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Updated: June 2, 2025
Notwithstanding the climate, however, Anadyrsk is as pleasant a place to live as are nine tenths of the Russian settlements in north-eastern Siberia, and we enjoyed the novelty of our life there in the winter of 1866 as much as we had enjoyed any part of our previous Siberian experience.
The Russian governor ordered six of his Cossacks to transport Dodd and me on dog-sledges as far as the Korak village of Shestakóva, and sent word to Penzhina by the returning Anadyrsk people to have three or four men and dog-teams at the former place by December 20th, ready to carry us on to Penzhina and Anadyrsk. That evening the Major delivered to us our instructions.
This party experienced terrible weather on its way from the mouth of the river to Anadyrsk, and one of its members a man named Robinson died in a storm about 150 versts east of the settlement. His body was left unburied in one of the houses which Bush had erected the previous summer and his comrades pushed on.
During his absence the unfortunate parties on the Myan were left to take care of themselves, and after consuming their last morsel of food and eating up three horses which had previously been sent to them from Anadyrsk, they organised themselves into a forlorn hope, and started on snow-shoes for the settlement.
As long as these migrations of the fish are regular the natives have no difficulty in providing themselves with an abundance of food; but once in every three or four years, for some unexplained reason, the fish fail to come, and the following winter brings precisely such a famine as the one which I have described at Anadyrsk, only frequently much worse.
I started myself for Anadyrsk on November 20th with five of the best men and an equal number of the best dog-teams in Penzhina. These men and dogs I intended to take with me to the mouth of the Anadyr River if I heard nothing from Bush before I reached Anadyrsk.
The month of February wore slowly away, and March found us still living in Anadyrsk, without any news from the Major, or from the missing men, Arnold and Macrae. Fifty-seven days had now elapsed since they left their camp on the lower Anadyr, and we began to fear that they would never again be seen.
The distance which remained to be traversed, therefore, was only about fourteen hundred versts from Okhotsk to the Russian outpost of Anadyrsk, just south of the Arctic Circle. After some deliberation the Major concluded to send Dodd and me with a party of natives to Anadyrsk, and to start himself on dog-sledges for the settlement of Okhotsk, where he expected to meet Mahood and Bush.
Anadyrsk, not being a Russian military post, had no bank of this kind; but had our work been continued another year, we intended to petition the Government for the organisation of such institutions at all the settlements, Russian and native, along the whole route of our line.
The country between Gizhiga and Yamsk was entirely different in character from anything which I had previously seen in Siberia. There were no such great desolate plains as those between Gizhiga and Anadyrsk and in the northern part of Kamchatka.
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