On the coast of which sea do the Pomors live? Unknown Rus'

To the east, the Pomors discovered the Kanin Peninsula. In the 13th century Pomors sailed along the Kola Peninsula, reaching Norwegian lands. Since the voyages of the Pomors were not always peaceful, the Norwegians kept guards to protect the eastern sea borders. To the east, the Pomors discovered the Kanin Peninsula, and then the islands of Kolguev and Vaygach. It is believed that at the same time, northern sailors visited Novaya Zemlya for the first time. Around the 13th century. the first Pomors could reach the island of Grumant (Spitsbergen). By the 14th century include the voyages of Amos Korovinich around the Scandinavian Peninsula to the Baltic. For long-distance sea voyages, a new type of vessel was gradually created - the koch. Apparently around the 14th century. The Pomors invented a wind thrower for navigation at sea and began to use it widely. This simple device was a wooden disk into which wooden rods were inserted: one in the middle and 32 around the circumference. The main rhumbas were called: siver, vetok, poludennik, zapadnik. Taking the bearing of specially installed signs on the shore with a wind blower (their side coincided with the north-south line), the Pomors determined the course of the ship. Far from the coast, the course was determined at noon by the sun, and at night by the North Star. The improvement of technical means of navigation continued actively in the following centuries. In 1462-1505. under the Grand Duke of Moscow and All Rus' Ivan III, the unification of the Russian principalities into a single state was completed. In 1480, the Russian lands were finally liberated from the Mongol-Tatar yoke. Victories over the Livonian, Lithuanian and Polish conquerors contributed to the recognition of Rus' by other European states.

In the 15th century The Russians launched several expeditions from the White Sea in eastern and western directions. The sea directions of Ivan Novgorodets are known along the White, Barents, Kara Seas and the Baltic.
In the second half of the 15th century. Pomors, engaged in fishing and sea animals, went further and further to the east. Having reached Vaygach Island, industrial sailors entered the Kara Sea through the Kara Gate and Yugorsky Shar straits, and then, moving along the rivers of the Yamal Peninsula, reached the Ob Bay, where they traded with the Nenets and Khanty. At the mouth of the Taz River, the Pomors founded small trading posts. It can be assumed that in the 15th century. sea ​​routes along the White Sea and along the coast of the Kara Sea to the Ob Bay were reliably developed.
In 1466-1473 The famous journey to India of the Tver merchant Afanasy Nikitin took place. A significant part of the journey took place on ships in the Caspian Sea and the Indian Ocean. On the way back from India to Russia, the traveler crossed the Black Sea on a merchant ship. Afanasy Nikitin’s travel notes “Walking across Three Seas” had great scientific value for that time. In 1496, the Russian ambassador Grigory Istoma sailed from Arkhangelsk to the shores of the Scandinavian Peninsula to Denmark. With his comrades, he left Arkhangelsk on four ships, passed the White Sea*, circled the Kola Peninsula and from Trondheim continued his journey overland. Grigory Istoma compiled a detailed description of the peoples of the Kola Peninsula, spoke about sailing conditions and the nature of tidal currents in this area of ​​the Arctic Ocean. Thus, he was significantly ahead of the “discovery” of these areas by the British and Dutch, which was made only in the sixteenth century.
In the middle of the 15th century. Turkey conquered the shores of the Azov, Black and eastern Mediterranean Seas, which significantly complicated trade relations between European states and the countries of the East. Trade routes to India and China were in the hands of the Turks, who imposed huge trade duties. Trade with the East through Syria and Egypt became extremely unprofitable. Venice and Genoa, the largest shopping centers in southern Europe, gradually fell into disrepair. There was an urgent need to find new ways to trade with eastern countries. Portugal turned out to be the most prepared to carry out these searches. In 1471 Portuguese sailors reached and crossed the equator. In 1487 An expedition led by Bartolomeu Diaz (c. 1450-1500) passed along the western coast of Africa and on February 3, 1488 reached the southern part of the African continent, later called the Cape of Good Hope. The outstanding navigator Christopher Columbus was born in 1451 in Genoa. From 1476 to 1485 he lived in Portugal and participated in several sea expeditions. Columbus drew up a bold project to sail to Asia by the western route, but the Portuguese king recognized the project as untenable. Then Columbus went to Spain, where his persistence was crowned with success: he achieved the organization of a sea expedition to reach India and China across the Atlantic; if successful, he was promised the title of admiral and vice-king of all lands that would be discovered during the voyage.
On August 3, 1492, the caravels “Santa Maria” with a displacement of up to 130 tons, “Nina” - up to 60 tons and “Pinta” - up to 90 tons left Palos. The total crew of all three caravels was 90 people. The expedition safely crossed the Atlantic and at dawn on October 12 discovered an island named San Salvador (Bahamas), which meant “savior.” The main interest for travelers was gold. Following the instructions of local residents, the navigators discovered and explored several more islands, and on October 28 the flotilla reached the island of Cuba. Continuing his voyage, Columbus after some time reached the island, which he named Hispaniola (Haiti), and founded a colony there. Three months later, Columbus set out on his return journey on January 16, 1493 and returned to Spain on March 15. The expedition did not bring the expected fabulous wealth, and Columbus had to show a lot of resourcefulness in order to appropriately embellish the commercial results of his voyage and awaken interest in the further development and consolidation of open lands, which he took to be part of East Asia.

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Grumant- Russian (Pomeranian) name for the Spitsbergen archipelago. The earliest settlements of Russian hunters on Spitsbergen date back to the 16th century.

