All unattributed T.W. Atkinson quotations are from his Oriental and Western Siberia (O & WS), 1858, or in later chapters Travels in the Regions of the Upper & Lower Amoor (U & LA), 1860.
All unattributed Lucy Atkinson quotations are from her Recollections of Tartar Steppes, London, 1863, published under the name of ‘Mrs Atkinson’.
TWA j.: T.W. Atkinson journal. Atkinson’s journals are in the Royal Geographical Society, formerly in the possession of Paul Dahlquist. The two dates for entries from 1850 on represent Western (or Gregorian) and Eastern (or Julian) calendars, the latter twelve days behind and used in Russia until after the 1917 Revolution, although the Russian Orthodox Church still retains the Julian calendar.
His last journal was to be of 1851, although the Atkinsons did not return to St Petersburg until December 1853. It generally devotes one date per page, is in tiny faint pencil throughout, other than the inked dates atop.
The almost total lack of dates in his two books probably obscures the fact that he was travelling with wife and small child, and conceals his seemingly fictitious visit to Mongolia in his first book. But the dated journals are nevertheless sometimes confusing, because of the difference between European and Russian dates and his habit of inserting entries completely out of context and often even in a different year, when he runs out of paper.
Occasionally, his misspellings have been corrected in pen – presumably Lucy’s corrections.
1 The Central State Archive of St Petersburg, No.161, II. 85, 1846, file 58, p.3.
2 William Atkinson’s will, 1st November 1826.
3 Wilkinson. The description of Atkinson’s early life is taken almost entirely from Wilkinson’s memoir.
4 By his step-uncle, Matthew Bates, of Tivy Dale, Cawthorne, the brother of his father’s first wife.
5 Wilkinson, op. cit.
6 Ibid.
7 Stirling, The Letterbag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer Stanhope, II, 95.
8 William Atkinson divided his estate equally between his two daughters, Ellen and Anne, leaving nothing to Thomas, perhaps because they had split or he had benefited him already.
9 Wilkinson 353, citing the Rev. Charles Spencer Stanhope’s unpublished memoir of Atkinson, now lost. Spencer Stanhope, tenth child, born 14 October 1795, Vicar of Weaverham, Cheshire, and for fifty-two years non-resident (in effect absentee) Vicar of Cawthorne. Married Frederica Goodenough 1840. Died 1874, aged seventy-nine. Stirling, op. cit., I, xviii, ix, xx.
10 Her death certificate states that Rebekah Atkinson died on 7 May 1872 aged seventy-seven, so she must have been born in 1795 and aged twenty-four on her marriage.
11 International Genealogical Index. Baptised 22 August 1792.
12 Stirling, op. cit., I, xxix.
13 Ibid., I xvii, xxix.
14 Dr Thomas Dimsdale, pioneer of smallpox inoculation, was given the title of Baron by Catherine the Great.
15 Stirling, op. cit., II, 19; I, xviii. It was an intelligent and well-educated family: even the daughters ‘having learnt French, German, Latin and Italian … are now at a loss to find something to know, and talk of learning Russian. They will be dyed blue-stocking up to their chins.’ Philip, a younger brother, became page of honour to both George III and IV and ultimately British Army general. Ibid., I, xxiv; II, 106.
16 Wilkinson, 353, quoting from Charles Spencer Stanhope’s unpublished memoir of Atkinson.
17 Proceeding alone from Cadiz, he was handed over to the Napoleonic authorities, spent eight weeks in a dungeon wrongly accused of a plot and expecting death at any time. Transferred to a fortress, he was given parole which suddenly became invalid, and after many hair’s-breadth escapes, he managed to reach Germany and finally return to Cannon Hall. But returning to France after Waterloo, he had to flee France a second time, just ahead of Napoleon’s return from Elba. Stirling, op. cit., I, 200, 217, 241, 278.
18 Wilkinson, 354.
19 Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1000–1840, 4th edn, 2008.
20 Records of Manchester.
21 DNB & Society of Antiquaries, 3 April: The Manchester Historical Recorder 136.
22 According to Records of Manchester only two drawings by him seem to have survived and those unauthenticated, but his attractive watercolour of Flint Castle is in the National Library of Wales.
23 Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society.
24 Ibid.
1 Pitcher, When Miss Emmie was in Russia, 9.
2 Born in Russia of an Italian noble family, the young Rikord had entered the Russian navy, serving for four years in the North Sea on patrols designed to aid Britain against Napoleon, 1794–7. He was authorised to stay in London to learn English, French and naval science; serving in the Royal Navy, he helped capture several Spanish ships and visited many foreign ports. Returning to Russia in 1805, he was promoted to captain, appointed governor of Kamchatka (1817–22), and admiral in 1843. A founder member of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, 1845.
3 Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science, London, 2013.
4 Thomas was to be in touch with Humboldt in 1856.
5 Warnes, Chronicle of the Russian Tsars, 168.
6 Lady Londonderry in Cross, St Petersburg, 160.
7 Andrew Buchanan (1807–1882), later Sir Andrew Buchanan, Bt, ambassador extraordinary to Russia in 1864. Resident at nearly every European court, first as attaché, afterwards as ambassador (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).
8 Nesselrode, who, surprisingly, spoke very little Russian, had become Russia’s foreign minister in 1816 in the reign of Nicholas’s elder brother, Alexander I, and remained in post for 30 years, right through the Napoleonic wars.
9 23 August.
10 Lev Alekseevich Perovsky, Minister of Internal Affairs (1841–52).
11 Austin was to make two tours of Siberia, the first partially with Thomas, when he crossed the Altai mountains to the Chinese border; on the second, with his wife, he visited several places of exile, again reaching the Chinese border, and then lived for some time in Irkutsk. He went on to survey new railway lines in Brazil, the Crimea and the Ottoman Empire, and in later years worked on several patents, including a new form of ship’s propeller. Source: Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers, which elected him a member in 1858.
12 Maria Markova: Fond No. 1689, op.1, 1847–9, files No. 4. 1848, 05, No. 5790, St Petersburg State Historical Archive.
13 See Catalogue raisonné.
14 Surely most unlikely.
15 Vine Street had been quite a well-to-do street for merchants, etc., but by the end of the 1830s, after the ‘Asiatic’ cholera epidemic, which actually began in Sunderland in 1831 and was to claim some 52,000 lives across the country, the street had badly deteriorated, with open dung-heaps, and was demolished in the late 19th century. John Lilburne (1614–1659), ‘Freeborn John’, Leveller and radical, once owned a mansion in Vine St, and it was also the home of Captain Joseph Wiggins (1830–1905), who pioneered a mercantile sea route from the North Sea to Western Siberia. Source: Sunderland Antiquarian Society & www.historyhome.co.uk.
16 Pitcher, xi.
17 The conspiracy culminated in December (hence the name) 1825 in a failed revolt in St Petersburg for political reform. Three Muravyov-Apostols (a different branch of the family) were also Decembrists, and a cousin, Sergei Muravyov-Apostol, had been hanged as one of the conspiracy’s five leaders.
18 Ulam, Russia’s Failed Revolutions, 120.
19 Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 19–20.
20 Mironenko, Dekabristy. Biograficheskii spravochnik.
21 Count Sergei Sheremetev, Graf Mikhail Mikhailovich Muraviov i ego doch [Count Mikhail Mikhailovich Muravyov and his daughter], St Petersburg, 8 April 1892. Sofia Mikhailovna Sheremeteva (née Muravyova, 1833–1880), married S.S. Sheremetev in 1856, and had 11 children. Her health was not good and she died at the age of 46. She is buried with her parents in a memorial chapel in the Alexandro-Nevskaya Lavra monastery. Her husband and a son lie outside.
22 He would have told her he was a widower, but we simply do not know what had happened to his first wife Rebekah meanwhile.
23 Robinson, Postmarks.
24 Collie & Diemer, eds, Murchison’s Wanderings in Russia, 46.
25 His journal also states 5 March, yet his subsequent book gives 6 March for his arrival at Ekaterinburg, 1707 versts to the east.
26 A portable barometer, adapted for safe transportation, used in measuring the heights of mountains. Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, C. & G. Merriam Co., 1913.
27 Teissier 29.
28 But, according to his first book, between 12 and 1 midday (page 11), so an odd discrepancy when he is always so concerned to record times of arrival and departure.
