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Updated: June 1, 2025
I little thought when I shook hands with Harder and Robinson then, that I should next meet them at midnight, in a little snow-covered cellar, on the great lonely steppes of the lower Anadyr. As soon as we had taken off our heavy furs and seated ourselves beside a warm fire, we began to feel the sudden reaction which necessarily followed twenty-four hours of such exposure, suffering, and anxiety.
The chief engineer of our enterprise had promised faithfully that ships with men, material, and supplies for the immediate prosecution of the work, should be at Gizhiga and at the mouth of the Anadyr River as early in the season as ice would permit them to enter; but it was now August, and they had not yet made their appearance.
The Chukchees have mingled much with whalemen along Anadyr Bay and the Arctic Ocean, and readily adopt the white man's vices. They drink whisky without fear, and will get very drunk if permitted. When Captain Macrae's telegraph party landed at the mouth of the Anadyr the natives supposed the provision barrels were full of whisky, and became very importunate for something to drink.
A dense forest of larch, poplar, and aspen surrounds the town, so that the traveller coming from Gizhiga sometimes has to hunt for it a whole day, and if he be not familiar with the net-work of channels into which the Anadyr River is here divided, he may not find it at all.
Bulkley, the chief-engineer of the enterprise, had promised us, when we sailed from San Francisco, that he would land a party of men with a whale boat at or near the mouth of the Anadyr River, early enough in the season so that they could ascend the river to the settlement of Anadyrsk and open communication with us by the first winter road.
In the year 1880, Dr Hacks, who makes, I believe, no attempt to conceal himself under the vesture of Dr Bataille, was a ship's surgeon on board the steam-boat Anadyr, belonging to the Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes, and then returning from China with passengers and merchandise.
All the inhabitants of the settlement were in the streets to meet us when we returned; but we were disappointed not to see among them the faces of Macrae and Arnold. Many bands of Chukchis from the lower Anadyr had arrived at the village, but nothing had been heard of the missing men.
The very existence of his memoirs would have been jeopardised had the Anadyr reached Point-de-Galle immediately before instead of immediately after the catastrophe which converted Carbuccia.
We found that the river system of the Anadyrsk was divided from that of the Penzhina only by a low mountain ridge, which could be easily passed, and that, by following up certain tributaries of the latter, crossing the watershed, and descending one of the branches of the Anadyr, we should have almost unbroken water communication between the Okhotsk Sea and Bering Strait.
In the whole distance of eight hundred versts between Gizhiga and the mouth of the Anadyr River there were said to be only four or five places where timber could be found large enough for telegraph poles, and over most of the route there was no wood except occasional patches of trailing-pine.
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