Spitsbergen is an Arctic archipelago in the western part of the Arctic Ocean. It includes more than a thousand islands and the waters of the Greenland and Barents Seas. The area of ​​the archipelago is 63 thousand km2. According to the Treaty of Paris, from August 14, the Svalbard archipelago is under the limited sovereignty of the Kingdom of Norway and is separated into a separate administrative unit under the control of the governor. Natural resources - oil, gas, coal, polymetallic ores, barites, gold, quartz, marble, gypsum, jasper. The surrounding waters contain large reserves of valuable fish, shrimp, algae and seafood. The basis of the economy is coal mining (1.5 million tons per year), geological exploration and scientific activities, as well as tourism. The archipelago includes the seaports of Barentsburg, Pyramid (Russia), Longyearbyen, Sveagruva, Ny-Ålesund (Norway), and Longyearbyen International Airport. The archipelago is permanently inhabited by 1,600 people (Russian and Norwegian miners, as well as several dozen scientists from different countries).

The beginning of economic development of the Spitsbergen archipelago, according to modern archaeological research, dates back to the middle of the 16th century. It was the result of the activities of the inhabitants of the Russian North - the Pomors, who developed a variety of fisheries on its shores, mainly walrus hunting.

In a house on the shore of the lagoon, about fifteen kilometers from Stubbelva, they found a text carved on a wooden object: “Resigned from the city” (“A resident of the city has died”). This five-wall structure was built by the Pomors even earlier, in 1552. In Belsund Bay they read an inscription scratched on a whale vertebra and the name “Ondrej”. Much success awaited researchers in Russekaila Bay, where the “patriarch” of Spitsbergen Ivan Starostin lived for about forty years: nineteen inscriptions were found during excavations, and a third of them are dated to the 16th century, the rest are later.

In total, Soviet archaeological expeditions identified about a hundred Pomeranian settlements between 78 and 80 degrees north latitude. The villages were located along the entire coast, ten to fourteen kilometers from one another, and included residential, utility and utility buildings, places of worship, and navigational signs in the form of crosses.

According to V. Yu. Wiese, compiled on the basis of various historical sources, there were a total of 39 ancient Russian settlements on Spitsbergen.

From now on, an expedition of the USSR Academy of Sciences worked on the archipelago, which discovered many Russian settlements, burials and large Pomeranian crosses, household items and inscriptions in Russian. Thus, on the shore of the island of Western Spitsbergen, the remains of a Russian house were found near the Stubbalva River, cut down in the city. 6 of the 19 found inscriptions date back to the 16th century.

There is a known list of Pomors-Grumantlans and Novaya Zemlya, called up for naval service in 1714 by personal decree of Peter I, who later formed the backbone of the Baltic sailors and won more than one battle.

In the 17th century, Russian crafts on Spitsbergen expanded. This was facilitated by the abundance of fish and animals, the development of the sea route, and, to some extent, an established way of life. Although the icy desert was reluctant to let aliens into its possessions.

In 1743, Alexey Khimkov, a feedman from Mezen, came to Edge Island (the Pomors called it Maly Berun) on a regular voyage with his twelve-year-old son Ivan and comrades Stepan Sharapov and Fedor Verigin. They did not save their boat; it was torn away from the shore and destroyed by the raging sea. The path home was cut off. But the Pomors did not lose heart. They adapted to getting food and heating shelter without any special equipment, and when, after six years and three months of forced captivity, they were taken off by another ship, they loaded on board a large amount of furs they had caught, and a lot of meat.

Since 1747, the capital's commercial board regularly requested information from its Arkhangelsk office about fishing on Grumant and its intensity.

Vasily Dorofeev Lomonosov, the father of the outstanding figure of Russian science M.V. Lomonosov, spent the winter on Spitsbergen several times. The great Russian scientist subsequently organized a expedition to Spitsbergen in 1765-1766. two marine scientific expeditions under the leadership of V. Ya. Chichagov. The “Patriarch” of Spitsbergen is the industrialist Ivan Starostin, who spent a total of about 36 years on the island.

Mikhail Lomonosov, however, never learned the results of the first Russian scientific expedition, which was headed by Vasily Yakovlevich Chichagov, since it went to sea a few days after Lomonosov’s death. Chichagov conducted serious research on Grumant, where a special base had been created a year before, and even tried to go further - he reached 80 degrees 26 minutes north latitude. The following year it went even higher by four minutes.

The Spitsbergen problem forced the Russian government to take measures to protect its interests in the archipelago. The Russians believed that Grumant was discovered by Russian Pomors long before Barents. Sidorov's activities in the 1870s. contributed to the strengthening of this point of view in public opinion, and although the government accepted the status of Spitsbergen as “terra nulius”, that is, “no man's land”, in the Russian press of the first decade of the 20th century. the archipelago was considered a “lost Russian possession” that needed to be returned.

Russian authorities begin to register ships that sailed to Grumant and issue “pass tickets.” Thanks to these statistics, we know today that at the end of the last century, seven to ten ships with 120-150 industrialists were sent annually from Arkhangelsk alone to Grumant. Camps arose on Bear Island, and on Grumant the number of Russian winterers reaches two thousand.

Russia's priority for Grumant was never in doubt. But more far-sighted Russian people, in order to avoid complications with rights in the future, proposed that the tsarist government populate the archipelago with a permanent population. The archives have preserved the petitions of Pomor Chumakov (g.), merchant Antonov (g.), and ensign Frolov (g.). Starostin made such requests many times. However, no one in the capital was seriously worried about their concerns.

At the end of the 50s of the 19th century, Russian crafts on the archipelago gradually fell into disrepair. In 1854, during the Crimean War (-), the English corvette Miranda destroyed the city of Kola, one of the most important Pomeranian centers.

In the city, Russia founded a meteorological observatory on Spitsbergen, and a year later the icebreaker Ermak set out for that area.

