For both ivory and furs the smugglers of the Chinese
borderlands would pay a price. On pretence of collecting one-tenth
tribute for the Czar, forward pressed the Cossacks; now on
horseback,--wild {295} brutes got in trade from Tartars,--now behind
reindeer teams through snowy forests where the spreading hoofs carried
over drifts; now on rude-planked rafts hewn from green firs on the
banks of Siberian rivers; on and on pushed the plunderers till the
Arctic rolled before them on the north, and the Pacific on the east.[1]
Nor did the seas of these strange shores bar the Cossacks. Long before
Peter the Great had sent Vitus Bering to America in 1741, Russian
voyagers had launched out east and north with a daredevil recklessness
that would have done honor to prehistoric man. That part of their
adventures is a record that exceeds the wildest darings of fiction.
Their boats were called _kotches_. They were some sixty feet long,
flat bottomed, planked with green timber. Not a nail was used. Where
were nails to come from six thousand miles across the frozen tundras?
Indeed, iron was so scarce that at a later day when ships with nails
ventured on {296} these seas natives were detected diving below to pull
the nails from the timbers with their teeth.
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