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I have been ever your man, and counted myself but an usufructuary of myself, the property being yours; and now making myself an oblation to do with me as may best conduce to the honour of your justice, the honour of your mercy, and the use of your service, resting as "Clay in your Majesty's gracious hands, "Fr. St. Aldan, Canc. "March 25, 1621."
When he arrives he sees the people nodding their heads as they suck meat out of shells. He returns home without stating his mission, but reports an acceptance. Girl's people are surprised when people come for pakálon. A man sees people eating bamboo shoots, and is told they are eating pagaldanen. He understands them to say aldan "ladder," so he goes home and cooks his bamboo ladder.
At the first Tunguse encampment we took a rest of twenty-four hours, and then, exchanging our dogs for reindeer, we bade good-bye to our Okhotsk drivers and, under the guidance of half a dozen bronze-faced Tunguses in spotted reindeerskin coats, pushed westward, through snow-choked mountain ravines, toward the river Aldan.
The first stage of the journey from Okhotsk to Yakutsk was about six hundred and fifty English miles, not as the crow flew, but over the Stanovoi mountains in a southwesterly direction to the Maya, by this river's wavering course to the Youdoma, then northwest to the Aldan, and south beside the Lena.
It was the end of June, 1735, before the main forces were under way again for the Pacific. From Yakutsk to Okhotsk on the Pacific, the course was down the Lena, up the Aldan River, up the Maya, up the Yudoma, across the Stanovoi Mountains, down the Urak river to the sea. A thousand Siberian exiles were compelled to convoy these boats.
Traversing the mountains and reaching the tributaries of the Aldan river, they found their hardships commencing. The country was rough and game scarce, so that the fugitives were exhausted by fatigue and hunger. They traveled for a time with the wandering Tunguze of this region, and were caught by the early snows of winter when the coast was still two hundred miles away.
Cossacks pushed to the north, south, and east, forming settlements in the valley of the Yenesei and among the Yakuts of the Lena. In 1639 they reached the shores of the Ohotsk sea, and took possession of all Eastern Siberia to the Aldan mountains. I believe history has no parallel to some features of this conquest.
When he arrives he sees the people nodding their heads as they suck meat out of shells. He returns home without stating his mission, but reports an acceptance. Girl's people are surprised when people come for pakalon. A man sees people eating bamboo shoots, and is told they are eating pagaldanen. He understands them to say aldan "ladder," so he goes home and cooks his bamboo ladder.
Between the Yakut settlements on the Aldan and the town of Yakutsk, there was a good post-road really a road; so, harnessing shaggy white Yakut ponies to our Okhotsk dog-sledges, we drove swiftly westward, to the unfamiliar music of Russian sleigh-bells, changing horses at every post-station and riding from fifteen to eighteen hours out of the twenty-four.
In a monotonous routine of walking on snowshoes, riding on reindeer-sledges, camping in the open, or sleeping in smoky Tunguse tents, day after day and week after week passed, until at last we approached the valley of the Aldan one of the eastern tributaries of that great arctic river the Lena.
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