As a result of the indecisiveness and laziness of the kings, the archipelago, rich in marine resources and coal, went to Norway, although they began to develop the archipelago later than the Russians: only in 1793 did the first Norwegian fishing vessel sail from Tromso to Spitsbergen, and even then half with a Russian crew, and it only reached Bear Island.

In fact, in the last third of the 19th century, the Norwegians almost exclusively dominated the “eastern ice”. The growth of Norwegian expansion was also facilitated by the lack of means of protecting and defending the northern coast of Russia from the encroachments of foreigners, caused by the abolition of the Arkhangelsk military port and the White Sea flotilla in the city.

In 1871, the Swedish-Norwegian envoy to Russia, Biorstiern, addressed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of our country with a note in which he announced that Sweden and Norway, united by a union at that time, intended to annex Spitsbergen to their possessions. But this time the tsarist government did not take a serious step to consolidate Russia’s rights over Spitsbergen. On the contrary, it offered the status of “no man's land” and thereby effectively opened the way to the archipelago for other countries.

IN I remember April 23, 1981, Moscow, Institute of Archeology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. With caution, like a bare live wire, I hold in my fingers a slide on which is imprinted a board charred by time, on which, as if with the knife of Alexei Ivanovich Inkov, was carved about their weak-spirited artel worker: “Be gone from the city!” The head of the Spitsbergen archaeological expedition, Candidate of Historical Sciences V.F. Starkov, makes a report on the results of the first three field seasons.

Now more than eighty monuments are known,” he says. - The northernmost one we have excavated is located on the Brøgger Peninsula, on the shore of Kongsfjord Bay, at 79 degrees north latitude, four kilometers from the village of Ny-Ålesund. During its excavations, more than seven hundred objects made of metal, leather, wood, clay, and birch bark were found. There are Pomeranian graves, crosses and houses even higher, at 80 degrees. And in Recherge Bay, on the northern shore of Belsund, the remains of four residential complexes, which included nine living quarters, six cold cells and a bathhouse, were identified and studied. This is the largest Russian settlement known so far in Western Spitsbergen. It is also important to conclude that the habitation of the Pomors on Spitsbergen was regular and long-term, and that the main form of habitation of the Pomors was a village, and not a single hut-winter.

Almost two and a half centuries separate us today from those times. But thought never tires of reaching out, often collecting facts bit by bit, into the darkness of centuries, wanting to see life there clearly and correctly.

Stored in the Department of Manuscripts of the State Public Library named after M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin in Leningrad Collection of Novgorod and Dvina charters of the 15th century. And there is in it the “act” of Prince Andrei of Novgorod - a message to the people of the Dvina and the Icy (White) Sea. The letter is written by the charter. The letters are straight, powerful, and they bring us the tension of a big and hot life from seven hundred years ago.

Prince Andrei Alexandrovich sent three bands of his from Novgorod with ataman Andrei Krititsky “to the sea to Oshan” and ordered the Pomors to give “them food and carts, according to duty, from the graveyards.” And at the end of the letter he noted for the atamans: “as it happened, under my father and under my brother, Nougorodets did not go to the Terek side, and now they do not go.”

And the Tersk side is the Kola Peninsula. And the princely gangs of Novgorodians were not ordered to go there either to hunt or collect dues because in this XIII century it was still impossible to disturb the Terek settlers, because from time immemorial the sovereigns encouraged brave explorers who expanded and developed the borders of the princely possessions, they encouraged them by liberating them from state burdens and did not limit their freedom in any way. For the time being, of course.

However, on the same Studen Sea, on Solovki, by 1429, the monks were already driving away simple Pomors by force and threats “from this island, destined by God for the habitation of monastics,” as Archimandrite Dosifei puts it. So, thirty years later, “Solovki from the Ocean Sea” was assigned to the monks by the Novgorod charter, and in 1471, the list of Dvina lands included villages on the Tersky coast: Karela Varzugskaya and Umba.

A hundred years pass - and the royal, boyar guardians of power, no less than the monasteries, impudent and armed, are reaching here.

And again they break away from their homes, and people go into the unknown, to the North, to the sea, to the islands, to where it is freer for the soul and for fishing; Moreover, not just any people come, but strong in spirit, greedy both for work and for freedom, and deeply peace-loving not out of cowardice, but by nature. Such are the Pomors.

In the letter of Grand Duke Ivan Vasilyevich dated December 18, 1546, we learn that the people of Kargopol and the surrounding volosts buy salt ... “by the sea from the Pomeranians.” And this is probably the first written evidence of such a definition.

And life in the Russian North actually reached its peak by the middle of the 16th century.

Consider the diaries and testimony of Stephen and William Barrow. These English sailors, who met the Pomors in 1557, talk about how, for example, the Mezenians of the White Sea region all went to Pechora in June “to catch salmon and walruses” and turned out to be amazing sailors. They deftly led the English ship out of the disastrous fog, another time their twenty-oared carbas, going with the wind, ahead of the English leading ship and from time to time waited for the English, lowering their sails. It turned out that the Pomors were amazingly wise in predicting the weather and taking into account tidal currents. On Kigor (Rybachy Peninsula) on St. Peter, that is, on June 29, many people gathered with the Russians “on the occasion of bargaining”: Karelians, and Lapps (Sami), and Normans, and Danes, and Dutch - and “their affairs here were going well”; Moreover, at the same time the Russians spoke to the British about the Big Stone (Ural) and about Novaya Zemlya.

From the same Englishmen you can also learn some of the names of simple Pomors of the sixteenth century. These are Fedor and Gavrila from Kola (Murmansk), Kirill from Kolmogory (Kholmogory near Arkhangelsk), feedman Fedor Tovtygin and a White Sea feedman nicknamed Loshak.