29 It was on this hill that stood the Ipatev house where the Romanov family and their servants and doctor were murdered in 1918. The house was pulled down by Boris Yeltsin, then regional head of the Communist party, on Moscow’s orders in 1977, and the Cathedral of the Blood now stands on the site, echoing the cathedral of the same name in St Petersburg where a bomb fatally wounded Alexander II.
30 Howe, The Soviet Union: A Geographical Study, 343.
31 The Northern Urals are higher than the Central or Southern Urals, but even then their highest point, Mount Narodnaya, at 1,895 m, is only 550 m higher than Ben Nevis (1,345 m). (Scottish visitors have likened the gently undulating southern chain to the Lammermuir Hills of southern Scotland.)
32 Humboldt predicted diamonds, because of the gold and platinum present in alluvial deposits, ‘and within a few days of his arrival [in 1829] the first diamond was discovered’. Collie & Diemer, eds, Murchison’s Wanderings in Russia, 23 note. While Princess Maria Volkonskaya was changing horses in Ekaterinburg on her way to join her Decembrist husband in Siberian exile, ‘local merchants tried unsuccessfully to draw the “rich princess’s” attention to amethysts, opals, chalcedonies, topazes, aquamarines, emeralds, and other varieties of rock crystal, all exhibited on the counters in huge mounds. Magnificent malachite doors like those in the Winter Palace, superb urns, vases, malachite tables and stools could be bought at incredibly low prices, a king’s ransom for some enterprising merchant. But what use would they be to Maria? She looked utterly indifferent and ordered the coachman to speed on.’ Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia, 142.
33 Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent, l37.
34 Ibid., 95.
35 RT/Russiapedia: Prominent Russians.
36 Janet M. Hartley, Siberia: A History of the People, Yale University Press, 2014.
37 Thomas Esper, ‘The Condition of the Serf Workers in Russia’s Mettallurgical Industry 1800–1861’ in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 50, no. 4, Dec. 1978, 583.
38 Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent, 96.
39 RT/Russiapedia, op cit.
40 In his time in the Urals Thomas amassed 72 varieties of these semi-precious stones and, though it must have been a problem to transport them, some at least were exhibited in London on his return.
41 The nuts of the large cones of the Siberian pine Pinus sibirica are still harvested today, often by banging on the tree-trunks. The tree can grow to both a great age (the oldest cross-dated age is 629 years in Mongolia) and great size (e.g. 48 m tall and 350 cm in circumference on the Altai’s Kedrovy Pass). Source: The Gymnosperm Database.
42 But there are no descriptive notes in his 1847 gazetteer-cum-journal, only dates without even naming the month. Could there have been a journal now lost? Without it he surely could not have remembered all the details in the first ten chapters of this, his first book. 37.
43 12 were presented to the Emperor and are now in the Hermitage collection.
44 Collie & Diemer, eds, op. cit., 238.
45 Quoted by Atkinson, 46, from Murchison, The Geology of the Oural, 125: an artist, furthermore, who could also use words well despite his inadequate education.
46 Source: The gymnosperm database. But Thomas seems to differentiate wrongly between these ‘magnificent pines’ and the Siberian ‘cedar’. The latter term is a common mistranslation of the Russian word kedr instead of ‘pine’ which he mistakenly calls Pinus cembra rather than Pinus cembra var. sibirica or simply Pinus sibirica.
47 Kachkanar still has very large deposits of (albeit low-grade) iron ore, increasingly relied on. Howe, op. cit., 350–51.
48 Kalesnik, Rossiiskaya Federatsiya: Ural, 1969.
49 Collie & Diemer, op. cit.
50 The Voguls, now known as Mansi, a local indigenous Finno-Ugric people.
51 A rare reference to his watercolours per se; normally it is either ‘pencil’ or ‘drawing’.
52 A School of Design had been founded 70 years before and had sent several students to Italy to study for some years with Italian artists in order to decorate the sheet-iron tables, boxes etc. previously made here.
53 Collie & Diemer, op.cit., 107. Anatoli turned to diplomacy and became Russian ambassador to Tuscany, where he acquired 42 hectares of marshy land and built the lavish Villa San Donato, from which he took a princely title. Besides doing much public good in Tuscany, he amassed a fine art collection, its highlights now in London’s Wallace Collection.
54 Collie & Diemer, op. cit., 234–5.
55 See Captain James Abbott’s tribute to Anosov in A Journey from Heraut to St Petersburg (1843) quoted by Atkinson, 120–21. Above Anosov’s grave in Omsk a plaque reads: ‘In this place was buried the great Russian metallurgist Anosov Pavel Petrovich, 1787–1851.’ Pamyatniki Sibiri. Zapadnaya Sibir i Krasnoyarskii Krai, Moscow, 1974, 191.
56 Then the centre of the gold region in the southern Urals.
57 Nerchinsk was the main prison of East Siberia, specifically for political prisoners/offences from 1826 to 1917. Wikipedia. Inmates were part of the katorga – or penal labour – system, primarily in the area’s extensive silver ore mines. The 19th century saw a total here of more than one million convicts.
58 Cochrane, Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey through Russia and Siberian Tartary, to the Frontiers of China to the Frozen Sea and Kamtchatka, 2 vols., London, 1824.
59 O & WS 167. The ‘Kirgiz Steppe’ still appears in some modern atlases although it is now a misnomer for the ‘Kazakh steppe’ of the huge Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan.
60 Date uncertain. September of 1847(?).
61 TWA j. 28 August 1847.
62 Ibid., 1 September 1847.
63 Ibid., 2 September 1847.
64 TWA j. Sunday 7/19 and Monday 8/20 September 1847.
65 Ibid., 20 September/2 October 1847.
66 Ibid., 20 September/2 October 1847.
67 Ibid., 21 September/3 October 1847.
68 Ibid., 22 September/4 October 1847.
69 Relatively shallow, but allegedly 65 million years old, formed in the late Cretaceous period and, if so, three times the age of Siberia’s Lake Baikal, usually reckoned by far the world’s oldest lake at some 25 million years old. The Irtysh flows through it and is its only outlet.
70 The notebooks varied slightly in size: the one for the next year was about 12 by 8 cm to fit a large pocket. He called it ‘Rough notes from my Journal 1848’, and divided each page in three equal parts with two horizontal ink lines, heading each page with the pre-written date of both the Gregorian and Julian calendars. But it was far more than ‘rough notes’: a succession instead of usually complete sentences and, far more often, paragraphs in fortunately now larger ink or pencil, written in a regular sloping hand with idiosyncratic spelling (retained here throughout) and punctuation (minimally edited for better understanding). Perhaps a journal was his original intention, but it became instead two long books.
1 The association of British merchants in Russia was known as the British Factory. Acknowledgements to Prof. Anthony Cross.
2 All Lucy’s dates are according to the Western calendar, twelve days ahead of the Russian Orthodox calendar.
3 Irakli Abramovich Baratinsky (1802–1859), brother of the poet Evgeny Baratinsky.
4 Princess Abamelek Anna Davydovna (1814–1889), princess by birth, translator of Pushkin (who dedicated a poem to her), Lermontov and other Russian poets into French.
5 In this, his second year of travels (1848), Thomas began to record events and observations in a series of small, now entirely blank notebooks (no longer a gazetteer), one per year. However, he inserted throughout in advance two horizontal lines in ink on each page, thus dividing them into three equal sections with the dates inserted atop each, now using either pen or pencil. But his system inevitably did not work, for not only are there many days left blank for one reason or another but he found there was not enough space for certain entries so had to continue them pages later, e.g. p. 68 is continued on the whole of pp. 125, 126, and half 127; and this is only one of several examples, though possibly the longest. Yet there are few pages blank at the end of this journal.
6 Interesting that they had enough money to pay Nikolai’s wages a year in advance (obviously keeping more in reserve). Despite a great deal of hospitality, due above all to the Tsar’s entrée, how they were able to pay all their expenses remains a puzzle, and there is no evidence that Thomas was a British spy. Lucy’s wages for the past eight years must have been a help at the very least, assuming she had spent little of her savings.
7 Major-General Vladimir Andreevich Glinka (1790–1862), a former fringe member of the Decembrist movement, head of the Urals’ mines (1837–56) and later senator.
