Floating Coast by Bathsheba Demuth

Author:Bathsheba Demuth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Nonetheless, the Russian ministry of trade and industry wanted “the earliest possible involvement of private enterprise on the Chukchi Peninsula” to organize the energy of extraction, and gave out new concessions, including to Vonliarliarskii’s son, Aleksandr.80 But rumors of “the unusual richness of the . . . Volchia River area,” the regional mine inspector reported in 1913, were “widespread in Russia and in North America as well.”81 Ships from Vladivostok brought a few dozen hopefuls north each year. Some were peasants, hired to work at the small salmon cannery near Anadyr, only to sneak to the Discovery site. Others came under the pretense of trapping fur. They needed some reason other than prospecting; legally, only registered employees of concessionaires could work the deposit.

By 1914, there was a ragged camp of a hundred or so in the Volchia hills. “As I learned from talking personally with the gold diggers,” the Anadyr mine inspector wrote, “in most cases they have neither the material resources nor sufficient knowledge of mining. They compensate with their love for the cause, their great energy and a remarkable ability to endure the most severe deprivation.”82 Most came from the Far East. Few had mining experience, although many were fishermen. Some were literate. The majority were destitute. Dozens were arrested, like “Simbirsk peasant Ivan Khrisanfov Marin,” who “was found with gold” but no papers of employment, and was carrying “a notebook marked with daily production.”83 A few escaped the patrols, only to be arrested again.84 Jafet Lindeberg’s Pioneer Mining Company had ten thousand dollars in gold seized by imperial authorities for mining as a foreign agent.85 Six peasants and two Americans were tried in Anadyr for “predatory” mining, but the magistrate concluded that the fault lay with Aleksandr Vonliarliarskii, who hired the men under false pretenses.86

Most of the miners evaded patrols, the “difficult terrain and harsh climatic conditions,” allowing illegal workers to fade into the hills. Within a few years, miners had “many test pits,” reported the head of the Anadyr post, “complete with sluicing gates. The pits are properly lined in stone, and the total length of the works is three versts, at the depth of two fathoms.”87 They brewed alcohol and traded it with Chukchi for food. They fished the tsars’ streams. They killed reindeer by the hundreds.88 Each autumn, the Anadyr post had to pay steamers to take any destitute miners south before winter. In 1915, the Anadyr administrator reported that “preventing the complete plunder of the mines will require a permanent armed guard of five persons.” The empire sent no garrison, and so imperial gold continued to leak from Anadyr’s harbor. One group of peasant miners showed ten pounds of ore around a steamship as they sailed south.89 Another man tried to rustle nuggets out in sacks of coal.90

For gold to serve the empire, it had to be enclosed, sealed into the spaces and uses of the state, but enclosure takes power to make laws bind. The imperial state had little, with so few people in so vast a country.

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