And it is not surprising that in 1576 the Danish king tries to take advantage of the nautical knowledge of one of the Russian helmsmen - the Pomeranian navigator Pavel Nikitich from Kola. “It became known to us,” writes the king, “that last summer several Trontgey burghers entered into relations in Vardø with one Russian feeder, Pavel Nishets, who lives in Malmus (Murmansk) and usually sails to Greenland around St. Bartholomew’s Day (June 11) every year.” It is not without reason that it was then that the well-known project of occupying the Russian state from the north arose. To capture Muscovy and turn it into an imperial province, according to the calculations of one of the nimble Western Europeans, “200 ships, well supplied with provisions, are enough; 200 pieces of field guns or iron mortars and 100 thousand people; so much is needed not to fight the enemy, but to occupy and hold the entire country.”

The Dutch expeditions that visited Novaya Zemlya at the end of the 16th century sought to Dutch all the oral Pomeranian names on it, especially since the outlines of the Russian North were not yet on the maps of Muscovy. But it wasn’t because the Russian North did not represent “anything controversial in those years.” And the fact is that the traces of the fishing activities of the Pomors, often encountered by Dutch sailors both on Novaya Zemlya and on Spitsbergen - processed walrus carcasses and tusks, navigation crosses - are nothing more than traces of Russians, and not Norwegians, some, but the Dutch, By the way, they have no doubt. And they don’t doubt it, if only because, say, through the same clerk of the Stroganovs, who fled to Holland, Alferius Brunel, they knew very well what kind of narrow, long, albeit high-speed, but unsuitable for sailing in ice boats the Norwegians had and what - short, nut-shaped, sewn without nails and adapted to ice (even with runners) - Russian boats. So, when Norwegian fishermen were not going to rise above Jan Mayen, or at least above Medvezhye, the Russian hunter, brought up on the White Sea hummocks, had to walk along the Arctic Ocean to the Elisei (Yenisei), to Maly Oshkuy (Spitsbergen) or to Novaya Zemlya into custom.

“In the summer of 7113 (1605) in the city of Samara,” says the legend, “there was a Pomeranian man named Afanasy, his birth was beyond Solovki on Ust-Kola. And he spoke about many marvelous sea miracles, and heard about others. And he traveled across the sea on sea ships for 17 years, and walked into a dark land, and there it was as dark as a dark mountain; From afar, above the darkness, you can see snowy mountains on a red day.”

V. Yu. Wiese, who cites this legend in the biographical dictionary of Russian polar sailors, notes that the mentioned “dark land is undoubtedly either Spitsbergen or Novaya Zemlya.”

It is also interesting that the first cartographic evidence of Russian Pomors on Spitsbergen also dates back to this time. The map of Spitsbergen, the second in a row, but the first in practical value, is a map called “The New Country, or otherwise Spitsbergen,” published in 1613 in the book by Hessel Gerrits “The History of a Country with the Name of Spitsbergen.” The author talks about unsuccessful negotiations between Dutch whalers and Russian fishermen regarding the organization of a joint trading partnership and places a map drawn up in the fresh footsteps of his fellow countrymen, on which one can see one of the Pomeranian bays, called by the Dutch “Mouth of the Muscovite”.

There is another early cartographic document about the Pomors, but already on the English map of 1625. It shows a Russian boat hurrying to the southern tip of Spitsbergen, where from that time on for a whole century the Pomors were ousted by the British, Dutch, and later by the Danes, Germans, and Spaniards, whose expeditions were always richly equipped with cannons and cannonballs.

But then comes 1694, when the 22-year-old Tsar Peter I goes to Arkhangelsk, to the Pomors, with a great and daring thought about a military maneuver, with the implementation of which a “window to Europe” will be cut. True, the Pomors will pay a high price for their originality for the much-needed “window” for Russia, which was then called St. Petersburg, because the Tsar ordered the Pomors in Arkhangelsk to build, instead of their Pomor Kochmars, Ranshins, Shnyaks and Lodiys, powerful military ships modeled on the Dutch ones.

For eight years, cursing the tsar and his clerks, the White Sea fulfilled the sovereign's orders in a row, and in 1702 a real squadron of the first North Russian warships (13 ships) sailed from Arkhangelsk to Solovki, and from the village of Nyukhcha, on the Pomeranian coast of the White Sea, and to in the village of Povenets, on the shores of Lake Onega, a fantastic flooring is being laid - cut - the legendary Sovereign Road, a clearing road, a road road, a drag road, along which two ships will drag in ten days - the “Holy Spirit” and the “Courier”, which They will then go along the Svir to Ladoga, the ancestral home of the Pomors, in order to return it to Russia along with Shlisselburg forever.

One problem is that from century to century the Pomors, even though they are literate, have not respected the matter of “wandering with a pen”; They believe most of all in their living memory and trust in the memory of their sons. There are no words, it’s a shame that the royal decree of 1619, which imposed a ban on keeping sailing directions, completely discouraged people from starting a ship’s logbook or keeping a diary of observations on boats. And all the moral rules, all the father's covenants and seafaring signs were passed on from mouth to mouth.

Only after Peter’s reforms did they have nautical books, or Pomeranian sailing directions. But even then, all entries in such handwritten books were kept anonymously and in a stingy, businesslike manner. However, let’s try to retell one of the Pomeranian cases.

For eight days there was a wind - the boat from the Mezen itself went quickly to the coast, which means to the north-west, and the Arctic Ocean comforted the soul.

