ACCORDING to Lesur, the French historian (who, at Napoleon's bidding, wrote a careful and erudite "History of the Cossacks") it was the singular destiny of the Hetman Yermak and his Donskoi followers to add the immense empire of Siberia to the Russian crown, rather by chance than through any deliberate plan of discovery or conquest. In the course of an attempt to escape the vengeance they had incurred by breaking the stem peace declared along the Volga by Ivan the Terrible, this band of marauding Cossacks were cut off by the Tsar's forces from access to the "Free Steppes" and obliged to ascend the course of the mighty river towards the unknown North. Here Yermak repeated among the aborigines of the Arctic, exploits only comparable with the adventures met with a generation before by Pizarro during his conquest of Peru.*
The vast land known as Siberia covers nearly one-quarter of the habitable globe. Until the latter half of the fifteenth century this great expanse of
* See Lesur, op. cit. Vol. I, Page 224.
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
territory was as unknown to Europe as the trackless ocean crossed by Columbus. About the time that the continent of America was discovered the Russians first entered into relations with what was then called the land of "lougra," the wide "back country" beyond the low chain of the Urals. Upon the savage tribes of this borderland the free burghers of "Lord Novgorod the Great" laid a tribute of skins and precious metals.*
In an ill-chosen moment — just after the conquest of Kazan (1556) and before Ivan the Terrible had disbanded his \ictorioUs troops — a Siberian prince named ladiger attempted to evade the promised yearly tax formerly paid to the republic of Novgorod, whose liberties the Tsars of Moscow had trampled underfoot but a short time before. The loss of the tribute, paid by the thirty thousand subjects of the Siberian princeling, — which had been set at a "marten skin per inhabitant," — directed the attention of the redoubtable Tsar towards the resources of the vast unknown territories to the eastward of his empire.
In the district of Oustioug, north of Viatka, a family of Russian hoyars of Tartar origin, the Stroganovs, had for several generations exploited salt and iron mines. Although belonging to the merchant class, an exception seems to have been made in their favour from the rigid policy of cen-
* Waliszewsld, op. cit., p. 469. See also "Siberia" by M. P. Price.
tralization adopted by the princes of Moscow. The Stroganovs not only exercised "the rights of High Justice and Low," but were also allowed to maintain an armed force, on a footing which prepared them either for trade or war with the neighbouring Siberian chieftains. Their venture appears to have prospered, for, in 1558, Anakievitch Stroganov (according to records preserved in Moscow), petitioned Ivan the Terrible for a "further concession of 106 square versts on the shores of the Kama'* where he proposed "to erect a fort against the Tartars."*
* In October 1915 the author had occasion to visit the town of Veliki Oustioug, the old capital of the country ruled by the Stroganovs. This place, once so remote, could then be reached, without hardship, by following the new railroad connecting the town of Kotlas with the Trans-Siberian Line. This town (almost as ancient as Veliki Oustioug) at the outbreak of the World W^ar enjoyed great, if ephemeral, prosperity on account of the heavy river traffic which grew up along the northern Dvina. Here it is necessary for the traveller to change to a river steamer which, after fighting the slow current of the Oustioug River for a day and a night, finally lands its passengers at the ancient border city, whence Yermak set forth on his conquest of Siberia.
The first view of Veliki-Oustioug — the pious silhouette of the town's thirty or more great churches and convents suddenly breaking the monotonous sky line of stunted fir trees which for miles border the almost uninhabited shores of the river — presents an interesting and unf ore- •een incident in the journey. For every score of the