IV.] SCARCITY OF RUSSIAN HOUSEWIVES. 149 



. enormous tree-stems, blubber tanks with remains of the white 

 whale, &c., all witnessing that the place had had a flourishing 

 period, when prosperity was found there, when the home was 

 regarded with loyalty, and formed in all its loneliness the central 

 point of a life richer perhaps in peace and well-being than one 

 is inclined beforehand to suppose. 



In 1875 a "prikaschik" (foreman), and three Russian 

 labourers lived all the year round at Goltschicha. Sverevo was 

 inhabited by one man and Priluschnoj by an old man and his 

 son. All were poor ; they dwelt in small turf-covered cabins, 

 consisting of a lobby and a dirty room, smoked and sooty, with 

 a large fireplace, wooden benches along the walls, and a sleeping 

 place fixed to the wall, high above the floor. Of household 

 furniture only the implements of fishing and the chase were 

 numerously represented. There were in addition pots and pans, 

 and occasionally a tea-urn. The houses were all situated near 

 the river-bank, so high up that they could not be reached by 

 the spring inundations. A disorderly midden was always to be 

 found in the near neighbourhood, with a number of draught 

 dogs wandering about on it seeking something to eat. Only 

 one of the Russian settlers here was married, and we were 

 informed that there was no great supply of the material for 

 Russian housewives for the inhabitants of these regions. At 

 least the Cossack Feodor, who in 1875 and 1876 made several 

 unsuccessful attempts to serve me as pilot, and who himself 

 was a bachelor already grown old and wrinkled, complained 

 that the fair or weaker sex was poorly represented among the 

 Russians. He often talked of the advantages of mixed 

 marriages, being of opinion, under the inspiration of memory 

 or hope, I know not which, that a Dolgan woman was the 

 most eligible i^arti for a man disposed to marry in that part of 

 the world. 



A little fiirther south, but still far north of the limit of trees, 

 there are, however, very well-to-do peasants, who inhabit large 

 simovies, consisting of a great number of houses and rooms, in 

 which a certain luxury prevails, where one walks on floor- 

 coverings of skins, where the windows are whole, the sacred 

 pictures covered with plates of gold and silver, and the walls 

 provided with mirrors and covered with finely coloured copper- 

 plate portraits of Russian Czars and generals. This prosperit}"" 

 is won by traffic with the natives, who wander about as nomads 

 on the tundra with their reindeer herds. 



The cliffs around Port Dickson consist of diorite, hard and 

 difficult to break in pieces, but weathering readily. The rocky 

 hills are therefore so generally split up that they form enormous 

 stone mounds. They were covered with a great abundance of 