And on the ninth day the wind changed, and the ship turned east. It was driven, driven and nailed to a bare island, “butted against the ice.” The Pomors recognized the island: it was Maly Oshkuy, that is, it turned out to be Grumant the Bear. It was then that the fat ice moved and swaddled them, and soon the press began.

The Pomors see: this is a serious matter, it’s pressing and pressing - we need to prepare for the worst, maybe we’ll have to spend the winter. The feedman remembered that there was a camp somewhere here and decided to check it out.

The four of us went: the helmsman himself, Alexey Inkov, and with him three private soldiers - Khrisanf Inkov, Stepan Sharapov and Fedor Verigin.

It's a mile to walk to the shore. And the ice cracks - as if someone is squeezing it in a vice - from time to time, as if from a cannon, it wheezes, and swells, and creeps on each other, and then when it booms, a thick piece of ice sticks out, as if alive, into the rope.

In order to go faster and avoid drowning from the weight, the Pomors took little load. All there was was one gun, a horn with gunpowder, three charges per brother, the same number of bullets, an axe, a pot, a knife, a bag of flour - five pounds per person, a flame with tinder, a bottle of tobacco and a pipe in a wooden smoking room. And the clothes are all the same as they are wearing.

Finally we got there. They see: Zaleda is a coastal land that is hidden under the ice. From here to the camp hut, as it turned out, it was less than half a mile away. They found a machine. They lit a clay stove without a chimney. The smoke spread across the ceiling, curled, swayed, swelled to the top of the window, filled with a square black cloud, but did not fall lower - it flowed into the crack of the window. The house warmed up, and the Pomors decided to spend the night in it.

At dawn, as the wind calmed down, the Pomors hurried to their own - with nothing around, the wind dragged, as it was, both the ice and the boat with it into the ocean.

The souls of the hunters became heavy; they stand like a pillar, speechless. Finally, the helmsman Alexey Inkov raised his beard, looked around the ocean and said sadly:
- Father sighed! Our Grumanlanka (lodiya - author) was carried away by the dak. And where are you, our other comrades? Have you accepted death?
(And so it happened: eleven, everyone who remained in the boat, everyone drowned.)

Suddenly Alexey Inkov hurried up and shouted:
- Don't be shy! Tease the wind!

And he whistled famously. And that’s it: Chrysanthus, Stepan, and Fyodor started hooting and whistling after him!..

However, the wind did not go back and did not drive their Grumanlanka, their native Pomeranian Lodia.

Then the Pomors stopped, as they put it, tying up the wind, that is, begging for it. “Nikola the sea god doesn’t want to accept us,” they said. They said something, but looked at the bald bulge of the sea for a long time.

But you have to live. And the feeder said a word:
- We are all more equal here now, and our little ones are equal.

And let's go get along with the artel life.
The Pomors began by killing twelve deer, according to the number of bullets, preparing meat and skins for clothing for future use, and making a bed for each of them from crumpled deer skin. For heating, driftwood was brought from the coast for the first winter and the next. The hut was repaired and tightly sealed with dry moss. They gave the instrument all the necessary things: they found a ship's plank, nailed by the sea, thick, with an iron hook, with nails and a hole; it turned into a hammer; and from a suitable stone - an anvil; nails - so consider that ready-made tips or fishing hooks, and even every quilter was able to forge a needle from them.

The ticks came from two deer antlers.
The only thing they were afraid of was the teddy bear, the bear, the terrible oshkuy. He was too curious and sultry: he would come, growl, his thick fur standing on end; the moss is torn out of the logs, it breaks into the hut - there’s already a creaking and crackling sound - look, the box will fall apart log by log!

They made two spears from strong branches, and soon the first one, very daring, was lifted onto them; others became quieter. And in just six winters they killed ten.

Then a spruce root turned up, its curve resembling a bow. They pulled the vein from the first bear onto it with a bowstring - and immediately they needed arrows. They forged four iron tips and tied them tightly to spruce sticks with the veins of the same oshkuy at one end, and screwed feathers from a seagull at the other. With these arrows they killed about two and a half hundred deer and many blue and white arctic foxes.

The bowstring whistles, the arrow hisses, it screams at the deer - the beast ducks, and rushes over the mossy hummocks, bucking. And Chrysanthos followed - it’s impossible for the arrow to disappear! Kuhlyanka, like a sack, thrown over the head - arms, bare thighs, only a short sweatshirt on the body and shoe covers on the legs - that's all, and young Chrysanthus flies, the daring Chrysanthus runs no worse than that deer, and better, because he catches up with the fleeing deer , is catching up.

The meat was smoked and dried - in the hut, on sticks, under the ceiling. Over the summer, supplies were replenished. And it came instead of bread. They saved the flour. If they cooked it, it was only occasionally, with deer meat. There was flour for the fire pot. They made a kind of lamp from clay mixed with it, dried it in the sun, wrapped it in scraps of shirts, and boiled the scraps in deer fat again with flour, and dried everything again. It turned out fat. Underwear was used for the wicks. The fire has not been switched off since then. Otherwise, there was very little tinder, and how much sweat was lost while the so-called living fire was being extracted: twist a dry maple stick so that the tinder, stuffed around it in the tight hole of a birch log, would smolder!

So life went on in worries and labors.
An illness soon began to overcome her - scurvy. The Incas fought against it as best they could: they drank the blood of deer for this, and ate raw and frozen meat in pieces, and worked a lot, and slept little, and in the summer they collected spoon grass, from which they either cooked cabbage soup, or else, also raw , ate as much as possible. “..And that grass grows a quarter arshin high and higher, and its leaves are round, the size of a modern copper penny, and the stem is thin, but they take it and use those stems with leaves, except for the roots, but they don’t take the roots and don’t use them "

Three of the Pomors resisted scurvy gloriously. Only Fyodor Verigin was lazy and weak-willed. Therefore, in the very first year he fell into the infirmity of scurvy, became sick and weakened so much that he himself could no longer get up. For a long time his comrades fussed about him: they gave him a spoonful of broth, they took him out to breathe fresh air, they smeared him with bear fat, they said prayers... However, all the same, on the fourth spring, Verigin withdrew from his soul and died.

