ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION - A - THE TIGER (Panthera tigris)

[peter]

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12 - DOWN TO MONGOLIA

In the spring, Digby left Irkutzk for Mongolia. He took the ferry over the Selenga River, went across the Khamar Daban Range and came out on the bare steppe. From there, he went from post house to post house. Most of these had a room for travellers, but he had to be wary of small pox, typhus and typhoid everywhere. In those days, there were outbreaks of cholera and plague as well. They often occurred, " ... without ever being heard of. From such causes whole roving groups of nomadic natives , ...,  are wiped out (pp. 202). 

He bought a horse and travelled from Mukhina to Klewchevskaya, a small village " ... at the mouth of a gorge running up into pine-forested mountains ... " (pp. 159). Near that city, he " ... passed carts driven by bears ... " (pp 158.). Digby was adviced to stay away from dogs, as " ... there is a lot of wolf strain in most of the big dogs ... " (pp. 161). And wolves, at times, carry canine distemper.

Ubukanskaya was next. The village shop, like most in the southern trans-Baikal, was kept by Chinese. From Ubukanskaya, he went to Arbuzovskaya. It was there he was introduced to lamaserais, Buddhist monks from Lhasa. They, in the course of time, " ... became blended with with many of the Shamanistic beliefs of the forests and steppes of Siberia, making religion very difficult for even a skilled theologian to understand in all its aspects ... " (pp. 178). The Bhuddist monks were the only ones not to be banned from Siberia. One reason could be they didn't baptize local tribes. 

After a forested range, Digby reached Selenginsk. Two hundred years ago, this was the first town behind the frontier trading entrepot between Moscow and China. From there, he went to Povorotnaya. Here, the taiga began. Wolf country.


13 - THE WAYS OF NORTHERN TIGERS

" ... One of the most curious of the many strange sensations you can experience in Siberia is to sprawl on the turfy bank of a woodland stream just like any place that you know so well in New Jersey of the south of England, and to realize, ..., that instead of a perky little moor-hen coming out of yonder path of reeds up-wind, it may reveal part of an enormous tiger ... " (pp. 193).

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After World War One (1914-1918), tigers were not hunted as they were before. Most were poisoned and the skins were smuggled through Manchuria into China:

" ... His chief hunters used to be the officers of the naval and military garrison at Vladivostok, before the World War (One), but now, as in the case with the small tiger found in southwestern Siberia (I think he referred to Panthera tigris virgata in the west of Mongolia), very few men attempt to shoot him. Poisoned bait, generally his favourite food, wild boar, is laid in his haunts, during the winter when his skin is in fine condition and fetches a big price, even from the Chinese middlemen who smuggle furs out through Manchuria. You find splendid skins in Shanghai ... " (pp. 194).

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

According to Digby, tigers, in contrast to bears and wolves (who ranged all over Siberia), " ... have definite regions outside which they are seldom met with ... " (pp. 194). Just after the turn of the century, the Irkutzk region still had two distinct regional types: Panthera tigris virgata south-west of Irkutzk and Panthera tigris altaica in the south-east.

Panthera tigris virgata was the smaller of the two. It was " ... short-haired and rather smudgily striped ... " (pp. 195). This tiger had its headquarters " ... in the swampy flats around Lake Balchasj, in the south-west, though he ranges eastward, just south of the Altai Mountains, in fairsh numbers, all the way to China ... " (pp. 195). 

The Altai Mountains:

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Tiger skin from Lob-Nor:

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This tiger, according to poster 'Kaspi Tiger' who contacted the Harvard Museum some years ago, although labeled 'Mongolia', was actually bought in Manchuria sometime before 1905:

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Mongolian tiger:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Panthera tigris altaica, on the other hand, was a " ... big, thick-coated, vividly striped fellow ... " (pp. 195). This subspecies lived " ... between the mouth of the Amur River and Korea, ranging westward as far as the Yablonoi Mountains, north and south of Chita ... " (pp. 195).

Is it true Amur tigers featured during the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway? Yes. Digby wrote that in one part of the Trans-Baikal, tigers raided the camps of Chinese coolies so often that " ... they struck, and troops had to be fetched to clear the area ... " (pp. 195). Apart from raiding camps, Amur tigers indulged in swimming: " ... On several occasions, he has been seen swimming the two- or three-mile-wide Amur, in the region of Blagovestchensk ... " (pp. 195).

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In 'Mammals of the Sowjet-Union', Heptner, in a map, referred to a number of reports about Amur tigers seen north, west and southwest of Lake Baikal and the region well north of the Amur. It is not known if the tigers seen west and southwest of Lake Baikal were Caspian or Amur tigers:

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Digby had something to say on the matter as well: " ... I was shown an interesting old Russian record describing a mass trek northward of Ussuri tigers, which took them, in a few weeks, hundreds of miles from their usual haunts. The hero of this rout was - the mosquito. There was a particularly bad mosquito year, when the Ussuri woods were so full of dense swarms that the settlers kept mistaking them for clouds of smoke from forest fires. They drove the tigers frantic, and off the poor beasts moved to the dry uplands of Manchuria, where they stayed until the cold weather came ... " (pp. 196).

Could be true, but it seems more likely the animals they hunted, perhaps as a result of the mosquitos and perhaps as a result of a crop failure, moved north, leaving the tigers no option but to follow.


