IVORY ISLANDS IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN. 45 
In 1829 the scientific German traveller Erman visited 
Yakutsk, and obtained some valuable information about the 
wonderful stores of fossil ivory in the Liakoff and New 
Siberian Islands. The monopoly of trading in the islands had 
been abolished, and the traders from Yakutsk and UstyYansk 
journeyed to the islands in dog-sledges every year. The soil of 
the islands was described to Erman as being full of the bones of 
elephants, rhinoceroses, and buffaloes, and the tusks of elephants 
could be seen sticking up out of the frozen sand. In order to 
find good deposits of mammoths’ bones in the islands, the traders 
were in the habit of ascending the hills and marking the places 
where they saw the tusks projecting above the ground, and 
deposits of ivory in the desolate plains, were often discovered 
by the sight of a single tusk sticking up from the ground.* 
From information furnished him by the ivory traders, Erman 
thus describes the “ Wood Hills” in the island of New Siberia : 
“In New Siberia, on the declivities facing the south, lie hills 250 
or 300 feet high, formed of driftwood ; the ancient origin of 
which, as well as of the fossil wood in the tundras, anterior to 
the history of the Earth in its present state, strikes at once 
even the most uneducated hunters. They call both sorts of 
Adamovchina, or Adamitic things. Other hills on the same 
island, and on Kotelnoi, which lies further to the west, are heaped 
up to an equal height with skeletons of pachyderms, bisons, etc. 
which are cemented together by frozen sand as well as by strata 
and veins of ice. It is only in the lower strata of the New 
Siberian wood-hills that the trunks have that position which 
they would assume in swimming or sinking undisturbed. On 
the summit of the hills they lie flung upon another in the wildest 
disorder, forced upright in spite of gravitation, and with their 
tops broken off or crushed, asif they had been thrown with 
ereat violence from the south on a bank, and there heaped up.” 
In 1878 the Vega traversed the Arctic Ocean north of 
Siberia, and Nordenskidld was anxious to land on the wonderful 
islands, which contained such masses of the remains of mammoths, 
rhinoceroses, aud musk oxen. Before the Vega started, M. 
Sibiriakoff (who defrayed a portion of the expenses of the 
expedition) collected much information from the ivory hunters 
about the “islands of bones” in the Polar Sea. They informed 
him that the trade in fossil ivory still continued, and that many 
* Travels in Siberia, vol. ii, pp. 376, 383. 
+ Ibid., vol. ii, pp. 379-380. 