There was also a time among the Pomors when there was no need to sew shoe covers, no kukhlyanka, no crumpling leather, no kalgi-skis to get along with, and suddenly you had no need or desire to do anything else around the house. Then they did what their souls loved: Chrysanthus, for example, carved a box out of a round bone with a knife, Alexey smoked moss, remembered his wife, children, the mainland, and listened to Stepan as he sang a song with tears, thinking the same thought:

Grumant is gloomy, sorry!
Let us go to our homeland!
Living on you is dangerous -
Fear death at all times!
Ditches on hillsides.
Fierce animals are in their holes there.
The snows don't go away -
Grumant is forever gray.

And they lived like this, alone, beyond the seventy-seventh parallel, in the land of midnight, as is known, for six winters and years and three months. And they had order and harmony, and there was no quarrel or despair. Not even a flea or louse appeared.

One day (exactly: August 15, 1749) the Inkov Alexey was sitting on a hillock, on soft green-red moss; He planed a knot, thinking: maybe he could make a smoking pipe out of it; I wondered and looked with hunting envy at how the beluga whales were fawning.

So he was sitting like a Pomeranian, looking at the sea, at the beluga whales, at the sandpiper... But suddenly he was afraid that he was seduced, he saw, he imagined a wonderful miracle, a clear sail! But the sea is smooth; the wind is gentle and in your face.

“There’s something flickering in my eyes,” Inkov said to himself. And my heart sank faster.

But the light flap of the sail has grown. And then Alexey, like a young man, caught up and started to run. At the hut he shouts:
- Guys!.. Dear ones!.. Signs with banners... hurry up to signify!
(There is such a naval command: give a sign.)
They were immediately confused. “Are you going?” - they ask.
- Get the bed, get the bed!.. Yes, fire! Fire with a bowl!

They realized the fires. They set fire, sparing nothing. Then they put the bedding deer skins on spears and quickly waved them around and screamed as much as they could.

And soon the Russian fishing boat dropped its sails near the Incas.

So they finally returned to Arkhangelsk.
The people marveled. The director of the Kola whaling company, Vernizober, also expressed amazement. He expressed it and wrote about what happened to St. Petersburg. The next year, the Inkov brothers were summoned to Count Shuvalov. And he ordered to compile a book about what happened. Le Roy, the teacher of the count's children, compiled such a book in French and German 16 years later. And she went around the entire scientific world of Europe, now surprising the Germans, the French, the British, and partly the Russians themselves.

And our glorious coast-dwellers, the Inca people, lived like everyone else and continued to make a living, differing, however, from others in that for a long time they could not eat bread - they were sick from it, and they could not drink any drinks, because On their island they became accustomed only to the purest glacial water...

Now we can say with good reason that the Pomors remained on the archipelago for a long time back in the 18th century. And so close to me do I see the uncovered dark crowns of seaside huts, once collected here from imported timber, sometimes standing on the whale vertebrae of the foundation, so mysterious are the broken nameless ships white with the ribs of frames, so familiar are the mosses turning green and red, sparkling among the brown-black rubble of the scree. fat glaciers, finally, the lopsided crosses stand so achingly, stretching out their stumps of wooden arms from south to north...

And I don’t know why my heart is beating so hard: either because I lived two “polars” on Spitsbergen, or because I can hear the voices of my ancestors.
- Vadim Fedorovich! - I ask Starkov. - You consider the time of active voyages of Pomors in the Spitsbergen area to be from the 16th to the 18th centuries. The frame of the tree was found in the 16th century. Could there be earlier things?
“Yes, although we have not yet encountered earlier monuments,” says Starkov.

The scientist, naturally, is very careful with his conclusions. But the search continues, because Alexander Pushkin said: “Respect for the past is the feature that distinguishes education from savagery.”

In order to clarify...

It's 50 years since the first end-to-end voyage on the Northern Sea Route. This marked the beginning of the systematic development of the most important national economic sea route, the first discoverers of which were, in essence, the Russian Pomors.

Pomerania gave many glorious names to Russia and the whole world. Among them is the great M.V. Lomonosov, “Kamchatka Ermak” - V.V. Atlasov, the famous Semyon Dezhnev, who became a Yakut Cossack. From here, from their native shores, detachments of brave explorers set off on long campaigns, whose exploits and heroic deeds are recorded in golden letters in the chronicle of the great Russian geographical discoveries of the 17th-18th centuries. The role of the population of Pomerania in the development of Siberia is also significant. Pomeranian ship's apprentices and foremen, skilled builders of reliable boats, ship carpenters and helmsmen-navigators “set up” maritime affairs under Peter I in the previously unexplored expanses of the Sea of ​​Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean. But the most polar frontiers of Russian sailors from ancient times were the Arctic archipelago - Spitsbergen and Novaya Zemlya. And it’s quite natural: everything related to the exploration of these lands is of great interest.

The author of the essay spent two winters on Spitsbergen, became “sick” of the North and has since been quite successfully studying its fascinating history. At the Geographical Society of the USSR he made interesting reports (in Leningrad and Moscow) on the important clarification of the route of the expedition of V. Barents, which in 1597 discovered Spitsbergen for Western Europe. To the famous scientist, the author of a kind of Arctic encyclopedia “History of the discovery and development of the Northern Sea Route”, Professor M.I. Belov, the developments of Yu. Mansurov, undertaken, as he wrote, “in order to clarify a historical event,” seemed worthy of approval and produced “the impression of a solid research." And this impression, I think, is not deceptive.