8 His idea it was to build a factory in Ekaterinburg producing large-scale machinery such as steam engines and hydro-turbines.
9 Ivan Dmitrievich Yakushkin (1793–1857), one of the leading Decembrists. In 1816 he had founded a secret society, the ‘Union of Salvation’, together with two Muravyovs (Alexander and Nikita), two Muravyov-Apostols (Matvei and Sergei) and Prince Sergei Trubetskoi, who enters the story later.
10 This was Drosida Ivanovna Artenova (1817–1886), the widow of Wilhelm Karlovich Küchelbecher, Decembrist, well-known poet and great friend of Pushkin from their time at the Tsarskoye Selo Lycée. She was not a peasant, as Lucy thought, but a postmaster’s daughter.
11 He was one of three brothers who spent their childhood in Europe, where their father was variously ambassador, and were schooled in Paris. Interestingly, their parents kept the existence of serfdom in Russia secret from them until their very return to the motherland.
12 Pyotr Dmitrievich Gorchakov (1789–1868). Ten years older than Atkinson, Gorchakov was a tall, dignified and much-decorated professional soldier, ending as full general. Veteran of the 1812 Napoleonic War and other foreign campaigns of the Russian Army, he served in the Caucasus and Russo-Turkish and Crimean Wars. Governor-General of Western Siberia, 1836–51. His brother Mikhail served as Viceroy of Poland.
13 Now Kuibyshev of Novosibirsk region, not to be confused with the former Kuibyshev of Soviet times which has now reverted to its original name of Samara.
14 It is almost always to Lucy that we are indebted for such anecdotes. Thomas was much more interested in the actual travels and topography.
15 See Natalia Volkova, The English in Siberia. Adventures and anecdotes. Thomas Witlam Atkinson and Mrs Lucy Atkinson. Barnaul, 2012.
16 TWA j. 1848, 52.
17 John Bell, A Journey from St Petersburg to Pekin 1719–22, edited by J.L. Stevenson, Edinburgh, 1965.
18 So-called ‘Russian service’, as it is now known, i.e. each course served on large platters from which diners helped themselves.
19 Oddly, not included in his long list.
20 TWA j. 14 June.
21 TWA j. 15 June.
22 TWA j. 16 June.
23 TWA j. 17 June.
24 TWA j. 18 June.
25 TWA j. Monday 7/19 June. LA words identical to TWA journal.
26 Kalesnik, Zapadnaya Sibir, 330.
27 ‘Mistaken Foreign Myths about Shambhala’, Alexander Berzin, The Berzin Archives, 2003, online.
28 Due both to their terrain and location in a crossroads of civilisation, the Altaian people are predominantly rural even today and made up of five small ethnic identities with their own Turkic languages: Altaj-kiži and Telengit in the south (primarily livestock herders in high mountains and wide steppe) in one language group, and Kumandin, Tubalar and Chelkan (mostly hunter-gatherers in low mountains and dense forest) in a relatively small part of the north in another, dissimilar, language group. These last three languages have, sadly, now almost disappeared.
29 Or Kalmyks, a traditionally Buddhist Mongolian people who migrated in the 17th century from Dzhungaria, now living principally in Kalmykia, west of Kazakhstan.
30 Virginia le Page, Shambhala: The Fascinating Truth behind the Myth of Shangri-La. Quest Books, USA.
31 Mikhail P. Gryaznov, South Siberia. Ancient Civilizations series, London, 1969. Many of these famous treasures are now in St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum.
32 In his book Thomas gives the prices in pounds, shillings and pence: thus a pood of white flour cost 3s 4d, a pood of beef between 2s and 3s 2d, a pood of salmon 6s, a brace of grouse 6d, a hundred eggs 1s, and both raspberries and strawberries 8d for 2 gallons.
33 Having studied with a pupil of Linnaeus as well as with von Humboldt, at the age of 29 Semenov made an 18-month journey via the Altai to the virtually unknown Tyan Shan mountains on the Russian–Chinese border, collecting geographical and botanical specimens and recording both topography and meteorology. Beginning with one serf servant, only much later was he given a Cossack escort. See Colin Thomas, ed., Travels in the Tian Shan, 1856–1857 by Pyotr Petrovich Semenov, London 1998. Thereafter he organised many important scientific expeditions, compiled encyclopaedias and major statistical reports and for 40 years ran the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, of which he became Vice-President in 1873. In 1882 he became a senator and in 1897 a member of the State Council. Encyclopedia.com.
34 By the term ‘dinner’ Thomas and Lucy generally mean lunch, a meal Russians tend to eat in the afternoon; the Atkinsons hardly ever use the word ‘lunch’, if at all.
35 Standard at that time for all Russia.
36 The many apparently military ranks which the Atkinsons mention so often were usually not military at all but civilian, originating from Peter the Great’s 1722 table of ranks which developed in three main categories – military, civil and court – so that, for instance, mining engineers would wear uniform according to their rank (roughly ten) up to general with a ‘parade dress’ and ceremonial sword for higher ranks.
37 A portrait of one of Sokolovsky’s two sons, Alexander Lukich, has been attributed to Thomas Witlam Atkinson, although it was painted in oils, which Thomas is not known to have used otherwise. Alexander Lukich, a talented son, was to publish eight volumes of his Shakespeare translations.
38 The men would dig large holes 50 or 60 paces apart and usually 5 to 6 ft down to the gold-bearing bed of sand and gravel; the sand would be washed off; the officer would note the proportion of gold; and Sokolovsky, who had for long been compiling an exemplary geological map of the Altai, would decide in Barnaul which deposits would be economic to exploit.
39 ‘Altai’ means ‘Gold Mountain’ in Mongolian, and it was Altai gold, mined for millennia, from which the Scythians fashioned their magnificent (and rightly famous) gold artefacts. Altaian gold evidently reached the Greeks, and perhaps the superb pieces from the tomb of Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great’s father, now in Thessaloniki’s museum, came in their unwrought state from the Altai. In June 2015 geologists announced the discovery in the Anuy river valley north of the Altai mountains of a huge gold deposit weighing just over 22 tons and worth up to $850 million. The Siberian Times, 2 June 2015.
40 Author’s calculation.
41 TWA j. Tuesday 8/20 June.
42 TWA j. Wednesday 9/21 June.
43 TWA j. Thursday 10/22 June.
44 TWA j. Friday 11/23 June.
45 TWA j. Saturday 12/24 June.
46 Author’s estimate.
47 TWA j. Sunday 13/25 June.
48 TWA j. Tuesday 15/27 June, 57.
49 TWA j. Wednesday 16/28 June.
50 TWA j. Thursday 17/29 June.
51 TWA j. bottom 64.
52 TWA j. Friday 9/21 July.
53 Nuts of the Siberian pine (Pinus sibirica), still mistakenly called cedar or kedr.
54 TWA j. 11/23 July; LA.
55 TWA j. Monday 12/24 July.
56 The nomadic – and shamanistic – Kalmyks, now known as Altaians, whom the Atkinsons were about to encounter, were (and still are) one of Siberia’s smaller Turkic minorities. Population in the 2010 census was below 75,000. Jacquemoud 26. Mongoloid in appearance, their dress and language at the Atkinsons’ time still owed much to the invasion six centuries earlier by Genghis Khan’s horde, led by his son.
57 TWA j. 25 July.
58 LA; TWA j. 26 July.
59 TWA j. 26 July.
60 Thomas’s near-obsession with recording in his journal and later in his books the distances they were travelling was perhaps to impress both himself and his readers. TWA j. Tuesday 13/25 July.
61 LA; TWA j. Thursday 15/27.
62 LA; TWA j. continued from 66 Thursday 15 July.
63 TWA j. 28 July.
64 TWA j. 16/28 July.
65 TWA j. 28 July.
66 TWA j. 29 July.
67 His underlining. The Natural History Museum (Plants Division) think he must be referring to Matteuccia struthiopteris, ostrich fern or ostrich feather fern, common in the Altai, where it grows in swathes up to c. 1 m tall.
68 TWA j. Sat 17/29 July. Lucy uses the same words.
69 They set off early, says Lucy; Thomas says at 10 o’clock. A slight discrepancy.
70 Lucy mentions Byron; she has already referred to Orpheus. Her education, particularly with her father a teacher, must have been much better than Thomas’s, and her years as a governess must have greatly helped too.
