In the fall of 1806, carts splashed with mud drove into St. Petersburg. For about three months they trudged across all of Russia, from east to west. Their luggage was the bones of the skeleton of an outlandish animal. They were taken to the Academy of Sciences by the young scientist Mikhail Ivanovich Adams.
An unexpected decision
Adams was the son of a Russified German. He was born in Moscow in 1780 and graduated from the university there. He was barely twenty years old when he got on a scientific expedition to the Caucasus. For three years of travel, Adams traveled hundreds of kilometers through the mountains, described fifty new species of plants and several species of beetles. He became an associate (now we would say an associate professor) of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
In the spring of 1805, the "extraordinary embassy" was preparing to leave St. Petersburg for China. It was headed by Count Yu. A. Golovkin. Scientists were to join the diplomats, including Mikhail Adams as a botanist and zoologist. Due to disagreements with the Chinese government, the embassy did not get to the Celestial Empire, and Count Golovkin, having only reached Ugra in Mongolia, turned back with the diplomats.
Once in Irkutsk, Adams came to the idea that he would do much more for science if he went not east, as planned, but north, along the Lena River to Yakutsk and beyond.
With a request to make such a trip, he turned to Count Golovkin. Permission was given, and Adam set out on a journey to explore the places that, as he wrote, deserve "considerable respect."
A week later, the St. Petersburg scientist reached Yakutsk and there from the mayor Popov learned that "on the shores of the Arctic Sea, at the mouth of the Lena, an animal of extraordinary size was found, which still has meat, skin and hair."
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Finding the hunter Shumakhov
The remains of the beast, a giant mammoth, were found on Cape Bykovsky, a peninsula located north of the current port of Tiksi. This happened seven years before Adams arrived in Yakutsk. Popov himself saw the corpse of a mammoth lying on its side, half buried in the ground.
The unexpected news excited Adams so much that he was ready to go to the mammoth even tomorrow. “I wished,” he wrote later, “as soon as possible to save these precious remnants, which could very easily be destroyed.” On June 7, 1806, Mikhail Adams left Yakutsk on a small sailing ship.
The discoverer of the remains of the mammoth was the Tungus hunter Osip Shumakhov. In September 1799, while sailing on a boat, he noticed a strange object on the bank of the Bykovskaya channel, blackened on the rock. The object looked like an "ugly block".
Shumakhov directed his fragile boat to the shore, climbed a high cliff, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not get closer to his find. Only three years later, having visited the mysterious place again, the hunter realized that he was hiding in the icy rock. The summer sun melted the ice, and a mighty tusk and a dark gray side of an unusually large mammoth appeared in the light of day.
More than three years have passed since the last visit by Shumakhov to Cape Bykov. The ice around the remains of the mammoth completely melted, and the carcass of the prehistoric animal, under the influence of its own gravity, slid down onto the sandbank. Shumakhov cut off the mammoth tusks, took them to Yakutsk and sold them to the local wealthy merchant Roman Boltunov for 50 rubles - a lot of money at that time.
I have taken possession of the treasure
And now a zoologist from St. Petersburg was hurrying to the remains of the mammoth. Adams was accompanied by Osip Shumakhov, a merchant and industrialist Belkov, who knew these lands well, a huntsman, three Cossacks and ten Tungus hired by Adams as workers. Reindeer teams moved along the tundra, cut by countless rivers and strewn with hundreds of lakes. Not without adventure we finally got to the desired place. The tents were pitched not far from a mammoth lying fifty meters from the sea.
It was an old male who died at the age of 65 - 70 almost 36 thousand years ago. According to Adams' measurements, the height of the mammoth reached three meters. He has a mane on his neck. Dried skin partially covered the huge head. Dry eyes (even the pupil in the left), the remains of the brain, and the left ear are also preserved. The trunk, one front leg and tail were missing.
Time saved the skin on the side on which the mammoth lay - dark gray, covered with reddish wool. Adams ordered to carefully remove the skin. It turned out to be so heavy that ten people with difficulty lifted it and carried it to the shore to dry.
Adams himself searched the surrounding area and found several more mammoth bones, gnawed by predators. More pounds of reddish wool were extracted from the water and land.
Mikhail Adams could be pleased with the results of his examination of the find. All bones of the skeleton, carefully cleaned, were placed in boxes. The scientist recalled with satisfaction: "A few days later the work ended, and I took possession of a treasure that completely rewarded for the labors and dangers associated with this enterprise, and even for the costs that it required."
Buy - not buy?
In the Buor-Khaya Bay, not far from the Bykovsky Peninsula, a ship was waiting for Adams, which took heavy boxes with bones. The extraordinary cargo was transported along the Lena to Yakutsk, and then to St. Petersburg on the checkpoints. In Yakutsk, Adams managed to redeem the mammoth tusks, which were sold earlier to the merchant Boltunov, and attach them to the skeleton. The journal "Vestnik Evropy" wrote in August 1807: "Mr. Adams, a collegiate assessor and associate of the Academy of Sciences, brought to St. Petersburg a mammoth corpse, which he found on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, near the mouth of the Lena."
The miracle find aroused great interest among the St. Petersburg academicians. A special scientific commission insisted on purchasing a mammoth skeleton for the Kunstkamera, paying Adams the costs of delivering such a valuable exhibit to the banks of the Neva. However, this required more than 8 thousand rubles!
The buy - not buy debate lasted a long time. They ended with the order of Alexander I to purchase a skeleton for the Museum of the Academy of Sciences. Many years later, the skeleton of the mammoth was transported to the Zoological Museum, which opened in St. Petersburg, where it is still located.
Irresistible passion
Soon after the donation of the mammoth skeleton to the Academy of Sciences, Mikhail Ivanovich learned that he had to go to serve in Moscow, at the local university. This news grieved him unspeakably. He felt and understood that he would never be able to go on a new expedition to the North and that he was not destined to satisfy his "irresistible passion for travel."
In 1809, Adams addressed a letter to the tsar and the minister of education, in which he outlined a plan for an expedition to the Lyakhovsky Islands (a group in the archipelago of the New Siberian Islands). Adams hoped that it was in those places that he would be able to find "the fatherland, perhaps, and still living there mammoths." To obtain funds for the expedition, he offered to arrange paid displays of the mammoth skeleton in large cities of Russia.
Alas, no one was interested in Adams' plan. He went to Moscow and became a professor at the university, and then - at the Medical and Surgical Academy. For his scientific merits, Mikhail Ivanovich was elected an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as a member of five foreign scientific societies. Several plant species are named after him. Mikhail Ivanovich Adams died in Moscow on March 1 (old style), 1836, at the age of 56.
After Adams, several more mammoth remains were discovered on the territory of our country. But the value of the mammoth Adams is special: it was the very first relic animal found and the largest.
Gennady CHERNENKO. Magazine "Secrets of the XX century" No. 26 2008