Yu. A. Mansurov suggested back in 1977 that Mezen resident Alexey Inkov, in a conversation with academician Le Roy, could call Spitsbergen and Greenland as Small and Big Oshkuy (for Le Roy - Small and Big Brown), but, supposedly, after that As a foreign scientist, not understanding the Zyryan word “oshkuy” (polar bear), he demanded clarification; a quick-witted Pomor gave him the Scottish translation of “oshkuy” - “brown”. It seems that it is time for toponymists - specialists in the origin and interpretation of geographical names - to tackle this bold hypothesis.

The first cartographic evidence of Russian Pomors on Spitsbergen is also of interest in the essay. Turning to ancient maps, the author confirms the prevailing ideas in the scientific world about the wide possibilities of use and the need to increase attention to ancient cartographic materials. After all, old maps are surprisingly capacious and meaningful sources for the historical geography of our vast Motherland.

L. A. Goldenberg, Doctor of Historical Sciences

Since the 10th century, Russian Slavs who came here have settled on the coast of the North and Barents Seas. They mix with the local Finno-Ugric population and begin to live on the cold and inhospitable northern shores. Pomors, that’s what the descendants of these people call themselves. They played a key role in the development of the northern coast of Russia, the development of the islands of the Arctic Ocean, and were the first to come to the north of Siberia. The life of this people was inextricably linked with the sea. They fed on the sea, mined furs on the islands and on the coast, and mastered salt production. The Pomors ventured into the ice-clogged Kara Sea and reached the mouth of the Yenisei. On their sailing ships they visited the islands of Novaya Zemlya, reached the Spitsbergen archipelago, and founded the city of Mangazeya in the north of eastern Siberia. The harsh living conditions also shaped the character of these “plowmen” of the northern seas - they are trusting, hospitable, friendly and try to live in harmony with nature.

Modern replicas of ancient Pomeranian sailing ships (koches) made several outstanding voyages in the North, following in the footsteps of ancient sailors

Sailing ships of the Pomors

The first vessels of the Pomors were boats. On these sailing ships they sailed along rivers and carried out coastal voyages. The boats had sails, but mostly they used oars. The boats reached twenty meters in length and three meters in width. The type of ancient Russian boat underwent changes over time and was adapted for northern conditions. “Overseas” boats were built for long voyages in the Baltic and North Seas, while “ordinary” boats were built for sailing in the White Sea. The vessels had a shallow draft and varied in size. “Overseas” boats in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries reached a length of 25 and a width of 8 meters.

The sailing armament of the Pomeranian nomads differed from the armament of the boats

The boats had a solid deck, so water did not get inside the ship. The difficult conditions of northern navigation also formed a unique type of ship - the Pomeranian koch. These ships were a further development of the boat design. They were egg-shaped, and when they hit the ice, the Pomor ships were simply squeezed upward without damaging the hull. The design of the koches was more complex than that of the boats, and the sailing armament also differed. Researchers had to collect information about Kochs bit by bit, but many fragments of ships were found this decade. And now we can reliably say that the Kochi had a second skin in the area of ​​the waterline made of oak or larch. This helped when swimming in broken ice. The ship had large, heavy anchors. They were used for portage, including on ice. The anchors were strengthened in the ice and then, choosing ropes, they pulled the ship up, looking for clean water. The stern of the koch was almost vertical. The nose was very slanted. The vessel's draft was small, one and a half meters, which made it easier for the vessel to enter river mouths and shallow waters. The bottom was reinforced with overhead boards. The sides were covered with boards using staples; a huge number of them were required - several thousand. The carrying capacity of the ships reached 40 tons.

Nansen's "Fram", built similar to the Pomeranian Kochis, drifted in the ice for a long time

It was on the kochas that the Cossack Semyon Dezhnev walked in 1648 across the Arctic Ocean to the extreme point of the continent, passed the “Big Stone Nose” (now Cape Dezhnev), where several kochas were defeated, and the sailors entered the mouth of the Anadyr River.

Ancient legends and chronicles told people that the path to the Far North was paved by sailors for hundreds of years. Probably, light ships of the Normans visited the waters of the “Icy Sea” about 1000 years ago. But no reliable information about this has survived. Russian chronicles say that hundreds of years ago the Pomors, settlers on the shores of the White Sea and the Kola Peninsula from Novgorod, walked along the harsh waters of this sea. Brave, free from the yoke of serfdom, Novgorod peasants united into squads and went to unknown lands for precious furs, to fish for fish and sea animals.

The tenacious hands of the boyars and sovereign servants did not reach the distant shores of the White Sea. The common people left for the North not only from the lands of Veliky Novgorod. Peasants from the central and northwestern regions of the country fled here to get rid of the master's oppression, unbearable exactions and debt bondage.

In the XII-XV centuries. Novgorodians explored and developed the coast of the Kola Peninsula and the shores of the White Sea. They built strong ships and sailed far from their villages along the Arctic seas.

The Pomors discovered the islands of Novaya Zemlya, Kolguev, Medvezhiy, Spitsbergen (then this archipelago was called Grumant Land).

Often, brave Pomors had to stand up to defend the lands they had developed, which foreigners began to covet.

The Russian North has long been a vibrant trading place where foreign merchants from Western European countries flocked. Here they bought precious furs, fat and skins of sea animals, walrus tusks and other goods that were delivered from Western Siberia by land, through the polar Urals, and by sea.

