveler sauntered into a neighboring store.
"Is it true," he asked carelessly, "that a beaver skin is legal tender for a dollar?" "Yes, sir," said the merchant; "anybody will take it."
"Will you be so kind, then," was the traveler's request, "as to give me change for a dollar bill?"
"Certainly," answered the merchant, taking the beaver skin and returning four muskrat skins, current at twenty-five cents each.
The sable is the principal fur sought by the merchants in Kamchatka, or trapped by the natives. The animal is caught in a variety of ways, man's ingenuity being taxed to capture him. The 'yessak,' or 'poll-tax' of the natives is payable in sable fur, at the rate of a skin for every four persons. The governor makes a yearly journey through the peninsula to collect the tax, and is supposed to visit