From the poinr of view of benefiting the country, the con- centration of convicts on Sakhalin is a guarantee for strengthening our position as owners of the island;
The coal deposits can be easily exploited to satisfy the huge coal requirements. It was also assumed that the concentra- tion of the entire contingent of convict exiles on the island would cut costs for their upkeep.
(1 Sakhaltn Island, Its Coal Deposits and Its Developing Coal Industry ( 187 5). In addition to Keppen, works on coal were written by the mining engineers: I. Nosov, ''Notes on Sakhalin Island and the Coal Beds Being Worked," Mining ĵoumal ( 1859), No. 1. I. A. Lopatin, Extract from a letter. A supplement to the Report of the Siberian Division of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society for 1868. Ibid., "Report to the Governor- General of Eastern Siberia," Mining Journal (1870), No. 10. Deykhman, "Sakhalin Island with Respect to the Coal Industry," Mining journal (187 i), No. 3. Z. K. Skalkovsky, "Russian Trade in the Pacific Ocean" ( i883). The quality of Sakhalin coal was described at various times by the commanders of the ships of the Siberian fleet in their reports published in the Naval Miscellany. To complete the list I might as well mention the articles by Y. N. Butkovsky: "Sakhalin Island," Historical News ( 1882), X, and "Sakhalin and Its Significance," Naval Miscellany (1874), No. 4.
7 A character in Dostoyevsky"s novel The Village of Stepanchi- kovo attd Its Jnhabitants.—TRANS.
JX Tym or Tymi - Lieutenant Boshnyak - Polyakov - Upper Armudan - Lower Armtdan - Derbinskoye - A Journey on the Tym - Uskovo - The Gypsies - A Journey into the Taiga - Voskresenskoye
the second district of Northern Sakhalin is lo- cated on the other side of a ridge of the mountain range and is called Tymovsk, because its settlements lie along the Tym River, which falls into the Okhotsk Sea. As you drive from Alexandrovsk to Novo-Mikhaylovka, the moun- tain ridge rises before you and blocks out the horizon, and what you see from there is called the Pilinga. From the top of the Pilinga a magnificent panorama opens out with the Duyka valley and the sea on one side, and on the other a vast plain which is watered by the Tym and its tributaries for more than 200 versts. This plain is far more interesting than Alexandrovsk. The water, the many kinds of timber forests, the grasses which grow higher than a man, the fabulous abundance of fish and coal deposits suggest the possibility of a satisfying and pleasant life for a million people. That is the way it should be, but the frozen currents of the Okhotsk Sea and the icc floes floating on the eastern shore even in June attest with incontrovertible clarity to the fact that when nature created Sakhalin man and his welfare was the last thing in her mind. If it were not for the mountains, the plain would be a tundra, colder and bleaker than around Viakhty.
The first person to visit the Tym River and describe it was Lieutenant Boshnyak. In 1852 he was sent here by Nevelskoy to verify information obtained from Gilyaks about coal deposits and to cross the island all the way to the shore of the Okhotsk Sea, where there was said to be a beautiful harbor. He was given a dog team, hardtack for thirty-five days, tea and sugar, a small hand compass and a cross. With these came Nevelskoy's parting words of en- couragement: "As long as you have hardtack to quieten your hunger and a mug of water to drink, then with God's help you will find it possible to do your job."
Having made his way down the Tym to the eastern shore and back, he somehow reached the western shore, completely worn out and famished, and with abscesses on his legs. The starving dogs refused to go any farther. He spent Easter day huddled in the corner of a Gilyak yurt, utterly exhausted. His hardtack was gone, he could not communicate with the Gilyaks, his leg was giving him agonies of pain. What was most interesting about Bosh- nyak's explorations was, quite obviously, the explorer him- self, his youth—he was only twenty-one years old—and his supremely heroic devotion to his task. At the time the Tym was covered with deep snow, for it was March. Nevertheless, his journey provided some very interesting data which were recorded in his report.1
In i88i the zoologist Polyakov^ carried out some seri- ous and extensive explorations of the Tym from a scientific and practical point of view. He left Alexandrovsk on July 24, driving oxen, and crossed the Pilinga with the greatest difficulty. There were only footpaths, and these were climbed by convicts carrying provisions on their backs from the Alexandrovsk district to the Tymovsk. The elevation of the ridge is 2,ooo feet. On a Tym tributary, the Admvo, close to the Pilinga, stood the Vedernikovsky way station, of which only one position has survived, the office of the station guard.3
The Tym tributaries are fast flowing, tortuous and full of rapids. It is impossible to use boats. Therefore it was necessary for Polyakov to go by oxen to the Tym River. From Derbinskoye he and his companion used a boat throughout the whole length of the river.
It is tiresome to read his account of this journey because of the exactitude with which he recorded all the rapids and sandbanks. In the 272 versts from Derbinskoye to the sea he was forced to overcome I io obstacles: i i rapids, 89 sandbanks and 10 places where the water was dammed by drifting trees and bushes. This means that on the average of every two miles the river is either shallow or choked up. Near Derbinskoye it is 2o-25 sazhens wide: the wider the river, the shallower. The frequent bends and turns, the rapid flow and the shallows offer no hope that it will ever be navigable in the real sense of the word. In Polyakov's opinion it would probably be used only for floating rafts. Only the last 70 to 100 versts from the mouth of the river, where it is least favorable for coloniza- tion, are deeper and straighter. Here the flow is slower, and there are no rapids or sandbanks. A steam cutter or even a shallow-draft tugboat could use this part of the river.
When the rich fisheries in the neighborhood fall into the hands of capitalists, serious attempts will probably be made to clear and deepen the waterway. Perhaps a railroad will be built along the river to its mouth, and there is no doubt that the river will repay all these expenditures with interest. But this is far in the future. Under existing con- ditions, when we consider only the immediate future, the riches of the Tym are almost an illusion. It offers disap- pointingly little to the penal colony. The Tymovsk settler lives under the same starvation conditions as the Alexan- drovsk settler.
According to Polyakov, the Tym River valley is dotted with lakes, bogs, ravines and pits. It has no straight and level expanses overgrown with nutricious fodder grasses, it has no fertile meadows watercd by spring floods, and only rarely are sedge-covcred meadows found—these are islands overgrown with coarse grass. A thick coniferous forest covers the slopes of the hill. On these slopes we find birches, willows, elms, aspens and entire stands of poplars. The poplars are extremely tall. They are undermined at the banks and fall into the water, where they look like bushes and beaver dams. The bushes here are the bird cherry, the osier, the sweetbrier, the hawthorn. . . . Swarms of mosquitoes are everywhere. There was frost on the morning of August 1.
The closer you get to the sea, the sparser the vegetation.
Slowly the poplar vanishes, the willow tree becomes a bush; the general scene is dominated by the sandy or turfy shore with whortleberries, cloudberries and moss. Gradually the river widens to 75-100 sazhens; now the tundra has taken over, the coastline consists of lowlands and marshes. . . . A freezing wind blows in from the ocean.