When sailing east along the “Arctic Sea,” Western European travelers, as a rule, used the help of Russian sailors. The first Russian pilots appeared on the Neva and Volkhov during the time of Veliky Novgorod.

They were then called ship leaders (“leaders”). In the North in Pomerania there was even a special fishing industry and artels of ship leaders.

Russian sailors went far into the depths of the seas. On the Arctic islands, researchers have many times found the remains of Russian Pomeranian wintering grounds and their fishing equipment. Pomeranian Ivan Starostin is known to researchers of the Russian North; he lived for many years as a sedentary on Grumant (Spitsbergen). Bear Island was developed by the Russians. Foreigners even called its northern coast the “Russian coast.”

The Russian Pomors laid the foundation for a new type of navigation - ice navigation. They managed to explore not only the European North, but also a significant part of the Asian coast.

The study of the ships of the ancient Novgorodians and Pomors who settled in the North showed what abilities and ingenuity the first Russian Arctic sailors possessed.

Russian sea boat of the 16th century. could take on board 200 tons of cargo. It was a three-masted deck ship with straight sails. Smaller boats, with a deck and two masts, were usually intended for sailing on the White Sea. Pomors sailed on other types of ships. The oldest ship is the kochmara, or koch, a three-masted deck ship. The design of the koch is very similar to a lodya, only it is smaller in size. Pomors also built simpler types of ships: ranshins, augers and karbass.

On some types of ships, the Pomors attached the hull to the ship's hull using vicita—juniper roots. In some cases, northern shipbuilders preferred vitsa to iron nails, as they were convinced from experience that it was more reliable than iron. Sheathing sewn with wire was more waterproof than sheathing fastened with iron nails. When sailing in ice, the ship's hull became loose and leaked in places where there were nails. In addition, the nails quickly rusted and destroyed the sheathing. With a wooden fastening, the vista, swelling, almost did not allow water to pass through. The cladding boards, sewn in a special way to the frame of the ship, held tightly.

In addition to juniper, the material for the wooden “threads” was young thin spruce up to one and a half meters high. The trunks of such Christmas trees were cleared of branches, twisted and dried. They were steamed before use. The boat was sewn with such “threads”. The master's set of tools usually consisted of an axe, a saw, a drill, a level and a fathom, divided into arshins and tops. The ships were built on the river bank, near the customer’s house. Here, with a pole on the sand or in a hut, the master made a drawing with chalk on the floor and made the necessary calculations. First, the frame of the ship was built, which was then sheathed with boards outside and inside. Then they erected and secured tall straight masts and laid the deck.

A large ship - a boat - was built by a team of carpenters in one winter.

By decree of Ivan the Terrible, the first large shipyards and even a dry dock were built at the Solovetsky Monastery for the construction of ships on the White Sea.

In ancient times, sails on Pomeranian ships were sometimes made of suede - deer skin treated with the fat of sea animals. Sea hare skin was used for harness.

The boats had a flat, wide bottom and a shallow draft, so when sailing through the ice to “unseen lands” they did not need special harbors in order to hide from a storm or spend the winter. Sometimes the Pomors had to pull their boats onto the ice or onto the shore. With all these advantages, Pomeranian ships also had their drawbacks: they obeyed the rudder worse than keel ships, especially in rough weather.

Sailing on the Arctic Ocean with its harsh climate, piles of ice and unknown currents was a good school for sailors. Hardy and brave, not afraid of severe frosts and strong winds, the Pomors boldly set off on long voyages along the stormy waves of the ocean on their small wooden ships.

In their daily struggle with the elements, the Pomors studied the “Icy Sea” well. They knew that the magnitude of the ebb and flow of the tide was related to the position of the Moon in the sky, and they figuratively called the tidal phenomena “the sighs of the sea-ocean.”

“His chest is wide, powerful,” they said, “when he sighs, he lifts his chest, then the water has arrived: the tide, that means. When he exhales, the water leaves: the tide is coming. The ocean-father does not breathe often: he inhales twice, exhales twice, and the day will pass.”

The Pomors knew a compass, which they called a little mother. They have long recognized time by the sun and stars.

They also called the winds in their own way, depending on the direction. The “midnight owl,” for example, was the name given to the northeast wind; “sholonnikom” - wind blowing from the southwest; “coastal” - north-west wind; “dinner” - southeastern. Russian sailors studied not only winds, but also currents, tides, and the state of ice.

They knew well and used local remedies against scurvy: cloudberry, spoon grass, raw meat and warm animal blood. Since ancient times, northern sailors had handwritten maps, drawings and handwritten sailing directions, which briefly described the seashores, indicated profitable and safe routes and the best time for ships to sail.

The oldest handwritten sailing directions had the following headings: “Charter on how to navigate a ship”, “Ship progress of the Russian Ocean-Sea”, “Ship progress of the Grumanlandskaya”.

Sailing in the White Sea and the Arctic Ocean developed dexterity and unique techniques for controlling the ship. The Pomors improved their experience and passed it on from generation to generation. If, for example, the wind heeled the boat strongly, threatening to capsize it instantly, the Pomor would throw a sharp ax or knife at the sail, and then the wind would tear the sail to shreds, and the boat would straighten out.

Northern sailors have long used blubber as a remedy to calm unrest. Pomor ships always had several barrels of seal or seal oil in stock.

In 1771, the famous Russian academician I.I. Lepekhin wrote about it this way: “This remedy consists of blubber, which is poured into the sea when the ship is splashing, or bags filled with it are placed near the ship. This remedy has been known to our Pomeranians since ancient times and was used by them for many years before the European departments published about this remedy as some kind of important discovery.” Northern Pomor sailors were explorers of the Arctic Ocean. Fearlessly setting sail across unknown, harsh seas, they made valuable geographical discoveries.