14 - KIATHKA

" ... Before the western world knew anything of China but the entries in Marco Polo's diary, before the British, the Dutch, and the Portuguese merchants began to send ships up into the China seas, cumbrous caravan embassies were crawling to and fro through the steppes, and forests, and mountains of Siberia and the Mongolian Desert of Gobi, between the tsars of Moscow and the emperors at Pekin. Then venturesome Russian merchants began to follow in their train. After a while it was found more advantageous for Muscovite and Chinese to meet north of the Gobi. Finally, in 1727, imperial commissioners from Moscow and Pekin met at Kiathka, and signed a treaty that formally recognized this spot as the frontier of the two empires  and the clearing-house for the produce of northern Occident and Orient ... ".

" ... A strip of neutral territory ... was marked out, to divide China from Siberia, and at each side a sloboda, or stockaded cantonment was erected. Between the two forts rose a pair of wooden columns, nine feet high - the frontier posts. To Kiathka the merchants from Moscow brought bales of cloth and mirrors, tinware and ironware, a sprinkling of most of the manufactured goods of Europe, and, surreptitiously, quantities of fur, the exporet of which was forbidden. The Chinese brought silks and damasks, satins and dressed leather, gauzes and crepes, gold thread and velvet, tobacco and porcelain, tea and ginger, crystallized orange-peel and aniseed, pipes and artificial flowers, dolls and wooden combs, books and trinklets, pearls and brandy, flour and pepper, fans and silken girdles ... ".

" ... Soon the trade in tea became by far the most important. Eighty years ago practically all the tea consumed in Europe and America came from Kiathka ... "  (pp. 209-211).

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15 - NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN TRADING

" ... Sauntering about Siberia, ..., you hear many an amusing tale of the full-blooded old days when the pioneer bands of Cossacks from Muscovy reached the far sidee of the Trans-Baikal and began to encounter opposition from the Chinese, who regarded the region as a sort of protectorate. Neither Muscovite nor Chinese had any established right to claim territory or to levy tribute on the natives, but that did not worry them. There was no formal state of war, nor did either side desire one. They were armed parties of fur-traders - and fur grabbers ... " (pp. 244).

Notice that this, ehhh, new development in trading, described in many books (see some of the posts above) existed until the 20th century. So in what way did those targeted by these parties react? Well, 

" ... The natives presently understood the idea and introduced measures of their own, including the excellent plan of pretending, when encountered in small groups in the forest, that they had not so much as a rat-skin and did not know any friend who had, but intimidating that they had heard that some good furs were going to arrive in the spring at the junction of the two rivers yonder ... " (pp. 245).

In the end, the new way of trading resulted in something well-known in Canada as well:

" ... But the (trading) camps held tempting booty for rival parties, in greater strength, so it soon became the custom to fortify them with high stockades ... " (pp. 246). And the native Siberians? Well, they tolerated "  ... big 'yaller dawgs' with a streak of wolf in them - quite a big streak, ..., to give warning of the approach of strangers ... " (pp. 248).


16 - EXILE AND SCIENCE

" ... A good many high-born enemies of the emperors of Russia were exiled in the old days, both before and after the reign of Peter the Great. It was Peter who was the first tsar to see in the back of the beyond of his empire anything but a field for loot and a convenient wilderness in which to lose persons one did not like without having their blood on one's conscience.

His extensive travels had given him a keen interest in geographical matters, and he absorbed as high degree of culture from the savants of Western Europe. In 1717, he visited the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, and in the following year he became a member. He was the only monarch who ever kept up a regular correspondence with this body. He sent it a meticulously prepared chart of the Caspian Sea, from observations and soundings he had ordered to be taken. He equipped and dispatched several cultured men (many of them German) to various parts of the empire ... " (pp. 290-292).

Tsar Peter the Great's example was followed by Katharine II when she came to the throne in 1760:

" ...  She instructed ... the Academy to choose a number of able and learned men who might be enthrusted with this work (exploring Siberia). That Russia had, in those days, a good deal better fate in mind for Siberia than that of a region of exile is indicated by the sailing orders given to these nominees ... "  (pp. 294).

Professor Ivan George Gmelin of the Academy of Sciences was amongst those dispatched. He was mentioned more than once in J.F.Brandt's book 'Untersuchungen über die Verbreitung des Tigers (Felis tigris) und seine Beziehungen zur Menschheit', published in 1856 in St. Petersburg. Gmelin, in 1768, made an expedition along the southeastern frontier of Russia. In Persia, he had trouble with the lawless and domineering Khans. He was seized by Usmei Khan, ninety wersts from Derbent, and died a prisoner in this brigand's hands (pp. 197).

Gmelin wasn't the only educated man whose life was cut short while exploring. Professor Lovitz was captured at Dobrinka in 1774 and hanged after he had been impaled alive on a sharpened stake (...).

After the explorations of scientists, Siberia was chosen by many explorers. One of these was Captain J.D. Cochrane of the British Navy. In Kolyma country, he encountered a witch-doctor who gave an exhibition of the hara-kiri trick (...).

Digby wrote that Siberia as a place of exile for political suspects, in his day, was not nearly as bad as during the days of tsarism. Siberia was cold, its villages remote and the winters long and sombre, but nearly all exiles " ... were given a considerable degree of freedom after a much shorter term of actual imprisonment ... " than many assumed. They " ...  were merely told to live for a few years in certain tracts of the country no worse, climatically, than Maine, Ohio, or the northern grain belt of the United States, and infinitely preferable, in their scenic and ethnological interest, to the abdominations of desolation of Wisconsin, Dakota and Iowa. They drew government pay; they could marry or have their families join them from home. There were plenty of fish to catch and furs to wear, and there was plenty of fuel to burn and timber to build with ... " (pp. 306-308).

The rumours about terrible experiences in Siberia were, as always, a result of the newspapers. When they began to take the matter (of exile) up, " ... a heavy slump in martyrs ensued ... " (pp. 309). So there you have it, friends and neighbours. It was the newspapers. Reply