71 TWA j. Monday 19/31 July. If Lucy wins with her anecdotes, Thomas wins with his descriptions.
72 TWA j. 20 July/1 August.
73 ‘When the wind comes down from the Mountains’, Thomas noted, ‘the waves rise to a great hight and make a tremendous noise as they lash the Rocks It is very dangerous for any boat on the lake even in a moderate wind but in a squall no boat could live. Our Kalmucks were uncommonly attentive to certain signs in the Sky and mountains erer [ere] they would put off into this broad basin. I thought them cowards at first but I soon found they understood very well the difficulties and dangers to be encountred’. TWA j. Tuesday 20 July/1 August 1848.
74 Thomas depicted the exotic scene in a large watercolour now in the Royal Geographical Society, London.
75 Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia, 184.
76 Forsyth, op.cit., 184.
77 Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya, Moscow, 2002.
78 Kalesnik, Kazakhstan, 361.
79 Shamanism: the animist religion still practised by many of Siberia’s indigenous peoples today where the shaman or tribal priest is believed to enter a powerful spirit world by achieving a different layer of consciousness, usually by means of a ritual drum. Every place, every inanimate object is believed to have its own individual spirit. Many Altaians still believe in spirits who live in upper, middle and lower worlds. Jacquemoud 65–69.
80 It was the valuable furs, particularly sable, of the immense Siberian taiga which had propelled Russia’s conquest of Siberia. See Hartley, Siberia: A History of the People, 2014.
81 2s 9d and 3s 8d a month.
82 Blanchard, Russia’s Age of Silver, 98. The monumental 18th-century tomb of St Alexander Nevsky (1211–1263) now in the Hermitage was made of one and a half tons of pure Altai silver. Petersburg city.com.
83 Blanchard, op. cit.
84 Semenov, note 30.
85 TWA j. Tuesday 31 July/12 August.
86 Semenov, 31.
87 Semenov, 46.
88 Now in north-eastern Kazakhstan and renamed Semey to avoid association with the Semipalatinsk Test Site of atomic bombs for 40 years (1949–89).
89 Dostoevsky, Notes from the House of the Dead, 1861–2, 1.
90 The Tatars or Tartars: a Turkic (and Muslim) people with their own language living in both Europe (e.g. Crimean Tatars) and Asia in five major groups, the largest being the 6 million or so Volga Tatars of Tatarstan – the Atkinsons came through its capital of Kazan – and Bashkortostan (formerly Bashkiria). The 500,000 Siberian Tatars (2002 census) live in a west–east strip including the Altai. Lucy was to call her book Recollections of Tartar Steppes and Their Inhabitants, using the wider Russian connotation of the time, namely that anyone with oriental features in the Empire was loosely called Tatar.
1 Atlas SSSR, Moscow, 1983.
2 Wheeler, The Modern History of Soviet Central Asia, 7.
3 Ibid., 11.
4 The word ‘horde’, originally from the Turki ‘ordī’ or ‘ordū’, meaning ‘camp’, signified the civil and military structure of nomadic steppe peoples – highly organised in Genghis Khan’s time, not at all the disorganised rabble we understand today. Aziatskaya Rossiya (‘Asiatic Russia’), cited by Wheeler, op. cit., 12, 238 etc.
5 Olcott, 57.
6 R.A. Brown, French article, 51. Cited by Wheeler, op. cit., 237, 239.
7 Ibid., 237.
8 Olcott, 65–6.
9 Aziatskaya Rossiya, cited by Wheeler, op. cit., 53.
10 TWA j. 5 September 1848.
11 Teissier, ed., Into the Kazakh Steppe, 2014, p.10.
12 Ian R. Christie, The Benthams in Russia 1780–1791, Oxford/Providence 1993.
13 Even eight years later travellers – and the Atkinsons may well have been the very first apart from the Cossacks, troops, merchants and settlers – could not take this route south without an escort of two to five Cossacks. Semenov 46.
14 TWA j. 59 & LA 86 almost identical wording.
15 TWA j. 133.
16 Ibid., 84.
17 Ibid., 134 – continued from 84.
18 See lithograph, TWA, O & WS, 279.
19 TWA j. 7 September 1848.
20 TWA j. 85, 8/20 September 1848.
21 TWA j. & LA 87 identical.
22 TWA, U & LA 33–34. He would hardly have included this in his first book, dedicated to Alexander II.
23 Atlas SSSR & Semenov, 51, footnote: 288 km.
24 TWA j.
25 Schreiber, 85.
26 TWA j. 136 continued from p. 85, 10 September.
27 TWA j. 138.
28 TWA j. Saturday 11/23 September 1848.
29 TWA j. 11 September.
30 TWA j. 12 September.
31 TWA j., 129 continued from 86.
32 TWA j. 130, 13 September, & LA 100, identical phrase.
33 Ibid.
34 TWA j. 13 September.
35 TWA j. 131, 13 September.
36 Ibid., 13 September.
37 Ibid.
38 TWA j. 14 September.
39 Olcott, 278.
40 TWA j. 14 September.
41 Ibid
42 LA. 103, TWA 141, 15 September, almost identical.
43 TWA j. 15 September, LA phrase 103 identical.
44 TWA j. 141, 15 September.
45 Ibid., 15 September.
46 Ibid.
47 Semenov, 53.
48 TWA j. 16 September.
49 Ibid.
50 LA105, ‘13 days, 2 of which lost by our staying on the way’ at Ayaguz. Arrival Kopal 20 September, no departure date given for Ayaguz. TWA j. indicates 11 days’ journey: left Ayaguz 9 September, no arrival date given for Kopal. TWA 114, U & LA 154.
51 Baron Alexander Ludvigovich Wrangel came of a well-known Baltic German family which produced the Arctic explorer (after whom Wrangel Island is called) and the White general of the Civil War. He graduated from St Petersburg’s élite Corps de Pages, joined the army in 1838, and, still a young man, was appointed major in December 1847 and then, from the following January, as the first pristav or superintendent of the Great Horde, commandant of the Kopal area and adjutant to Gorchakov. Discharged in 1850 because of illness, he went on to several further postings.
52 ‘Alatau’ in Thomas’s journals is always spelt ‘Alatou’, the Kazakh as opposed to the Russian transcription, but ‘Alatau’ became the permanent version after their return to England. Source: Sergei Proskurin.
1 Less than a hundred years earlier, the Atkinsons’ compatriot, Dr Thomas Dimsdale, an early proponent of vaccination, had successfully vaccinated Catherine the Great and her heir, the 14-year-old Grand Duke Paul, which set an example to Russia and indeed to Western Europe. See Prologue.
2 Diplomatically, Thomas avoids saying that one of them was Gorchakov, Governor-General of Western Siberia, to whom he and Lucy were indebted for authorisation to visit the Kazakh steppe.
3 Atkinson archive, Hawaii. Dahlquist Coll.: TWA correspondence, 19 November 1848.
4 He was to set it himself: ‘rough surgery but it succeeded’.
5 TWA 1849 journal: Intriguingly, inside the front cover, written almost entirely in a very small pencil hand (other than a list of his sketches at the end, partially in pen), is a loose, handwritten slip of paper which reads: ‘Captain Jack R.N. [Royal Navy] commanding Her Majesty’s Ship Thunder. 101 Guns’ (there was no such ship; maybe HMS Thunderer). Was this captain of the Royal Navy someone whom the Atkinsons met somewhere in Russia? We simply do not know, and there seems to be no connection with Russia, or indeed the Crimean War.
6 Levshin 249, 268, 302–3.
1 Named after the Dzhungars, a West Mongolian tribe that conquered the Kazakhs in the 18th century. ‘Dzhungaria’ today denotes roughly the northern half of China’s north-westernmost province of Xinjiang.
2 According to the latest data. This is the summit (188-odd m short of Mont Blanc) of Semenov-Tienshansky (called after the great 19th-century explorer and geographer) straddling the Kazakh-Chinese border.
