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I thus retained my own fifteen sledges to supply Lieutenant Sandford and party, who were now cutting poles on the Tilghai River, north of Penzhinsk Gulf.
Our long intercourse with the Wandering Koraks gave us an opportunity of observing many of their peculiarities, which would very likely escape the notice of a transient visitor; and as our journey until we reached the head of Penzhinsk Gulf was barren of incident, I shall give in this chapter all the information I could gather relative to the language, religion, superstitions, customs, and mode of life of the Kamchatkan Koraks.
The settled Koraks of Penzhinsk Gulf are unquestionably the worst, ugliest, most brutal and degraded natives in all north-eastern Siberia. They do not number more than three or four hundred, and live in five different settlements along the seacoast; but they made us more trouble than all the other inhabitants of Siberia and Kamchatka together.
Night after night, as we journeyed northward, the polar star approached nearer and nearer to the zenith, until finally, at the sixty-second parallel of latitude, we caught sight of the white peaks of the Stanavoi Mountains, at the head of Penzhinsk Gulf, which marked the northern boundary of Kamchatka.
In 1860 more than a hundred and fifty natives died of starvation in four settlements on the coast of Penzhinsk Gulf, and the peninsula of Kamchatka has been swept by famines again and again since the Russian conquest, until its population has been reduced more than one-half.
As soon as possible after the departure of the Palmetto, I sent Lieutenant Sandford and the twelve men whom she had brought into the woods on the Gizhiga River above the settlement, supplied them with axes, snow-shoes, dog-sledges, and provisions, and set them at work cutting poles and building houses, to be distributed across the steppes between Gizhiga and Penzhinsk Gulf.
They were simply to follow the regular sledge road to Anadyrsk via Shestakóva and Penzhina, to ascertain what facilities it offered in the way of timber and soil for the construction of a telegraph line, to set the natives at work cutting poles at Penzhina and Anadyrsk, and to make side explorations where possible in search of timbered rivers connecting Penzhinsk Gulf with Bering Sea.
On the morning of November 23d, in a clear, bracing atmosphere of twenty-five degrees below zero, we arrived at the mouth of the large river called the Penzhina, which empties into Penzhinsk Gulf, at the head of the Okhotsk Sea.
For a description of the manner in which this band gets drunk collectively and individually upon one fungus, and keeps drunk for a week, the curious reader is referred to Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, Letter 32. It is but just to say, however, that this horrible practice is almost entirely confined to the settled Koraks of Penzhinsk Gulf the lowest, most degraded portion of the whole tribe.
Notwithstanding this democratic independence of the Koraks, they are almost invariably hospitable, obliging, and kind-hearted; and we were assured at the first encampment where we stopped, that we should have no difficulty in getting the different bands to carry us on deer-sledges from one encampment to another until we should reach the head of Penzhinsk Gulf.
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