Celebrated Travels and Travellers, Part 3.: The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth CenturyVerne, Jules
History
Celebrated Travels and Travellers, Part 3.: The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century
Verne, Jules
Discoveries in geography; Explorers; Voyages and travels
"The sons and their wives, the daughters and their husbands," says the
narrative, "live together with their parents, and _vice versa_. Each
family occupies one division of the back part of the hut, curtained off
from the others. The curtains are made of reindeer-skins, sewn into the
shape of a bell. They are fastened to the beams of the ceiling, and
reach to the ground. With the aid of the grease they burn in cold
weather, two, three, and sometimes more persons so warm the air with
their breath in these hermetically sealed positions that all clothing
is superfluous, even with the severest frost, but only Tchouktchi lungs
are fitted to respire in such an atmosphere. In the outer part of the
hut cooking-utensils, pottery, baskets, seal-skin trunks, &c., are
kept. Here too is the hearth, if we can so call the spot where burn a
few sticks of brushwood, painfully collected in the marsh, or when they
are not to be obtained, whale-bones floating in grease. Round about the
hut on wooden dryers, black and disgusting looking pieces of seal's
flesh are exposed to view." These people lead a miserable life. They
feed upon the half-raw flesh of seals and walruses hunted by
themselves, or on that of whales flung up by the waves on the beach.
The dog is the only domestic animal they possess, and they treat it
badly enough, although the poor creatures are very affectionate and
render them great services, now towing along their canoes, now dragging
their sledges over the snow.
After a second stay of five weeks at Petropaulovski, the _Seniavine_
left Kamtchatka, on the 10th of November, on its way back to Europe.
Before reaching Manilla, Lutke made a cruise in the northern part of
the Caroline Archipelago, which he had not had time to visit during the
preceding winter. He saw in succession the islands of Marileu, Falulu,
Faiu, Namuniuto, Magur, Faraulep, Eap, Mogmog, and found at Manilla the
sloop, the _Moller_ which was waiting his arrival.
The Caroline Archipelago embraces an immense space, and the Marianne
Islands, as well as the Radak group, might fitly be included in it, as
containing a population perfectly identical in race. For a long time
the old geographers had had for their guidance only the charts of
missionaries who, lacking alike the education and the appliances
necessary to estimate accurately the size, position, and relative
distance of all these archipelagoes, had attached notable importance to
them, and often fixed at a considerable number of degrees the extent of
a group which covered only a few miles.
Thus navigators accepted their guidance with wise caution. Freycinet
was the first to infuse a little order into this chaos, and, thanks to
his meeting with Kadu and Don Louis Torres, he was able to identify
later with earlier discoveries. Lutke did his part--and that not a
small part--in the settling of an accurate and scientific chart of an
archipelago which had long been the terror of navigators.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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