3 Kalesnik, Kazakhstan, 100.
4 TWA j. 6 May 1849.
5 Semenov, 149.
6 TWA j. 6 May 1849.
7 Schreiber, 252–3.
8 TWA j. 5 May 1849 and LA 127.
9 TWA j. for 17 July and 16 December 1848, 6 May 1849.
10 Despite Lucy’s words, is there some artist’s licence here? The travellers give only one measurement in this mountain sequence of less than 1,000 feet.
11 TWA j. 12 May 1849.
12 Geoff Welch, RSPB International Management Plans Adviser, suggests that this may be a female or immature Pine Grosbeak Pinicola enucleator and the second probably a white-tailed Rubythroat Luscinia pectoralis.
13 TWA j. 13 May 1849. (Both Thomas’s journal and Lucy’s published words are almost identical here.)
14 TWA j. 13 May 1849.
15 Koumiss, fermented mares’ milk, an obvious drink for nomads.
16 TWA j. 14 May 1849.
17 The Caspian or Turanian tiger, Panthera tigris virgata, now extinct, was historically found across the huge area between the west of the Caspian and Xinjiang. The last one in Kazakhstan was reputedly killed in 1948.
18 TWA j. 15 May 1849.
19 Ibid.
20 ‘The valley head is 3,000 m high and surrounded by glacier-covered peaks.’
21 TWA j. 16 May 1849.
22 It does not appear among the illustrations in either of his books.
23 TWA j. 17 May 1849.
24 TWA j. 19 May 1849. Successive waves of nomadic peoples in the area gave way to settled agriculturists and towns in the 11th to 12th centuries, only for the Mongols to bring a violent halt to development.
25 Schreiber 49, 122, 127.
26 Ibid.
27 TWA j. 22 May 1849.
28 TWA j. 23 May 1849.
29 Lucy’s book was written as a series of letters to a friend.
30 TWA j. 8 June 1849.
31 Schreiber, 287.
32 Subspecies of the Caspian red deer Cervus elaphus maral. Strictly speaking, the maral of this area is known as the Tien Shan maral or wapiti, Cervus canadensis songaricu, one of the largest species of deer in the world with massive antlers prized for their medicinal properties when ‘in velvet’, so farmed in the Altai and China. The world-wide population of around 50,000 is declining fast.
33 This must be Ovis ammon poli or Marco Polo sheep, named after the great traveller and found in the mountains of Central Asia. A subspecies of argali, this largest of all sheep can weigh more than 135kg, and also has the longest (spiral) horns, up to 190 cm in length (National Geographic News, 7 March 2006).
34 Schreiber, 264.
35 Lucy may have meant the temperature of the ground surface or their thermometer may have been faulty, as the earth’s record temperature is 58°C (136°F) in the Libyan desert, although there are reports of even higher temperatures. (Wikipedia.)
36 Thus called as it was thought to be cured by the touch of a king. This was scrofula, tuberculosis of the lymphatic glands, especially in the neck. Particularly common in children, it is usually spread by unpasteurised milk.
37 Nearly 2,500 sq. km compared to 18,000. Kalesnik, Kazakhstan, 52.
38 Red silk, on the other hand, would denote a sultan; not necessarily in mourning, but to appropriate a spot as a camping ground.
39 See also the systematic Levshin, 1832 (in Russian).
40 See Carruthers, 1914.
41 The Uyghurs or Uighurs, one of the oldest Turkic-speaking peoples of Central Asia, today live mostly in the Uyghur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, a total of 10 million in China altogether, and another 300,000 in the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
42 Perhaps the kaldi as chief officer was allowed his wife.
43 This is, in fact, the birthplace of the apple: its history starts here. It was proved in 2010 by genome sequencing that the 2,000 or so varieties of the domestic apple Malus domesticus descend from Malus sieverskii, which still grows on the slopes of the Tien Shan in Kazakhstan and China – the last surviving wild apple trees in the world. In Kazakhstan nearly three-quarters of them have gone in the last 30 years (particularly because of housing developments), and it is on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of threatened species. Once Kazakhstan’s wild apple forests stretched into Almaty (the former capital, whose earlier name was Alma Ata, meaning ‘father of apples’); ten years ago only 20% survived. Sensibly, China has applied to have its wild apple forests designated as a World Heritage Site. And, because the domestic apple is beset by disease and pests and the DNA pool is shrinking, the survival of the apple’s true ancestor is important.
44 Schreiber, 406.
45 No. 4328 (31.12.1849). Very different from the later Soviet era when so many parts of the largest country in the world were forbidden to foreigners. Perhaps the Atkinsons’ Cossack escorts were there as guides, guardians, interpreters and official eyes.
1 Thomas records the ‘Articles left with colonel Sokolofsky June 1850:
box with picture etc etc etc
Long leather Box
Large Iron case with paper
Gun Box
Large green Box
Long wood Box
Kirgis saddle’.
2 TWA j. 12 June 1850.
3 LA letter of 23 January 1862. She means St Petersburg’s St Peter and St Paul Fortress and its prison, which held notable/political prisoners.
4 Lenin and his wife Krupskaya were exiled to Shushenskoye from 1897 to 1900.
5 The second largest river system after the Ob-Irtysh flowing into the Arctic Ocean: including its main tributary, the Angara, the Yenisei is more than 5,000 km long and has the greatest flow – 630 cubic km per annum compared to 370–400 for the Ob, 358 for the Amur (and only 90 for the Rhine).
6 Eight Decembrists were deported here, and in Stalin’s time it became an important Gulag centre. The Trans-Siberian Railway (1895) was a major step in its development, and World War II saw the evacuation of dozens of factories from Western Russia and Ukraine. Today its population has grown to just over a million. (Wikipedia.)
7 TWA j. 4/16 August 1850.
8 www.krasplace.ru/zolotopromyshlennost-enisejskoj-gubernii (‘Gold-mining industry of Yenisei gubernia), 2015.
9 TWA j. 10/22 August 1850.
10 He helped one of the exiled Decembrists to copy and distribute his political pamphlets. T.A. Pertseva, Irkutsk v panorame vekov: ocherki istorii goroda. Irkutsk, 2003.
11 Most likely on the Bolshaya Peskina river, near modern Yuzhno-Yeniseisk.
12 TWA j. 23–24 August 1850.
13 TWA j. 13–14/25–26 August 1850.
14 TWA j. 30 August/11 September 1850.
15 Now used for the university library’s special collection.
16 TWA j. 22 September/4 October 1850.
17 TWA. d. 26 September/8 October 1850.
18 An engineer officer, LA 280.
19 TWA j. 29 September/11 October 1850. This may well be the framed and glazed picture of Altin-Kul which they left with Mr Basnin, the Mayor, while they were away that summer. TWA j. 1851, flyleaf verso: ‘A list of our Effects left in Irkoutsk 23 May/4 June with Mr Basnin the Mayor’.
20 TWA j. Saturday 30 September/12 October 1850.
21 See Christine Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia, 282.
22 LA 240. The British traveller S.S. Hill, who got to Kamchatka, wrote his own account in two volumes, which Lucy narrates with amusement: Travels in Siberia, London 1854.
23 Great-granddaughter of Lomonosov, the great Russian scientist. ‘Beautiful, highly cultivated, daughter of a famous general Rayevsky who was a hero of the Napoleonic Wars, she had been married for only a year to the fabulously rich Prince Sergei Volkonsky, scion of a great family.’ Sutherland, 5.
24 Sutherland, 108.
25 Bobrick, 293, quoting Maria Volkonskaya’s words.
26 Bobrick, 292.
27 About 10 km from the Chinese border.
28 LA 243. Unfortunately, probably now lost.
29 In August 1846.
30 TWA j. 4 June 1851, LA IX. In Lucy’s book she mistakenly gives 23 May as the date they ‘Left Irkoutsk for the mountains’, having copied the date of the Russian calendar from Thomas’s journal.
31 TWA j. 10 June 1851.
32 Buryat Mongols, the largest indigenous people of Siberia: Mongol, Lamaist, and reputedly descended from Genghis Khan, with both winter and summer dwellings – unlike the Kazakhs with their portable yurts – and herds of horses and cattle but few sheep. TWA j. 9 June 1851, LA 263.
