d his neck--and
slid down the chimney into a miserable room filled to suffocation with
blue smoke, lighted only by a small fire on the earthen floor, and
redolent of decayed fish and rancid oil. Viushin soon had a teakettle
over the fire, and in twenty minutes we were seated like cross-legged
Turks on the raised platform at one end of the _yurt_, munching
hardbread and drinking tea, while about twenty ugly, savage-looking
men squatted in a circle around us and watched our motions. 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. They led, originally, a wandering life like the other
Koraks; but, losing their deer by some misfortune or disease, they
built themselves houses of driftwood on the seacoast, settled down,
and now gain a scanty subsistence by fishing, catching seals, and
hunting for carcasses of whales which have been killed by American
whaling vessels, stripped of blubber, and then cast ashore by the
sea. They are cruel and brutal in disposition, insolent to everybody,
revengeful, dishonest, and untruthful. Everything which the Wandering
Koraks are they are not. The reasons for the great difference between
the settled and the Wandering Koraks are various. In the first place,
the former live in fixed villages, which are visited very frequently
by the Russian traders; and through these traders and Russian peasants
they have received many of the worst vices of civilisation without any
of its virtues. To this must be added the demoralising influence of
American whalers, who have given the settled Koraks rum and cursed
them with horrible diseases, which are only aggravated by their diet
and mode of life. They have learned from the Russians to lie, cheat,
and steal; and from whalers to drink rum and be licentious. Besides
all these vices, they eat the intoxicating Siberian toadstool in
inordinate quantities, and this habit alone will in time debase and
brutalise any body of men to the last degree. From nearly all these
demoralising influences the Wandering Koraks are removed by the very
nature of their life. They spend more of their time in the open air,
they have healthier and better-balanced physical constitutions, they
rar