358 RUSSIA IN EUROPE. 



unimportant place till the end of the sixteenth century, when the English traders 

 made the White Sea the commercial route between Russia and the West. Its 

 most flourishing period preceded the foundation of St. Petersburg, which offered a 

 more convenient highway of communication Avith the rest of Europe. And 

 although he here founded an arsenal, a castle, and a dockyard, Peter the Great 

 contributed none the less to the decadence of the place by restricting the amount 

 of its imports, by suppressing its export trade in hemp, flax, tallow, and over 

 one-third of the other products of the empire, and by summoning its sailors and 

 traders to h's new capital. Nevertheless its position at tha only river outlet of a 

 vast basin, with a rapidly increasing population, could not fail to restore a certain 

 activity to " the fourth capital of the empire." In spite of the ice, suspending all 

 navigation for nearly seven months. Archangel exports, especially to England, 

 Holland, and Norway, flax, hemp, oats, and other cereals, timber, resin, train oil, 

 and tallow, its exports being usually tenfold its imports, which consist mainly in 

 fish from Norway, wines, and colonial produce. The women are here formed into 

 unions for loading the vessels with corn, the sJikividorka, or manageress, being 

 generally chosen from amongst those familiar with the Anglo-Russian jargon of 

 the place. The town presents a very animated appearance during the annual fair, 

 when some 50,000 people crowd into Archangel and its northern suburb of 

 Solombala, ceat of the Admiralty. But the resident population seems to have 

 been falling oft' during the last fifty years, the census of 1860 having returned 

 33,675, and that of 1872 not quite 20,000 ; this last, however, was taken in winter. 

 A colony of English artisans is settled in the neighbourhood in connection with 

 some large saw-mills. 



Mez(/n, although the outlet of the Mezen basin, is a mere village, lying almost 

 beyond the limits of vegetation, and deprived of much of its trade by Russanova, 

 situated 12 miles nearer to the mouth of the Mezen estuary. It is a dismal place 

 of banishment, one of those " Siberias this side the Urals" where the dominant 

 Church kindled the first fires of persecution against the Raskolniks in the seven- 

 teenth century. In this and other respects it resembles Pustozersk, the modest 

 commercial centre of the Petchora basin. The natives, no less than the exiles, in 

 these arctic stations are often decimated by nervous disorders attributed to the 

 "evil eye," but caused probably by privations of all sorts. Memorial crosses, 

 greatly revered by the people of Mezen, still recall a terrible winter in the first 

 half of the eighteenth century, during which the whole population all but perished 

 of cold and exposure. 



NovAYA Zemlya. 



NovAYA Zemlya — that is, "New Land " — forms the eastern limit of the waters 

 stretching along the northern shores of Lapland, and sometimes known as 

 " Barents' Sea," in honour of the illustrious navigator who crossed it towards the 

 end of the sixteenth century. With the island of Waigatch it may be regarded 

 simply as a northern continuation of the Russian mainland. But though long 