33 TWA j. 11 June 1851.
34 O & WS facing p. 593.
35 O & WS, 592–3.
36 V.P. Solonenko, I.A. Kobyalitsky, Vostochnye Sayany (‘East Sayan Mountains’), 1947.
37 TWA j. 2 July 1851.
38 TWA j. 30 June 1851.
39 Despite the inaccessibility, Alibert’s mine ran very profitably for fifteen years, blessed by the fact that the famous Borrowdale mine in the English Lake District, hitherto the world’s only source of good-quality graphite, was becoming exhausted. His graphite was transported first by reindeer, then down the Amur river to Russia’s eastern coast and on through the Pacific and Atlantic finally to Hamburg, when ‘the Siberian pencils’ would be encased in fine wood from Florida and distributed worldwide; they were marketed in Switzerland later as ‘Caran d’Ache’, a pun on the Russian word for pencil, karandash (www.fabercastell.com).
40 It was here in the Sayan region, some believe, that the reindeer was first domesticated at the beginning of the first millennium AD by the local Samoyedic population. (Wikipedia.)
41 Now the village of Sayany.
42 O & WS 582. It is intriguing that Thomas for the otherwise blank entry in his journal for Tuesday 15 July 1851 writes ‘St Swithin’ (underlined), which according to English folklore denotes rain or its absence for the next forty days, his only apparent reference to English customs.
43 Alexei V. Ivanov et al., ‘Jom-Bolok Holocene volcanic field…’ in Bulletin of Vulcanology, November 2011, Vol. 73, 9, 1279–94.
44 TWA j. 17 July 1851.
45 TWA j. 19 July 1851.
46 TWA j. 20 July 1851.
47 TWA j. 20 July 1851.
48 TWA j. 21 July 1851.
49 TWA j. 13 August 1851.
50 Between 20 and 25 million years old and over 1½ km deep, with below that an astounding 7 km of sediment: John Massey Stewart, ‘Baikal’s hidden depths’, New Scientist, 1990, No. 1722. The locals call it a sea while the Buryats call it a ‘Holy Sea’. But see also Chapter 1 note 70.
51 TWA j. 17 August 1851. Thomas’s finished watercolour survives of a possibly fanciful arch on Baikal’s shoreline cliffs. It includes a small representation of Lucy in her distinctive hat. They both agreed that the Altai’s Altin-Kul, now Lake Teletskoye (where he had depicted her as an even smaller figure in a canoe), surpassed anything at Baikal.
52 This seems to be one of a very few discrepancies between Thomas’s journal and his two books: according to his journal he spent 19 days on the lake. TWA j. 13–31 August 1851.
53 U & LA 381. But no longer; both the rock and the rapids have gone since the lake’s level has risen, due to a major dam and power station at Irkutsk.
54 Baikal is famous today inter alia not only for its depth and age, but for its volume (one-fifth of the planet’s unfrozen fresh water thanks to the combination of depth and surface area), its huge number of endemic species including its freshwater seals and its remarkable transparency.
55 TWA j. 18–19 August 1851.
56 TWA j. 19 August 1851.
57 TWA j. 20 August 1851.
58 TWA j. 20 August 1851.
59 TWA j. 23 August 1851.
60 TWA j. 24 August 1851.
61 TWA j. 30 August 1851.
62 TWA j. 30 August 1851. An unfair judgement, as he visited only a quarter of the lake and really only the west side.
63 His ‘catalogue of Sketches made in 1851’ dates from 28 May (‘a view of a Bouriat Temple on the summit of the white Mountain near the River Ikeougoune’) to 29 September (‘A view of a Monastery where Basil Mouravioff lies Buried’), a total of 54, all dated. Then he adds, confusingly, ‘Sketches made on a journey to the Bielouka in 1852 – seemingly only two – both views on the Kara-goll’. There follows an intriguing (but undated) list of their expenses in the Baikal area. (Lucy was still paymaster, as we have seen.) They range from 10 kopeks for yamshchiks, 20 kopeks for ‘Post horses’ and 25 kopeks for lodgings at Goloustnoye, various payments to Cossacks and Buryats, and 2 roubles for ‘Alatau doctoress of the Gold priesk’ to 20 roubles ‘stolen from our carriage’ – a sizeable theft – and, most expensive of all, 21 roubles for Alatau’s reindeer ‘including saddles’. Nothing is said about reselling the reindeer. The total was 231 roubles. One is again puzzled as to the source of their money – could it have been Lucy’s accumulated wages over the years as governess?
64 LA 285. Christmas pudding was served (as well as caviar) at the concluding dinner of the British–Soviet Siberian week in Novosibirsk in 1978.
65 LA 287. An amnesty came only four years later in August 1856, when Alexander II succeeded Nicholas and restored the Decembrists’ rights, titles and privileges.
66 Rheum palmatum or Chinese rhubarb, a remedy for many health problems, particularly constipation.
67 At this point in the 1851 journal there appear to be two sets of entries for August – one in normal date order, another inserted just before the May sequence.
68 Lincoln, Conquest of a Continent:, 193–6.
1 TWA j. Monday 30 August 1852.
2 Ibid. Monday 3 September 1852.
3 F. Maier, Trekking in Russia and Central Asia: A Traveler’s Guide, Seattle, 1994. Belukha was finally conquered only in 1914 by the Russian brothers R.V. and M.B. Titanov and is now part of a World Heritage site, the Golden Mountains of Altai.
4 A Turkic people on both sides of the southern Urals with their own republic of Bashkortostan within the Russian Federation; capital: Ufa.
5 Certificate of Baptism, Guildhall, London. John Lumley Savile (1818–96), diplomat, created Baron Savile 1888. History of Parliament online.org.
6 Paul Dahlquist Coll., Hawaii.
7 19 January 1854.
8 Rebecca McCoy, London 1855, quoted by Anthony Cross in St Petersburg and the British, 2008. ‘Many British employed by Russian companies lost their jobs but some stayed and became Russian citizens.’ Roderick Heather, An Accidental Relationship, London, 2008. The Crimean War ended 30 March 1856.
9 Preface to the correspondence of Iu. Samarin and Baroness von Rahden (1861–76). Iurii Fedorovich Samarin, 1893. First Russian edition.
10 Commissioned by Catherine II for her son, later Tsar Paul.
11 Miss Euler to TWA, 22 May/3 June 1855. Dahlquist Coll.
12 During the Crimean War she helped with the training of combat nurses and in the later Russo-Turkish War ‘medical trains’, as well as recruiting many society ladies to help the Red Cross. After the Grand Duchess’s death she became lady-in waiting to the Empresses successively of Alexander II and III.
13 TWA to Baroness von Rahden, 28 April 1855.
14 Baroness von Rahden to TWA, 19 January 1855 (?).
15 Vladimir Fedorovich Adlerberg (1791–1884). Ed. Euler to TWA, 26 January (1855).
16 Adlerberg to Atkinson, 9/21 February 1855.
17 Atkinson to Adlerberg, 10/22 February 1855, and Adlerberg to Atkinson, 14/26 February 1855. Russian State Archive, fond 472, ref. 108/945.
18 Lord Bloomfield in Berlin to TWA, 6 July 1855.
19 ‘Chinese Tartary’, roughly the eastern part of Central Asia, then inhabited by many tribes of nomadic Tatars. In his first book Thomas wrote separate chapters on the ‘Kirghis [i.e. Kazakh] Steppe’ and ‘Chinese Tartary’, of which the former was part, so to differentiate is misleading.
20 He would probably have been unaware that many of the thousand and more watercolours prepared by John Soane’s pupils between 1806 and 1820 to illustrate his lectures at the Royal Academy were up to 3 or 4 ft long. David Watkins entry on Soane, ODNB, now preserved in the Soane Museum.
21 TWA to Elena Pavlovna, 21 February 1856.
22 1 March 1856.
23 Baroness von Rahden to TWA, 10/22 June 1856.
24 Bodleian Library, Oxford.
25 Not exactly true, as regards visits anyway. Thomas was not to know of the journeys of Carpini and William of Rubruck in the 13th century, although neither visited Siberia, or Ides and Spafary in the 17th, or John Bell in the 18th century, who all did. And Lucy mentions in her book John Dundas Cochrane, the 19th-century ‘pedestrian traveller’ across Siberia a little before the Atkinsons.
