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Updated: May 28, 2025
I was unwilling to risk myself twenty feet from land, but after putting me ashore the Koriak boatman pulled fearlessly into the bay. The Chukchee trader has a crew of his own race to paddle his light canoe. Occasionally the baydaras are caught in storms and must be lightened. I have the authority of Major Abasa that in such case the merchant keeps his cargo and throws overboard his crew.
Then the Chukchee Indians swooped down on his caravans, stampeded the pack horses, scuttled the goods, and Baranof was a bankrupt. The rival fur companies on the west coast of America were now engaged in the merry game of cutting each other's throats literally and without restraint.
They go far from shore with their baydaras, or seal skin boats, visiting islands along the coast, and frequently crossing to North America. Their voyages are of a mercantile character, the Chukchee buying at the Russian towns and selling his goods among the Esquimaux. At Ghijiga I made a short voyage in a baydara. The frame appeared very fragile, and the seal skin covering displayed several leaks.
And when the expedition should reach the tundras of eastern Siberia, there was the double danger of the Chukchee tribes on the north, hostile as the American Indians, and of the Siberian exile population on the south, branded criminals, political malcontents, banditti of the wilderness, outcasts of nameless crimes beyond the pale of law.
He is not worshiped he is regarded rather as the explanation of phenomena, a genuine product of early cosmogonic science. For the Koryaks of Northeastern Siberia the "Big Grandfather" is an arranger of all things out of preëxisting material; the Chukchee, on the other hand, regard as creator a benevolent being residing in the zenith.
Captain Kennan said he heard at Anadyrsk and elsewhere of its wonderful strength, and was greatly amused when he arrived at Macrae's and heard the whole story. Many of these natives have learned English from whalemen and speak enough to be understood. Gov. Bilzukavitch visited Anadyrsk in the spring of 1866, and met there a Chukchee chief.
Neither spoke the other's language, and so the governor called his Koriak servant. The same dilemma occurred, as each was ignorant of the other's vernacular. There was an awkward pause until it was discovered that both Koriak and Chukchee could speak English. Business then proceeded without difficulty.
The three Russians succeeded in gaining Waxel's boat, but the Indians grabbed the mooring ropes and seized the Chukchee interpreter, whom Waxel had brought from Siberia. Waxel ordered the rope cut, but the Chukchee interpreter called out pitifully to be saved. Quick as flash, the Russians fired two muskets in midair.
Wind, rain, roily, shoaly seas breaking clear over the ship across decks drove Cook out from land to deeper water. With an Englishman's thoroughness for doing things and to make deadly sure just how the two continents lay to each other, Cook now scuds across Bering Strait thirty-nine miles to the Chukchee land of Siberia in Asia.
And these Chukchee Indians of the Asiatic Pacific told the Russians of a land beyond the sea, of driftwood floating across the ocean unlike any trees growing in Asia, of dead whales washed ashore with the harpoons of strange hunters, and most comical of all in the light of our modern knowledge about the Eskimo's tail-shaped fur coats of men wrecked on the shores of Asia who might have qualified for Darwin's missing link, inasmuch as they wore "tails."
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