26 TWA to Alexander II, 26 April 1856.
27 Fedorchenko, 2004, 457–8.
28 Up to 3 archines by 2, approx. 150 x 200 cm = 1.5 x 2 m.
29 TWA to Count Tolstoy, 15 June. No year stated.
30 TWA to Baroness von Rahden, no date. About 10 August 1856.
31 Dahlquist Coll.: March, no date.
32 Wikipedia.
33 Dahlquist Coll. Letter from E. Liprandis, Sunday 8 April.
34 Autobiography, Vol. I, p. 464. Cornell email 4.06.2010: Cornell University.
35 Bodleian Library, Oxford.
1 Galton, Memories of My Life.
2 Data from The London Encyclopedia, ed. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert.
3 Lord Palmerston to TWA, 8 October 1856.
4 Spencer to TWA, 25/26 October (1856). Atkinson’s journals are now in the Royal Geographical Society archives, kindly presented by Paul Dahlquist. Sir Spencer Cecil Brabazon Ponsonby-Fane (1824–1915), Private Secretary to Lord Clarendon 1853–57.
5 Alexander Theodor von Middendorff (1815–1894): Russian (of German-Estonian descent), zoologist and explorer of Siberia, Central Asia and the Far East.
6 Dahlquist Coll.: R. Murchison to TWA, 29 October 1856.
7 Unfortunately, Colnaghi’s records were destroyed in World War II.
8 Reisen in den Steppen und Hochgebirgen Sibiriens, comp. A. von Etzel and G. Vagner from the works of Atkinson, Middendorff, Radde, etc. Gustav Radde (1831–1903): a German naturalist and explorer who, inter alia, participated in the East Siberian expedition of 1855–59 and was awarded prestigious medals by the Geographical Societies of both Britain and Russia.
9 See The English in Siberia. Adventures and Anecdotes: Thomas Witlam Atkinson and Mrs Lucy Atkinson, trans. into Russian from English by N.S. Volkova, Barnaul, 2012.
10 The Times, 8 January 1858, 5.
11 The Art-Journal, 1858, 30.
12 The Athenaeum, 28 November 1857, 1477–9.
13 The Saturday Review, 13 February 1858, 167–8. See also Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 13 December 1857.
14 New York Daily Tribune, 4 June 1858, 3.
15 Richard Milner, Senior Editor, Natural History Magazine, American Museum of Natural History, letter in The Linnean, 2000, Vol. 16, 12–13.
16 A Tarantasse Journey through Eastern Russia in the Autumn of 1856, London, 1857. Spottiswoode was to be buried in Westminster Abbey.
17 Dahlquist Coll.: W. Spottiswoode to TWA, 14 January 1857.
18 A.N. Wilson, Tolstoy, 861.
19 Dahlquist Coll.: Charles Dickens to TWA, 8 September 1857. According to the Atkinsons’ descendants there was another letter from Dickens, now lost.
20 28 March, no year. Dahlquist Coll.
21 Dahlquist Coll.: J.D. Harding to TWA, 1 December 1857.
22 RGS archives.
23 Dahlquist Coll.: Charles George Barrington (1827–1911) to TWA, 5 December 1857.
24 Later Sir Thomas Villiers Lister (1832–1902).
25 Dahlquist Coll.: T.V. Lister to TWA, 12 December 1857.
26 Dahlquist Coll.: Col. C.B. Phipps to TWA, 18 December 1857.
27 Dahlquist Coll.: J. Arrowsmith to TWA, 14 December 1857.
28 Dahlquist Coll.: T.V. Lister to TWA, 11 January 1858.
29 ‘The selection of desired heritable characteristics in order to improve future generations…’ With acknowledgements to britannica.com.
30 Francis Galton to TWA, 13 November 1858.
31 14 May 1858.
32 TWA to Kingsley, 19 May 1858.
33 2 August 1858.
34 3 September, J.H. Gurney.
35 21 September 1858.
36 TWA, 9 October 1858.
37 TWA to P. O’Callaghan, 10 January 1859. NB from Old Brompton.
38 Later merged with the Royal Anthropological Institute.
39 W. Spottiswoode to TWA, 7 December 1858.
40 Henry Blackett to TWA, 10 January 1859.
41 Spencer Ponsonby to TWA, 4 February 1857 (sic, 1859?).
42 W. Ewart to TWA, 10 February (1859) and ‘Miss Ewart & her sister’ to TWA, no date.
43 B. Rose to TWA, 11 February 1859.
44 21 March 1860.
45 31 March, no year.
46 John Bull & Britannia, 21 May 1859.
47 28 March 1859.
48 All these letters were addressed to T.W. Atkinson Esq., ‘esquire’ being the customary appellation for a gentleman, which Thomas had now become.
49 His hair turned white during a night off the east coast of Africa when he thought his ship would be lost. Note appended by Alatau in 1905.
50 Not the young naval officer referred to on page 231.
51 1 January 1860.
52 Royal Institute of British Architects.
53 13 August 1859.
54 25 August.
55 8 (or 4?) February 1860.
56 16 February.
57 5 September.
58 William Drogo Montagu, 7th Duke of Manchester.
59 13 August 1860.
60 14 May.
61 Dolgoruky to TWA, 18 August. Dahlquist Coll.: note from Dolgoruky’s secretary (?), 14 May 1860.
62 May 1860.
63 20 April 1860?
64 8 May 1860.
65 Showing the interest at the time, three other books on the Amur appeared in 1860–61, notably the geographer-cartographer E.G. Ravenstein’s detailed The Russians on the Amur.
66 U & LA, vii.
67 U & LA. But Atkinson had already visited, on Murchison’s behalf, Middendorff, who had reached the lower Amur valley from the eastern seaboard by 1845 (Wikipedia). The Irish H.A. Tilley reached Nikolayevsk near the mouth of the river on a Russian ship in 1859 (see his Japan, the Amoor and the Pacific, 1861). But, above all, there was Maack’s expedition: see Chapter 9.
68 U & LA.
69 The Athenaeum, 28 July 1860, 117–19. Other reviews appeared in, for instance, The Art-Journal, 1860, 346–7; The Quarterly Review, 7 January 1861, Vol. 110, Issue 219, 179; the London Review, 1 January 1861, Vol. 15, Issue 30, 439; and Obshchestvennye Zapiski of Irkutsk, August 1860, 39–44.
70 26 July 1860.
71 1 August 1860.
72 4 August.
73 8 August.
74 Blackett, 25 September 1860.
75 17 September.
76 Rev. Charles Spencer Stanhope to TWA, 19 September.
77 Rev. Charles Tiplady Pratt, History of Cawthorne, 1882, 104.
78 1 November, Wilkinson, Barnsley Worthies.
79 Annals of a Yorkshire House, From the Papers of a Macaroni and his Kindred, 1911.
80 Sold to a special preservation trust for £7 million in 2017.
81 (Wikipedia), 13 November 1860.
82 Lucy Atkinson to Rev. C.S. Stanhope, 6 May 1861 via Wilkinson, Barnsley Worthies.
83 Acknowledgements to Marianne Simpson and Nick Fielding’s blog ‘Siberian Steppes’.
84 Lucy Atkinson to Rev. C.S. Stanhope, 6 May 1861 via Joseph Wilkinson, Worthies, Families, & Celebrities of Barnsley & District.
1 Old St Mary’s, Walmer, which the Duke of Wellington had attended for over 23 years when he had been Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, staying in Walmer Castle, his official residence.
2 Architectural journal from 1843.
3 Hayles, 2015.
4 Charles Darwin’s wealthy half-cousin, polymath, explorer (RGS gold medallist), and ‘father of eugenics’, with a reputed IQ of 200, who died as late as 1911.
5 Galton, 177.
6 The Principal Registry of Her Majesty’s Court of Probate, 31 October 1861.
7 Bank of England Inflation Calendar.
8 Hoe, 2014. A few biographical dictionaries have mistakenly claimed Emma Willsher Atkinson, writer, as a daughter.
9 Leeds Mercury, 14 September 1861.
10 Acknowledgements to Hammersmith Local Studies.
11 Richard Monckton Milnes, charming, eccentric, brilliant conversationalist, Yorkshire poet and MP whose forebears won the monopoly of the North England cloth trade with Russia and used Russian timber for their houses. Stirling, Letter bag, 194. He and Florence Nightingale had a seven-year courtship which she ended.
12 Lucy Atkinson to Richard Monckton Milnes, 11 November 1861. Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge.
13 The case was certainly not unique. After the satirist and illustrator of Dickens George Cruikshank died in 1878, for instance, a younger woman and ten children were found a few streets away, unknown to his second wife.
14 Anthony Cross, Introduction to Recollections of Tartar Steppes, vii, citing The Athenaeum No. 3750, 9 September 1899, 341.
15 TWA writes to Murchison from 13 Great Marlborough St (address of Hurst and Blackett, TWA’s publisher) presenting ‘my work on Siberia, Mongolia etc’ to the RGS, 4 December 1857.
16 Maack, 1859. Richard Maack (1825–1886), Estonian by birth, made a two-year expedition to the Amur, returning with massive collections. A.M. Torkanov, Maack, Richard Karlovich, short biography.
17 U&LA viii.
18 According to J. Tallmadge. Cited by Anka Ryall in ‘A Woman in the Wilderness: The Travel Narratives of Thomas and Lucy Atkinson’ in Proceedings from the Third Nordic Conference for English Studies, Hasselby, Stockholm, 1986. Ryall notes that Lucy ‘is fully able to live up to the masculine standard of wilderness heroism. In many ways she presents herself as what anthropologists call “an honorary male”.’
19 Lucy Atkinson to John Murray, 23 January 1862.
20 Ibid.
21 Founded in 1790 and ‘Royal’ from 1842. Set up in 1790 to help indigent authors. Since then it has helped more than 5,000 authors including Coleridge, Conrad and James Joyce. The fund’s annual income is now swollen greatly by £90 million from Disney Enterprises, which bought the rights to A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh in 2001.
22 Lucy Atkinson to the Committee of the Royal Literary Fund, application on the death of her husband, 1 March 1862. British Library.
23 Memorial in favour of Mrs Lucy Atkinson signed by R. Murchison and 15 others to Lord Palmerston, March 1862. Public Records Office, PRO TI/6421B.
24 Lucy Atkinson to Lord Palmerston, 7 April 1862. Public Records Office, now National Archive.
25 At Walmer Castle, where Palmerston stayed when Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.
26 Lucy Atkinson letter to John Murray, 26 June 1862.
27 28 February 1863, 285–7.
28 Frank Cass, London, 1972, reprinted in Anglo-Russica, Selected Essays by Anthony Cross, Berg, Oxford.
29 Five of Lucy’s chapters and one (XIX) of Thomas’s first book were translated and published there in 2012 as Anglichane v Sibiri…. (see Chapter 8, note 9). The same year part of Thomas’s chapter XIX (on Barnaul) appeared in the journal Altai, No. 2, 2012, 131–7.
30 p.69, Evelyn Ashley to Murchison.
31 Lucy Atkinson to Lord Houghton, 20 July 1863. Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge.
32 S.M. Ellis, ed., A Mid-Victorian Pepys, London, 1923, 310–11.
33 He has been known since as ‘the Hangman of Vilna’ (now Vilnius, then the capital), having hanged 127 men and sent another 9,000-odd to Siberia, and was rewarded by Alexander II by the suffix to his surname ‘Vilensky’, thus joining his similarly honoured brother Muravyov-Karsky and cousin Muravyov-Amursky. Lucy’s attitude seems surprisingly harsh.
34 Bank of England Inflation Calendar.
35 Galton was one of the two trustees. RGS Archives.
36 Matthew, George, Thomas and Mary Ann (later Mrs Francis Smith). Marianne Simpson, 9 March 2015.
37 BL MSS Murchison Papers Vol.1. Add 4612572: 74.
38 1870, 21 January. Mrs Lucy Sherrard Finley £50.
39 Literature and The Pension List. An Investigation Conducted For The Committee Of The Incorporated Society Of Authors. By William Morris Colles, of the Inner Temple, barrister-at-law. Published for the Incorporated Society of Authors by Henry Glaisher, 95 Strand, WC., 1889. http://www.archive.org/details/literaturepensio00coll.
40 Of the now long defunct Serjeants’ Inn, unsatisfactorily combining barristers and solicitors.
41 Robinson’s reminiscences, Bench and Bar: Reminiscences of One of the Last of an Ancient Race, London, 1899 (2nd edn), published by Hurst and Blackett, Thomas’s publishers, went into three editions.
42 According to the 1891 census.
43 There are contradictions regarding her age in the three censuses of 1851, 1861 and 1871 when given as 54, 60 and 72, although ten years apart and birth years given as 1797, 1801 and 1799.
44 Susanna Hoe text.
45 Adapted from Jeremiah 31:3. ‘The Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with loving kindness have I drawn thee.’ Courtesy of Sally Hayles, Pippa Smith and Marianne Simpson.
46 Hawaiian Star, 30 April 1906.
47 George F. Nellist (ed.), 1925.
1 His namesake (no relation) John Augustus Atkinson (1775–1830) was known for his aquatints and watercolours of Russia, e.g. A Picturesque Representation of the Manners, Customs, and Amusements of the Russians, London 1803–04, and his oils of Russian history painted for Catherine II and Paul I.
2 Dictionary of National Biography, Supplement, 1901, & ODNB, 2004.
3 TWA O & WA vii.
4 Honour, Romanticism, 1979.
5 Canadian landscape artists such as Krieghoff date from the early 1840s.
6 Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, America Sublime: Landscape painting in the United States 1820–1880, London, 2002, p. 234.
7 Dr. A.V. Tivanenko, Ulan-Ude.
8 Gothic Ornaments selected from the different Cathedrals and Churches in England, 1829. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture [also] selected, 2 vols, 1821, 1823, beat him by a few years although it is not strictly comparable.
9 St Nikolaikirche, see Appendix I.
10 TWA O & WA vii.
11 But Atkinson is roughly correct: glycerine and mercury share freezing/solidifying points.
12 See Chapter 6.
13 LA 162.
14 LA 242.
15 St Petersburg State Historical Archive, with acknowledgements to Maria Markova. TWA letter to Count Tolstoy, high court official, 15 June 1856. English watercolourists were painting ever bigger works at that time to compete with oils, particularly at exhibitions, e.g. Peter de Wint’s On the Dart, 1848, 55.8 x 93 cm (now Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), but still 7 cm smaller than Atkinson’s largest.
16 Ibid. TWA letter to Alexander II, 26 April 1856.
17 Ibid. V.F. Adlerberg, Minister of the Imperial Court, letter to TWA, 9 Feb. 1855.
18 At Christie’s first Atkinson sale (9 June 1858) sixty-three paintings were auctioned (only thirty-one sold). The second sale, in June 1861, was of nineteen watercolours – twelve repeats of the first sale and five new ones – plus the ‘original drawings’ for his two books; all apparently unsold. A third sale, in 1862, the year after Atkinson’s death, repeats unsold work from the previous sales, adding six new ones; but only one (of Cyprus) was sold. The last, fourth sale a year later, of Atkinson’s ‘remaining works in water-colours’, produced nothing new (but seems to have sold all items).
Add to the above, provenance unknown: three watercolours, one of Kopal sent to Prince Gorchakov, Governor-General of Western Siberia, one of the river Hook painted for Zanadvorov, one of mountain landscape with river or lake foreground, known only from photograph in Witt Collection, plus possibly fourteen missing of the Chusovaya River (see catalogue raisonné item 1).
Contrarily, a portrait in oils of Alexander Sokolovsky as a youth was almost certainly misattributed to T.W. Atkinson in the exhibition (and catalogue) Unforgettable Russia: wrong style, medium and subject. The artist was possibly Carl Peter Mazer (1807–1884), Swedish painter and draughtsman, who lived 1838–54 in various parts of the Russian Empire including Siberia, painting many portraits, largely untraced. See entry in Jane Turner (ed.), The Grove Dictionary of Art, 1996.
19 Maack, 1859.
20 Coincidentally or not, Raby Castle had been owned in its long history by the Earls of Westmorland, one of whom recommended Atkinson in 1846 to the protection of St Petersburg’s British Embassy.
21 Andrew Dixon White, Autobiography, New York, 1906.
22 TWA U & LA 155.
23 TWA numbered the paintings now in the Hermitage as between 1 and 26 although there are only twelve of them.
24 Past-President of Watercolour New Zealand.